A digital marketing sales funnel is a set of methods to bring traffic to your platform and convert leads into loyal customers. These loyal customers can be pivotal in the long-term growth of your business.
In eCommerce, marketing is the most crucial factor in generating online sales. When you look into the digital industry, you will see that numerous business companies have evolved from traditional to digital marketing methods. Traditional marketing refers to the word of mouth marketing, advertisements on billboards, and television adverts.
If you go back a few decades, the potential for business growth is minimal. However, the evolution of the Internet and social media has elevated the digital marketing game to different heights. One of the best techniques that marketing experts have come up with is to use digital marketing sales funnel to attract audiences and promote their products. Understanding digital marketing sales funnel is essential for the long-term success of your business.
What is Digital Marketing Sales Funnel?
A digital marketing sales funnel is a framework used to generate website traffic and educate them until they become paying customers. A typical digital marketing sales funnel has four stages, i.e., awareness, discovery, consideration, and conversion.
Image taken from Strikingly User’s Website
There are numerous marketing strategies for you to attract and nurture your visitors at different stages of the marketing funnel. However, one crucial thing to consider is that you will attract visitors to different marketing funnel stages, and every visitor won't always follow the same path.
The four digital marketing sales funnel stages are as follows:
- Awareness: This is where a person becomes aware of your store or website. The awareness comes from different ways, such as social media, word of mouth, email, or references
- Discovery: A visitor will see a few website pages and learn more about your company and services.
- Consideration: Visitors spend more time going through your website content, consuming your data, and joining your mailing list
- Conversion: It can either be quick or may take some time to be completed. Conversion depends on your product pricing strategy, the type of products or services you sell, and how you counter the customers' problems.
Importance of a Digital Marketing Sales Funnel
The conversion rate can interpret the significance of digital marketing sales funnels. The higher the conversion rate is, the more effective the marketing funnel will be. Usually, the aim is to convert all the leads into customers, but that is practically impossible. The objective is to increase the number of business leads converted into customers.
A digital marketing sales funnel can benefit your business in the following ways. For example,
- More targeted leads: With a marketing funnel in place, the users that make it to the end of the funnel will be highly qualified. In other words, the attracted customers will be more suited to your business plans
- Nurtures customers for an efficient sales experience: When you talk to different parts of the marketing funnel, you will likely progress them from visitor to customer. When you understand digital marketing sales funnels, you will realize that it is not a hard process and is all about providing value to the customers
- Increased revenue: Most elements of the digital marketing sales funnels can be automated, which means that your business will generate more sales with less effort
Tips to Create Powerful Digital Marketing Sales Funnels
1) Build Brand Awareness
It is not a secret that Google is a huge fan of brands. There is no single formula to create strong brand awareness, but many factors make a strong brand, such as brand searches, mentions, and appearance. Some of the brand signals are as follows:
- A verified business address mentioned on your website
- The local number on your website
- An "About Us" section that describes the business and shares the employees' information
- Social media presence on popular platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram
Brand mentions are a critical factor in the case of building brand awareness. It can be the online mentions of your brand, even if they don't include your link. This approach sends a message to Google that you have a strong brand built on authoritative sources. If people are talking about your brand by name, it shows that it is high quality.
Image taken from Strikingly User’s Website
When we speak about brand searches, we refer to the keywords that include the brand name. If we take Strikingly as an example, the keywords can be "Strikingly website content," "What is Strikingly," and more. A decent volume of keywords shows you have a strong brand.
Here are some of the tips for building brand awareness:
- Your brand must have verified contact information and local citations (if you own a physical business)
- Conduct a PR campaign to increase brand mentions
- Use guest blogs to connect your brand with popular websites in your niche
- Pay attention to on-page and off-page SEO to improve search engine rankings
2) Identify Your Target Audience
The different stages of your digital marketing sales funnel will interact with various members of your target audience. The more your audience moves down the funnel, the narrower your approach will be. For example, the top of your funnel will attract pet owners if you have a pet-friendly website. Once they start moving down the funnel, they will get more specific information, such as grooming dogs, the food dogs should eat, etc.
