The field of marketing has evolved a great deal in the last couple of years. Through continued customer engagement, it has been learned that a simple ad to sell the product or explain its features or a brochure design or banner about a new product launch will only help the brand be seen. It won’t work towards the customer buying it right away!
These days, the more popular marketing platforms are fully engaged in winning over the internet for leading brands globally. The online campaigns are robust and thought-provoking. If you’re a small business just introduced to your marketing, know that it’s a misconception that you can market your product independently.
You can market your product yourself, but it won’t have the product identity and brand image that experienced marketing offers. Dedicate at least 10% of your company’s budget to an active marketing campaign. Forbes Council Member Aaron Agius insists that the marketing budget for any brand should be at least 25% of the total business budget.
Modern-day marketing is a process driven by its many different constituents. You can market your brand in different ways and through different media. Internet advertising and print advertising are the more popular advertising methods. Both involve various advertising and marketing tools. For instance, no online campaign would see the light of the day without a website. For your website design, go with a style that resonates with the values of your business.
None of your marketing strategies would be effective if you fail to understand how marketing leads to sales. That’s the whole point. Despite digital marketing being a discrete field, it has to uphold the sales and demands cycle. Without keeping a check on adequate sales, any marketing campaign would not be as effective as it should be. In his blog, Justin Funk explains how markets and sales are inter-connected. He explains marketing to be the strategy that leads to effective sales.
A marketing funnel model is a perfect example of how a marketing service and its many strategies can lead to product sales.
The Funnel Model for Marketing
To understand what the funnel mode sets out to explain, you should know what lead generation in digital marketing is. Lead generation has to do with attracting potential buyers and online users to your business so that you not only inform the user about your services but also convince them to invest in your product.
The Funnel Marketing Model emphasizes how the marketing campaign would often ensue on a grand, large scale with much of the company’s product marketing budget. The funnel model (just like a funnel) would gradually lose its width until it becomes a wholly sleek small passage. The funnel structure is symbolic of the marketing strategy that begins on a large scale but gradually selects and identifies potential customers. The marketer would strategize throughout the campaign ways to buy the generate leads.
Not All Funnels Are the Same
The funnel model and its constituents change with different marketeer and the different strategies to market content. No two plans will create the same impact on the buyer. Many techniques like content marketing and inbound marketing are not as explicit as an ad or a pop-up are.
Unlike an ad, it also largely depends on whether the consumer wants to explore the page or the link you’ve referred them to. The time an ad would take to convince the reader to invest in a product will differ from the time written content takes to create an impact.
How Does the Funnel Model Work?
Since there are many funnel models out there, for reference, we’ve chosen a funnel that’s easier to explain. Imagine the funnel’s structure—thick at the top and gradually narrowing towards the bottom.
Market Research and Focused Audience
Any marketing campaign begins with adequate market research into product features and the marketing gaps it meets, and after much research, it can find the right audience for its product. A few factors that help decide the target audience include age, gender, location, employment status, and education.
Large-scale businesses have entire marketing companies collaborating with them on different products. They are responsible for market research and brand promotions.
Brand Awareness
Once you’ve identified your audience through market research, you’ll go with brand promotions then. For promoting your brand, you can invest in multiple marketing strategies like:
Email marketing: Attractive emails that talk of your brand, its many services, the impact your business has been able to make, and future directions for your brand’s image and reputation management.
Direct Marketing: Includes flyers, brochures, letters, advertisements, online promotional appearances, celebrity endorsements, and more. Direct marketing gives complete information about your product to the audience.
Influencer Marketing: You ask a popular person on the internet to talk about your brand and user experience while availing your services. In recent years, due to a heavy emphasis on visuals, brands have offered product trials and brand endorsement initiatives to influencers who have a significant social media presence.
Audience Engagement
Congratulations on finally unlocking the third step in our funnel model! Brand engagement happens when a user clicks on an ad, visits your website, or posts a query to get more information about your services. Engage well with your audience. Tell them about your services, coupons, free services (if you’re offering any). You can even offer free product trials to engage your audience.
