Digital Marketing Funnel: Know How to Create and Why Businesses Need19 min read

The digital marketing funnel is a framework that allows you to know your target audiences better through their buyers’ journey.

Precisely, when you know what they want, you can provide better solutions.

Indeed, this type of marketing comes in great use for leveraging your business goals.

A marketing funnel for e-commerce businesses provides a tremendous competitive advantage.

It is more like a customer life cycle where you can monitor them through different segments.

Each digital funnel strategy is created to nurture leads and turn them into loyal customers.

Significantly, a digital advertising funnel helps you search for more target prospects.

Mainly, they provide a suitable ground to drive your sales marketing better.

Today, we will learn more about the digital marketing funnel and why businesses need it.

First, let’s understand some of the basics of digital funnel marketing.

What Are Funnels In Digital Marketing

Digital marketing funnels are an integral part of a strategic model plan that is used for lead nurturing

and winning new prospective customers for your business.

Also, people call it a digital marketing sales funnel, sometimes interchangeably.

This model shows details of the buying journey related to the targeted personas.

Importantly, this marketing strategy is usually implemented to bring out good sales results.

If you start analyzing all the sales funnel stages, you will know this concept is quite vast to explore.

Primarily, there are four digital marketing funnel stages —

• Awareness
• Interest
• Decision
• Action

In short form, it is called “A.I.D.A.”

Marketing funnels are also addressed as sales funnels that let you track the overall digital marketing sales funnel progress.

Also, this lets you know at which stage of the buying process your potential customers are.

These funnels work altogether, starting from targeting prospects to boosting conversion rates for your business.

Indeed, the competition is high now and marketers always look for effective marketing strategies to survive the race.

Each marketing sales funnel represents techniques used for bringing more conversions to your business.

What Is Funnel Strategy?

A funnel marketing strategy involves everything that helps to turn your prospects into potential customers.

Mostly, tailored marketing ads, service offers, or lead nurturing, all are included.

Indeed, all these help win more customers for your business.

Throughout the buyer’s journey, the prospective leads are slowly nurtured with marketing efforts until they become your loyal customers.

Importantly, a digital advertising funnel strategy helps you track R.O.I. for your business.

What Is Sales Funnel in Digital Marketing

A sales funnel is more technically defined as the customer journey where leads are nurtured to turn them into potential customers.

This includes building their interest, making them aware of your services, and finally, helping them make a purchasing decision.

Moreover, a digital marketing sales funnel provides many other advantages to drive your business sales better.

There are three common steps in a sales marketing funnel—

• Awareness stage (TOFU)
• Consideration stage(MOFU)
• Conversion stage (B.O.F.U.)

However, these steps are changeable depending on a company’s marketing requirements & preferences.

Marketing Funnel Vs. Sales Funnel

Your products or service is marketed through a marketing funnel to make your customers buy them.

Whereas, the sales funnel interacts with the leads from the marketing funnel to entice them for making a purchase.

The terms “marketing funnel” and “sales funnel” are sometimes interchangeable.

Also, they are combinedly and used as a single term—the marketing sales funnel.

However, they’re two separate parts to consider.

The marketing and sales functions are different for each company or organization.

The marketing funnel focuses on utilizing marketing tools to create brand awareness and help build a customer base.

Importantly, it is more about building customer loyalty, optimizing digital advertising funnel strategy, and helping them retain.

Also, it tells you more about driving sales-qualified leads and nurturing them to turn into loyal customers.

On the other hand, the sales funnel is more on sales-driven strategy and how it is implemented to drive more sales for your business.

Precisely, it focuses more on what is being sold and how you can boost your sales rate.

Stages of Sales Funnel

The customer journey is divided into five main stages – Awareness, Interest, Decision, Action, and Retention.

It is usually implemented through a structured sales funnel to generate more sales rates for your business.

Specifically, different companies set their digital marketing funnel strategies according to their needs and goals.

