All your competitors are fighting tooth and nail to capture the attention of the same customers to whom you would like to sell your products or services. In this context, the Marketing funnel emerges as a central and essential tool!
This dispute is not so relentless for nothing, since people’s attention is the most valuable asset on the Internet, since it is through it that companies like yours can:
- Build an authority that reflects the quality of the brand;
- Nurture a relationship that guarantees recurring sales;
- And even predict near-future profitability with jaw-dropping accuracy!
But getting the public’s attention isn’t everything!
For your sales strategies to be successful, it’s crucial that you find a way to show your audience that you have what they need to achieve their desires — or overcome the problems they’re struggling with — in a way that no other alternative can do!
That’s where the Marketing Funnel comes in: a subtle and intelligent way to bring your company’s orbit closer to the needs of your ideal customers, to the point where avoiding your products or services becomes as impossible as defying the force of gravity!
This text gives you the materials that make up the perfect alchemy between function and emotion that results in increased sales for your brand by explaining in detail:
- What is a Marketing Funnel and how to use it;
- The difference between the Marketing funnel and the sales funnel ;
- What are the most important steps in the Marketing funnel;
- And how to build a strategy capable of attracting, fascinating and retaining the right customers in your business’s web of content!
Put on your helmet and get on the Enjoy Minder ship: I’ll take you on a complete tour of the universe in the mind of your ideal consumer!
What is a Marketing Funnel?
The Marketing funnel is a model that represents the level of awareness of a lead (which is what we call a potential customer in Digital Marketing) in relation to the challenges they encounter in their own life or in the business they manage.
This model is called a “funnel” precisely because it starts wide — in which the lead knows they need a solution, but doesn’t quite understand the complexity of the problem they would like to solve — and it gets narrower until the moment they become a customer of your brand!
In the past, the implementation of the Marketing funnel was very basic and attempted to formulate a cake recipe to be reproduced by companies from different sectors and with different audiences.
The problem with this approach is that, with the popularization of the Internet (and the potential to collect data about users through the mobile devices they carry around 24 hours a day), the time it takes for each lead to become aware has become quite variable!
This inconsistency began to reflect in a considerable decrease in sales because, since a person could enter at any part of the funnel, the rigid model of this strategy ended up preventing them from reaching the end of the journey — instead of guiding them to the moment of conversion into a customer !
From a cold strategy, focused on the brand’s success (which basically tried to push a sale down the public’s throat), the Marketing funnel adapted to the digital age and took a 360-degree turn in the way the audience interacts with a company.
Instead of doing everything to get a person to buy, the funnel gained the function of helping the public to understand their own problems through valuable content, with the aim of instilling confidence that, with the right nutrition, would start to result in more sales:
- Organic;
- Continuous;
- And sustainable!
Today, the attention given to Customer Success has become one of the most indispensable strategies in the virtual world to:
- To sift a visitor or curious person;
- Qualify them as a potential customer through content that is relevant to their reality;
- And ensure that when they’re ready to buy a solution, they come to you — instead of you having your company chase them!
The Marketing funnel represents the intentional, strategic and intelligent construction of the stages of this conversion that advise and guide the choice of a stranger to become familiar with your business.
And that without traumatizing him and without shoving anything down his throat!
Marketing Funnel Stages
There are three different stages that your leads can be guided through, from the moment they enter the Marketing funnel until the time they close a deal with your company.
The steps are:
- The top of the funnel, which is the stage at which a person enters the Marketing funnel;
- The middle of the funnel, being the second stage in which leads express the possibility of interest in your brand’s offer;
- And the bottom of the funnel, which is the moment when these potential customers show themselves ready to be converted into buyers!
Below you can find details about each of these steps and how to use them strategically to boost your business’s sales and authority!
Top of the Funnel (TOFU)
The top of the funnel concentrates all the users attracted and made aware of the problems or needs they face in their daily lives!
Since a stranger only becomes a lead when they give your brand permission to communicate with them (whether by email or phone), it is essential that your attraction strategy gives them a strong reason to introduce themselves to you!
