If you’ve taken even the briefest of marketing classes in high school or college, you’ve heard of the marketing funnel. It’s not necessarily the basis of all marketing, but it summarizes everything a marketing plan can do and should want to accomplish. The marketing funnel starts when your brand/business first interacts with a potential consumer and ends with you getting a purchase.
Everyone who runs a business of any kind, from eCommerce stores to law firms, needs to know the basics of the marketing funnel.
The Marketing Funnel
1. Brand Awareness
People who don’t know about your business can’t interact with it, let alone make a purchase. With these consumers, the first thing you want to do is make them aware of your brand’s existence. You can do this through posters, online ads, billboards, or just by making your business easy to spot in person.
How much you want to tell someone about your brand is up to you. There’s plenty of freedom in moving someone from the Awareness stage to the next. They don’t need to know what you do or provide to move from being aware to being interested.
With Awareness, you do not want to try and make a sale or capture information. Consumers make purchases from brands they know, not ones they don’t. This is your first impression, and people don’t like being sold things during a first impression. If that’s what you’re going for, you need to have the best salesperson, or else you’ll guarantee that the consumer will never be your customer.
2. Interest
After Awareness comes Interest. Once they are aware of your brand, you want to get them interested in what your brand can offer. You can interest consumers who only know of your brand’s existence and consumers who know what you offer at the same time.
Interest is all about making sure everyone knows what your brand provides and how it helps them or brings them enjoyment. This phase of the marketing funnel has a lot of overlap with the next step, Consideration. The difference is that you don’t necessarily have to appeal to your target audience specifically. You more so explain why your brand’s products and/or services appeal to anyone.
Marketing tactics that make consumers interested include the same tactics as Awareness. Use public-facing tactics such as your website, ads, public displays on your storefront, and appearances at local and/or public events.
3. Consideration
It’s during Consideration that you appeal to the consumer and show them what your business can do for them. While you can build Interest with email blasts and newsletters, these are best utilized during the Consideration stage. These can spend less time informing the consumer about your brand and more time showing the consumer how you can help.
This is the time to offer free trials, advertise specials, and provide specific information about your products. You’re nurturing a lead here to turn Interest into Consideration or turn Consideration into Intent.
You can try to push Awareness, Interest, and Consideration with one marketing effort, but the more you push, the less likely your marketing push is to be effective. For the sake of time and budget, it’s best to never push all three together, but consider two points of the marketing funnel. Even then, you want to make sure you’re pushing one as effectively as possible before pushing a second.
4. Intent
A consumer is only at the Intent stage if they’ve shown interest in buying the product, not interest in learning more. To gauge Intent, you want to gather information from the consumers you have been marketing to through special email blasts, surveys, and product demos.
Through these methods, you learn where on the marketing funnel your potential consumers are. When you’re first starting out, you can wait before you start measuring Intent, but once you start, you never stop. Even if someone is not showing Intent, it’s incredibly useful and important to know when someone is showing Consideration, Interest, or Awareness.
5. Evaluation
Evaluation is when consumers are on the edge of becoming buyers and are actively trying to decide whether or not to make a purchase. During this part of the marketing funnel, you don’t want to be obvious about what you’re doing, but subtly make a purchase easier.
Send your regular email blasts and newsletters, but for those who have shown Intent and hover over the item in their carts, advertise a special. Another option is to offer a discount. You could try to push them with pop-ups that their cart is waiting for them, but that can risk pushing them too far. Sometimes it’s better to remind them of the item or service that interests them as if they weren’t close to buying it. This interaction will feel natural to them, but also work to push them over the edge.
6. Purchase
If they’re giving you money, you might be thinking, “I’ve won! All my hard work is done!” you would be wrong. When someone makes a purchase, there is no better time to make sure they do so again.
When they make a purchase, offer them a discount on their next purchase if they meet a purchasing threshold. You can also advertise a new service, item, or discount coming soon. You want to give them a reason to come back because once they purchase one thing from you, they’re likely to do so again… unless you let them slip away.
Keep the Marketing Funnel Going with ENX2 Marketing
Once you push a consumer through the marketing funnel, it’s not time to give up. It’s time to push them through it again. Odds are, the second time around, they’ll start at a place of Interest or Consideration. Then you can push them up through the funnel until you have what you need.
But this is long and hard work. Marketing is a job in and of itself. For some businesses, such as law firms, finding the time to start, develop, and execute your marketing funnels can feel impossible. If this describes you, you don’t have to do it alone. Instead, you can contact a marketing team who has the experience to turn your target audience into paying customers and/or clients.
For help maintaining your marketing efforts, contact the experts at ENX2 Marketing. We have the experience and abilities that you need.