The success of every marketing campaign depends on proper planning and identification of the target audience. According to a survey by Google, 61% of people expect brands to tailor their experiences to suit their needs. This statistic alone shows how brands and organizations should strategize and properly construct a marketing plan in line with what their audience expects. Two critical parts of your marketing campaign are a marketing funnel and segmentation of your audience. In this article, we will primarily focus on how you can create an effective marketing funnel for your brand so that you can attract consumers, convert them, and retain them.
What is a Marketing Funnel?
In basic terms, it is a visualization of the strategies you will deploy to create awareness of your brand to a specific audience. Once you have a specific number of people who know your brand, you can employ strategies to convince them to buy your product, and then those who do will become your consumer-base. Afterward, you have to carefully consider how to retain those existing customers and make sure that their consumer experience is top-notch.
The strategies employed for each brand may differ on a surface level but in terms of the marketing funnel, the strategies listed above will be the ones driving your marketing campaigns. In essence, we can divide the core practices into:
- Brand Awareness
- Conversion Strategy
- Customer Retention
- Continuous Quality Improvement
- Dealing with Opposing Forces
With these 5 elements above in view, we can draft out our marketing campaigns. Let’s take a look at them step by step.
Brand Awareness
The first core strategy that is employed in any marketing campaign is brand awareness. Assuming you are kicking off your company with your first main product or perhaps a range of products and services, you need to work on improving your company’s reputation and brand image before you can actually reach customers. There are numerous strategies you could employ to increase your brand awareness. Such as establishing a proper presence on all social media handles and consistently maintaining them. You could also hire a proper digital marketing company to help improve your brand awareness.
Another thing to keep in mind when you are starting off with a new company is that your friends, relatives, and colleagues are going to be your biggest followers. So don’t be afraid of asking them to share your company posts and promote your work. This will ultimately help you generate leads.
Conversion Strategy
So, you feel that you have effectively promoted your brand and have got a reasonable number of people talking about your product. The next step is to try and convert the leads you have generated. You need to devise a strategy to drive leads toward your site and have them purchase your product or service. For instance, if they landed on the homepage searching for shoes, you need to clearly list all the items and make sure that the interface of the website is user friendly. The user will browse the product, select the one he or she likes, and proceeds towards the checkout.
This is the user journey of your potential customer. If there are any complications along this path, the user will immediately drop off. This will cause you a loss and ultimately result in the failure of your marketing strategy. Hence it is really important to ensure that the design and all other elements of your landing page are optimized to ensure that the customer experience is as smooth as possible. A strategy that some brands employ is the use of a chatbot to answer frequently asked questions about your brand. Wherever the bot fails, an employee should immediately join in to offer personalized help to your potential customer or future client.
Customer Retention
You now have some customers or clients for your product or service, now it is time to retain them. Many times when brands get customers, they forget to keep them engaged and updated with their upcoming products. Your existing customer base is one of your biggest assets and you must keep on interacting with them periodically. Whether you continually ask for feedback regarding the product they purchased from you or keep them updated with new announcements or newer products, these are just some small steps that you can take to make the customer feel important.
An important strategy which popular brands deploy are rewards for customers who have purchased your service or product. These perks and exclusive benefits go a long way to making the customer feel special. They will ultimately tell others about their experience with you, becoming a source of advertisement that will make your brand even more popular.
Continuous Quality Improvement
Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) initiatives should be a prime goal of your company when designing marketing strategies and converting customers. There should be proper benchmarking tools in place and methodologies to assess how well your campaigns are performing across online channels. You need to tailor your campaigns and product specifications to cater to the ever-changing requirements of your customer base. The landscape can shift quickly, but you must have strategies in place to counter that movement.
Dealing with Opposing Forces
Another extremely neglected segment by brands is their rivals and the opposition. Let’s face it, every brand has a negative follower base which will go to great lengths to disrupt your work or influence your marketing campaigns. Rather than taking this as a bad factor, marketers need to be flexible and smart to use this to the advantage of their brand. If a brand is able to convince one person who used to hate its products to become a customer, you will be able to set a great precedent and use it for your benefit.
You’ve Created a Marketing Funnel
A marketing funnel defines the essential part of your marketing campaign from start to finish. It also devises methods to convert people who oppose your brand. A digital marketer needs to keep all these elements in mind before designing a campaign. They must also be ready to make any changes if the situation changes and to keep up with newer trends. Also, you need to focus on what your opposers are saying and use that to improve your marketing strategy. Be sure to interact with your existing customer base and employ CQI initiatives to ensure that your product and marketing campaigns are up to the latest standards.