One of the most effective ways to capture the attention of your ideal audience is to make them feel privileged to receive a portion of your company’s expertise for free.
This sharing of practical and original wisdom takes place through various content formats created specifically for:
- Assist the public in fulfilling a wish;
- While educating you about the problems you face;
- Showing which solutions can be applied to solve such challenges;
- In addition to positioning your brand in the first results of searches carried out on the Internet.
The creation of relevant and intentional materials (aimed at achieving a goal for your company, which in the case of the top of the funnel translates into attracting and fascinating new leads) is focused on Content Marketing!
This Digital Marketing discipline transforms the needs and expectations of the target audience into educational materials with the greatest chance of being found (and clicked) during the audience’s searches for answers on search engines and social networks!
This means that each platform on which your brand wants to build a virtual presence will need to be refined to meet quality guidelines, such as those of search engines like Google (increasing the chances of your company being found by buyers), while entertaining the public and meeting their needs!
That’s why creating a blog for your business ends up being one of the most effective solutions for attracting new potential customers, since publishing informative materials helps both to build your brand ‘s authority among the audience it wants to impact, and helps to position your company’s website at the top of searches!
You can also take advantage of the hypnotic power of videos, the generation of highly shareable infographics and even educational podcasts: all with the aim of bringing more people to the top of your funnel and qualifying them to continue to the next stages!
Middle of the Funnel (MOFU)
Once leads approach your business and start consuming the content you make publicly available, they start providing several clues about their interests and the potential to acquire a paid solution offered by you!
This filtering from TOFU to MOFU happens when prospects feel they need to dive deeper into the materials provided in the previous phase — and that’s where you have the opportunity to provide invaluable value to them!
The middle of the funnel is perfect for starting a relationship with these curious leads (since they are hungry for a realistic way out of the dilemmas they face) through:
- Webinars, which are digital lectures and classes, on video;
- Email Marketing flows with personalized messages that demonstrate your brand’s concern for customer success;
- And case studies, which give a unique perspective on how the solution your business offers can work in their journey compared to other customers your company has helped.
When MOFU leads finish exploring most of the content your business has to offer, they lose the fear, doubts, and objections that make it difficult for your brand to take a more direct sales approach.
This is when they are taken to the bottom of the funnel!
Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU)
The last stage of the Marketing funnel concentrates the leads most interested in the facilities that your business offers, making this phase the right time to influence their purchasing decision!
To win the hearts of these leads, you can offer product demos, free trials of your offerings, and even testimonials from satisfied customers.
The important thing is to highlight initiatives aimed at showing the best of your company, going beyond everything that leads have already experienced (and loved) in the previous stages of this strategy!
Bringing people into the BOFU is the reason the Marketing funnel exists, so make sure you create an approach plan that doesn’t jeopardize all of your team’s work — or your lead’s trust — and that extracts the best results from this starting point for a lasting relationship!
What is a Sales Funnel?
Just like the Marketing funnel, the sales funnel, also known as the sales pipeline, is an essential tool for understanding and optimizing the customer conversion process.
While the Marketing funnel focuses on strategies to attract, engage and qualify potential customers, the sales funnel takes the leads qualified by Marketing and guides them with the goal of closing the sale!
The profile and interests of these leads are analyzed to verify their purchasing potential. This way, a salesperson can contact them directly to offer a quote, a product demonstration or a special discount, for example.
So the intersection points between these two funnels are crucial! It’s important that Marketing and Sales teams are aligned and work together to ensure that leads receive the follow-up and nurturing they need at every stage of the process.
Differences between Marketing Funnel and Sales Funnel
Despite being very similar concepts (and almost always mentioned interchangeably to express the same purchasing journey of future customers), the sales funnel and the marketing funnel express two ways of looking at the same process through different points of view:
- The Marketing funnel aims to attract the attention of the target audience, relate to them, and educate them about the solutions that your brand offers, with a strategy based on raising their awareness of their own problems and desires;
- Whereas the sales funnel (or “pipeline”) tries to transform leads into buyers after the stages they go through the Marketing funnel, segmenting commercial efforts to the leads most qualified to close a purchase.
