Updated January 11, 2023
Reading Time: 2 minutes
Following Up On Some Leads
A marketing funnel, or purchase funnel, sounds like a complicated thing. But it’s not. A marketing funnel is simply the steps a visitor to your website takes on their way to becoming a customer. Creating a marketing funnel helps you easily visualize what it is that makes a customer become a customer, while showing you where you are spending your marketing budget.
A marketing funnel is typically split into three different stages:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Decision
These different stages indicate what your potential customer is thinking about and actions they are taking at that time. For example, when someone first comes to your website they will want to learn about your company. Maybe they will visit your ‘About us’ page. But, by the time they’ve been there 5 or 6 times, they will probably navigate straight to your product page to look at what you have on offer.
Marking Your Marketing Funnel
These three stages indicate a linear progression, however, it is possible for a lead to join at later stages, or go backwards through the steps. For example, if a lead has researched another vendor and then sees an advert for your product, they may enter straight at the decision stage as they already know about the concept behind your product.
In addition to being a useful illustration of where your leads are in the purchasing funnel, and how close they may be to be to converting, the marketing funnel also helps you create marketing material.
The different stages each have different styles of content that suit them best. For example:
- Awareness – Explainer content. Explaining what your company does and the concept behind your business. General content that is not very complex or detailed.
- Consideration – Content explaining exactly what you do and why you do it best. More detailed information with specific mentions of what your company does.
- Decision – Pricing comparison pages, facts, and figures. Highly detailed content going into depth about your services and why they fit the customer’s needs.
Breaking down your marketing into stages makes it simpler to manage, and easier to improve upon. Making things more granular enables you to pick what’s working, losing what’s not. This is especially important if you have a relatively tight budget and can’t afford to waste money on campaigns that aren’t bringing you success.
Have you ever built a marketing funnel? Do you know what content you would put in your awareness stage?
