How To Build A Marketing Funnel That Generates Massive Leads and Sales

Do you have an amazing product(s) or are you offering a phenomenal service(s) but you aren’t generating sales? If so then you need to learn how to build a marketing funnel that generates massive leads and ultimately, sales.

An effective digital marketing funnel focuses on successfully promoting your products or services to your target audience purposely to convert them into paying customers.?

It’s also a powerful customer retention strategy that can help you grow and expand your business.

But there is a challenge:

Creating a powerful marketing funnel can be a complex task especially if you’re doing it for the first time.?

Well, of course, you probably already have a conversion funnel (if you’re running an online business) even if you haven’t created one.

Whether you already have a marketing funnel but your business isn’t doing well or you are planning to build one, this guide is for you.

We’ll hold your hand through every step on how to create a powerful marketing funnel that can help you attract website visitors and walk them down the customer journey until they become paying customers.

Let’s get started.

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What is a Marketing Funnel?

A marketing funnel is a visualization of the typical buyer’s journey from the time website visitors find you through Google searches to the time they become potential customers.

A marketing funnel takes the shape of a physical cylindrical object with a wider top and a narrow bottom. Since the top is wide, it takes in, channels, and controls liquids from one source into another, ensuring nothing spills out.?

Image via Ahrefs

A marketing funnel works similarly by channeling people from being just website visitors to becoming customers.

When done well, it can be a powerful marketing tool that can streamline the sales process and drastically boost sales. Besides, it can help you generate regular marketing qualified leads, turn them into repeat customers and increase revenue for your business.

Benefits of a Marketing Funnel

As mentioned earlier, a marketing funnel helps you to visualize the buyer’s journey so that you can create effective marketing strategies to target potential customers throughout the stages of the marketing funnel.

Still not sure whether you need a digital funnel?

Here are more reasons to convince you:

Helps You Pick a Marketing Strategy

When you visualize your typical buyer’s journey, you understand the stages where prospects drop off and why before taking action as well as the tools and strategies you can employ to keep them interacting with your brand.

Helps You Maintain Consistency With Your Promotion

With a working funnel in place, you don’t have to think or worry?about the next step to attract repeat customers.

The funnel will help you determine where prospects drop off and why. Use these insights to create effective marketing strategies for each stage to engage with them and convert them into paying customers.

Learning How to Build a Marketing Funnel Can Help You Increase Sales

Working without a funnel is like shooting in the dark. You will never know where prospects drop off and why before making a purchase.?

This means that you lose a lot of insights and sales and in the process, your effort to increase your sales conversion rate become futile. An effective funnel can help you nurture leads until they become customers.

A Funnel Makes It Easier to Close Deals

For B2B brands, closing sales involves a combination of marketing efforts between the marketing and sales team. Since a marketing funnel provides your sales representatives with detailed insights into the lead’s behavior and actions, it becomes easier for them to close the deals.

Marketing Funnels Help Save Time and Effort

Once your marketing and sales teams visualize your customer’s journey and employ effective marketing activities for each stage, it becomes easier for them to automate sales and marketing efforts. This helps to save time and generate better results for the company.

Helps to Retain Customers

Retaining customers is better and cheaper than acquiring new customers. But this is easier said than done. Fortunately, a digital funnel can help you create a practical customer retention strategy that encourages customers to engage and keep buying from you.

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Having learned how important marketing funnels are, let’s understand how they work. Later on, we’ll teach you how to create winning funnels for your business.

How to Create a Marketing Funnel That Works

Ready to learn how to optimize your marketing funnel for the customer journey?

Below, we’ll walk you through a step-by-step process to help you fully understand how to build a marketing funnel:

Let’s get started.

1. Create Awareness

Awareness is the topmost stage of the funnel, also known as the lead generation stage.

Your target audiences recognize that they have a problem or need and become aware of your business, product, or service.

They may have been drawn in by a social media post you made out there or a Google search that led them to your website or blog posts.

As a marketer, you need to focus on building brand awareness (educate your audience about your business, its product, or service) instead of selling to them what you offer right away. You risk driving them away immediately if you do this.

