How to Refine Your Marketing Funnel and Earn Devoted Customers
Before you work on refining your own funnel, first refresh your knowledge about what should be happening in each of these phases.
Awareness/Exposure
During this phase, your potential customers don’t yet know your brand exists, so your first task is to introduce them to it. Consider tactics that introduce potential customers to who you are as a brand, such as:
- Ad campaigns
- Paid search
- Social media
- Webinars
- E-books/whitepapers
- Events/trade shows
- Press releases
- Blog posts (much like this one)
If you don’t make your brand accessible to potential customers in the awareness phase, they can’t progress any further into the funnel.
Interest
Once your customers are aware of your brand, you want to show them how it fits their needs. Your goal should be to build relationships with customers and introduce them to positioning.Try these strategies:
- Landing pages
- Product descriptions
- Targeted content
- Videos
Consideration
As customers move toward consideration, your job is to make their decision to buy your product or service an easy one. At this point, potential customers will compare your product or service with other brands, so you should demonstrate the ways you stand out. The right materials and incentives could be just enough to convince the prospect to commit to, rather than just consider, your product. This stage often involves:
- Emails
- Case studies
- Product reviews
- Product comparisons
- Free trials/demos
- Special offers
Purchase
If you do well in the consideration phase, commitment should follow naturally. Potential customers may need to justify their purchase to themselves, but if you’ve created an emotional connection with would-be customers, that justification will come easily.
During this phase, you should position your company to be readily available to handle any of the customer’s needs, whether they have questions or need purchasing help. Once a customer commits to your brand, you’ll have an easier time convincing them to make purchases in the future.
Retention
Potential customers become actual customers at the moment they decide to make a purchase, but your job doesn’t end there. Your marketing team will need to work to retain each customer’s loyalty with ongoing efforts, seeing them through the funnel multiple times as their needs change. You can send existing customers marketing materials such as:
- Support articles
- Emails
- Blog posts
- Social media
- Special offers
Bonus: Advocacy
Some companies have also considered that satisfied customers are likely to bring in new customers through word-of-mouth. Give existing customers an opportunity to pull new prospects into the consideration stage. You could ask them to leave a review, share pictures of them using the product, recommend a friend for some sort of reward, etc.
How to make your own marketing funnel template with Lucidchart
After re-familiarizing yourself with the concept of the general marketing funnel, sit down with your team and take a closer look at your own. Download our free Lucidchart template, and then follow these steps to make your own internal marketing funnel diagram. Communicating your marketing funnel and strategy to the company as a whole will improve interdepartmental collaboration over time.
1. Build your own unique template.
Don’t feel the need to follow a traditional marketing funnel exactly when designing your own. If your team feels strongly that certain steps can be added or removed, then do so. Lucidchart’s user-friendly design caters to customization, so decide on the steps that work for you and your brand, and then build them into a practical template.
You can even create a different marketing funnel for each brand of your marketing team (for example, digital marketing).
Digital Marketing Funnel Template (Click on image to modify online)
2. Evaluate your funnel and add actionable steps to each phase.
After you and your team decide which phases to include, evaluate how your company approaches—or should approach—each phase and fill your template with specific steps that your team members can take to improve. If you follow a traditional marketing funnel, that discussion and process could look something like this.
Awareness
What does your team do now to encourage brand awareness? What could you be doing better or more of? Can your team define your brand’s persona? Make a high-level assessment of your involvement in social media, blogging, and trade shows, and include that assessment in your document to remind your team of areas you could improve.
Interest
Are you tracking reviews, targeted emails or newsletters, and brand engagement with paid search and paid social? Outlining a big picture plan of the interest phase unites smaller tasks under one larger goal and could reveal gaps that inspire process refinement on other levels. Start recording your efforts and make that information accessible from your Lucidchart document to keep team members accountable.
Consideration
What does your brand do to help customers through the consideration phase? When was the last time you looked at what competitors were doing to give potential buyers more information about their products? Outline a plan or change a stale existing one to make sure your customers have a chance to experience your product or service with incentives like free trials before having to commit to it.
Purchase
What constitutes commitment for your brand? Is it a customer putting an item in a shopping cart or signing up for a specific service? Define the point at which you consider a customer “committed,” and then list any steps you take (or would like to take) to help them get there.
Retention
Does your brand have a specific strategy for customer retention? If so, outline it here. If not, set aside a larger amount of time to figure out what that strategy should be, and consider creating a separate Lucidchart document for a customer retention process.
3. Try Lucidchart for free.
Get started building your own marketing funnel in Lucidchart for free today.
Marketing funnels aren’t the easiest part of a business to define, especially as the Internet and social media have disrupted the traditional customer experience. Regardless of what your brand’s marketing funnel looks like, though, illustrating it gives you the opportunity to evaluate what you’re doing currently and what you could be doing better in the future.
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