A marketing funnel guides your users through the process of first becoming aware of your brand or product, right through until they become converted, paying customers.
The design of a funnel reflects real-world marketing pretty well. A lot of leads (interested people) go into the funnel but only a few come out as customers.
The better your funnel is designed, the higher your conversion rate which of course means more profits. We’ll be taking you through a look at exactly how you can build your very own marketing funnel so that you rake in customers and conversions.
A Basic Three-Tier Funnel
Marketing funnels can be as simple or as complex as you need, with the sales pipeline being segmented appropriate. However, the simplest example to start with is a three-tier funnel. The top of the funnel classifies your activities used to attract new targeted customers. Once customers become conscious of your brand through the awareness raised, marketing moves to the middle.
The middle of your funnel holds the goal of capturing leads and then nurturing them towards making a sale. The bottom of the funnel is next, classifying the landing pages, sales portals and final sales steps used to turn your leads into customers. If you’re looking for one of the best marketing tools available to manage your campaigns, leads, funnels, and automation, give Systeme.io a try.
Top of the Funnel
The top of your funnel needs to be designed to attract awareness, drawing the right potential customers. Here is where the research that you put into your customer demographics comes into play. The better you know your audience, the keywords that they use to describe their searches, the style of content they like, the things that they care about, and the sites that they frequent, the better the top of your funnel will be.
Ranking high in search engine results is a top funnel technique to raise awareness. On-site search engine optimization is essential for raising awareness. You need to know which keywords you are targeting so that you know which pages need to be ranked in order to pull in visitors. Organic search is top of top funnel design. Every part of your online store or website needs to be optimized for SEO so that you can be found in popular search engines like Google and Bing.
Top Funnel Content
Content making is a part of raising brand awareness and needs to educate or entertain your visitors. It must also be free. You’re trying to capture their attention so you need to stand out. Anything can serve as top funnel content, from blog posts to podcasts, social media posts, blogs, infographics, and videos – all work well if they’re strategically designed.
Email marketing is a top funnel tactic that always works. Build a list and engage your audience with interesting information regularly, while presenting your product at the optimal stage of marketing. Press releases raise awareness quite quickly, especially if your brand has a local interest or a large business model.
Paid advertising can also be used to attract new visitors just be sure that what you’re promoting is relevant, catchy and tested against alternate campaigns design to target the same demographic. Lastly, there are offline marketing methods. This can span everything from a feature in a local newspaper to flyers. Print advertising and other offline techniques work surprisingly well but take a little more effort than their digital counterparts.
Middle of the Funnel
Middle of the funnel marketing is where you convert visitors to your website into active leads. A captured lead comes with a means of contact. For example, if you’ve got the email address of a visitor on your list, they’re now a lead. There are two basic parts of middle funnel design. You firstly need premium content which a visitor will need to ‘unlock’ by subscribing, thus turning them into a lead, and you need middle funnel design which helps nurture existing leads towards becoming paying customers.
Middle Funnel Content
Your middle of the funnel content needs to supplement the content which attracted your website or sales page. Now that you’ve got their attention, you need to convert visitors into leads. As previously mentioned, the best middle funnel content will need to be unlocked by providing an email address or other detail. In order to coax your visitors into handing over their valuable contact info, you need to supply something of value.
Develop a PDF or eBook, looking at a topic covered freely but in more detail. Look towards your top funnel content and determine which subjects can be elaborated on. Other than eBooks, you can consider creating video guides, free mini-courses, webinars, and trials or demos of your products and services where possible. Integrate unlockable content using popups or forms.
Most good mailing software such as Mailchimp has popup integration readily available for you to place on your site, while all good online store design packages and providers will also have a membership feature integrated. Alternatively, opt for an all-in-one marketing tool like Systeme.io which will let you handle all your email campaigns, funnels and more from one dashboard.
Lead Nurturing and Your Middle Funnel
You must also create middle funnel content for the purpose of lead nurturing. While all ‘unlockables’ are essentially a form of lead nurturing, more direct methods are possible for even better conversion results. Once a visitor has subscribed to your list or channel, periodic emails need to be created in order to bolster brand presence in the eyes of your customer.
End of the Funnel
Now that your leads have been captured, it is time to coax them into buying related products or services. The end of the funnel also involves motivating your customers to share their positive experience with their friends, family and colleagues. Referrals are extremely valuable to your business. Word of mouth advertising is, after all, still the most lucrative and successful way to promote your business. It is second only to email marketing,
End Funnel Content
Incentivize your referrals and carefully plan your upselling campaigns. Upselling should make up a part of your middle of the funnel content marketing strategy, and should always accompany every sale closed. You don’t have to be complex or elaborate. Simply suggest a few related top selling products.
When incentivizing referrals, feel free to offer discount codes, promotional coupons, and digital goods like eBooks, webinars, courses and guides. Discounts tend to work much better than collateral at the end of most sales funnels but test for yourself. Each market is different.
The Grand Plan
Every single product, service, or promoted post on your website or page needs to be a part of a larger marketing funnel. It is a waste of time, resources, and potential conversions to add new products, pages, or content without first integrating it into existing sales cycles. The better you silo your links, pages and content marketing, connecting resources to each other for rich internal linking, the better you will rank and the higher your conversion rates will rise.
Robust marketing software will track every marketing campaign and will allow you to create multiple funnels for all your demographics. When you’ve got the metrics and practical functionality of Systeme.io on your side, your marketing and funnel creation are set for success. Everything that you need is ready and waiting.