While the top, middle and bottom of the marketing funnel focus on educating your prospect, the sales pipeline tries to persuade them to become a buyer — and the two need to go hand in hand if your ultimate goal is to make more, better and faster profits!
How important is it to work with the Marketing Funnel?
With such fierce competition for people’s attention online — and attention is the determining factor in convincing someone to buy — the Marketing Funnel plays a key role in ensuring that your perfect audience is:
- Attracted;
- Captured;
- And converted into a customer!
By meeting the needs of your audience, the Marketing funnel ends up being the most guaranteed way to ensure that your sales strategies achieve your company’s financial goals and continue to make a profit in the following ways:
- Optimized;
- Predictable;
- Sustainable;
- And exponential.
The benefits that start with a simple increase in the conversion rate (which is an indication of how many strangers become buyers), quickly lead to better qualification of these leads (which generates a greater propensity to buy) and huge retention of loyal customers!
It is these details that lead to predictability, which is the great advantage of Digital Marketing: you will know exactly how much sales to expect and how to organize the growth of your business based on this.
Not to mention that, by better understanding the profile of your ideal customer (who is the one who buys what your brand has to offer), it becomes much easier to create irresistible content, super effective advertising campaigns, and funnels that are impossible to escape!
It all starts with an appreciation for Customer Success and an affinity for delivering quality materials, products or services — elements that positively impact the success of your company as a whole!
How to define the ideal strategy for each stage of the Marketing Funnel?
The ideal strategy for each stage of the Marketing funnel is not far from:
- Observe and get to know your audience (identifying what they fear, what they need to overcome and what solution they hope to find on the Internet);
- Offer this audience a wide range of free, informative and relevant materials to their awareness-raising needs, all in relation to what these people need;
- In addition to ensuring continuous monitoring (and a measurable lead qualification system) to analyze public engagement with the content published by your brand;
- And, most importantly, facilitate communication between these leads and your company’s sales department at any stage they are in the Marketing funnel.
After all, there’s no way of knowing exactly when someone will raise their hand and shout, “Hey, company, I’m ready to buy!”
How to build the Marketing Funnel for your company?
The best way to build a marketing funnel is to start with market research. From there, you can make informed decisions to:
- Define the best personas (ideal buyer profiles at an individual level) for your business;
- What services will Digital Marketing automation tools need to provide for you to achieve your financial goals;
- And what key metrics (called KPIs, from the English “Key Performance Indicators”) will your team need to monitor to ensure that goals are achieved and that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow!
It is important to be flexible in your choices (but always based on accumulated data, not guesswork) to adjust the funnel according to market changes or the behavior of your perfect consumer!
The most important thing is to get started — an attitude that is often the biggest challenge on the path that leads a company like yours to success on the Internet.
The list of challenges below is intended to teach you how to overcome every obstacle in your path and build a castle for your brand — and, from there, the empire you deserve!
The Marketing Funnel that made Rodojacto take off!
Speaking of putting things into practice, I can’t help but mention the success story of Rodojacto, which was among the 5 finalists in the Best Marketing and Sales Case category at the Limitless 2023 Awards!
The digital transformation that Rodojacto has undergone illustrates the power of a well-designed funnel!
With an effective Digital Marketing strategy and all the power of RD Station Marketing, the funnel was optimized, resulting in financial and operational success, even in the face of decreased traffic and leads.
Just look at the achievements made through Rodojacto’s partnership with Enjoy Minder:
- Increase in MQLs: Marketing Qualified Leads increased by an impressive 362%;
- Cost per MQL reduction: cost per MQL reduced by 77%;
- Sales growth: sales increased by 153%;
- Increase in revenue: business revenue increased by 19%;
- Average sales per customer: There was a 174% increase in average sales per customer.
With these results, it is possible to see how improving the funnel and attracting more qualified leads can, in fact, bring out-of-this-world performance!