The goal in this stage is to generate awareness and pique the interest of your potential customers by answering possible questions they have.

This is where you need to make an excellent first impression.

Arguably, your sales can explode at this stage. However, use the awareness stage to lay the foundation for transforming website visitors into paying customers.

Here are a few tips to build brand awareness:

• First, understand your target customers and their paint points by creating buyer personas that uncover who they are and the problems/challenges they are facing.
• Once you uncover your target buyer personas, the next step is to capture brand awareness of your company.
• This is where content marketing comes in.
• Remember that you need to create content that resonates with your target consumers and appeals to your buyer personas- create high-quality content that builds trust and identifies you as an authority in your niche.

At this stage, you need to focus on creating educational and entertaining content that creates hype about your products or services. Your content must be free, educational, and relevant to your audience.

Here are some effective marketing strategies and types of content to use at this stage:

• Lead magnets: A lead magnet is a piece of content that requires a visitor to enter their contact information to access it. They give you their email addresses, you compensate them with some valuable content.

Typically, lead magnets can be free eBooks, tools, trials, and much more.

Attrock, a digital marketing firm does this very well by offering a detailed marketing plan that’s accessible once a user enters their personal details.

Image via?Attrock

Lead magnets are extremely helpful in helping you further market your product or service to potential customers as they move down the funnel.

• Evergreen posts and articles: Create evergreen blog posts and articles to pique user interest and drive traffic to your site. Remember that this stage focuses on only increasing brand awareness.?

Create informative content about the topics and areas your visitors search for on search engines.

• Infographics: Create extremely informative and shareable infographics to enforce brand awareness to your target customers.
• Videos: Videos are a fun and entertaining way to connect with your target consumers and demonstrate your brand personality. Target your audience who might not have the time to read your blog posts and articles with educational videos that teach them about your products or services.
• SEO & SEM: According to Internet Live Stats, Google process more than 8.5 billion searches a day. This makes search engine optimization and search engine marketing powerful tactics to draw in more users at the ToFu stage.?

Optimize your website to appear at the top of Google’s SERPs for keywords your prospects are searching for or use Google Ads.

• Social media marketing: Leverage social media marketing tactics to create posts in the form of insightful videos, shareable memes, and more to align your brand personality with your target audiences’ preferences.

Remember to share all the content we have mentioned above across your social media networks to further attract a huge audience.

2. Generate Interest?

At this stage, your audience is now aware of your products or services. Since they are still undecided, they do further research, compare different solutions, and think about their options.

At this stage, you need to lock in their personal details and grow your email list so that you can continue feeding them with targeted content that educates them. Don’t start selling to your audience right away here. Focus on building trust and demonstrating your expertise while helping your readers make an informed decision.

At this stage, you need to come up with marketing tactics that showcase your advantages over your competitors and why your visitors should choose your products or services.

Here, you will use similar content to the one from the awareness stage, but with some little tweaks.

The type of content you offer at this stage should be free. You can also offer premium content but don’t overprice it.

Here are the marketing strategies and types of content to use at this stage:

• Case studies: Create case studies that encourage your audience to consider your products or services instead of your competitors.

Take a look at how Attrock uses case studies to convince customers that their services can help them achieve real results:

Image via?Attrock

Case studies demonstrate exactly how your products or services can be helpful to your target customers. After all, as prospects move down the funnel, they’ll want to see how others have benefited from using your business.

• Blog posts & articles: At the awareness stage, you create content about broader topics keeping the visitor in mind. However, at this stage, you need to create content that centers around the pain points or challenges the visitor is facing and how your product or service can solve them.

For instance, at the awareness stage, a vehicle maintenance website could write about the benefits of maintaining your vehicle regularly. For the interest stage, your blog posts and articles could focus on ways to maintain a car, highlighting your car maintenance services as a great option.??

• Email marketing: Use email marketing to distribute the content you have created to your audience. Since people have already subscribed to your email list, they are interested to hear from you. Thus use a combination of the content you created in the awareness and interest stages of the digital funnel.
• Video marketing: 94% of marketers have increased awareness of their products or services to their target customers.

