What is the Marketing Funnel and How Can You Optimise Yours?

This week’s guest blogger is Will Morrison, Digital Marketing Specialist at CareScribe, an assistive technology company based in Bristol (South-West England). Will has over 10-years of experience working as a Digital Marketer under various guises and has written a lot of blogs in his time. I hope you enjoy this one all about the Marketing Funnel.

Over to Will…

The marketing funnel, sometimes called a sales or conversion funnel, is a fundamental concept within sales and marketing.

The term is used to describe the journey, broken up by stages, that your potential customers go on with your business before they take a desired action (for example, from first hearing about your business to picking up the phone and getting in touch). It is a useful tool when trying to visualise your marketing strategy and helps show how you or your team generates value by moving customers from stage to stage.

If we think about other journeys we take in life, we typically focus on the final step taken to get to a destination. However, if you were to analyse the process, there would have been several other hoops you had to jump through along the way before being able to even think about taking that final step.

Consider Frodo from The Lord of the Rings (spoiler tag for anyone who has been putting off watching the films for the last 20 years…), you could describe his story in its simplest terms as a walk from point A to point B, but in reality, he had to take different steps, and meet certain goals, along the way before being able to finish his journey. Our job as marketers is to analyse that journey and see how we could have made it more efficient for Frodo in order to make the trip easier for the next poor hobbit that comes along.

In summary:

Prospective customers navigate a path within your company's marketing funnel as they assess the decision to purchase from you

Understanding the mechanics of a funnel enables you to identify issues in your marketing strategy

As marketers, it’s our job to use this information to enhance our marketing strategy and to guide people through the funnel to convert them from potential buyers into customers

What Are the Stages in the Marketing Funnel?

The marketing funnel is based on the Awareness-Interest-Desire-Action (AIDA) model and the specific details can vary but they typically include the following stages:

Awareness - the point at which someone becomes aware of your brand, product, or service

Interest - when someone expresses interest in your product or service

Desire - when someone evaluates your product or service. This stage can also be known as “Consideration”

Action - when someone becomes a customer. This stage can also be known as “Conversion”

Advocacy - not all funnels include this stage, but for advanced strategies, this step describes someone who has progressed from a customer to someone advocating for your product or service to others

Let’s take a closer look at each of the marketing funnel stages:

1. Awareness

The awareness stage marks the moment that someone first learns about your brand. For example, they may be browsing LinkedIn and see a relevant post from your brand.

At this point, they are now aware of your business.

An example of a Tweet from Merceds-Benz AG featuring a poll about their ambitions for 20392. Interest

The interest stage is when people start to engage with your brand.

They may sign up for your newsletter, download one of your resources, subscribe to your social media pages, or browse your web pages.

A screenshot of CareScribe’s website

For example, CareScribe, a company who create software for people with additional needs, offers useful, free content like a guide to neurodiversity in the workplace to help nurture users through the interest stage. To get to this point, a user will have to have first become aware of CareScribe before then investigating more and by finding content that is genuinely useful for them, they are more likely to engage and move from awareness to interest.

3. Desire

The desire stage (also commonly known as consideration) is when people evaluate your product or service.

At this point, the customer already wants to know more about your brand, so it is your job to offer them as much information as they need in order to make a decision.

Customers will be evaluating alternatives, reading reviews, looking at customer testimonials, talking to friends, and comparing you against your competitors. If a large portion of your customers visit you via your website, then it’s important you offer plenty of information to answer any questions they may have. You may provide them with product guides, video guides, and FAQs to help influence their decision.

A screenshot of TalkType’s website

For example, TalkType (pictured above), a dictation software company, tries to include as much information as could be needed at this stage on their dictation software page. This helps users who are now considering the product more easily navigate their way to a conversion by offering information like statistics and also other valuable things for this stage of the funnel like case studies.

4. Action

The action stage (also commonly known as the conversion stage) is when your prospective customers have decided they’re going to buy from you. They’re one step away from becoming customers.

Your goal is to make it easy for them to convert in some way whether that’s for example through a phone call, filling out a contact form, or buying one of your products.

Amazon have famously worked a lot on optimising this stage of their funnel and have seen a lot of success because of this.

Why Are Marketing Funnels Effective?

In reality, most people are not going to navigate your marketing funnel perfectly from A to Z. Users will often move back and forth between stages, stay in one phase without making progress, and all sorts of other behaviours.

It would not be realistic to expect any marketing team to be able to anticipate the countless variations that will appear, especially when dealing with large numbers of customers and a complicated user journey.

The marketing funnel helps to simplify our understanding of the customer journey and acts as a framework for businesses to refine their marketing strategies. By mapping the funnel out, you are able to more effectively analyse users and conclude which tactics to implement at each stage of the funnel.

Without a deliberate focus on this structure, certain stages of your marketing funnel may be overlooked, leading to gaps that result in customer loss, often referred to as a "leaky" funnel.

For instance, you might be attracting significant traffic to your website, yet none of those visitors are subscribing to your email list. Or maybe lots of people reach your checkout and then drop off. The marketing funnel can highlight these problems, providing you with the opportunity to address them.

How to Improve Your Marketing Funnel

Every business will need to approach their funnel differently, and there will a lot of different things to consider when mapping out your funnel. So, it’s hard to provide a one size fits all suggestion for how to create a marketing funnel. But, broadly speaking, you can break the process down into several steps.

Understand Your Users

The first step is to understand how your customers are currently interacting with you. A good option here can be to create buyer personas to better map out the type of customers who are buying your products or services. You will likely find that different personas are interacting with you differently. They might face different challenges and so be researching differently or be looking for different ways to convert.

Map out your user journey

From this point, you will be able to start thinking about how those different personas typically convert with you. Do they come through ads for example, or maybe through blog posts? It’s important at this stage to try and understand the conversion events that indicate that a user has moved from one stage of the funnel to the next. Maybe they download a case study which indicates that they have progressed to the desire/consideration stage, or maybe they have left a product in their basket which could indicate they are in the action stage.

What Metrics Should You Use

Now you should start to understand the different metrics you will use to measure success at different stages of the funnel based on these customer journeys you have identified. Typical metrics include things like your site visitors, ad clicks, and conversion rate.

Funnel Analysis

From here, you will need to carry out the actual analysis and work out things like where people are dropping out of your funnel, and what steps are most commonly taken before a user becomes a customer, based on your success metrics.

You can use all sorts of tools to analyse how people are using your site with heatmaps being a common source of interesting information. Microsoft Clarity currently offers a free heatmap that can do this job.

Implement Changes and Review

At this point you should be able to recognise the reasons why users are not converting. This allows you to implement changes and review how these impact your funnel. If they improve things, great! If they make things worse, no problem - just revert your changes and try again.

For example, if your finding that you have a high amount of interest on your site but users are dropping off once they reach your product page, then this indicates that it’s time to optimise this page. You could monitor things like heat maps to find information or you could even send users a questionnaire.

Conversely, if you have a great conversion rate but a low number of users, then it’s time to work on your awareness and generate some more traffic to the site. Maybe that’s through the use of ads or maybe through a content strategy.

As mentioned above, there is no one size fits all approach to improving your funnel, so these are just examples, but if you set yourself up in a position where you’re able to analyse what’s working and what’s not, you’ll be able to use this to your advantage.

Thank you so much Will and CareScribe for your informative post! If you would also like to feature on the All About Digital Marketing Blog please get in touch via louisaguiseauthor@gmail.com.

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All images were provided by Will Morrison from Carescribe.