What is Digital Marketing Funnel? How to Create One?

A digital marketing funnel is a well-designed model representing the steps involved from the time product is revealed to the time it is purchased. An online marketing funnel aims to direct enough organic traffic to the top level and to support them through content marketing and other strategies. Therefore, the visitors eventually convert into customers.

Essentially, a digital funnel helps you evaluate various stages the customers pass through, from when they get familiar with your products/services to when they make buying decisions. The digital marketing funnel has proved inevitable for marketers in achieving their goals. This is because marketing success is guaranteed when marketing actions are segmented depending on the content ads and other relevant aspects. This is where the digital funnel proves its worthiness.

A digital funnel’s every stage represents the implementation of various techniques to motivate customers to move down the funnel and approach closer to purchase. With this overview, let’s look at the steps to create a digital marketing funnel.

Steps to create a Digital Marketing Funnel:

1) Analyse your target market:

Analyzing your target market helps you to design customer profiles that will eventually help you to formulate targeted content matching their needs. Moreover, you can use this information to evaluate the best channels to approach them and the content type they will most likely react to.

2) Competitor research:

After thoroughly understanding your customers and their needs, it’s time to conduct competitor research. You need to get answers to the following questions:

• Are the competitors’ strategies effective?
• What competitors’ strategies don’t work?
• How can you stand out from your competitors and prepare a unique and better digital funnel?

Learning and tweaking your funnel is essential to make it as cost-effective as possible. You can use your competition as motivation but remember not to copy them altogether. You need not revamp all the strategies but aim to improve your digital funnel.

3) Define goals:

Your online marketing funnel must aim to convert your website visitors into purchasing customers. Hence, your goals must be dependent on what actions you want from customers. It can be purchasing a product, downloading a white paper, or signing up for a newsletter.

After defining your goals, you must prepare an action plan that helps you to achieve the defined goals. This plan must entail all the steps you may need to implement from start to end. So, the steps could range from creating reliable and appealing content to making customers click through your website. Furthermore, you must set a real-time timeline for accomplishing each step; otherwise, you may get confused.

4) Creation of a Content Strategy:

It involves developing content that solves your customer’s queries. It must be relevant and valuable to your target audience at every funnel stage. At the initial stage, i.e., the awareness stage, your goal is to seek the attention of potential customers and familiarise them with your products/services. You need to create informative, interesting, and convincing content. 

Your content strategy must enlighten the potential customers about your products/service and also make them aware of the benefits. You can use case studies, videos, cheat sheets, e-books, and more to compare your products/services with others.

Not just the awareness stage, but content strategy is also helpful in the purchase stage. Your goal must be to persuade potential customers to purchase your products or services at this stage. So, your content must be convincing and able to build up confidence. You can create compelling content at the purchasing stage by creating product demos, testimonials, pricing pages, webinars, and more.

5) Website designing for lead conversion:

The key idea behind designing your website is to convert visitors into leads with an optimal conversion rate. The following tips will help you to create a website guaranteeing optimal conversion:

• Create easy-to-understand content on your website. 
• The website must be easy to navigate, and visitors should be able to easily and quickly find what they want.
• Your CTA buttons should be easily visible and clickable.
• Use images and videos to make the content interesting.
• Test various website versions to determine which offers the best lead conversion.

6) Analysis and Optimization of Funnel:

You can effectively analyze and optimize your created digital marketing funnel using data inferred from your Google Analytics account. With Google Analytics, you can have comprehensive information on how people search and engage with your website. Also, this tool helps you to track aspects like the number of visitors to your website, which pages they visit, their location, and their stay duration on your website.

By analyzing these data, you can discern what improvements are required in your funnel and how to make relevant changes to optimize your conversion rate.

7) Creation of advertising campaign:

One of the key purposes behind creating a digital funnel is that whenever potential customers search for their query, they must get your website at the top of the SERP results. You should create a blog post resonating with your customer persona and must invest in search engine optimization to get long-term benefits. You can hire an SEO agency to manage your SEO efforts.

You should determine which social media platforms your target audience use frequently and smartly place ads over there to reach them. Remember that the content and ads must be educational and unbiased.

If you are targeting consumers, Facebook and Instagram are recommended social media platforms to run ads. The reason is these platforms help you to market your products or services efficiently. If you want to directly interact with your audience and market your products/services, go for Email marketing. It is one of the leading digital marketing channels helping you to build a reputation by providing useful resources like case studies, e-books, cheat sheets, free trials, etc., to your audience to attract them.

Consider the following when creating an advertising campaign:

• Blogs
• Videos
• Social media ads
• Pay-per-click ads
• Checklists
• Quizzes
• Industry studies

8) Creation of a landing page:

A landing page demonstrates your expertise. Creating a landing page on your website is inevitable because it brings potential clients to your website. It is the page where users ultimately click on an ad, and also it is the place that guides visitors.

Your landing page must include all details of your offer along with appealing visuals. You can include a form that accepts the visitors’ contact information so that you can follow them later.

Visitors will be more likely to share their details if you include security badges and testimonials on your landing page. Based on your campaign’s objective, you can include a captivating call to action, for example, ‘Buy now’ or ‘Subscribe to our newsletter.’

9) Perform A/B testing:

The A/B testing process allows you to compare your landing page’s two versions and ad copies. Based on this comparison, you can determine which one works better. Also, this comparison suggests which one explores positive customer behavior. Using this test, you randomly demonstrate one type of landing page to half of your traffic and the improved version to the other half.

Although A/B testing involves generating twice the amount of content, it offers valuable insights into what works effectively and entices your customer most. Based on the results, you can amend your campaign.

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10) Work with online influencers:

If your budget allows, it is recommended to work with online influencers. They are people or companies with a following that might be intrigued by your product. Influencer marketing can use mutual promotion or sponsorship to reach a broad audience effectively. Moreover, it makes your services always available to your audience. Furthermore, you can create a useful FAQ section that answers all the frequently asked questions. 

11) Creation of a powerful brand presence:

Consumers already have a myriad of options to choose from. So, you should create a powerful brand presence and value that will make you stand out from the competitors. You should be able to make your users believe that you care for them and understand their concerns, irrespective of their digital marketing phase.

SEO strategies and content marketing can improve your brand presence. Including testimonials on your website makes sure you align with consumers’ expectations and that your product/service would meet their needs.

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