Digital Marketing Funnel 101: Turning Leads into Conversions

Imagine this: You own a garden shop and you create some of the best online content on the market as well as offer world-class products. However, you’ve noticed that your number of abandoned online carts is increasing, and your volume of sales isn’t increasing despite the volume of content you put out and your focus on paid ads. What’s going on? It’s time to take a look at your digital marketing funnel.  Your marketing funnel examines every point in your buyer’s journey—what works, what doesn’t, what’s bringing your customers in, turning them off, and making them stay. Essentially, it’s the blueprint behind your business’s success—or failure.  In what follows, we will provide a complete guide to help you understand and develop an effective marketing funnel. We’ll explain what a modern funnel is, the stages involved, why it’s important, and more. We’ll also share tips for how to create a marketing funnel tailored to every business, gearing you up for optimum lead generation that gets results.

The Digital Marketing Funnel Explained: How to Turn Leads Into Conversions

As you’re probably aware, many organizations these days are in the business of optimization and offerings. They know that they need to design smooth and lightning-fast websites and create mounds and mounds of captivating content in order to reach their target consumers. And they know that it will help their ROI…but, how? One of the main concerns marketers and online business owners have is how web visits, sessions, and clicks actually turn into product or service acquisitions. Enter: the digital marketing funnel.  Your digital marketing sales funnel breaks it all down—explaining and demonstrating, in simple key categories, how your efforts result in sales. Successfully analyzing your current funnel and identifying weak and strong areas can help you improve your funnel significantly, allowing you to capture more leads with less effort. Consequently, understanding and building a powerful digital marketing funnel is one of the most impactful things you can do to grow your business and simplify the process of turning visitors into loyal customers.  In what follows, we will provide a complete guide for understanding and developing a marketing funnel.

What is a Conversion Funnel?

What is a digital marketing funnel? Essentially, it’s a strategic model that represents the customer journey of a business persona from the moment they are aware of the brand until they turn into loyal customers. Your digital marketing funnels help you get people’s attention, keep it, turn it into revenue, and then expand. Understanding and developing a marketing funnel is vitally important for the performance of your marketing strategies. It:

• Allows for a successful segmentation of marketing actions
• Allows you to address the right audience with the right content
• Increases leads and conversions
• Includes strategies for acquisition and retention
• Increasing transparency in your marketing efforts

Digital Marketing Funnel Stages

Unlike the traditional marketing funnel, there are several different stages of a modern digital marketing funnel. Integral to understanding each step is having a firm grasp of the audience for each stage and how to reach them. Let’s take a look at each of the 10 stages:

1. Engagement

At the top of the funnel, it’s all about networking—raising awareness of your brand by actively engaging with leads. This awareness stage can take a number of different forms, like responding to reviews or engaging in conversations with people who comment on your posts. At this point in the funnel, you shouldn’t be trying to do a hard sell, but let customers know who you are as a brand and what your business personality is.

2. Education

When you want to learn how fast a cheetah can actually run, or top tips for creating an effective digital marketing funnel, where do you go first? The internet. People consistently turn to online sources and search to educate themselves and others, providing brands with the unique chance to fill the gap. Brands can create targeted content that educates and also converts by directing leads to their website or other resources. Consider your particular expertise and industry. What do your customers want to know? What do people searching your industry want to learn? And how might you position yourself as an expert on the subject? Consider using a number of different platforms and mediums as well as working to rank high in search engine optimization. For example, if you’re an HVAC business, you might make a video on youtube with one of your employees to show how to know when your air filter needs changing and how to do it.

3. Research

Once a new customer becomes interested in you or your product, they’ll want to read more. At this point in the consideration stage, the best thing you can do is look at your competitors. Are there gaps in the content they’re producing? Are there places where you can offer more balanced or personalized expertise? Perform content marketing that fills gaps for your potential customers, and does it better than your competitors.

4. Evaluation

After potential customers have educated themselves and done their research, they’ve possibly selected you as the business they want to provide their solution. At this point in the funnel, all you need to do is emphasize credibility to make sure they decide to patronize you instead of the guy next door. In order to do this, make sure you offer strong customer testimonials and display your awards (if you have any) as well as any public highlights. You can also offer free workshops, webinars, services, trial periods, or rebates in order to seal the deal.

5. Justification

As a customer yourself, you know that many complex and variable factors go into making a purchase decision. For example, when it comes to getting a new car, maybe you’ve found a car you really love, but your partner hates it. Maybe you’ve found “the one,” but you’ve just had a serious medical expense and it’s now out of your budget. Perhaps you like the car, but are secretly wondering if there’s something better. As a business owner, you can’t control all of the factors in your customers’ decisions. However, your job at this stage is to try to resolve anything that might be holding your customer back. You want to justify the purchase or overcome any remaining obstacles.

6. Purchase

Did you know that 1 in 4 people abandon their carts if their preferred payment option isn’t available? Your payment process should be secure, transparent, and uber-convenient. Don’t hide any extra fees or have hidden costs–these can make customers feel like you’re trying to cheat them. One of the best ways to ensure ultimate ease in the payment process is by using text. Features like text-to-pay allow you to send customers a text with a simple link that directs them to an online page where they can pay. The feature gives them multiple options, including credit card, bank transfers, or even mobile wallets—such as Apple Pay or Google Pay. The right tools can even help them set up low or no-interest payment plans with you, all from a short and simple text.