Here, you can closely monitor the buyer’s journey and target more potential customers through lead nurturing.

You can evaluate each funnel to select qualified leads and lead them to the next stage of the sales funnel.

The rest, with no interest, get rejected from your priority list.

The Stages of a Sales Funnel 

Stage 1: Awareness Phase

In the awareness stage, your ideal personas start to discover and understand your overall services and products.

They realize they have a need and come to seek a solution for it in your service.

Suppose, you have a business that sells fitness products.

Adding relevant content will help inform your target audience about what they should be buying from you.

This could include treadmills, exercise mats, dumbbells, and other workout equipment.

Your content must provide solutions regarding fitness, so your targeted customers will get interested in your services.

Indeed, the awareness stage is crucial in informing your target audiences about what you sell.

Hence, your job is to provide the right information through the right marketing techniques.

Stage 2: The Interest Phase

The interest phase is the stage where visitors observe your business activities closely but are still not ready to buy your products.

Your prospects want to know more about what you sell before purchasing.

Importantly, the main factor here is to provide your audience with the right solutions to their needs and problems.

Social media marketing, Facebook or LinkedIn marketing, blogging, and case studies, are great methods to keep your audience engaged.

Indeed, they all provide excellent value in nurturing potential leads.

To keep their interest alive, you can also do video marketing, as it is an effective content marketing method.

Besides, you can hire a full-funnel marketing agency to do more professional marketing for your business.

It will increase your engagement rates, particularly.

Stage 3: The Decision Phase

The decision phase is when your prospects finally decide to buy your products and be connected with your services.

At this stage, customers have already considered everything and are ready to buy.

This phase is referred directly to as the bottom-of-the-funnel marketing, the decision stage.

Also, this is an opportunity to provide lucrative offers so that they can remain connected with your brand.

You can offer discounts, bonuses, or small gifts to boost customer loyalty.

Indeed, a better quality of your content will give you a competitive advantage.

Stage 4: Action Phase

The action phase represents the final step.

Indeed, this is where your prospects become your customers when they finally buy your products.

The bottom of the sales funnel is the stage that shows customers take the action of buying a specific product.

At this point, you can think of creating more marketing campaigns to give them other options to buy.

Moreover, you can implement nurture campaigns to gain a competitive edge.

Stage 5:  Retention Stage

This is also crucial to retaining your customers and increasing your brand loyalty.

In addition, remarketing at this stage can bring fruitful results.

You can ask them to give testimonials about their experience with your services.

Furthermore, in-depth branding can be done to boost customer retention.

Sincerely, you need to keep up with your branding efforts to increase your reach.

The main agenda here is to keep your customers happy so that they can become brand advocates of your business.

Digital Marketing Funnel: Know How to Create and Why Businesses Need

We have so far seen the different stages of the sales funnel and how they are segmented to achieve a particular goal.

Next, we will get into the details of each top to bottom marketing funnel stage and how they can help achieve your marketing targets.

How To Create A Digital Marketing Funnel

Digital marketing strategy is different for each company; still, certain things remain as it is.

Selling your product or services is the common agenda behind all content marketing goals.

It would be best if you designed your digital marketing sales funnel with tactics that best respond to your company’s needs.

Moreover, you can categorize each stage of the funnel while creating sets of marketing strategies.

Also, you can include as many funnels as required to achieve your marketing objectives.

There are many digital marketing funnel examples, but only a few works well for certain businesses, specifically.

Some important marketing funnels include- focus funnels, customer funnels, buying funnels, shopping funnels, etc.

Steps to Build Digital Marketing Funnel

There are three basic stages of the digital marketing funnel—-

1. Top of the Funnel (TOFU)—- Awareness stage
2. Middle of the Funnel (M.O.F.U.)—– Consideration stage
3. Bottom of the Funnel (B.O.F.U.)——Conversion stage

1. Top of the Funnel Stage (TOFU) — Awareness Stage

The top of the funnel is called the awareness stage in your digital marketing strategy.

