The term Marketing Funnel sounds potentially super confusing, super difficult. You might not know exactly where to get started or what to do. I want to break it down and make it super simple for you.
Marketing Funnels can get very complicated but they can also be very simple. In simple words, Marketing Funnel is basically taking a person from discovering your brand to purchasing a product or service. It’s getting someone to know you, to get awareness of you and your brand – to purchasing your service.
Now this can be as quick as someone typing a search into Google. After finding your website, seeing that your website offers a product and buying it. Or it could be as complicated as someone finding your video on YouTube and ending up on a social media page of yours, interacting with them and somehow getting them on your email list. And after weeks and months later they get an email about a new product or service of your and then purchasing it.
So I am basically going to show you how we can do this with content. There are lots of ways to make it even more confusing and complicated with how you get those people to your content in the first place through advertising or targeting specific audiences. There are going to be lots of cool stuffs down in this article but let’s break it down and keep it simple with taking a person from discovering your brand to purchasing your product or service.
Have you ever heard of AIDA? So its Attention, Interest, Desire and then Action. So it’s like a large group of people will pay attention to your social media post. Out of them some people who’ve got your attention will become interested in you or your content. Then even a smaller group of those people will have a desire for more content and viewers for a product or service. And then the smallest subset of that big group of people takes action. So that’s what the AIDA funnel looks like and that’s what it is. And this is a sort of tried and tested definition of a Marketing Funnel.
So what this may actually look like? So first maybe in the attention phase you post something on social media and one of your followers shares it. And one of their friends sees that social media post and that gets their attention. So first it’s just getting the word out there maybe that social media post was an image with a cool graphic but it also links to a blog post of yours. So someone goes on to your blog and read something that’s really interesting, something educational perhaps on that blog post.
There’s also a sidebar on your blog website or within the content a link to a product or service of yours that’s related to that blog article. And that person who went from attention to interest now desires that product and they click on that page and so that’s your desire part of the funnel. And then on that product page there’s going to be a buy now button or something like that where they can actually take action and make that purchase. So that’s a super easy way.
Hopefully that’s what we all wish is that your friends just share your social media posts and then their friends just end up buying your product. But in general it’s not going to be that easy it’s going to take more time warming up your audience and getting people. It’s a lot of work getting people into that attention and interest phase before moving on to the desire and action.
Another example would be like you posting a YouTube video and someone searches on YouTube and finds your YouTube video. From there they might click on a link to your website. That’s the interest on your website home page. There might be a lead magnet which is basically a giveaway in exchange for someone subscribing to your email list. So you give away a free e-book or a free online course or a free podcast or something like that and they get on your email and they take action by signing up for your email list. So this is just another way how the ADIA model fits in to content marketing.
One thing I want to add though to AIDA is an R which stands for Retention which is so important with marketing or any business because it’s way easier to sell a product to someone who is already someone who’s purchased from you or someone who’s on an email list of yours then finding a new customer. And so we need to do work as content creators and marketers to create follow up content that engages your audience continually and keeps them engaged, keeps them liking, trusting and following you so that if you do end up wanting to sell another product or service to them they are still there, they are still willing to buy.
Marketing Funnel isn’t over when someone takes action. You do have to have retention to have a successful business.
Author: Ankita Mundhra