7. Adoption

As you’re probably aware, the middle of the funnel is where most businesses fall short. After-purchase is one of the most important phases of the funnel because customers know that you don’t have to do it–which is why it’s so important that you do. After a transaction, providing proper support and care for your customers is crucial. Make sure that they understand who can help them. Reaching out to obtain feedback and ensure your customers are getting the most out of their product is crucial to ensuring that they continue to buy from and interact with you. You always want them to feel like they’re getting more for their money than they expected.

8. Retention

Retaining your customers past the adoption stage involves continued contact that is relevant and valuable. You might create a membership or rewards program that has irresistible benefits, or continue to provide free educational materials that help your customers get the most out of their products. Referral programs are also particularly effective at this stage, as there’s hardly anything more persuasive than liking something so much that you recommend it to friends or family.

9. Expansion

At this stage of the funnel, expansion means up-selling—or cross-selling. But you should only do this after a significant amount of trust has been built. Pushing customers to buy more after giving a shoddy post-purchase experience or failing to offer the right amount of support or free products/services can be a huge turn-off and can even redirect customers who’ve been with you for a while. Make sure to opt for too much rather than too little, going out of your way to ensure customers know you value them as people before you recommend more products that can improve their quality of life.

10. Advocacy

As we mentioned, one of the most effective ways to get your name out there is to be so amazing that people can’t help but talk about you. Existing customers should become brand advocates for you naturally. How can you encourage this at the bottom of the funnel? After every satisfactory customer experience, provide your customers with multiple opportunities to share their experience through reviews, social media posts, or referral programs and have an effective call-to-action. You can even offer discounts or points for people who review you or recommend your brand online. 

How to Create a Digital Marketing Funnel Strategy That Fits Your Business

While the stages of a digital marketing funnel are typically the same across the board, their internal applications are not. Every business has different strengths and weaknesses. If you don’t play to these, your plan is basically useless. When it comes to digital marketing sales funnels, one plan does not fit all. You have to take into account your unique advantages and where you’re falling short. Who are you trying to reach? How are you trying to reach them? What are they looking for?  Now that you know the steps of a well-crafted, effective digital marketing funnel, it’s time to create one that works for your business. Here are three tips for crafting a well-structured, comprehensive marketing funnel that will work for you individually.

1. Build Brand Awareness

The foundations for the best digital marketing funnels are set way ahead of time–and built over years. One of the most important things you can start doing right now is building, or improving, your brand awareness. Engage with your local community and build a presence by partnering with other businesses or sponsoring local events. Make sure people have seen your name in person and online multiple times–this is one of the most effective ways to build credibility and presence in the minds of your customers.  A key way to build brand awareness is through online review collection. Building social capital is essential for letting people know who you are and what you stand for. Make sure that you ask every customer who interacts with you for a review–and make it easy for them to give you one. One of the best ways to do this is through text. With the right platform, you can send customers a simple text with a link they can click to review you.

2. Identify Your Target Audience for Each Stage

Digital marketing strategies that are built to appeal to the masses miss the point entirely. Why? In each campaign and each stage of your funnel, your audience is unique. At every stage, you need to identify who you’re targeting specifically. Who is this for? What are they worried about? What’s the best way to reach them? Once you’ve started to answer these questions, you can start building out strong customer personas in order to successfully market to different segments of your target audience. This includes their pain points, their goals, and why they purchase from you–what need are they trying to fill? What are their preferred marketing channels? Email marketing, text marketing, social media marketing?  In identifying your target audience, consider their history with other competitors or with you as well. You should always gather as many metrics as you can in order to make your marketing personal and relevant.

3. Create Targeted Content for Each Stage

Once you’ve created your buyer personas, you can create content that’s specifically crafted for them and their needs. For example, if you’re targeting local Gen-Z customers in your advocacy stage, you might work with an influencer to create a TikTok that lauds your referral program as one of the best “hacks” in the industry. If one of your stages is targeting new moms in the “research” stage, you might include articles or blog posts that highlight interviews with your target audience, or collections of reviews and case studies that are specifically directed toward them.  Remember that your content goals are different at every stage. Your “bofu” (bottom of funnel) content will naturally be different from your “mofu” (middle of funnel) materials, focusing on closing sales, advocacy, and after-purchase care rather than justification or information.  One of the best ways to create targeted content is to have your customers create content for you. You can achieve this by offering rewards or discounts for customers who post about you at different stages of your marketing funnel.

How to Turn Leads Into Conversions?

Even though your conversion funnel simply represents the journey of a business persona, turning leads into conversions is not easy and requires a good amount of trial and error. You have to prioritize each customer relationship, keep track of what’s working and what’s not in terms of SEO, understand the why behind your results, and employ modern tools and technologies to implement innovative solutions. Regardless of the size of your team, it never hurts to have a bit of help.  Podium is an award-winning marketing and communication solution that has helped thousands of small and local businesses grow. With its suite of growth solutions such as Webchat (an asynchronous, text-powered landing page chat solution), Reviews, Phones, Podium actively helps customers get more leads and improve their conversion rate naturally. By bringing all communications together on one convenient, simplified dashboard, Podium also increases transparency and convenience for you and helps you ensure no hard-earned leads are lost through the cracks.  To learn more, check out: More reviews. More business for you, Make your website a conversation starter, Send one text that drives thousands in revenue, and Customer Success Stories.