Understanding the power of a marketing funnel is one thing – building out its pieces to create a marketing funnel is another challenge entirely. In this guide, we’ll explore how to create an effective marketing funnel that guides prospects through six crucial stages: awareness, desire, evaluation, commitment, return, and ultimately, advocacy.
Different Strategies for Different Stages
Here’s a crucial insight that many businesses miss: You can’t use the same marketing strategies for all prospects because of the different marketing funnel stages. While the funnel may look linear on paper, the reality is far more complex. Different prospects will be at different stages of their journey, and therefore need different approaches and marketing tactics.
Businesses often flood Facebook or Instagram with videos about why their product is better than the competition, but many in their target audience doesn’t even fully understand the problem the product solves yet. This approach simply won’t be effective. Instead, we need to map out and create marketing pieces that align with where people are in their journey.
And therefore, in order to create this strategy in a way that aligns with where people are in the journey, we need to map out and create the marketing pieces or resources that you need at each stage of the journey. Let’s explore these stages together and what resources or pieces that we need.
The Awareness Phase: Top of the Funnel (ToFu)
At the awareness stage of the digital marketing funnel, target customers may not fully recognise their problem, let alone your solution. Your primary goal here is to ensure they become both problem-aware and solution-aware.
To do this, your traffic generation strategy needs to start with education – which is where content marketing comes in. This means providing helpful, interesting, and engaging content with low barrier to entry – it should be free and shouldn’t require prospects to provide their contact details. At this early stage, they’re simply not ready to put skin in the game.
You could use content in the form of blog articles, videos, infographics, photos, podcasts, primary research. Let’s use social media as an example. Some businesses make the mistake of putting up ads with basic product pictures but little explanation of the problem being solved. While this might work for products that offer obvious solutions to well-known problems or for impulse buys, but for most products and services it’s insufficient.
This is where videos can be incredibly powerful tools for building awareness and desire, moving prospects toward the middle of the funnel. Expressive, explanatory pictures and photos and images can also work. Infographics can be powerful. And as I mentioned, blog articles. that give people helpful, interesting information are also a helpful way of building awareness.
Real-World Success Examples
Let’s look at some real-world examples of successful top of marketing funnels.
GoToSkincare demonstrates best practice marketing with their organic video post “Five Ways to Spring Clean Your Beauty Routine.” This content provides valuable, interesting information that helps build trust and moves people through the first phase of the funnel.
They also use infographics about trans-seasonal skincare, offering checklists for spring and autumn skincare routines.
Their blog articles, both organic and sponsored, further enhance their educational content strategy.
Distribution Channels: Getting Your Content Out There
It’s important to realise that your content marketing pieces need to be distributed through various marketing channels.
Social Media Strategies
For example, organic and paid social media is one channel. That includes Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and other constantly emerging channels, TikTok and so on. Organic social media is simply posting your content to your page or channel, with the intent that the social media algorithm will show it to your network, and that some of your network will then hopefully like or share it with their network.
Of course, the success of this relies in part on the quality of your content, but also critically on how large your social media network or following is. If it’s small, you may not get much traction. If so, paid ads can help you reach a much larger audience. At the same time, you obviously need to pay for those ads. But those are two options within each social media channel.
Search Engine Marketing
Search engines, particularly Google with its dominant market share, offer another powerful channel through both paid and organic approaches. Google Search and shopping ads appearing at the top of search results can drive significant traffic with a high purchase intent. Meanwhile, organic search visibility through SEO practices remains beneficial, though it requires creating quality content and building backlinks to your site.
Factors to Consider when Choosing Your Marketing Channels
Demographics and Target Market
Selecting the right marketing channels involves careful consideration of several key factors. First, you need to understand where your target market spends their time and searches for products like yours. If your target market is 35 and older, Facebook might be your best bet. For the 25-35 age group, Instagram becomes essential. When targeting teens, you’ll want to focus on Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and other emerging platforms.
Business Context Considerations
Demographics aren’t the only consideration – business context matters too. If you’re targeting larger businesses or organisations with corporate buyers, LinkedIn might prove more effective than Facebook or Instagram. For consumer products, however, Facebook or Instagram often work better.