Technically, it is the part where your targets get introduced to your brand.

They start to get familiar with what you offer and try to find ways to remain engaged.

In particular, the awareness marketing funnel must contain all the necessary advertising essentials to make your leads convert.

Here, the marketing funnel awareness stage must have the proper advertising techniques—

Implement Various Content Marketing Methods

The awareness stage is crucial in convincing your target audience about your services.

If they are happy with what you offer, they are more likely to join you in the next marketing funnel stage.

Indeed, it will highly depend on how effectively your content keeps them engaged.

It can be the social media paid ads or the quality of your brand that might lead them toward the path to the purchase funnel.

Moreover, you might even need some professional help here to nurture your leads.

Besides, taking professional assistance from a funnel marketing agency won’t be a bad idea if required.

Here are some top ideas to optimize your digital advertising funnel–

• Facebook Ads
• Social media posts
• Set recommendation widgets for specific targets
• Informative Blog Posts
• Video Ad Marketing
• SEO optimizing all your marketing content
• Get your community involved in interactive quizzes
• Instagram, TikTok & LinkedIn Ads for B2B audiences
• Call-to-action
• Showcasing your product benefits

Offer Varieties of Enticing Offers 

Never stop providing offers to your prospects.

Indeed, lucrative offers work well in convincing your audiences.

It would be best if you chose the lead magnets that best suit the needs of your audience.

Particularly, the plan behind your offerings must be to provide your customers with something valuable.

They need to trust your services to take subscriptions from you.

What you must include in your marketing offers—–

• E-books
• Webinars
• Podcasts
• Free trial subscriptions
• Share success stories on
• Case studies on recent industry updates
• White papers for business professionals
• Instructional infographics
• Reports on industry trends & updates
• Email marketing on new product launches or product discounts

Create a Dynamic Landing Page 

Your landing page must create a good impression on your audience.

It should be compelling enough to make them stay connected with your brand.

Make it look appealing and specify your service offers.

Things you can do to make your landing page look inviting—

• Give a clear message about your offers
• Choose some suitable lead magnets— e.g., e-newsletters, free consultations, discounted gifts.
• Put engaging visuals
• Share positive testimonials about your services
• A form for people to enter their contact information
• Highlight your company’s achievements
• Provide evidence of the authenticity of your brand
• Put a C.T.A. (call-to-action) button
• An optimized sales funnel website

SEO Optimization 

The top of the digital marketing funnel is all about utilizing the opportunity to better connect with your target audience.

SEO techniques help you achieve that by increasing brand awareness for your business.

Without a doubt, we know how important search engine optimization (SEO) is.

It is a game-changer strategy that knows how to leverage your marketing efforts.

Besides, it can optimize your digital marketing sales funnel and help drive traffic to your website.

Your content will get the chance to get high rankings on search engines if it is appropriately SEO-optimized.

At every stage of the digital marketing funnel, SEO optimization is essential to increase your brand visibility in search results.

Researching the niche-related keywords and implementing them will get your content noticed by the right audience.

Hence, doing SEO is essential as this allows you to publicize your services to make people know that you exist.

2. Middle of the Funnel Stage (M.O.F.U.) —– Consideration Stage

In the middle of the digital marketing funnel, user actions vary.

While some are focusing on a specific product, others are comparing brands.

It’s a stage with a lot of action, but there are proven strategies for reaching middle-of-the-funnel (M.O.F.U.) audience members.

Send Lead Nurturing Emails 

Your subscribers need information from you to help them make a purchasing decision.

Importantly, you need to send them informative emails to keep them informed and engaged.

This allows you to nurture your prospects by providing them with helpful content.

Also, you can send a case study highlighting all the benefits of receiving your services to your subscribers.

Even, it will be great if you can send automated emails to specified subscribers as well.

