The Marketing and Sales Funnel and Its Stages

Today I want to share with you a very important concept in digital marketing. Maybe you’ve heard of it or you already know about it, but it doesn’t matter, you might be able to compare what you know and complement it. Here it goes. The marketing or sales funnel, in English, Funnel. It’s nothing more than the process of acquiring customers online, it’s not a complicated concept but depending on the business and its current stage, we can expand.

To understand and implement a funnel, it is important that you have a high level of clarity about your audience, and if possible, that you have designed your ideal client, Your Avatar, that you have personified them. If you are not clear about this yet, here is this article where I help you with the process.

Well, besides the above, it’s good that you are clear about the customer journey map, meaning the journey that your user needs to make until they reach your offer. Because what the marketing funnel does is help us Convert that user into a Client, making them go from being a reader to a subscriber, until they become a recurring client. 

The funnel has 3 crucial stages, depending on the strategy more can be included, but these 3 are enough to understand this journey for now.

The 3 steps are Awareness or Attraction, Consideration, and Conversion. Below on the page, I leave you a graphic so you can see it better. It’s literally an upside-down triangle 🙂

In the first phase, as its name implies, we must attract the user to your business. Maybe that user does not yet know your solution, but you must make yourself noticed, and later in the second stage, you will get the user to consider you in their purchase decision.

In this second stage, we will prepare that visitor to soon become a client. Here, content is key, you must nurture and educate them, give them value, meaning information that is truly useful to them. In the consideration stage, you must understand and listen a lot to your ideal client, achieve getting into their mind and identify if they are ready for your offer.

That is why segmentation is also very important here, so you will understand how to speak to each user in your buying cycle.

Once your user goes through the Consideration stage, they are ready to convert into a client. Here in the third stage, they feel that they really need your help, and it is likely that your funnel is not the only one they are in, so here you must use some persuasion and sales techniques, in addition to generating a lot of trust with your user.

In this third stage, Conversion, the goal is to make the client feel unable to refuse your offer. To bring them to the point of feeling “bad” if they pass up that opportunity. I bet you’ve been in that situation, we’ve all been victims of good marketing and persuasion.

Overall, you must make their consciousness and heart lead them straight to the purchase.

These are the 3 basic steps of any sales funnel. After the last step, we could find steps like Loyalty and Evangelization, but they are part of more advanced strategies.

For now, keep these three stages I just taught you in mind, and don’t worry because they can be applied to any type of business, from selling a physical product, e-commerce, to service businesses like consulting, coaching and information businesses. For example, you can have your makeup selling business online through your funnel, or you could promote your real estate advisory services. There are no limits, everyone can and should have their funnel running online.

This is how business is done on the internet today.