Competitive Analysis
Competition levels in each channel also plays role. If you’re competing with large companies on Google ads for a commodity product with low profit margins, you’ll face significant challenges. In such cases, you either need to find a product you can compete with effectively or explore alternative channels and less saturated marketing tactics.
Marketing Funnel Stages Alignment
The marketing funnel stage you’re focusing on should influence your channel selection too. Social media excels at the top of the funnel because it can reach people who aren’t actively looking for your product and may not even recognise their problem yet. This “interruption marketing” appears in their feed as they scroll, and engaging content can capture their attention. While Google search can be powerful, it assumes prospects are already aware of their problem – after all, why else would they search for information about it?
Time and Resource Management
Time constraints also affect channel choice. SEO and organic social media following take time to develop – it might take months for an article to rank highly for desired keywords, especially in competitive industries. If you need quick results, paid social media ads, YouTube ads, and Google ads offer more immediate impact. While these still require a couple of months to optimize fully, they typically deliver results in a shorter timeframe.
Budget Allocation
Budget considerations often determine your initial channel focus. Rather than spreading resources thin across multiple channels, it’s usually more effective to concentrate on the most promising channels first. Extract maximum value from these primary channels before expanding to new ones.
So there’s no one right answer to which channel to focus on. It’s a balancing act, weighing up the different factors and applying them to your unique situation. Your first task is to therefore to determine which channels to focus on and which content you will put into those channels to build awareness.
Now that’s the top of the funnel, the awareness phase, but what about the next stage of the funnel, the desire stage?
The Desire Stage: Moving Down the Funnel
Creating Product Desire
Once prospects understand their problem and are actively seeking solutions, your goal shifts to sparking desire for your specific solution. This requires highlighting both the benefits of your product and what differentiates it from competitors. This is where those differentiators you developed earlier get deployed.
Channel-Specific Approaches
If you’re advertising via social media, you can do this via videos, infographics, photos, images. If you’re advertising via Google ads, you’re limited to a few lines of text for search ads and some photos or images for Google shopping ads. If you’re using Google remarketing so that your ads feature on other websites when people are searching online, then you can use photos, images, and even video. And if you’re using YouTube, then you’ll obviously need video. Whichever channel you’re using, the more you can illustrate and spell out for people the benefits and differentiators of your products, the better. Have a look at some examples.
Successful Marketing Campaign Examples
Consider GoTo’s paid social video ads, which effectively showcase benefits and differentiators while highlighting additional advantages like free shipping as part of their marketing efforts.
In Google’s ecosystem, they balance shopping ads featuring product images with text-based ads that concisely communicate key benefits.
Pet Circle’s paid social photos incorporate powerful imagery alongside key differentiators and benefits like “best price guarantee” and “fast free metro shipping.”
Lead Magnet Strategy
For prospects in the middle of the funnel who have seen your differentiators but aren’t ready to buy, smart businesses employ lead magnets as an effective strategy. Lead magnets are free offers valuable enough that prospects willingly exchange their contact information to receive them. True to their name, these offers attract and draw prospects deeper into your funnel.
While lead magnets often appear as pop-up offers on websites, they can also be effectively deployed through organic and paid social media posts to generate traffic. This strategy acknowledges a crucial reality: most people who discover your business aren’t prepared to make an immediate purchase. Lead magnets provide that vital intermediate step, allowing you to build and nurture relationships with prospects until they’re ready to buy. By motivating prospects to share their contact information, you can build an email list of potential customers to cultivate over time.
The key to a successful lead magnet is providing immediate value to your target market. This isn’t a marketing gimmick – the offer must deliver genuine value to be effective. Common types of lead magnets include:
- Free products or samples
- Discount coupons or vouchers
- Educational resources (ebooks, guides, white papers)
- Practical tools (checklists, templates)
- Interactive content (quizzes, surveys, assessments)
- Live content (webinars and events)
Here’s some real-world examples demonstrate these principles in action:
Xero offers free accounting templates to potential customers
Adore Beauty provides a $20 discount for new sign-ups
Alaya Skin uses a skin routine quiz that provides personalised recommendations
The Evaluation Phase: Building Trust and Confidence
As prospects move to the bottom of the funnel, they enter the evaluation phase. These are individuals who may be actively comparing different solutions, including yours. They might be reading your blog, have downloaded your lead magnet, or clicked through to your site after watching promotional content.
