Understanding the Marketing Funnel

In the world of business, marketing plays a pivotal role. In fact, without marketing, a business cannot survive on its own. Marketing not only helps businesses to reach their customers but also helps in increasing their retention.

Marketing is not magic. It does not work on its own. Metrics and frameworks are required to understand and track the customer journey toward your product or service. Turns out, there exists a framework that can make all of these happen. It’s called the marketing funnel.

A marketing funnel helps you understand your customer’s journey with you and your product or service.

There are stages of the marketing funnel which help businesses analyze their actions which would help them persuade their customers to buy their products.

Historically speaking, the concept of the marketing funnel was born at the end of the 20th century. Elias St. Elmo Lewis created a model which represented the relationship between the customer and a particular business. It had four stages namely, awareness, interest, decision, and action. To this date, this model is applicable in the marketing realm.

In order to convert your prospects into customers, there are strategies that need to be applied at each stage. Let’s explore all the stages and their strategies and understand the marketing funnel in a bit more detail.

Stages of Marketing Funnel

Stage 1: Awareness

The first stage of the funnel is awareness. Initially, in this stage, a customer is unaware of the product or service that a business is selling. What a business needs to do in this stage is to make its potential customers (or prospects) aware of its product or service. 

Strategies to be implemented in the Awareness stage:

• Advertising your product on social media, websites, television, etc.
• Optimizing your social media handles and websites to gain more traffic
• Curating content that helps in educating your product or service to your prospects

Stage 2: Interest

After your prospects are aware of your product/service, they try to dig deeper into it. The second stage is where they try to gain more information about your product. This shows their interest in what you have to offer. In this stage, prospects may compare your product’s worth with that of your competitors.

Strategies to be implemented in the Interest stage:

• Email Marketing
• Consulting with your prospects and addressing their queries
• Making a whitepaper of your product/service available to your prospects

Stage 3: Decision

In the Decision stage, prospects have decided to buy your product after carefully analyzing your product. This means that they trust your product and its worth.

Strategies to be implemented in the Decision stage:

• Providing customers with case studies, product manuals/demos, and customer reviews to cement the understanding of your product.

Stage 4: Action

This is the last stage of the marketing funnel where your prospect is now converted into a customer. The customer has now bought your product. In this stage and beyond, all decisions are taken in favor of retaining the customer.

Strategies to be implemented in the Action stage:

• Providing excellent customer service
• Coming up with various ways to encourage repeat purchases
• Building customer loyalty

Benefits of Marketing Funnel

• It simplifies the efforts taken behind decisions that need to make the marketing campaigns a success.
• Each and every customer interaction is mapped to one or the other stages of the marketing funnel.
• Helps in pivoting your strategies as it indicates where you’re going wrong with your decisions to convert your prospects into customers. 

We can conclude by stating that the marketing funnel is an important and fundamental concept that helps in the growth of a business. Every business out there needs a marketing funnel strategized and tailored specifically to its niche and its targeted prospects. Check out our blog series at https://www.wingstechsolutions.com/blogs/ to dive deeper into more such interesting topics!