Every business needs a marketing model. Be it a multi-national company like Apple that sells consumer products; a small emerging start-up company innovating a brand new product that would wow the world, or even dropshippers who are intending to profit by reselling.
Literally, everyone knows marketing. Even the hawkers or butchers in the wet markets know how to attract customers through creating awareness.
Well Craig, as simple as that sounds, how do we do it then?
The Marketing Funnel, is a strategy used to visualize the process of attracting leads to convert into potential customers. Sounds tough? Let me break it down for you:
For example, fishermen cast their net wide into the sea, hoping to capture as many fishes as they can. Knowing that different fishes require different baits, they push out as many different types of fish baits, hoping to get the fishes to come to them. And when they do, they catch them and make a profit by selling it at the port.
In reality, marketers push out ads through search and display, as well as through affiliated marketing to get enough users to attract potential customers, and then narrow it down by slowly increasing their buying intent through various methods such as targeted ads and finally, getting them to convert into customers.
The Marketing Funnel Stages
The Marketing Funnel can be split into 4 different stages, and I’ll explain each of them individually below:
Awareness
Looking at the funnel from top to bottom, Awareness being at the top would represent people who currently do not know the product yet. Which is why it is wide, meaning that we would spend the most to target the potential customers, be it through Display, Search, YouTube ad campaigns, or through affiliates and content such as blog articles infographics, videos, and social media, because we want to generate as many leads as possible. In short, it is catering of awareness messages to audiences to attract them into gaining interest for the product and/or the brand.
Ad copies in Search and Display at this stage would be recommended to be generic and simple; not too complicated for the general public to pay attention to.
Interest
When potential customers start to gain interest for the product, they want to find out more, and are entering the Interest Stage. Having more in-depth information or features through email marketing campaigns with targeted content will further increase their buying intention. For mobile phones, customers would be interested to compare different competitors of the product, as well as finding out how your product stands out compared to the rest. Unique features and selling points such as awards if your product has won any previously will definitely increase awareness significantly, as it grants credibility in the particular category community.
Seriously, can’t we all just get along already?
Desire
In this stage, we have narrowed the potential customers down to whoever already is interested in a product after competitors. The marketing team will have the best opportunity to convince them that our product is the best option of choice. We’ll use the iPhone for example.
The customer decided that the iPhone is his preferred choice of mobile device after comparing its competitors. So what Apple has to do right now, is to feed him more information to convince him to have the desire to make the purchase. Unique features and specifications of the iPhone would interest the customer, as well as further information or video examples of how the unique features work to allow him to visualize himself using the phone. This creates a halo effect which induces the customer to want to actually make the purchase.
Action
Finally, the potential customer has decided to buy our product and has turned into a customer. At this stage, the sales team handles the purchasing transaction. If there is a positive experience, the customer might refer the product to new potential customers and the marketing funnel will repeat! Of course, having existing customers can be further marketed with retention marketing where email newsletters can be targeted to current customers to induce them to make a second purchase of similar products, increasing their “lifetime value” to the business! The cycle goes on and on.
Take note, as a business, we want to move potential customers through the various stages of the funnel if they don’t do it naturally, however, there are also customers who have short journeys with only a few stages, and can go from Awareness to Action directly!
For any questions, feel free to drop me a message. Connect with me on LinkedIn to find out more of such contents!