What is Marketing Funnel

Complete Explanation of Marketing Funnels for beginners in Digital Marketing: What they are, why we need, its stages and levels

Whether you are B2B, B2C, Online, Offline, Beginning, and Experienced marketers, your Business needs Marketing Funnel to sell your product or services.

Funnel is complex to understand for many people who are new to Digital Marketing.

What is a Marketing Funnel?

Marketing Funnel is a series of steps you take to convert a visitor or lead( Potential buyer) into a customer. We can understand its meaning with a simple example. 

Suppose you have seen a post on LinkedIn with a free pdf on How to get clients for your Business. Then you click the link provided with the post Marketing guide to download that free stuff. The link will redirect to the Landing Page containing all the information related to that product, its benefits, social proof, and all about the Business’s authority with a popup. So you will provide your email id to get that pdf. After that, you will redirect to thank you Page.

Then the Business communicates with you further through a series of emails with high-quality content to educate and nurture you. They will try to build enough trust with the brand. Then they will pitch their premium product or service. 

So This quote rightly denotes the purpose of creating Marketing Funnels.

Move Prospective browser to buyers

Ryan Deiss

Components of Marketing Funnel

An email list is an excellent asset for Business because emails are very personal, and people don’t change their emails too often. You can communicate through this list to your potential customers to take feedback even before product development. Therefore start building an email list because it takes time to make a list. 

Through an Email List, you have the opportunity to build expectations; by the time you launch your already in-demand product with unique features and benefits, you will get big sales.

A Lead Magnet( Freebies)

There are several options to create a freebie

  • For Ebook sales, offer the first chapter for free
  • For Ecourse Products, offer few lessons from the course
  • For physical product, provide a special discount as a freebie
  • For consultation service, offer a free consultation 

Whatever the type of freebie you offer, focus on the thing that your leads should crave for the premium product while creating a lead magnet. 

Are you confused between a website and a Marketing Funnel?

A website consists of many pages like Home Page, Sales Pages like Premium products & services, About us, Privacy Policy, etc., with tons of information. Due to this reason, the visibility of sales pages is significantly less.

But on the other hand, in the Marketing funnel, the user is redirected to the sales page only with free product(Lead Magnet) with information about features and benefits of products and with a popup in which you have to enter your email id to get that free product with no distraction. The visitor has only two choices.

  1. Take the free product in return for an email id
  2. Exit the Funnel

Therefore the chances of buying the product are more.

Why do we need a Marketing Funnel?

Every business owner wants to grow their business. Thus, they have to increase the number of customers, increase average transaction value per customer, and increase transactions. To achieve this, they need to implement a Marketing Funnel.

Let me clear this if you are selling a low-priced product, Then you don’t need a Marketing Funnel. You can do marketing for your brand through advertising in the newspaper, Broadcasting on TV, and affecting people buying from retail stores in low-priced items, e.g., toys, cosmetics, etc.

On the other hand, if you are selling a Premium Product (High priced), you need a Marketing Funnel to sell your premium product. E.g., you visit a landing page for the first time. There, you go through various premium products.

But most of the time, visitors don’t buy the product because there are several questions in their minds while making the purchasing decision.

  • Whether the product is reliable or not?
  • How is it different from competitors?
  • Who else bought it? What are their views about the product?
  • What if I don’t like the product after I buy it?
  • How is their support service?

Therefore, we have to answer these questions that come to visitors’ minds before pitching our premium services.

Stages of Marketing Funnel

Before anyone buys from you must be aware of your brand. Attract new customers, educate about your services, and nurture them to build a brand relationship after converting. Therefore, marketers divide the buyer’s journey into four stages, collectively known as AIDA or CATT. The customers go through these stages to buy from you.

AIDA Marketing Funnel

A-Awareness

I-Interest

D-Decision

A-Action

In AIDA, brands create high-value content linked to their product or services as per the need and interest of their target audience to create awareness for their brand. When people get to know about and trust your brand, they are ready to purchase your paid services or do business with you. Educating the customers brings the customer from top to middle of the Funnel then to the bottom of the Funnel.

CATT Marketing Funnel

Most of the marketers are using the CATT marketing Funnel to build Mass trust. CATT Marketing funnels have the following stages

n-niche

C-Content

A-Attention

T-Trust

T– Transaction

Content

In this stage, brands create material that allows your customers to learn about your products and Business.

