What Is a Marketing Funnel? Stages, Examples and How to Build One

Do you know how many times a customer interacts with your brand before buying? It’s the marketing funnel that traces rather than outlines those checkpoints for you! As a result, a marketing funnel becomes a very crucial part of any business.

If you can’t figure out this process, your system will be completely haywire and you’ll have no clue what’s wrong.

What exactly is a marketing funnel?

A marketing funnel is a model that maps how a person moves from discovering a product or service to evaluating it and finally making a purchase. It shows where prospects enter, where they drop off and which marketing actions help move them closer to conversion.

Marketing funnels are usually based on the AIDA model where 

• Awareness: The prospect is aware of the problems he’s facing and comes across a possible solution.
• Interest: The prospect shows interest in a product or service.
• Desire: The prospect shows desire for a particular brand offering that service and starts studying it.
• Action: Finally the prospect acts on deciding whether to purchase it.

What are the different stages of a marketing funnel?

A marketing funnel is called a funnel because the audience is widest at the top and becomes smaller at each stage. Many people may discover your brand, but only a smaller number become leads, qualified prospects and paying customers.

At the top of the funnel, there are website visitors and your app users. They are usually brought by marketing activities like paid campaigns, blogs, SEO, etc.  You can conduct them by yourself or with the help of professionals and working with a digital marketing agency to attract more prospects in your audience.

As the funnel narrows down, the prospects usually drop off your funnel and you are only left with your actual customers. While in this process, you also learn what are you doing wrong in turning a prospect into your customer and accordingly improve your funnel. 

Finally, at the bottom of the funnel, there is usually a conversion. These are the customers who’ve got your attention and earned your trust & are interested in your product and this completes the whole funnel.

Usually, a Marketing Funnel is broken down into three stages:

Top of the Funnel (TOFU) – Awareness/Lead generation

This is where a prospect becomes aware of your product or service and engages with it for the first time. The goal of TOFU is to attract the right audience and turn unknown visitors into identifiable prospects or leads. This stage depends heavily upon marketing activities like creating content, landing pages, SEO, paid campaigns, podcasts, etc.

Example: To drive more traffic through SEO, a business can create landing pages around keywords its target audience is already searching for, build relevant backlinks and use those pages to bring more prospects into the top of the funnel.

This is just a single example, to create awareness and generate more leads for your product, you can try using these different approaches.

• Create landing pages and optimize them around targeted keywords.
• Run paid campaigns on Facebook, Google and other relevant platforms.
• Create podcasts relevant to your audience and publish them on platforms like Spotify and RSS directories.
• Start a YouTube channel and publish educational videos for your target audience.

Middle of the Funnel (MOFU) – Consideration

Once you’ve caught your customer’s attention and he’s aware that you have a solution for his problem, a lead is generated. Now the next step is to start building trust amongst those customers. Start creating content and give them a reason to stick with your platform and not go to your competitors. 

MOFU is the consideration stage where leads compare solutions, consume educational content and decide whether your product is relevant to their needs.

You can start creating more content now to educate your users about your product. You can also advertise it, driving traffic; try using a backlink checker to monitor backlinks and find authoritative websites from that link to your competitors and reach them for link-building.

• Create a blog channel and start creating content to drive more traffic to your website.
• Create landing pages targeted to specific industry users.
• Share informational posts on various social media platforms.

Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU) – Conversion

BOFU is the conversion stage where qualified leads are ready to take action, such as booking a demo, starting a free trial, requesting pricing or making a purchase.

You can use different approaches to convert these prospects to pay you:

• Offer a free trial or demo so prospects can experience the product before buying.
• Create an FAQ page to answer pricing, setup and usage doubts.
• Send follow-up emails or messages to prospects who visited key pages but did not convert.
• Share testimonials, reviews and case studies to build trust.

These are your qualified leads and are ready to pass over to your sales team.

How to build a marketing funnel?

1. Define your target audience and their main problem.

2. Create awareness content such as blogs, landing pages, ads or videos.

3. Capture leads through forms, demos, free trials or downloadable resources.

4. Nurture leads with useful content, reminders and follow-ups.

5. Convert qualified leads using demos, offers, testimonials and sales conversations.

6. Track drop-offs at each stage and improve the funnel regularly.

Conclusion

Thus a marketing funnel basically simplifies your customer’s journey. It makes the route easy to follow. It even gives you clarity as to what spots are you losing out on your customers. Whether it’s the awareness state that demands changes or the action state!

So a marketing funnel will ultimately help you organize your marketing activities, ultimately leading to business growth.