What is a Marketing Funnel and what is the definition of a normal Funnel? The Funnel itself is a tube or pipe that is wide at the top and narrow at the bottom used for guiding liquid or powder into a small opening. In a Marketing sense, we unfortunately won't be guiding any liquids or powders, but we are going to be guiding people to convert, to buy our products or services.
The goal is for you to be able to establish your own funnel. It'll tell you when to write things down and what to write so that you can also fine tune this over time. It's not going to be a perfect system probably right out of the gate.
How can you set up a funnel? I break them down into three pieces and more pieces can be added for your business. If you get this concept down really well, you can start to elevate it with adding more steps into the funnel, but I'll tell you the three steps that I break it down into. The first one is our customer acquisition piece.
Getting new people to see the business for the very first time going from never hearing of the brand before is important. This section has a lot of bleed into the next. When you go to write things down, there's going to be a lot of overlapping pieces between part one and two, and you'll see why the second middle piece is our brand impact and awareness piece of showing value through exposure to the brand.
The third piece is the conversion piece. The bottom of the funnel, where people go through the end is imagine again, you're guiding liquids or powders there. That's getting them to buy from you, and there's a bonus piece to that as well, which is getting them to become a return customer.
So, to exit the funnel and then reenter the funnel again, if you do, you set up a good marketing funnel for your business. That should be an attainable goal. So I'm going to also discuss the percentage breakdown for the new and return businesses as well as how we focus on what I called the 40, 20, 40 rule.
This is the three sections of our funnel. The top section, I give 40% of my effort and the budget for marketing itself. I would attribute it as if you have the marketing budget and we're going to set up this funnel 40% to the top section and 20% to the middle section brand awareness, and then 40% at the bottom again, which would be for conversions.
So, the top funnel, that's the first thing I'm going to go over the customer acquisition piece. We want to set up multiple ways to gain new people into the business, through digital, and one of the most effective ways we can do that is paid ads.
Google ads, Meta ads, TikTok ads, it's a pay to play platform. Most of them have been for years. They don't try to hide it, but Meta and the others, for instance, have just so much volume nowadays of the billions of people that are on Facebook.
There are however organic things that you can do, which could be things like blogging. You need to be doing your consistent posting to Social Media, making Reels, making TikToks', YouTube videos, or jumping in people's DMS.
The digital door to door, these days, the DMS to the DMS and the cold emailing is still a thing, especially for where service-based businesses. All of these are ways for new people to hear about your business and work, to get them to the middle piece of the funnel, get people down to the middle piece.
That's why I was talking about there's going to be a little bit of bleed here because the ultimate goal of the top of the funnel is to capture somebody and to bring them into the brand. On Facebook, if you make a post and one of your page likes / follows, then one of your followers shares that post and their friend sees it.
If they click like on your page, after that, they've subscribed to your feed and have entered the secondary portion of the funnel. Another way that you could talk about that would be your blogging or a newsletter for instance. So, if you had a piece on your website or maybe an ad where you're capturing an email and they get entered to a newsletter, that newsletter is going to serve as our middle funnel piece, where we can kind of get some actual brand exposure to them on a consistent basis.
That is our goal with the top portion of the funnel. What you can do is write down all the things that your business is currently doing to please the top of the funnel category. See how comprehensive it is. If you either need to improve things, or add new things. There's many things that you can do, but essentially to label it, it is getting new customers and trying to get them under some sort of feed of exposure to your page.
Next thing I'm gonna go over is Middlesex. We're cutting to the middle of the funnel, the brand impact and awareness part.
There are studies that show people with a higher frequency of exposure to your brand over their lifetime. It indicates that they are more likely to convert. I always give the example of Coca Cola or these bigger brands. We're berated with these over the course of 20 years and that's their portion of the middle funnel.
Then when you come to the store, that is the conversion at the bottom. So for Social Media Ads, for instance, we found that on a monthly basis, the typical amount of exposure you want your followers to have, or just people that you're advertising to is 8 to 12 times. That seems to be the sweet spot for us to get people to the bottom of the funnel, to optimize for conversions.
