What is an online marketing funnel?
An online marketing funnel is called a "marketing funnel". It is an imaginary representation of the process from potential customer to actual customer. The wide top of the funnel is your entire target group and the narrowest part at the bottom is the customers who actually bought your service or product. The entire funnel symbolises the journey they took before making a purchase.
Phases online marketing funnel
The online marketing funnel basically consists of four phases. These are the following phases:
Phase 1: Awareness phase
The first phase of the marketing funnel is all about awareness. This is the phase in which the potential customer becomes aware of your service or product. Through search engines or social media they will come to your website.
Phase 2: Interest phase
In the next phase, attracting the potential customer's attention is important. He or she is now aware of your service or product and looks around on the website to see if it is something for him or her.
Phase 3: Decision phase
The third phase is perhaps the most important. In this phase, the potential customer makes the decision: will they order your service or product or not? To be able to make this choice, the customer will look at reviews, the price, different variants and much more.
Phase 4: Action phase
Has the customer decided to purchase your service/product? Then they have also passed phase 4. In this last phase, the customer performs the actions necessary to proceed with the purchase.
Example online marketing funnel
What do these phases look like in practice? That can easily be explained by means of a practical example. Suppose you have a webshop for jewellery. You want to sell these jewels. For this, the customer must take several steps.
- First of all, the customer has to visit the website
- Then the customer has to look at a certain product
- This product must be added to the shopping cart
- Finally, the purchase must be completed
This is your funnel. The first step is for your entire target group. Those who choose to actually visit the website proceed to step 2. Fewer and fewer people will continue to the next step, until you end up with a small group of actual customers. They have been through a funnel, so to speak. Ide
Why online marketing funnels?
But what is the use of an online marketing funnel? What added value does it offer your company? The answer is simple. It provides more insight. With a well thought out funnel system it is easier to bring in new customers. After all, in an online world you have little grip on consumer behaviour. An online marketing funnel can help you gain insight into the point at which you lose the most customers. This way you can easily do something about it.
Making an online marketing funnel
Now that you know what it is and why it is important, you can get started! To create a funnel it is important that you have insight into your target group. What does your target group look like? What are their interests? And what demographic characteristics does this group have? When you have a clear picture of this for yourself, you can start with phase 1: awareness.
Filling your online marketing funnel
Of course you want as many people as possible to go through your online marketing funnel. Therefore, it is important to make as many people as possible aware of your company. You do this by making sure you have a good online presence and are easy to find. There are various ways to achieve this.
SEO
One of these ways is SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. SEO means that you will write content for your website based on various rules. That way you will rank higher in search results and you will be found better online. For example, a text must contain a certain number of words, it must consist of different headings and the keyword must be sufficiently prominent.
Keyword
Finding the right keyword is also a challenge. A keyword is the term that people type into search engines when they are looking for your service or product. For example, for a bicycle shop in Tilburg, this will probably be "bicycle shop Tilburg". To find out which words these are, you need to do some keyword research. This takes a lot of time, but can be very valuable for your website.
Link building
Another way to make more people aware of your website is through link building. Link building is about making sure that as many other websites as possible link to your website. Google sees these links as recommendations for your website and will therefore see your website as more important. Because of this, you will end up higher in the search results and therefore easier to find.
SEA
Besides SEO, SEA is also a way to get higher in Google. SEA stands for Search Engine Advertising. In this case, you pay to be found better in the search results. SEA is a more convenient and faster way than SEO, but it does cost more money. With SEA, you can bid on certain keywords and the highest bid is placed at the top. These amounts can therefore be quite high. SEA is a good short-term solution, while investing in SEO is more profitable in the long term.
Drawing up a strategy
All these methods are designed to make the top of your funnel as wide as possible, so that more people are more likely to reach the end of the funnel. In order to do this properly, it is important that you have a good strategy. Without a good strategy, it becomes difficult to make choices. Because of the enormous amount of options, it quickly becomes confusing.
A good strategy is well thought out, clear and controlled. You don't want to do too much at once. It is best to spread it all out and build up slowly.