What is a Marketing Sales Funnel and How It Works?

UUnderstanding how your customer thinks is the best way to connect with them and always be one step ahead of your competitors.

The marketing funnel is fully linked to your customers’ journey when purchasing your services or products. In other words, it is the process that your persona goes through on your website until they are ready to convert.

To ensure your business thrives, it is essential to analyze and understand this process completely. First, we must understand how this process works:

Digital Marketing Funnel Process

The most famous principle used in recent years for the marketing funnel was created by Elias St. Elmo Lewis at the end of the 19th century. 

According to Lewis,, a potential customer’s purchasing journey is divided into 4 stages: Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action. The process became known as AIDA.

To attract more customers and make more conversions, companies need to always be up to date with these four main funnel stages of the customer journey:

Awareness

The way you impact a potential customer for the first time is essential for the sequence of their purchasing journey. That’s why your website must have good performance that benefits the user experience, your products/services must be well descriptive and you must focus on your persona’s pain points.

This is why organic content is so important. If the person is not even at the stage where they’re interested in converting, there is no point in sending them a specific ad. It is necessary to attract users through inbound strategies and offer a good experience, as well as information that attracts attention.

With the market growing more and more and the number of competitors increasing, standing out in the initial phase of the customer journey is a great opportunity to build good results. 

And to do this, you need to understand how to draw people’s attention to your product or service.

Awareness starts with just putting yourself out there. Before buying ads and promoting your product or service, it is important to try organically promoting your product or service.

Even when you are buying promotion for your product or service, then it is still important to never neglect the organic reach that your product or service is capable of.

Interest 

From the moment you attract your persona’s attention, you need to provide them with relevant information that is associated with their needs. This increases interest and the person becomes more interested in what you offer.

And nothing better than this research being done through your website or social network. This will create a bond between the persona and the brand, even if they have never purchased from you. 

That’s why organic content is so important, as you can focus on solving problems, educating and engaging these people through quality content. 

Ask yourself:

  • What benefits will they get from your product?
  • Why do they need your product or service?

It is important to provide value and then people will gladly move on to the next stage which is desire.

Desire

From the moment you have already attracted attention and created interest in your persona, the desire phase comes to the fore. This is an opportunity that cannot be missed and your interaction must be very accurate.

This is the time when it is necessary to point out all the qualities of your brand, the benefits of your products or services, reviews and testimonials from other customers, as well as essential tips on what you are selling.

Some very interesting options to offer at this stage are: e-books, guides, success stories, evaluations, comparisons, and everything that can strengthen your brand, leading to conversion.

Desire is the most critical phase of the marketing sales funnel. This is the final step before people purchase your product or service.

What separates you from the competition?

After they have seen your content, then they will need to see it more than once. At this stage, remarketing is what finally leads them on to the final stage which is action.

Action

Congratulations! You have successfully created awareness, interest, and desire foryour product or service. It is not an easy feat to get to this stage and many businesses struggle to get here

Therefore, for this entire purchasing journey process to work, it is necessary to create a sense of urgency in the buyer so that they can convert.

Furthermore, facilitating navigation and the purchasing process is also essential for you to be able to sell. There is a huge number of people who abandon purchases in the last stages of the process due to lack of information.

With this in mind, working with CTAs is a great option to convert and guide the person through a detailed process until they make a payment.

Retention

After a person has gone from the awareness stage to the action stage, then the process is still not over. For a business to thrive, a person must return to purchase the product or service again.

Most businesses rely on a successful retention strategy and this is just as important as the first 4 parts of the sales funnel process.

Creating Ads using the AIDA Model

Whether you realize it or not, the AIDA model is applied to successful marketing ad campaigns on all social media platforms.

When you set up awareness campaigns you want to target based on interests and then when you start to get further along the process, it is important to create retargeting ads by utilizing website code. 

For example, when you run a conversions campaign on Facebook you can install their pixel which will allow you to retarget people who visited your website and this will help to move them down the funnel.

Schedule a Meeting with Modernized Marketing

To learn more about the marketing sales funnel and more marketing tips, subscribe to our newsletter and, if you’re interested, book a meeting with us.

What is the marketing sales funnel? AIDA which is action, interest, desire, then action. Followed by Retention.

Modernized Marketing Logo

Connect