We understand that the mere existence of a marketing funnel for your business does not guarantee success and results right away. It is the continuous optimization at each stage of your funnel that will turn viewers (especially from social media) into loyal customers for your brand. In this step-by-step guide, we will explore the essential strategies for each phase to master digital funnels and enhance the volume and quality of your conversions.
Each stage of the funnel represents a unique opportunity to create trends, build relationships, and influence decisions.
Furthermore, each stage has its details and peculiarities when it comes to optimization.
In this first part of the article, I will talk about the basic structure of an efficient marketing funnel.
Next, I will publish another text to explain and showcase the best strategies for paid media funnels, such as the importance of creating landing pages for each stage of the funnel, how to connect and create audiences and segmentations for each phase, how to align persuasive messages and ads, and so on.
Therefore, here I assure you that if you understand these three stages of the funnel, which consist of Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion of your audience, you will be able to think and plan your own Marketing Funnel strategy.
Let’s get started!
1) Awareness
The first stage of the funnel consists of the moment when you introduce your brand to the market.
- Who are you?
- What do you do?
- Why do you do it?
- How do you do it?
And so on. The focus here will be to capture the attention of your target audience, increase brand visibility, and, as the name suggests, create awareness of your existence.
We have already discussed in previous posts how to create the ideal persona for your business, and how to structure this Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) to plan paid campaigns.
Therefore, speaking of paid media, it is interesting to run campaigns that will increase the Reach of your business, promote Brand Awareness in your niche, increase the Impressions of your ads, and generate Traffic to your content, which could be on your social media, website, and/or blog.
These actions will ensure that you can penetrate the market and showcase your product to a specific audience, which will eventually transform into your customers.
Another important factor to consider is your budget allocation and demand.
If your company is just starting today, for example, it is always important to keep in mind that results will be long-term. Therefore, I would put more effort into the Top of the funnel, and consequently, the Middle and Bottom of the funnel. This way, you ensure that your brand will be seen more often, and consequently, more people will become aware of your existence.
2) Consideration
In the second stage of your funnel, it is time to strengthen your authority and improve your connection with the target audience. Therefore, this is the stage where the delivery of value to your audience comes into play.
And how do you do that? Through valuable information for your leads, such as:
- Rich materials to educate the market.
- Addressing the audience’s questions.
- Handling objections.
- Demonstrating your differentiators compared to the competition.
- Showing that you understand the audience’s pain and also know how to solve it.
And how to enhance this through paid media?
With Video View campaigns, for example, selecting excerpts (depending on the placement of your ad) from informative content, Conversion campaigns for rich materials, free classes, specific webinars, and a well-crafted Email Sequence discussing the pains the audience has and the solutions your product/service offers to address these problems (focus on the audience that has downloaded your rich material).
This value delivery without asking for anything in return will cultivate the audience’s interest, establish your brand’s authority on the subject, generate real value for the audience, and consequently, your connection/consideration will increase with your target audience.
In addition to campaigns, it’s also worth highlighting content with SEO. Focus on producing videos on YouTube, for example, on How-To topics that are trending in your niche.
3) Conversion
And finally, we reach the conversion stage for the audience you’ve generated through the strategies above.
At this point, the audience already knows your brand, understands how you communicate, and how you behave, and knows what problems you solve, and how you solve them. Therefore, your goal here is to fine-tune the details to be more relevant than your competition and ensure that the audience chooses you over another brand.
The focus is on understanding how your business can create different and compelling offers to leave no chance for competition.
Conversion campaigns will drive your paid media strategy. Converting Engagement audiences, Remarketing audiences, Visitors to specific pages, and Lists of people who have interacted and/or downloaded some rich material will be your main segmentations for this action.
As I mentioned, focus on creating special offers, unique discounts, one-time offers with killer upsells, free trials, exclusive demonstrations of the product or service, and so on.
CTAs that will genuinely prompt your lead to take action at that moment.
Also, of course, a well-crafted Email Sequence with these specific offers.
Conclusion
Success in the marketing funnel relies on the fluidity between these stages and the ability to adapt strategies based on audience responses. The funnel is not linear; leads can enter at different points and require distinct approaches.
Therefore, understand that this is not a final point but rather a validation of the principles that govern the creation of meaningful digital relationships. By comprehending the importance of each stage — from the awakening of awareness to the flourishing of consideration, culminating in the desired conversion — we, as paid media strategists, elevate marketing beyond mere transactions.
Now, tell me what you like to do as part of your Marketing Funnel strategy to optimize your results on the internet. It’s great when more experts share their insights into strategies. This way, we can all learn and further strengthen our community.
Feel free to give me feedback and share insights about the content I create.
Don’t forget to sign up for my newsletter to receive the continuation of this content, where I will discuss specific paid media funnels.
See you in the next one!
