What are marketing funnels? And how do you use them to turn Likes on Facebook and Instagram into real sales?

How do you move people from your social channels into your mailing list? From your mailing list to your store? And from your store to checkout?

You may have already heard of marketing models like AIDA (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action). Often, these sales flows or “buying paths” are referred to as marketing funnels.

Yet it takes some effort and time to actually understand the differences in applying these models to online businesses compared to traditional brick-and-mortar businesses.

To simplify things, we’ve broken down each stage of the process. Additionally, we’ve identified which digital channels are relevant to that stage and contrasted it to traditional businesses.

Stage 1 – Awareness

Where are your audience?

• Looking at Facebook and Instagram Ads
• Reading your email in their Inbox
• Seeing a Banner, Pop-Up, or Native Ad while surfing the web

What’s the Brick-and-Mortar equivalent?

• Looking at a flyer or poster at point-of-purchase
• Watching or hearing a TV or radio ad
• Walking past a roadshow or pop-up booth

How to craft the message?

• Focus on the customer’s pain points
• Keep it short and simple
• Grab their attention with a compelling solution to their pain points
• Be contextually relevant

Stage 2 – Interest

Where are your audience?

• On your website homepage
• On a specific product page
• Reading a blog post about your products

What’s the Brick-and-Mortar equivalent?

• Entering a store to browse
• Listening to the salesperson’s pitch
• Flipping through a catalog

How to craft the message?

• Provide details and specifications of your product
• Highlight key benefits and differentiation points
• Be precise and clear about exactly what they are getting (colours, sizes, ingredients, components, and so on)
• Provide easy access to addition details (shipping policies, size charts, zoomed in high resolution pictures, and so on)

Stage 3 – Desire

Where are your audience?

• Adding your product to their Wishlist
• Adding your product to their Cart

What’s the Brick-and-Mortar equivalent?

• Taking a salesperson’s name card
• Placing an order for a product
• Reserving a product

How to craft the message?

• Focused on only one main Call-to-Action (“Buy Now”, “Checkout Now”, “Complete Order”, and so on)
• Keep it short and sweet
• Highlight the main Call-to-Action button in a clearly visible button with clear font
• Eliminate other information and distractions that are non-essential to the Call-to-Action

Stage 4 – Action (Conversion)

Where are your audience?

• Checking out and completing payment

What’s the Brick-and-Mortar equivalent?

• Making payment at the cash register

How to craft the message?

• Professional, polite, and appreciative
• Thank them for their purchase and give them an incentive to stay in touch
• Provide opportunities to opt-into mailing lists or give them a discount for their next purchase with you

Wondering what this looks like in practice and how you actually track where customers are in each stage of marketing funnels? With free tools such as Google Analytics, you can trace where your website traffic is coming from, and which pages users most commonly move through to get to your checkout cart.

Here’s a quick summary of the easiest ways to keep track of marketing funnels:

1. Google Analytics Behavior Flow

Remember the vertical funnel graphic above? Imagine it flipped to the side. On the left side, you have the sources of all traffic from search, social media, or email campaigns. This dashboard shows you which pages users visit from the Awareness stage, and which pages they visit next. In contrast, the red flows indicate how many people drop off or leave your website at that particular page.

Behavior flow helps you understand what paths users are taking to your website and where users are dropping off. From this, you can determine if there are opportunities to improving the user journey. Similarly, it can also help you identify popular paths that you could use to leverage more traffic to other pages.

2. Google Analytics Goal Flow

Like behavior flow, Google Analytic’s goal flow dashboard allows you to identify “nodes”. Each node represents one of each of your funnel steps for your goal, while the final node represents the goal.

By observing the flow, you can see the percentage of people who dropped out of each stage of the funnel at that point. As a result, you can better understand which pages of your website in the funnel might need improving.

3. Google Analytics Funnel Visualization

This is another way to analyze the goals mentioned above in “Goal Flow”. This dashboard shows the exact figures of people in each stage of the funnel who dropped out or proceeded to the next stage. Displayed vertically, this dashboard presents your data in a way that is more intuitive and aligned to the funnel analogy.

4. Facebook Analytics Funnel

As with Google Analytics, Facebook Analytics allows you to create simple or complex marketing funnels based on defined goals. These marketing funnels allow you to track user behavior and actions across a sequence of steps.

To sum up marketing funnels…

If you are just beginning your journey with marketing funnels, Google Analytics and Facebook Analytics are good tools to start with.

You can get even more sophisticated with marketing funnels using:

• Customized landing pages
• CRM funnel tools
• Automated emails

If it seems daunting at first, don’t fret! It takes time and experimentation to be able to think in terms of conversions and marketing funnels. Many small and medium businesses still look at each of their digital channels in isolation and wonder why they don’t see results. In order to see better conversions and more sales, it is crucial to be able to integrate the steps into a cohesive flow.

We hope this post has helped shed some light on this often complex and confusing process. With some discipline and time, you’ll be comfortable with using marketing funnels on a daily basis!