- This will be your most significant audience and will consist of multiple groups
- Here, you will start creating customer segments based on different attributes, actions taken, and how often they visit your website
- You will have different audience segments based on how much the user spends or whether they have bought some product
3) Set Marketing Goals
As a business owner, you want to set up your marketing goals after building your digital marketing sales funnels. There are different types of marketing funnels that you can create for different purposes. If you take an example of an eCommerce store owner and a course creator, both have different objectives. The eCommerce store owner will try to increase sales through paid ads, whereas the course creator will use long-form content to attract email subscribers. The overall process will remain the same for both, but the specifications will differ.
Some of the common marketing goals in the eCommerce world are as follows:
- Boost email subscribers by 2,000 by running Facebook ads
- Increase online sales by running coupon-based ads on Instagram
- Gain more leads through telephone
4) Different Conversion Funnels for Each Goal
If you own an online store, you will likely have multiple conversion funnels at your disposal (unless you have a single product). Likewise, you will have multiple conversion funnels if you have multiple targets to reach those objectives. For example, you will have one funnel dedicated to boosting email subscribers and another dedicated to generating more sales.
The different types of conversion funnels are based on your type of content assets and your ultimate objective. Usually, you will have different funnels running at the same time and will test them individually to see which one converts best.
5) Create Targeted Content
As you understand digital marketing sales funnels and the different audience types, let's examine how different types of content fit your funnel.
- Attraction Stage
The attraction stage sits at the top of a digital marketing sales funnel. This stage is where you will be attracting different audiences to your website. Most of your content should be about building brand awareness. When they arrive at your final at this stage, most people will be hearing about your brand for the first time. Blog posts and video content are some of the types associated with this stage.
- Engagement Stage
In the engagement stage, people start to express themselves with your brand. This stage usually consumes a lot of content, emails, videos, etc.
The engagement stage has a few overlaps with the attraction stage. For example, your blog posts' high search engine rankings will help you generate traffic to your website. However, those blog posts will also resolve many queries from your viewers. Case studies and product comparisons are examples of the engagement stage's content.
- Decision-making Stage
By the time your visitors come to this stage, they will already be familiar with your business and will be deciding whether or not they should buy products from your website. Depending on the niche you have pursued, your first sale won't happen immediately. For example, a subscriber can join your email list, go through your emails and finally become your customer in six months
As a business owner, you should know that making a sale is not as important as building a long-term relationship. Content that boosts your number of sales includes:
- Free trials
- Live demos
- Coupons
- Sales pages
Relationship-building Stage
By the time you move to the final stage, you have already established a good relationship with your customers before they make their buying decisions. However, you must deepen that relationship. You can delight your customers in the following ways:
- Send exciting offers
- Run contests and giveaways
6) Use Multiple Marketing Channels to Reach Your Audience
Image taken from Strikingly User’s Website
Nowadays, there are a handful of ways to reach your target audience. The methods you use will depend on the attributes of your target audience and your marketing budget. Here are some of the ways through which you can reach your target audience:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
- Paid ads on social media
- Organic social media
Conclusion
You cannot do digital marketing without a website builder that efficiently manages and updates your website. Strikingly's tools are exciting and easy to use, so you don't have to spend on a designer to make minor adjustments to your content.
Visitors enter your marketing funnel in the awareness stage, usually through social media or paid advertisements. They will understand more about your offerings as they go through your content or join your email list.
Once they have finished their research and you have built your trust, they will eventually become paying customers. An attractive landing page with Strikingly is a great strategy to convert potential customers to paid users. It can help move people faster into the funnel.
Creating a digital marketing sales funnel is an ongoing process, but it is something that can elevate your business moving forward. Sign up for Strikingly today, create your landing page, and start growing your business.
