Planning your marketing funnel
Knowing and understanding your funnel will have a really positive impact on many parts of your marketing plan. From your marketing mix of activities to the content you produce, we need to align both with our funnel in and funnel out. If you are going to create YouTube videos so that people can find you, what is your strategy once they have found you to then get them onto your website or mailing list? Once you have moved them to evaluating your company, what is your strategy to get them to push the button or pick up the phone to buy what you’re selling? Once they have bought from you, what is your strategy to continue to love them and communicate with them to make them buy again? And once they are a loyal customer, what is your strategy to make them an advocate of your business and the person who is posting links to your website when they see someone asking for recommendations?
Having strategies to move people to the next part of their customer journey are really important. Some customers will naturally move their way along if your product and story are amazing, but others will need a push. Big companies have whole departments set up to handle each step:
- The marketing department creates awareness of the company and product
- The sales department pick up that awareness and turn it into a sale
- The customer service department looks after people to make them regular buyers
- The customer retention department does everything they can to keep a customer (as you will have found if you have ever tried to cancel a phone contract!)
In your company, it might be just you trying and do all this! But that doesn’t mean that you can’t take some of their strategies and use them yourself.
We are now going to map out your strategy for each stage of a customer’s journey by deciding on a way to move someone along your funnel depending on which stage they are at. If you have already created a content plan then you can also use this exercise to test it, because you want to make sure that you have specific content which will engage people at different stages in your funnel. You can see how the content that you produce for someone who you are trying to make into a customer will be different to the content that you produce if you are trying to turn a current customer into your biggest champion.
The first thing is to identify the tool that you are going to use in each stage of your funnel (by tool I mean the medium or marketing channel – such as Facebook, email etc) and then the strategy for pushing someone to the next stage of the funnel (eg the actual thing that you are going to do). Write down each stage of the funnel, and then next to this, write down your strategy to move people to the next step. I’m going to use three examples of different types of companies to show how this works:
- A company selling a physical product
- A company selling a service
- A charity looking for donations and supporters