At this stage, your primary task is building trust and confidence in your solution by helping prospects evaluate your offering. Even when people want what you’re selling, they need to trust that your claims are true. This becomes increasingly critical as the purchase price or risk increases.
To enable evaluation and build trust, consider what content your prospects need to make an informed purchase decision. Effective evaluation tools include:
- Testimonials and case studies
- Product comparisons and detailed specifications
- Product demos
- Free trials
- Consultations
Many successful companies implement these strategies effectively.
GoTo leverages both paid and organic testimonial posts, while also creating case study videos featuring customers trying their products.
Similarly, Xero shares customer success stories and offers free trials, allowing prospects to experience their product firsthand.
Pet Barn provides free consultations, offering expert advice to help prospects make informed decisions.
Moving Potential Customers to Commitment
Overcoming Purchase Barriers
For prospective customers who have evaluated your offer but haven’t completed the purchase, additional strategies can help nudge them toward becoming paying customers. They might be concerned about risk, lack urgency, or simply feel distracted. Great marketers address these barriers through various approaches.
Risk Reduction Tactics
Money-back guarantees help reduce perceived risk. Limited-time discounts create urgency – consider Xero’s 50% off promotion
Free shipping and returns, as offered by Mecca, can eliminate final purchase barriers.
Low-cost entry-level products provide an easier first step into your brand.
Return and Advocacy: Completing the Cycle
Customer Retention Strategies
The final stages of your funnel – return and advocacy – deserve careful attention in your marketing plan. Marketing and sales teams should collaborate to ensure existing customers receive targeted ads about new or complementary products, or reminders about refills for recent purchases. To foster advocacy, consider running campaigns that promote your referral programs.
Pet Circle exemplifies this with their referral campaign that encourages online reviews by offering chances to win prizes.
The Power of Multi-Channel Marketing
Beyond Single-Channel Thinking
Great marketing isn’t about running isolated campaigns – it’s about creating effective marketing funnels that guide potential customers through various stages of their journey. Simply running Facebook ads alone rarely proves effective in today’s market. You need to meet prospects where they are and deliver the right messages at the right time to guide them along their journey. While single-channel marketing can work, multi-channel strategies often produce results greater than the sum of their parts.
The Modern Customer Journey
Consider this common customer journey: Someone might begin with a Google search about managing skin pigmentation, finding your blog article. Though they read it, they’re not ready to act. Later that evening, while scrolling through social media, they see your remarketing video highlighting product benefits. They engage but don’t purchase. The next day, they receive a $20 off coupon and download it – why not? It’s risk-free. Finally, while watching YouTube or reading news online, they see your customer case study or a remarketing ad with a major discount, which finally triggers their purchase.
This interconnected approach supports natural decision-making processes, often yielding extraordinary results that exceed what individual channels could achieve alone.
Taking Action: Your Next Steps
To implement these strategies effectively, start by mapping your marketing strategy to the funnel. Use a marketing funnel template to outline the specific pieces you’ll deploy at each stage. Then, carefully select your channels, considering which platforms best serve each funnel stage.
Finally, and crucially, commit to testing, tracking, and optimising your approach. Launch your initial campaigns, closely monitor results, and continuously refine your strategy based on performance data. Remember, building an effective marketing funnel is an iterative process – start with these fundamentals, measure your results, and optimise based on what you learn.
Get the Full Training Video About Building Your Marketing Funnel
Need help getting started?
Building marketing funnels that actually drive results can be daunting and difficult to execute.
That’s where Digital Autopilot comes in. Our team of full funnel marketing experts have helped hundreds of businesses just like yours implement successful retention strategies that drive real results.
Start With a Free Strategy Session
Book a free 30-minute strategy session with one of our strategy experts. We’ll:
- Review your current marketing funnel
- Identify key opportunities for improvement
- Provide actionable recommendations for your business
- Explain how we can help implement these strategies for you
