The Funnel

In a previous blog, we introduced the sales funnel concept and created a visual integration with the game board to help us when trying to align our customers’ needs with our digital solutions. Today, let’s take a look at a more specific example of how each section of the funnel can be applied to a client in a realistic scenario.

Mr. Advertiser has an app that helps people with their digital marketing needs. It’s a great app, but nobody knows Mr. Advertiser’s brand, and nobody knows the app exists! The advertiser needs to meet prospective customers where they are in the funnel, and then guide them down to the point of download. Let’s take a look at how this could look from the perspective of an end-user that has a business and needs to do some online advertising.

A Case Study

It all begins with recognizing a pain point. This pain point may be that we don’t have enough money, enough time, or maybe enough support needed to succeed. In this case, we don’t have the knowledge to market our business online. We have officially entered the funnel, and two things can happen. We could go directly to a brand that we have already purchased from (Loyalty), but since we are new to this funnel we haven’t ever purchased anything:

           We Google, “digital marketing help”.

Thanks to Adwords and SEO, we are now aware of 5 different brands: the two ads we see, and the top 3 organic results. We know those top two are ads, so let’s skip right to the first organic result: Digital Marketing Pro. Hey wow, that looks like a familiar name (turns out Mr. Advertiser has been running programmatic ads for a couple of months and targeted us as a business owner).

60% of global consumers prefer buying new products from a familiar brand.

So let’s follow suit and click on Mr. Advertiser’s app. So far, Programmatic Advertising and SEO have been great top of the funnel performers.

We get to the website and read about the Mr. Advertiser. We have to ask, “Will this app help us successfully market our business?” If the answer is no, then we go right back to Google. If it does, well 91% of people say that a company’s behaviour influences their purchase decision, so let’s explore the site and find out more about Mr. Advertiser. Is the website easy to use? Do we relate to the brand? Do we trust it with our business? If not, then it’s back to Google. If yes, then we are now considering Mr. Advertiser’s app.

           But what if there’s something better out there?

We go back to Google to find out more.

At this point, we’re deeper in the funnel, we’re now beginning to consider a couple brands, and need to get more technical information about what it is we need to successfully market our business. As we continue to repeat that search cycle we start to see videos pop up for Digital Marketing Pro that show us how easy it is to use the app. We come across a blog that talks about how to market your business successfully. We get a bunch of great info from this blog, and at the bottom is a link to download a helpful app: Digital Marketing Pro.

We’re nearly convinced. The next day, we log on to our Facebook, and notice an ad on the side that offers a free 3 month trial to Digital Marketing Pro. At this point, we have nothing to lose.

Click.

Download.

It seems like this whole process happened so fast. It could have been two days ago, or even yesterday that we first Googled, “digital marketing help”, but for Mr. Advertiser who’s been targeting us with ads for months, this has been a long, drawn-out process. Luckily for him, there are many more people just like us going through this process every day!

Throughout this journey, we touched on a slew of digital solutions: SEO, programmatic advertising, blogs, videos, remarketing and social ads. While it seems like a lot, each of them worked together with a common purpose to meet the end-user at an appropriate moment in the sales funnel, and help lead to a purchase decision.

Think of your own clients and the sales funnel related to their business. Put together a digital plan that will help them increase conversions by reaching their end-users at different points of the sales funnel and prompting them to take action. If done properly, you can be assured of customer satisfaction, loyalty, and repeat customers!