Image via Wyzowl

What does this mean?

Using video marketing you can target and educate customers who aren’t willing to read about your company as they move down the digital marketing funnel.

• Social media marketing: There are an estimated 4,59 billion social media users globally. This makes social media a powerful platform for maximizing your conversion rate. Answer questions people are asking on social media.?

Create live videos teaching your audience how to use your product to nurture leads and move them down the funnel stages.

• SEO & SEM: To get your business to show up on search engines when people search for information about products or services you offer, optimize your blog posts, articles, and other content you have created with keywords that answer their search queries.

Remember that SEO takes time. So if you want quick results, invest in SEM or combine the two funnel marketing tactics.

3. Consideration

At this stage, your audiences know what they need. Their relationship with your brand has grown stronger so you have converted them into marketing-qualified leads and can now become prospective customers.

Here, you have the opportunity to:

• Capture qualified leads.
• Build trust.
• Nurture leads.
• Set yourself apart from your competitors.
• Establish your brand as the best fit for your audience.

Since you have their contact details and some basic insights about them, you can now send them more information about your offers.

Here, you can use automated email campaigns as you continue your audiences down the funnel with content that answers their questions.

Here are the types of content to create at this step:

• Case studies.
• Downloadable resources.
• Product videos.
• Product comparison chats.
• Webinars.
• Podcast.
• Landing page.
• Original research or reports.
• etc.

Here are a few strategies to use in this step:

• Understand and segment your potential buyers.
• Ensure your content speaks to your audience.
• Align marketing efforts with sales efforts.
• Distribute content to segmented channels.
• Optimize your content for search engines.
• Track, measure, and improve your content.
• Create content that offers solutions to problems your audience faces.

Be sure to focus on giving more specific answers to questions people are asking on social media, search engines, and other channels. You can also use influencer marketing to build trust with your audience.

4. Encourage Decision?

You have now moved your marketing-qualified leads from the consideration stage into the decision stage. They have already done enough research, read your case studies, and interacted with your content.?

They probably have a list of options- you being one of them if you have checked all the boxes.

Even though they have all this information, they still aren’t convinced to take the final action- to sign up for your course, purchase your products, or do whatever you want them to do in exchange for their credit card details.

Just to remind you of one thing here:

Up to this stage, you have spent, time, money, and effort on your marketing strategies.

Now is the time to make sure your marketing budget and the time you have spent don’t go to waste.

Be careful here because a slight mistake can make your leads drop off at this stage.

Remember that your prospective consumers are at the closing stages of the buyer’s journey. At this stage of the funnel, you can direct them to content that sells your products or services.

Use content and marketing tactics that encourage them to convert.

BoFu Content

Here are the types of content and marketing tactics to use

• Free trials and live demo videos(product walk-through videos): Even though you offer valuable products or unmatched services, some users may fear that they won’t get value for their money. Giving them a free trial or creating demo content can help to dispel that fear.

Animoto is one of the best online video makers that use this strategy efficiently.

Image via Animoto

This helps their users to interact with their product before purchasing it thus helping them to decide whether it’s the best choice for them or not.

In fact, many streaming websites like Spotify, Amazon Prime Video, and many others allow users to try their services for free for one month before they commit to a purchase.

• Testimonials, reviews, and case studies: Prospective customers want to be sure that what they are about to purchase will be helpful to them. For that reason, they will want to see what other customers are saying about your business.

After all, 95% of online consumers say that reviews, whether negative or positive, can make them decide whether or not to purchase.

Include as many customer testimonials, case studies, and positive reviews to build trust with your customers.

• Offer them coupon codes & discounts: Your prospects are already at the bottom of the funnel, but if your prices are a little bit high for their budget, they may drop off the funnel.?

To avoid losing these potential buyers, offer them a little incentive in the form of discounts or coupon codes.

• Create a sense of scarcity: This is one of the widely used marketing strategies where brands maximize the value of their products or services by limiting the supply.?

Image via Starbucks

????Starbucks has used the notorious limited-time offers to get a lot of orders.

