What is a Marketing and Sales Funnel? Why do businesses need it?

Full-funnel marketing combines a marketing funnel and a sales funnel. It is a marketing plan that starts by creating awareness and attracting people’s interest. The aim is to motivate people to visit, or consider visiting your website. As it pushes people down the funnel it will encourage them to get to know more about your products or services to consider purchasing before finally going on to make a purchase. 

You might be confused about the difference between a marketing funnel and a sales funnel, as they sound similar. A marketing funnel encourages and gives customers a reason to purchase, whereas a sales funnel generates and handles leads.

Of course, it’s important to have a strategy to convert potential customers to actual customers, with the ultimate goal of generating brand loyalty from customers who spread the word about, or review, your product or service.

Now that we have a brief understanding of the meaning, let’s take a closer look at what steps are involved in each stage.

Awareness & Interest

The first step of a marketing funnel is building a relationship. Of course, we must be visible to our target audience first, so creating brand awareness and interest is paramount. One easy way to do this is by addressing the pain points of your target audience and presenting them with a solution (your product or service). 

Recommended Strategy

During this period, we recommend doing Search Engine Marketing and keyword research concurrently to help customers find you. Even though they may never have heard about you before, you should take the time to create engaging content about your products and services that demonstrates how they solve the target audience’s pain points. This content should be published across your website and social media channels, but it shouldn’t use hard-sales tactics, as customers might get a negative impression of your brand.

Consideration & Intent

Once customers become familiar with your brand, the next step is to present your company as the right choice for them so that you’re front of mind when they make a purchase. At this stage, our target audience tries to find information about the product or service they’re interested in. This means they’ll read reviews and comments, and consider which products and brands they might buy. In traditional marketing, the function of marketing is to gain customers’ interest, and in digital marketing, the idea is the same, but it’s all done through online channels.

Recommended Strategy

We recommend influencer marketing during this period to help expose customers to your products or services. This should include creating content that details the product and motivates customers to chat, register or find out more information.

Purchase

This is the period when customers decide to buy. The customer may have only one brand in mind or many. What we have to do is ‘close the sale‘ as soon as possible. This is the point at which the funnel changes from a marketing to a sales funnel, which is the shift from creating interest in products and brands, to closing a sale.

It’s essential to close a sale quickly and concisely and encourage quick decision-making. This is the final step of the sales funnel. To encourage purchases, you can offer discounts, giveaways, perks, and other promotions and add a time limit to drive conversions.

Recommended strategy

An example of a recommended way to close a sale is by offering promotions, giveaways, discounts, and other perks to drive customers to make a purchase decision. Your communication should not present new products or additional information; otherwise, the customer may return to the start of the product review process once again.

For businesspeople and marketers, whether you operate as a B2B or B2C, it’s essential to plan your strategy based on the different stages of the marketing funnel and sales funnel to build your customer base, draw their attention, and close sales.