Attention

Brands share high-value content through Email Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing to grab attention and increase their website traffic.

Trust

This phase creates a deeper relationship with customers through personalized messages to targeted audiences.

Transaction

This stage focuses on converting leads into customers by giving product trials, discounts, and offers.

Wealth= n ^ CATT

The Above equation denotes most brands’ success in creating wealth for their Business because their powerful Marketing strategy starts with niche selection that exponentially increases the power of the CATT funnel.

TOFU, MOFU & BOFU

We get a lot of traffic at the top and quality traffic relevant to your Business at the bottom. Marketers divided the stages of Funnel into three sections: TOFU (Top of Funnel), MOFU (Middle of Funnel), BOFU (Bottom of Funnel)

TOFU (Top of Funnel)

At the top of the Funnel, Marketers focus on brand awareness instead of converting leads into customers. They attract visitors by providing highly engaging content like Blog posts, Guides, podcasts, White papers that match visitors’ interests and needs. 

When most people know your brand, you have to focus on SEO and Paid Advertising Strategies. If someone searches your Business over the internet, they can easily find information about your brand.

MOFU (Middle of Funnel)

 In the middle of Funnel, Marketers focus on lead capturing and nurturing. Lead capturing is done by attracting the visitors through lead magnets like the free course on Instagram Hashtag strategy, and lead nurturing is done when we have email ids of the visitors in return for the free course. In Lead Nurturing, High-value content is provided to leads via a series of emails. Through this, we can establish trust and credibility in the brand. 

So we develop a relationship with leads in the middle of Funnel. 

BOFU (Bottom of Funnel)

 In this section, brands focus on sales and conversions by pitching your premium product or services via email. For this, they use assets like product demos, free trials, free audits, consultation. To grab the attention, brands offer discount codes with deadlines. 

So the success of Funnel depends upon the no. of Loyal customers you get for your brand. For this, you have to provide lifetime value to make them repeat customers. 

For creating a successful marketing strategy for your brand, you must consider all of the stages of the conversion funnel and develop an integrated, comprehensive approach to increase conversion percentage and ROI for your Business.

The significant benefit of using Funnel for Business is that we have a clear idea about 

  • The buyer’s stage.
  • How many people are buying our products?

Types of Funnels

There can be many types of Funnel based on the purpose we are using, e.g., is Webinar Funnels, Lead generation Sales Funnel.

Webinar Funnels

The Webinar is a robust platform to transform your Business. Creating and delivering webinars is one challenge and getting people into webinars is another challenge. Several questions arise when you conduct webinars and have low attendance.

What’s wrong with Webinar?

Is the quality of the Webinar less?

The answer lies in whether you are following the sales funnel for your Webinar or Not. In this, you focus on the high Conversion registration page and Email Automation Sequence.

Lead Generation Sales Funnel

A sales funnel a system through which you sell your products online. It starts with a landing page with a great free offer to attract leads. An email popup is attached to the landing page. Those who want to avail of the free offer will give in their email ID to get it.

Then, the first few emails delivered to the subscribers provide excellent value to create trust and credibility that the sender is an expert in that field. An advanced bulk emailing system called auto-responders is used in this process.

At the end of the email series, a related paid product is pitched.

To sum up, Lead generation sales funnel, collect email ids, deliver autoresponder emails and sell your products via sales pages.

What do you need to think about before creating a Funnel for your Business?

Before creating, you must have a clear idea about

  • what you are going to sell
  • create an email list 
  • connect the Funnel with the autoresponder

How is content essential for Funnel to attract leads?

Business needs educating and nurturing customers to maintain good customer relationships that inspire them to visit the web or social media platform again. So, every brand needs high-value quality content.

What are the ways to Promote your Funnel to find more leads for your Business?

We have created the Funnel now, and we want to bring traffic to our Funnel. We can achieve this through various methods like

  • Blog Posts around similar content
  • A Link in bio to your Funnel on Instagram
  • Quality and content related to your Funnel on social media
  • YouTube Videos
  • Podcasts
  • Guest Posting
  • Affiliates

Thanks for reading my article. Please give your valuable comments and share this article on your social media handles

16 thoughts on “Complete Explanation of Marketing Funnels for beginners in Digital Marketing: What they are, why we need, its stages and levels”

  1. Very useful and informative article; such kind of concepts /services must be utilised which lead towards success of business.

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