If you're running Ad Campaigns, you can go into the actual insights, look at the frequency column and be able to see that there, if you're just running a normal page and just posting things, you can go into your insights. It's going to be a little harder to determine your frequency but if you can do the reach versus impressions and your page following, you might be able to get some rough calculations out. If you're working with an ad agency, ask them if they're monitoring what this frequency is and tell them that you would like it to be between 8 and 12 for every 30 days. That's how you're going to keep people coming.
Service-based businesses like mine, once we kind of book a client, they're typically with us on a contract and we don't need to berate them within a 30 day period. We'd send about one email per month and that's about it. So it depends, but for the actual advertising to new people, themselves 8 to 12 is our sweet spot.
Otherwise apart from social media ads to continue this frequency are things like mailing lists. We talked about that at the top of the funnel. Getting in the middle of the funnel portion is sending those monthly emails.
Blogging, and Social Media posts are things that don't actually overlap into the top of the funnel, because it's mostly something that only your followers would see would be like stories. Being consistent is important!
You have to show up and play the game. You want to do that because constant exposure is good for the psyche of your customer so that they are more likely to convert. The middle section can be a little confusing. So for me, writing down all the things that we're going to keep, people, seeing us, all the things that are getting people to engage with all the possibilities of the ways that they could see us, helps make it a little bit easier for me to look at it. If you've got your top of the funnel list, you can probably pull a lot of that down to the middle funnel because there's some overlap like your posts and the blogging and that kind of stuff.
This is my favorite part is the bottom of the funnel, the conversion space, known as getting people to buy. This is seemingly simple. If you ask yourself how many ways can someone actually convert with me? Meaning how many ways is there online for someone to purchase with me? How many efforts do you have consistently running in order to keep somebody coming into the store? What things are you doing on a regular basis?
Are there more things that I can do? Are there more things that I could create that give people more ways to convert with me online? Through conversions, statistically means you're getting people to go there, you should then have overall more conversions.
What are some ways that we can do that? Some easy options are, if you have physical products and you don't already sell online would be to list those on the internet. If you have a thousand product catalog and you just created a thousand opportunities of purchase on your website.
We've had so many clients approach us and say they've burned out their local market as well. They've exhausted the amount of growth that they can do. So, they start a nationwide campaign and sometimes that does mean having to list the entire product catalog, or maybe listing prices for services.
HubSpot has been a dramatic game changer for my business. It has dramatically changed my sales efforts and how I manage client experience for all my clients. It allows my team to see all emails from every client, no matter who, which no matter which team member it was with allows you to see it all in one feed.
I lost a project manager recently. She went on to an awesome opportunity and I'm so happy for her, but we actually automated her role after the fact through HubSpot.
On top of that, it keeps my team more plugged in than any other software. One software can change everything for your business. So the best advice is to explore online. I've seen it firsthand. Dozens of times I've set up numerous things, such as property management at Folio. We've had a city high for products listed on the internet and using an international catalog of stuff.
They didn't have to photograph things beforehand. Imagine that there's already a pre photograph catalog of every product you hold that could be out there. For the bonus, getting these people to return as customers, how do you keep someone to return multi pictures of the funnel? You want to cut a little hole into the middle section on the side there, and then you can draw a line from the bottom of the funnel back up to that middle section.
That line is the thing that will be the ultimate thing, getting people to re-engage with the brand, probably isn't what you think. I believe that that line is called product quality and client experience. This may sound harsh, but if your product or service or the quality is not the number one thing that you're focusing on to improve before you set up this marketing funnel, it's not gonna work.
People are not going to keep coming back. Unfortunately that's just at the end of the day, if your product sucks, all the marketing in the world isn't going to save it. If you've found your hero product line that you're known for. If you haven't fine tuned the service or found your hero product that you're known and famous for, and that people love and tell their friends about, then go and fix that problem first, then come back.
