How to Create Marketing Funnels
For newbies and wannabe digital marketers
As my apprenticeship goes ahead, I’m here to share more with you.
Let me start out by saying that funnels are an artsy kind of thing, they require creativity and a sense of style.
This article is the follow-up to another article I wrote about funnels and here I’m going to try and explain how to actually create a marketing funnel.
How do I create a marketing funnel?
In my previous article, I already mentioned that the usual entry point to a marketing funnel is a Facebook Ad.
While there are many different possible entry points, in this article I will be only talking about marketing funnels for medium businesses, which don’t usually rely only on organic traffic.
When choosing what type of funnel to use, we should keep in mind that marketing funnels have a tree kind of structure.
They can be:
- Webpage funnels
- Facebook Ad funnels
And again, since the structures of a brand’s marketing funnels can change according to the type of product sold, to the price, and to the budget of the brand, funnels can be:
- Short funnels: An example structure for a short funnel could have a Facebook Ad as an entrance point and could lead directly to a landing page on which to make a sales offer or to collect email addresses.
- Long funnels: An example structure for a long funnel could have a Facebook Ad as an entry point, followed by a webpage on which to collect email addresses in exchange for a free piece of information. After this, we could place a thankyou page followed by a series of emails (this specific point is called email marketing). Following this, a long funnel would typically have a sales offer.
The choice of the funnel’s length is determined by:
- The price of the product (the cheaper the product is, the shorter the funnel needs to be)
- How tangible the product is ( the more tangible the product is, the shorter the funnel needs to be)
- Budget is also a key factor as, clearly, big companies can afford incredibly intricate funnels and, while intricacy tends to lead to chaos, obviously the budget factor influences the type and quality of funnels.
What do I need to know in order to make educated guesses when thinking up a marketing funnel?
The reason why longer funnels are used to bring clients to purchase more expensive products is that it’s necessary to build trust before someone considers parting with a big sum of money for an intangible good.
Imagine seeing an Ad for an online MBA on the internet, asking you to “Subscribe Now” and pay 3700$. Would you do it? For most of you, the answer will be “no”.
Things are, of course, different when the product in question is software. Softwares allow demos and, if it’s possible to demonstrate the functionality of your product, this helps to make it a little less “intangible”.
The funnel for this type of product could include an Ad to a demo registration page, a free demo webinar, a thankyou page and an invitation to a Facebook group, along with a series of emails and some retargeting, that could end in a sales call.
Finally you should keep in mind that
As my mentor says, the complication wirth digital marketing is that everything moves, including the benchmarks. While everything in digital marketing is measured comparing it to the most up tp date benchmarks, these also change and good digital marketers are constantly on the lookout to see if their strategies are performing well or underperforming.
Marketing and marketers make the strategies but they also kill them by overusing them. It’s a lot like fashion: you buy some new clothes to be part of the fashionable group. After a while the trend becomes outdated and nobody wants to wear those clothes anymore. Sooner or later, after a few years, you’ll be able to reuse those clothes because they will be back in fashion.
Mareketing strategies go in and out of fashion but it’s vitsal to not overuse them or you will lose your whole client base.