Consideration
Just before the user has decided on your product, you will have to let them evaluate and consider if they find the product worthwhile. This will be a decisive step to judge whether your sales and marketing strategies are synchronized. Remember! A good marketing strategy will always focus on what sets your product apart from all the other products in the same market.
Purchase
This step marks the end of the funnel, where the action is an antagonist to the expansive outreach action in the first step of the tunnel. The customer will or won’t make the purchase at this step. If they purchase, you can continue with similar marketing and sales strategies. If they desist, there’s enough scope to reconsider your marketing and sales strategy for future purchases.
The marketing funnel model can also be adopted for the different types of marketing techniques around. It works perfectly for both digital and print marketing both. In marketing, communication is key. Make sure you only have professional website designers to assist you with different icons, features, and tabs on your website.
A Different Marketing Model
Your business model can be unique to most business models. You might be serving a niche, specialized service, or a small business. If you feel the shared marketing funnel model is not for your business, you can always go with other funnel models to streamline your marketing process. Here’s how you can make a funnel marketing model for your brand.
Your Target Audience
The first step towards creating a marketing strategy is knowing your target audience. Targeted marketing has many benefits. Knowing target audiences helps evaluate the right marketing strategy for your brand. For insurance businesses, for instance, you will not need an influencer marketing strategy.
The influence marketing gimmick does well for cutesy items late millennials and early Gen-Z take an interest in. Once you’re clear about the purpose of your business and the age group it caters to, you can go ahead with opting for the right marketing strategy for your business.
Devise a Marketing Strategy
As a budding business, you must have simply decided not to go with advertising or print marketing. The strategy should be based on the number of consumers who buy online products and those who look up products and items on the internet. For conversions, you should be interacting with a user who’s purchased enough goods through online transactions.
If you’ve decided to go with digital marketing as your number one marketing strategy, make sure you’re well aware of its multiple tools available around. Social media engagement and informal networking sites offer a great opportunity to young businesses to promote their business on social media. You can make it work as an extension of your website. No need to panic if you’re new to the social media scene. Web designers Santa Cruz offer customer-friendly digital solutions at the best rates.
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Make promotional content—such as print and digital ads, celebrity endorsement, PRs, articles, blogs, and social media postings—based on your marketing strategy.
B2B B2C Businesses
If you’re a B2B business, a social media presence won’t help. This is simply because niche businesses don’t need to promote their businesses among all parties. You should go with tutorials or detailed industry reports for credibility in your business circles.
Create a Website
The funnel has started to compress from here onwards. You’ve marketed your product among a significant age and gender pool. Not everyone would bother to message, call or email to know about the offer or place an order right away. For those interested in your business and services, provide a point of contact: a cell number or a website address. It’s best to offer a website address to engage the reader at their convenience.
You should have a website made before you offer any deals, bumper offers, discounts, and complimentary services to entice your readers. Deals and discounts offer maximum consumer interest. This is your chance to leave a lasting impression on readers.
Be Responsive
It’s time for your brand to pick up calls, respond to messages and write back to queries posted on your website. During consumer engagement, be vocal about the purpose, brand, and services you offer. You can later introduce an FAQ page on your website based on the queries posted and questions asked by viewers. The customer engagement activity should ensure you communicate details about all your brand offers and discounts.
Here’s an interesting read by the Harvard Business Review that shares strategies to handle the toughest questions from a prospective customer.
A good idea would be to have your offers enlisted on your website for better clarity. You can even have them mentioned in your online articles and blog posts. Look out for web content writers in Santa Cruz to assist you with content that sets an impression!
If you find it too difficult to devise your own sales funnels, you can have automated sales funnels made by digital marketing solutions providers.
Synchronize Processes
To make your funnel marketing model work, you need to test if every aspect of your model works in harmony with the other elements. Your website should emphasize the business features that you’re most willing to highlight. All offers, discounts, sales packages should have clear terms and conditions. Your business model should complement your marketing model to generate leads and lead to your service doing excellent business in the market!
Conclusion
A sales or marketing funnel model helps you strategize before you act! A pre-planned model works wonders for online businesses and new businesses that need a clear direction to move in. When devising your marketing funnel model, make sure you evaluate each move against your business model and budget.
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