Common Challenges in Building a Marketing Funnel (and How to Overcome Them!)
One of the biggest obstacles on the journey to selling more, better and in a predictable way on the Internet is the lack of alignment between your Marketing team and your sales team due to a lack of perspective.
Marketing’s job is to understand the public, collect information about them, and prepare an entire lead qualification structure that guarantees the effectiveness of your sales department — meaning that less time is wasted on indecision, so that you can focus your efforts on the hottest buyers!
The opposite is also true: the sales team needs to inform the Marketing team about the bottlenecks in the qualification process, how the fluidity in sharing information about customers is going, and what has worked (or not) in the persuasion strategy!
Speaking of information, the lack of quality data (which is data based on the public’s real behavior when faced with content and approaches in the funnel) is another gap that leaves many possibilities for profiting from the differential that your company offers.
Data poverty (and poor communication of that information) is exacerbated by resistance to change from your business’s organizational and executive structure — another evil that needs to be nipped in the bud!
Since the company’s common goal is to offer quality service — and earn a good amount of money as a result of this — it is essential that all members, teams and systems work in unison to achieve the goals that bring the brand closer to the profit scenario it envisions for growth.
Without a culture that encourages curiosity or explores the opportunities and technologies that emerge all the time in the world of the Internet, no funnel can save a business from itself.
So, don’t back down: accept challenges with open arms, gather your partners, and decide to do whatever it takes for the good of your company!
Unity is strength — and turns problem solvers into billionaires!
Market Trends for your Marketing and Sales Funnel
And since we’re on the subject of technology and new things, there has never been a more exciting time in human history than this! We’re seeing the popularization of:
- Artificial intelligence, capable of creating content in different types of media, as well as chatting with customers to answer questions or direct them to the sales department, just like real people;
- From real-time content personalization, with the potential to make every individual within your target audience feel seen, heard and cared for by your brand;
- Predictive Marketing, which can anticipate the audience’s behavioral trends and, in turn, their predisposition to purchase your products or services;
- And the absurd advance of digital automation, eliminating the waste of time with repetitive tasks, and freeing up space for your teams to work on what really takes a business like yours to the top of the market!
But not everything is perfect!
Such innovations mean that your competitors will also have access to a heavy arsenal to direct the attention of the public on the Internet and guide them through purchasing journeys (and Marketing funnels) as strong as black holes in space!
This is yet another reason for you and your teams to work as one big organism to achieve common goals — otherwise, the gravity of new trends will tear your business into a million pieces!
Compared to this nightmare, wouldn’t it be nicer to have a million in the bank?
Ready to boost your Marketing Funnel?
The evolution of Digital Marketing is so fast and intense that it is normal to feel a little lost and not know what to do in the face of so much new development.
The only certainty you can have at this point is that the Marketing funnel really works — and it is essential for your business to remain competitive and continue growing on the Internet!
Of all the lessons shared with you in this text, keep in mind that:
- The Marketing Funnel is a model that helps your target audience understand what they need from your brand (and what it has to offer them);
- So that, through the top (TOFU), middle (MOFU) and bottom (BOFU) stages, you can attract, educate and convert leads;
- And the results, such as an increase in the conversion rate, more recurring sales for loyal customers, and predictability about the near future, are just the tip of the iceberg of the fantastic benefits of this tool!
If the difference between a Marketing funnel and a sales funnel is still not clear, or if all this stuff about Content Marketing, SEO, etc. are too many concepts to apply alone in the aggressive panorama of the Internet, know that you don’t need to invade this universe alone!
You can count on Enjoy Minder to ensure that your company achieves even greater sales, gaining the attention it deserves — and that shouldn’t be shared with its competitors — to become the sun in the lives of the right audience: those who buy!
Astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first person to set foot on the moon, said it was “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
Consecutively elected the best Inbound Marketing agency in Brazil, EnjoyMinder’s Digital Marketing Diagnosis is just a small touch away, but it will be a giant leap for your profitability!
Enjoy!
