What is a Marketing Funnel and Why Should you Care?

To make money in ecommerce, you need to understand the buyer’s journey.

This is the process that customers go through before they make the decision to purchase something, and it’s one you’ve no doubt experienced at some point.

It goes a little like this:

You enter a store and walk through the product aisles to look for something you need. After several minutes of searching, and considering viable options, you add your preferred product to your cart. Afterward, you move to the check-out desk to pay, thus completing the purchase and the buyer’s journey.

When it comes to online retail, ecommerce store owners need a way to guide people through this journey, from the moment of awareness until the point of purchase.

This requires a marketing funnel.

In this article, we’ll explain just what that is, and discover its importance in modern marketing.

How Does the Marketing Funnel Work?

The marketing funnel visualizes the buyer’s journey, and it works by incorporating the key stages of awareness, consideration, and decision.

To do this, these stages correlate to three sections in the funnel:

• Top of the Funnel
• Middle of the Funnel
• Bottom of the Funnel

Understanding Top of Funnel Content

At the top of the marketing funnel, your aim is to attract more traffic, so that you boost the potential for securing leads, and subsequent conversions.

People here are in the awareness stage, as they may just have realized they have a need for a product or solution of some kind. Your business must look to spread brand awareness to appeal to these people early in their journey before your competitors can.

Blog content is arguably the best form of top of funnel content, as it is easily accessible, inexpensive to create, and helps establish your brand voice and thought leadership. This is excellent for nurturing trust, which is essential for people to convert later on.

After your blog articles build trust, you can make more compelling calls-to-action with lead magnets, such as an eBook or cheat sheet. This can encourage people to share their contact information and join your mailing list.

This effectively moves leads further down the funnel, and also filters out unqualified leads who aren’t engaged enough with your brand or what you have to offer.

In addition to blog content, marketers can use other tactics to spread brand awareness at the top of the funnel. Some powerful channels include:

• Social media marketing
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
• Video marketing
• Online Ads
• Influencer outreach

At this stage, you can measure awareness among your audience, which helps you align your content with the needs of your target customers.

That being said, although you want to create targeted content, you don’t want to filter out too many people at this early stage. Therefore, it’s best to try and appeal to the majority of your target audience with relevant content that encourages conversation and responses.

Ultimately, you should be educating your audience on specific needs, but the key is to only offer value. There shouldn’t be any attempts to sell until later on.

What’s in the Middle of the Funnel?

After you collect some qualified leads into the middle of your marketing funnel, you must nurture a relationship that breeds trust and loyalty.

People that make it this far are in the consideration stage of the buyer’s journey, and so it’s up to you to convince them to make a decision.

Modern marketing has a plethora of tools and programs that enable businesses to keep tabs on customer behavior. This makes it easier for you to monitor customer engagement, and you can then build up their purchase intent by responding to the insights you gain through data analytics.

In the middle of the funnel, you will continue to educate people who are in the awareness stage, and also build upon that by positioning your brand as the solution they need.

There are many ways of doing this, including:

• Advanced eBooks
• Newsletters
• Email marketing
• Marketing automation
• Webinars Live events

If you want to strengthen your credibility, high-value content like white papers, case studies, and video courses will accelerate the process.

Middle of funnel content is all about identifying whether your leads are aligned with your solutions, and whether or not they are interested in buying your product.

If they are, then they will move to the bottom of the funnel – just one step away from the conversion.

Getting to the Bottom of the Funnel

Ah, the evangelical bottom of the funnel! It’s not just a myth – it really exists!

Before we explore it, here is an essential nugget of wisdom:

Save yourself from silo syndrome.

This is when sales and marketing departments work independently to the point that communications suffer. If that happens, your marketing funnel suffers, and you’ll lose out on sales because there are unnecessary hurdles in the buyer’s journey.

This is the most crucial stage so you should share whatever information your leads need so that the bottom of the funnel is streamlined for an easy conversion.

You can expect to have a significantly smaller group at the bottom of the funnel compared to the initial group of leads at the top. However, people here are ready to take action – they are in the decision stage of their journey.

With that being the case, you can cut back on educational content, and instead focus on giving your leads the details they need to make their minds up. You can make them aware of:

• Pricing
• Costs
• Quotes
• Benchmarks
• Specific product information
• Service information

The goal here is to make your leads comfortable and confident with making their decision.

Perhaps you can offer a consultation call or even a free trial of the product or service. This is a great way to convince leads to buy. Here, you can measure the total number of leads, and deduce your conversion rate.

Fine tune Your Funnel for More Conversions

Strive for symmetry with your funnel, so that the middle and bottom sections aren’t neglected. Having a great blog is a solid top to your funnel, but you need to follow up to ensure your leads don’t lose interest.

Your marketing funnel allows your business to track the journey that your customers take before a conversion. Moreover, it helps you see where you lose leads, which can help to improve your marketing strategy over time. How do you evaluate if your marketing funnel is performing well in different stages of customer journey, read in this blog.