Digital funnel is a marketing term that refers to phases a consumer goes through over time before converting and becoming an advocate of your brand. It helps you understand the buyer’s journey from exposure to retention. A prospect, after his first interaction with your brand, either exit the funnel or move forward to next stage.
For instance, if 100 prospects visit your website, 10 of them might buy your products and services and perhaps 1 one them recommends your brand to his circles. Undoubtedly, you want all of your prospects to become your loyal customers. In this blog post, I will highlight some of the important stages of a digital funnel and a conversion strategy for each stage.
(1) It All Starts From Awareness
Awareness is the first pre-purchase stage when a prospect visits your website and becomes aware of your brand. When your audience starts finding you on the internet, it’s time for you to start building trust and engagement. Make sure your web presence provides a great experience to your new visitors. Content marketing is considered to be a great tool to spread awareness of your brand among your potential customers. Make sure your website and content deliver value to your prospects so that they become curious enough to move on to the next stage.
(2) Consideration
Why prospects, aware of your brand, should consider your brand when they have plenty of other options? In the second stage, you have to give all the reasons why your prospects should prefer you over others in the industry. At this stage of the funnel, prospects search solutions to their problems. Possibility is that your prospects do not trust your brand yet. This is the point where educational and targeted content comes to play its role. Content allows you to speak directly with your prospects and helps them evaluate your products and services.
(3) Purchase Stage: Conversion
Now, at this point, prospects who remain in the marketing funnel make a decision whether or not they would buy from you. It’s time to convince your prospects that why your products and services are better than that of your competitors. This is where you surface your final direct pitch. Reviews and testimonials can be helpful in encouraging prospects to convert into customers. Once someone is willing to buy, make sure the selling process is easy to follow. Do not ask for something that is unimportant in completing a transaction or a desired action.
(4) Repeat Purchase
Conversion is not the last stage of a customer life cycle. Once you convert all those prospects into customers, now your goal should be to retain them and build long-term relationships with them. It is, by no means, a good idea to forget your existing customers and move on to finding new prospects. It is rightly said that long-term customers are too valuable to lose. Therefore, at this stage, you need content that can retain customers for a long period of time.
(5) Keep Delighting Your Customers
A recent study highlighted the fact that 6 trillion dollars of annual consumer spending were inspired by the word-of-mouth. Therefore, build strong customer relationship plan so that your customers advocate your products and services across the internet.
It takes time to optimize and develop a digital marketing funnel. You have to figure out the strategy in accordance with your business and digital funnel. By understanding above discussed stages of a digital marketing funnel, you are likely to convert more prospects into customers and more customers into fans.