These automated emails can be of many forms— 

• a welcoming mail
• mail about a new product launching promotions
• Mailing about discount offers
• Informing benefits of the product or services
• Sharing industry updates via emails

Indeed, feeding your prospects with meaningful content will help nurture them better.

If they are impressed by your overall business activities, then they can move on to the next stage of your digital marketing funnel.

Surely, an email marketing strategy is a great marketing technique to convince your M.O.F.U. audiences.

Email marketing campaigns work best in nurturing leads throughout their buyer journey and guiding them for conversions.

Social Media Marketing

A digital marketing funnel is designed to let your brand reach the middle-of-the-funnel users more efficiently.

Undoubtedly, influencer marketing has a significant impact on the public in general.

Also, it has the power to leverage your digital marketing sales funnel

This type of social media marketing brings more popularity to your services, pretty quickly.

Besides, there are other forms of digital marketing out there.

However, influencers help bring more focus to your brand due to their popularity.

It becomes easier to convince the prospects to move into the next stage of the funnel.

Video Marketing

Prominently, video marketing dominates all aspects of the digital marketing world.

A funnel marketing agency would not work without implementing a video marketing strategy.

In addition, you can represent a vast number of topics beautifully through video content.

Indeed, visually appealing videos have proven to attract more attention from visitors than any other marketing method.

It is better if you include all the necessary details about your business and products in your marketing ad videos.

Indeed, this is a valuable strategy for M.O.F.U. consumers to make a purchasing decision.

So far, video marketing is known to have improved conversion rates for many businesses before.

Marketers keep this a top priority in their marketing strategy planning.

Video marketing formats come in many variations—-

• Service-related informative videos
• Product demos
• Testimonial videos
• Promotional Ad videos
• New product launching videos
• Advertising videos with the influencers

Case Studies 

Case studies allow customers to get better insights into your services and products.

You must showcase all the necessary quantitative marketing data and details in your case studies.

Besides, a hired funnel marketing agency can do professional marketing to leverage your business.

Importantly, the information you will put must consist of solutions to most customer-based problems.

You can share success stories in a case study to ignite interest in your prospective customers about your services.

3. Bottom of the funnel (B.O.F.U.) — Conversion Stage

The bottom of the funnel (B.O.F.U.) is the final stage of the marketing funnel, where prospects finally make a purchasing decision.

After they are done evaluating the TOFU & M.O.F.U. stages, they finally come into consideration for buying your services.

It is difficult to convince your prospects through the buyer’s journey and bring them to this last stage.

Sometimes, big companies invest millions of dollars in paid advertising to make their prospects reach the final B.O.F.U. stage.

Some Bottom-of-Funnel Strategies to Increase Conversion Rates —

• Product comparison analysis
• Offering promo codes
• Create and implement a strategic digital marketing sales funnel
• Offering lucrative discounts
• Sharing testimonials
• Remarketing
• Hire a funnel marketing agency
• Pay-per-click (P.P.C.) Ads for in-depth research on services

Get to know some recent statistics on Marketing Funnel Awareness Consideration Conversion

Measuring Your Success Rate Is Important  

You need to evaluate the performance of your branding tactics.

From time to time, you need to measure the marketing funnels to evaluate the final performance.

Technically, each target funnel has many marketing strategies involved to meet a specific goal.

It would be best to evaluate them to see how they all have benefited your business.

Also, this includes both quantitative and qualitative digital advertising funnel data.

You must thoroughly analyze all the funnel metrics to measure your branding success.

Indeed, a funnel marketing agency can be a better alternative to make things easier.

6 Types of Digital Marketing Funnel Metrics

Here we have talked about six funnel metrics, best for optimizing your digital advertising funnel.

However, there are other metrics out there you can utilize for your branding evaluation.

In every way, these metrics can better drive your digital marketing sales to the funnel.

