Marketing or marketing funnel stages are no longer a new term for us. However, what about the digital marketing funnel?
Along with technological developments and marketing trends, digital marketing has indeed become the target of most businessmen as the most effective marketing strategy. Especially given the number of Internet users which is increasing year after year. Thus, digital product marketing is a very effective type of marketing strategy.
However, you should know that the fact is that digital marketing strategies cannot deliver immediate results. Indeed, the public must go through different stages before making a purchase. Therefore, understanding the digital marketing funnel is something you need to do in order to determine the right marketing strategy.
In addition, understanding the steps of digital marketing is also useful to be able to analyze the benefits and costs of conducting marketing activities (CBA), in order to obtain maximum profits and revenues. So what is a digital marketing funnel and what are the stages?
What is a digital marketing funnel?
The digital marketing funnel is a template that outlines several steps for customers before making a product purchase. Usually, this stage is also known as customer journey or customer journey. This stage starts from when the customer knows a brand (brand awareness), decides to buy a product, to become a loyal customer and loyal to the brand (brand loyalty).
In fact, this digital marketing funnel is almost similar to a marketing funnel or marketing stages. However, these steps are not only applied conventionally, but by digital means. This template is useful for designing business plans and developing the right marketing plan and marketing strategy. So indirectly, this digital marketing step can be a guide to map the customer journey of the customer.
With the existence of digital media, there are now different types of digital strategies that you can include in the marketing phase. Examples are the use of social media and social messaging, paid marketing, paid advertising, SEO and SEM, PPC, content marketing, etc.
Benefits of the Digital Marketing Funnel
The digital marketing steps are helpful in maximizing the marketing strategies that your business implements. Because so far, many businesses have used digital marketing campaigns, but only a few understand the marketing stages that prospects or potential customers go through. Well, developing a digital marketing funnel strategy can help businesses prepare the right strategy at every stage.
Moreover, the main benefit of implementing this stage of digital marketing is that businesses can do better segmentation. And create marketing or advertising content with a more interesting message. This way, you can more easily increase your conversion rate.
Knowing the right strategy at every step means you can deliver an effective customer experience. As a result, you also have a great opportunity to increase retention rates and customer satisfaction.
Digital Marketing Funnel Stages
Broadly speaking, there are six stages of the digital marketing funnel that customers will go through during the customer journey. Here is an explanation of the six steps:
1. Exhibition
The first step is exposure. As the name suggests, this is the stage of introducing your brand to potential customers. Because, it is impossible for potential customers to buy products directly without knowing or knowing the brand beforehand.
This exposure stage is usually the starting point of the marketing process, where we begin advertising and promoting through the right marketing channels. This step typically uses a content marketing strategy via search engine optimization (SEO). The reason is that there are 75,000 searches on Google every second, so we need to use it to increase brand awareness.
Start researching short-tail keywords (keywords) with thousands of searches every month. You can also maximize it by placing advertisements such as Google Ads or native advertising.
So basically this exhibition is a stage to introduce the brand to the public. To generate a lot of exposures, you need to create marketing content that grabs the attention of potential customers (like a lead magnet). Also apply the right promotional strategy by doing market research first, to match the target market.
2. Discovery
It is at this stage that potential customers begin to learn more about the brand. So you need to focus on lead nurturing to convince them. Discovery is an advanced stage of exposure, where you need to get them to know more about the products you offer.
The goal is to make customers feel at home and more curious about the brand. Here, visitors to your website or social media accounts will turn into potential customers. You should be able to prompt visitors for their contact information. Remember to be diligent and consistent in creating educational blog content so that potential customers get more comprehensive information.
3. Considerations
As the name suggests, this is the stage where potential customers consider buying a product. Here they already know the brand and know what benefits your brand offers.
You need to design a strategy that can get them to buy the product. For example, you can say the advantages and uniqueness of the product compared to those of competitors. You can also provide data, facts, or information that leads customers to believe they should buy your product. For example, by including positive testimonials from customers who have purchased the product.
At this stage of thinking, you also need to open communication or interaction with customers. Either via email marketing, social media and social messaging (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, to Whatsapp and Telegram) or by contacting directly via customer service contacts. Because usually potential customers will ask a lot of questions about the product before deciding to make a purchase.
4. Processing
This is the stage where the purchase occurs after the prospect has considered your product. At this point, you need to create content that aligns with your business goals. The strategy you can use is to create personalized ads and engaging landing page content.
Because you have to remember, the landing page has to really make potential customers want to convert. For example, offer a free trial or test of a product so they can try our product or service first. You can call this strategy product-driven growth, which is all about highlighting the value or benefits of the product.
This way, potential customers can know that they will benefit from your brand (brand equity). They therefore have a great opportunity to become loyal customers.
5. Customer relationship
This is an important step where you need to maintain a good (relative) relationship with customers. The goal is to keep customers using your product. Moreover, this relationship marketing strategy is also useful for you to get customer reviews or feedback from customers.
You can use this feedback to design better business strategies and business plans in the future. With careful business planning and strategy, you can also perform competitor analysis, increase sales growth as well as maximum lead conversion.
Also, this step is easier for you, since we live in very sophisticated times right now. So you can communicate with customers through different marketing channels, both omnichannel and multichannel.
6. Customer loyalty
This is the last stage of the digital marketing funnel that needs to happen continuously or continuously. Retention is the stage where you entice consumers to come back to make purchases in the customer lifecycle. In this way, you can retain existing customers who play an important role in maintaining the development and growth of the business.
To retain your customers, you must maintain a good relationship with them. You can also set up a customer loyalty program so that they are more enthusiastic about making purchases and doing advocacy with other customers. Because as we know, retaining old customers is much more profitable than finding and acquiring new customers (customer acquisition).
These are the digital marketing funnel stages you need to know. Remember that implementing the right strategy at every stage is the best way to get the most out of your marketing.
You can also use the services of a digital marketing agency to grow your business. Some of the marketing strategies that can be implemented are growth hack marketing, inbound marketing, 360 digital marketing and data driven marketing so that the business can grow rapidly.