• Provide an intuitive checkout system: Now that you have spent time, budget, and effort creating a killer marketing strategy and lead-generating digital marketing funnel, your checkout system shouldn’t be the reason for driving your customers away.

A study has shown that 17% of online shoppers will abandon a cart if the checkout process is too long or complicated.

Creating powerful influencer marketing can also help you to close sales at this stage as well.

Image via Baymard Institute

5. Post-Purchase Delight

What happens after the lead has become a paying customer is as important as what happens before lead generation. So, once a purchase happened, the customer journey doesn’t end there.

Greeting customers using a thoughtful onboarding process and personal attention can help to make them become loyal customers.

In fact, this is the stage to use your existing customers to refer you to their friends and colleagues.?

Post-purchase advocacy can help you get repeat customers thus you need to give them a good post-purchase experience.

Here are practical tips to spark post-purchase delight:

• Solicit feedback from your customers?
• Thank them for their purchase?
• Give them ways to contact the support team?
• Create FAQ content
• Ask them to write a positive review

6. Customer Retention

After the post-purchase delight stage, you need to build a powerful customer retention strategy.

If you can walk your customers down the digital funnel up to this final stage, then it will be easier to grow your business.

Customer retention can greatly impact your business in the following ways:

• It helps to increase ROI, customer loyalty, and business growth.
• Most studies show that the cost of retaining a customer is 7x less expensive than the that of acquiring new ones
• Retained customers purchase more often and spend more than new customers since they are already aware of the value of a product or service

In a nutshell, customer retention can help to generate good ROI, build customer loyalty, and drive business growth.

Thus you should learn how to build a marketing funnel that ensures all customers reach this stage.

Wondering how you can achieve this?

It’s simple.

Give the customers you have attracted the best experience your competitors can’t.?

Here are a few ways to do that:

• Encourage them to become members of a loyalty program by luring them with a tempting upfront sign-up reward. “Sign up for our loyalty program right now and get 20% off on your purchase today”
• Give referral and repeat customers special offers.
• Create email drip campaigns with awesome content about the product or service the customers have purchased.

Of importance is to remain relevant in whatever you do.

To help you deliver relevant offers, discounts, and useful content to your existing customers, use customer feedback and data insights.

This takes us to another term: Remarketing.

Remarketing can help you to show relevant content and offers to customers who have already purchased from you.

You can also use remarketing to target people who visited your website or engaged with your brand and dropped off along the funnel, especially at the checkout stage. It’s also a powerful marketing strategy for reaching disengaged website visitors with ads.

FAQs

1. What is a funnel for marketing?

A marketing funnel involves a step-by-step process of guiding prospects through the customer journey from the time they visit a website to the time they make a purchase.

2. What is a marketing funnel template?

A marketing funnel template is a tool that helps marketers to develop a winning marketing strategy for their target customers.

3. What are the 5 stages of the?marketing funnel?

The five stages of a marketing funnel are:

• Awareness?
• Interest?
• Consideration?
• Decision?
• Post-purchase stage and customer retention

4. What are the 3 main stages of a funnel?

The five stages of a digital funnel can be simplified into three main stages as below:

• Top of the funnel (ToFu)
• Middle of the funnel(MoFu)
• Bottom of the funnel(BoFu)

5. How does funnel marketing work?

A marketing funnel functions in a simple way. At the top of the funnel, a marketer uses different channels and marketing strategies to attract many visitors.?

The visitors then go through the funnel until they are convinced to take a certain action as indicated by the marketer.

6. Which marketing funnel metrics should I track?

To measure the success of your marketing funnel, you need to use the following metrics:

• Website traffic
• Conversion rates
• Average order value
• Sales velocity
• Cost per acquisition
• Conversion rate per channel
• Customer lifetime value

Over To You

Now you know how to build a marketing funnel that generates great results and why it’s essential to increase revenue for your brand.

We must mention that all stages of the marketing funnel are crucial for your revenue generation and business growth.

Remember that building a sales and marketing funnel using the stages outlined above isn’t an easy feat. Besides, it’s not something you can do in one day.?

Building a successful digital marketing funnel takes time and is a repetitive process that you will actively do as long as you’re in business.