Check out six types of funnel metrics ——

1. Cost Per Acquisition (C.P.A.)

C.P.A. measures the total cost of spending on your advertising campaigns to acquire new leads.

The measurements are taken by analyzing paid ads, email marketing costing, social media content marketing, and other paid methods.

To find a C.P.A., you need to divide the total marketing cost by the number of conversions.

If the result outweighs the profits you gained, you have to change your campaign ideas and try a different approach.

Moreover, hiring a well-experienced funnel marketing agency can help you make budget-friendly marketing approaches.

2. Customer Lifetime Value (L.T.V.)

L.T.V. is the measurement of each customer who brings continuous value to your business.

Importantly, this metric is important to measure customer loyalty.

Through this analysis, you can better improve your digital advertising funnel.

Particularly, this method helps you make better strategies to retain loyal customers.

3. Conversion Rates

Measuring conversion rates are significant to know how many potential customers you have won through your marketing efforts.

A professional funnel marketing agency can also put value in increasing your conversion rates.

From time to time, you need to measure the frequency of conversions to evaluate your overall business progress.

*C.P.A. = Campaign Cost/Number of Conversions*

Also, you can measure each marketing funnel stage to analyze in-depth conversion rates for your business.

For example, you can find out how many have converted to marketing qualified leads (M.Q.L.s) from TOFU conversion.

The M.O.F.U. conversion rate analysis will show how many M.Q.L.s have joined your subscription list.

An analysis of the B.O.F.U. conversion metric will inform you how many subscribers have turned into your customers.

Moreover, analyzing the performance of each marketing channel will let you measure the success rate of your business.

Hence, measuring conversion rates of different levels in funnel marketing will help you improve your marketing efforts.

4. Cost Per Lead (C.P.L.) 

To measure your cost per lead (C.P.L.), divide the total marketing spend by the total number of new leads.

Cost Per Lead (C.P.L.) = Total Marketing Spend / Total New Leads 

This metric helps you adjust your marketing budgets and help track R.O.I. for your business.

Moreover, your funnel marketing agency will gain an advantage by analyzing this metric.

It informs you about each new lead and how it drives your sales rate.

Precisely, measuring C.P.L. lets you know how to improve your digital marketing sales funnel better.

5. Click-Through Rate (C.T.R.) 

Click-through rates are measured by total adding the many times an ad, site, or link is clicked on by visitors, compared to the number of impressions.

Undoubtedly, the content is well appreciated if the click-through rates show a high number.

You can improve the productivity of your digital advertising funnel by measuring C.T.R.

6. Bounce Rate 

The bounce rate increases for your website when more visitors leave shortly after visiting.

Unfortunately, this happens when your overall content fails to impress visitors in general.

Your funnel marketing agency will suffer if bounce rates get high in number.

Importantly, it is one essential metric every marketer needs to understand how their content is performing for the audiences.

Indeed, your content should be compelling enough to engage the site visitors and connect them long enough.

In this way, you can avoid getting high bounce rates.

The general bounce rate should be under 40% to maintain your digital advertising funnel.

Wrapping Up – Digital Marketing Funnel: Know How to Create and Why Businesses Need

Branding your way through the digital advertising funnel lets you discover new prospects and ensures business growth.

So far, this has worked out effectively for businesses and helped them reach new heights.

In this article, we have seen all the segments through each digital advertising funnel and how they work.

Your marketing funnel will work better if you have the right audience and marketing tools.

Moreover, hiring a funnel marketing agency would be best to market your brand professionally.

Choosing the proper marketing channels is also essential while segmenting each marketing funnel.

Importantly, you must ensure how each funnel platform is performing in achieving the desired results you have expected.

Indeed, you are optimizing your business in the best way possible by evaluating TOFU, M.O.F.U., and B.O.F.U. in your digital marketing funnel.

Thus, it is dynamic in every way, and businesses worldwide need it to stay ahead of the competition.

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