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An effective marketing strategy involves more than nailing your message. You also need to deliver it to the right people at the right time and through the right channels to drive conversions. With so many moving parts, the process can get complicated real quick! How can you make sure you have all the bases covered?

The digital marketing funnel helps you break down the customer lifecycle and map out what your audience needs to know at the different stages of the buyer’s journey. The insights will allow you to leverage the most effective channels to distribute the right content and generate more sales.

What’s a Digital Marketing Funnel?

A digital marketing funnel is a framework that illustrates how a persona interacts with your company along the purchasing path — from the moment they become aware of your brand to the time they buy from you and tell others about your business.

Traditionally, most brands approach the marketing funnel as a linear process. However, digital channels have changed how consumers interact with brands and the modern online buyer’s journey is more like a loop:

As such, we have to approach the modern buyer’s journey differently. For example, with the See-Think-Do-Care model:

• See: During the awareness stage, you’d identify the largest addressable qualified audience that haven’t developed any commercial intent and let them see your brand.
• Think: Mapped to the consideration stage, you’re targeting the largest addressable qualified audience with some commercial intent and get them to think about buying from you.
• Do: You’d be marketing to the largest addressable qualified audience with a high level of commercial intent at the purchase stage and get them to take action.
• Care: This focuses on delivering a post-purchase experience to current customers with two or more commercial transactions to make them care about your brand.

Top Marketing Strategies For Every Stage of the Digital Marketing Funnel

Guided by the see-think-do-care framework, you can leverage various marketing strategies at the different stages of the buyer’s journey to deliver the right message to the right audience:

Awareness stage: See

At this stage, your largest addressable audience is either not aware of your brand or doesn’t know that they need your product. Your goal is to educate them about their needs and make them aware of the available solution (i.e., your product or service.)

You can reach a large audience via social media platforms and display ads. Focus on sharing valuable and relevant content and interacting with your prospects on social media. Research your ideal customers (e.g., the content they consume) to make sure that you’re targeting the right audience segments with your display ads.

Consideration Stage: Think

Today’s consumers tend to go back and forth among different platforms to learn about new products and services. Your marketing strategy should focus on building trust with your audience via various channels and driving traffic to your website.

Deliver a wide range of content using different touchpoints to meet your audience where they’re when they do their research. Some effective strategies at this stage include SEO marketing, video marketing, online paid advertising, and email marketing. Your content should focus on showing how your products can solve your audience’s problems.

Purchase Stage: Do

At this revenue-building stage, you need to convert prospects into customers. Your content should trigger an action — purchasing your products or services. Additionally, reduce the friction to completing a transaction so you can increase conversions.

Marketing strategies for this stage include SEO, pay-per-click ads, and email marketing. In particular, personalization and retargeting tactics can work very well to drive traffic to a product page and promote a special offer to prospects who demonstrate a high purchase intent to entice them to make a purchase.

Post-Purchase Experience: Care

This stage focuses on building loyalty to increase customer retention and customer lifetime value. Since it’s less expensive to retain existing buyers than to acquire new ones, continuing the relationships with your current customers can help you increase profitability. Offer outstanding post-purchase support and a loyalty program to keep them coming back.

Also, word-of-mouth marketing is a great way to generate high-quality leads. Turn your loyal customers into brand advocates by asking them to post online reviews or enticing them to recommend your brand to others with a referral program.

Conclusion

To optimize your digital marketing funnel, you need to leverage various channels to get your message to the right people at the right time. Our digital marketing solutions cover everything from social media marketing and SEO to email marketing to PPC advertising to help you put all the pieces in place to progress prospects seamlessly along the buyer’s journey. Learn more and get in touch to see how we can help you build brand awareness, generate leads, and increase conversions here.

The news and editorial staff of the Bay Area News Group had no role in this post’s preparation.