Your Marketing Funnel is crucial for your biz growth and sustainability. Therefore, mastering your marketing funnel is extremely helpful. A marketing funnel simply put, represents the steps potential customers take from first learning about your product or service to making a purchase.

It starts wide at the top, with many potential customers and narrows down to those who make a purchase – which is typically 1-2% of your total audience.

Marketing Funnel For Biz

In digital marketing, having a funnel to automate your lead generation is helpful for several reasons:

1. Efficiency: Automation saves time by handling repetitive tasks such as sending emails, following up with leads, and nurturing prospects. This allows you to focus on more strategic activities and delivering your client work.
2. Consistency: Automated funnels ensure that every lead receives consistent communication and follow-ups, reducing the risk of human error or missed opportunities.
3. Scalability: With automation, you can handle a larger volume of leads without a proportional increase in workload, making it easier to scale your business. Automated systems also work around the clock, ensuring leads are engaged and nurtured even outside of business hours.
4. Personalisation: Advanced automation tools can segment leads and personalise communication based on their behaviour and preferences, increasing the likelihood of conversion.
5. Data and Insights: Automated funnels provide valuable data on lead behaviour and funnel performance, helping you make informed decisions and optimise your marketing strategies.
6. Steady Flow of Leads: A well designed funnel ensures a continuous and predictable flow of leads into your pipeline, helping maintain a healthy sales pipeline and reducing periods of low activity.

Why Is It Important

It’s important when marketing your biz to have a strategy for how you nurture your audience at the different stages of the sales cycle, which typically look like:

1. Awareness: People learn about your product or service.
2. Interest: They show interest by learning more about it.
3. Consideration: They consider if it meets their needs.
4. Intent: They show a clear intention to buy.
5. Purchase: They make the purchase.
6. Loyalty: They continue to buy and support your brand.
7. Advocacy: They recommend your product to others.

When you consider that a typical sales cycle from a cold lead through to a customer purchasing, can range anywhere from 6-12 months…

You can see why having a strategy for mastering your marketing funnel will help speed up the buying decision ensuring a steady flow of leads and potential customers at different stages of the sales cycle.

This helps you to avoid a situation where your leads dry up and you’re worried about where your next sale is going to come from.

The Marketing Funnel Broken Down

The marketing funnel typically divided into three stages: cold (awareness), warm (consideration), and hot (decision). Each stage necessitates different strategies to engage and move prospects to the next phase:

• Cold Leads: These are people who have just come across your brand. They’re like visitors at a party who’ve just walked in and are scanning the room to see if they’d like to stay. Your job is to capture their attention with things like: engaging social media posts, blog articles, podcasts, and video content.
• Warm Leads: At this stage, your potential customers have had a taste of who you are and what you offer and are considering whether to invest more time in getting to know you. They’re weighing their options, so this is your chance to nurture them through things like: email marketing, a lead magnet, workshops or active Facebook groups as examples.
• Hot Leads: These are your party guests who are ready to commit. They’ve danced, mingled, and now they’re ready to sign up for your services or buy your products. Here, personalised deals, one-on-one calls, and special events can help close the deal.

Balancing Your Marketing Efforts

This may change slightly depending on what stage of your biz you’re at eg. if you’re at the start, you’ll likely be spending 70% in cold, 20% warm and 10% in your hot.

The important thing is that you’re always doing some form of marketing to all these essential areas of your funnel to keep your biz growing and sustainable for the long term – and to prevent those big dips.

So let’s break down the different areas of your funnel and the types of activities you can be looking at for each:

Cold Stage Marketing

For cold leads, your goal is to grab their attention and make them want to know more about you.

Use social media, blogs, podcasts, Pinterest, and YouTube to introduce your brand and share valuable content with your target audience. (Learn more about Building Your Brand.)

It’s important to capture your potential customer’s details at this stage, so you can grow your email list which will help you with the next stage.

To do this, I recommend A lead magnet.

A lead magnet is a valuable incentive offered to potential customers in exchange for their contact information, typically their email address – I also recommend having their first name in your opt in form, so you can personalise your emails.

The goal of a lead magnet is to provide something of value that solves a problem or fulfils a need for your target audience.  The more niche and specific you can be – the better.

Common Types of Lead Magnets:

1. Ebooks: Comprehensive guides on a specific topic relevant to your audience.
2. Checklists: Simple, actionable lists that help your audience solve a specific problem.
3. Webinars: Live or recorded sessions offering valuable information or training.
4. Templates: Pre-designed documents, spreadsheets, or tools that help users accomplish tasks more efficiently.
5. Quizzes/Assessments: Interactive tools that provide personalised results or insights.

Here are some examples of ones I have:

Thriving in Perimenopause Guide
Digital Marketing Roadmap

Lead magnets will help you to grow your email list, generate qualified leads, and ultimately drive conversions to sales in the future – when you nurture your audience in the next stage.

Warm Stage Marketing

Warm leads are familiar with your brand and are considering their options. Your task is to build a stronger relationship with them.

Engage them with email campaigns (eg. a welcome sequence to your lead magnet), further relevant resources through weekly email marketing, hosting interactive workshops or active participation in Facebook groups. 

The goal with this stage is to build the ‘know, like, trust’ factor and to demonstrate your expertise to your audience.  Most importantly it address how you can help them with the pain points they’re experiencing in their lives.  

Hot Stage Marketing

Hot leads are on the verge of making a purchase. This is where it’s important to share testimonial content and demonstrate more of how you can help them.

You could offer personalised deals, schedule 1-1 calls, and host events to close the sale.

After you have closed the sale, it is important to have a strategy for managing your customers and giving them a great experience of your products and services, as this will make them more likely to recommend your biz to other potential customers.  This is often overlooked as the danger is you can move on to the next sale – but there is so much potential opportunity in your existing customer base, so this should not be overlooked.

Monitoring and Adjusting Your Funnel

Now that you have mapped your funnel Is important to monitor and analyse the performance of your overall marketing funnel – I would recommend regularly reviewing and adjusting your approach based on performance data and your biz goals to maintain a good balance in your overall biz.

Use analytics tools like Google Analytics, Email Marketing workflow insights and Social Media insights provide valuable information to track how well each stage is performing and make data driven decisions to refine your strategy.

Conclusion

By strategically engaging cold, warm, and hot leads with tailored content (see more about this in my blog: Mastering Your Social Media) and personalised communication, you can more efficiently guide them towards making a purchase and becoming loyal customers.

But remember, a well-designed funnel not only saves time and resources but also provides valuable insights into lead behaviour, enabling you to make informed decisions and grow your online business as a result.