Marketing is one of the most crucial aspects of being successful in business, especially for smaller businesses or start-ups. While it may seem like giant brands such as Pepsi or Disney are ubiquitous to modern society, the truth is they got where they are at on the shoulders of good marketing.
Having a reliable product or service is important but being able to stand out from the crowd and get attention for your product or service is a completely different beast. Finding product-market fit is a goal that is shared by every business both big and small, and marketing and customer interaction is how this magic happens.
One of the most fundamental and basic tools of marketing that every business has to understand is the marketing funnel. This important tool helps to categorize important data and gives companies the insight they need to make meaningful decisions. If you have been wondering about what a market funnel is and how it can help improve your entire marketing strategy - here is everything you need to know!
What Exactly is The Market Funnel?
If you don’t already know what the market funnel is, no need to worry because it’s never too late to discover this valuable tool is. A market funnel is a tool that tracks a customer’s journey with a particular business or brand. This funnel represents three key stages that can then be divided into further, and those three stages include awareness, contemplation, and purchase.
Stage 1, Awareness
Every aspect of a market funnel is crucial for the success of a company as it deals directly with the customer journey. This stage can be one of the most challenging for new startups or smaller businesses. In the digital age, customers have more options and are inundated with more advertisements than ever before.
This can make simply raising brand awareness a real challenge. The good news is that there are a lot of ways that a company can do this. Everything from building competent and powerful SEO content that promotes a higher Google ranking in search results, to even using physical mediums like OOH media. Whether you are building out your website’s on-page SEO or paying for a billboard, growing awareness is possible.
One method that has one of the best ROIs in the business and is equally appealing to both small and large businesses is email marketing. In fact, working with a klaviyo email marketing agency to help you meet the challenges of eCommerce marketing is a great way to help spread awareness and fine-tune your market funnel.
Stage 2, Contemplation
This is the stage where the customer is through the door and they are taking a look! In a digital world, this mostly happens in a virtual space and there are key factors that can help encourage a visitor to transition to customer.
Having a well-defined, easily navigable, and smooth-running website is key. A website is one of the first lines of defense when it comes to customer satisfaction. However, even the most satisfying and pleasing websites are not enough at times. In fact, an astounding 95% of all first-time visitors to a website will leave without becoming customers. This is where retarget marketing can come into play.
The good news about retarget marketing, is that you can use retarget marketing platforms that track visitor experience, and you can also use email marketing. Working with a klaviyo email marketing agency can give you access to trained experts who know how to get your visitors back on your website and turn them into customers.
Stage 3, Conversion
The third stage is all about a visitor transitioning to a customer. This is a stage that is deeply impacted by
customer experience. The better a visitor’s experience, the more likely they will be to make that transition and become a paying customer.
What Comes After?
Marketing departments don’t get to take it easy once a customer has funneled through stage 3 - in fact, this is where the real fun comes in. From conversion, the work of creating customer loyalty comes into play. Yes, this has a lot to do with how the customer enjoys the product and the customer service, but this also relies heavily on marketing.
Staying in touch with the customer, learning about the customer, and building a robust customer profile that informes all of this falls on the marketing department. Email marketing is powerful to help companies move customers deeper into the market funnel by encouraging brand loyalty. This can happen through exclusive offers or updates and information that customers actually care about.
Conclusion
Whether you are running a brand new start-up, or you manage a successful business, the market funnel is an important tool that needs to be taken seriously. With solid marketing that can garner the kind of data that will improve customer experience, creating loyalty in your customers is always possible!
