Marketing funnel stages outline the steps taken by customers as they progress through marketing funnels. It gives marketing, sales, and customer service teams a complete picture of the customer’s journey and highlights areas for improvement.
An ideal digital marketing funnel is ever-changing in the new information age we live in.
The abundant access to the information out there (read the internet) empowers customers to do their research and make an informed decision about products, which means that you need a funnel that shifts and adapts with them.
The traditional marketing funnel has evolved. Long gone the days where you’d create awareness, then have consumers consider a purchase, and finally, they’d convert.
In this article, I will share an approach to how you can map out your marketing funnel stages to widen the scope of the entire customer journey and align it with your digital marketing strategy.
The Traditional Marketing Funnel
Most of us are aware of marketing funnels. It moves customers to your product or service in a simple, streamlined manner.
It’s the path your customer takes to purchase from you. The process that helps you convert a stranger into your paying customer.
From when someone learns about your business at the beginning to the purchasing stage, funnel maps out a route to conversion.
The basics of the marketing funnel have stayed the same since the 1900s. In 1890, Elias St. Elmo Lewis, an American advertising advocate, developed a model that mapped a customer journey. This model is often referred to as the AIDA model.
- Awareness – the customer is aware of the existence of a product or service.
- Interest – the customer is actively expressing an interest in a group of products or services.
- Desire – The customer begins to evaluate a particular brand
- Action – Customer taking the next step and decides to purchase
Loyalty and advocacy were recently added to the marketing funnels to improve the overall marketing strategy.
But through these traditional marketing funnel stages, the view of the customer journey can be a bit narrow, incomplete, and lacks granularity.
Customer Journeys Are Not Linear
In the traditional model, the customer typically enters at the top of the page called awareness and moves through sequentially until they reach purchase.
In most of the funnels, the funnel stages will be slightly different, but the linear view of the customer journey is pretty consistent. But the customer journeys are not linear.
Marketers have the power to influence the customer journey but not to dictate or control it.
Customer journeys are now self-directed. Customers not only enter all different stages, but they often skip over entire steps, move back and forth without any exact order, or stay at one stage indefinitely.
Customer journeys can vary significantly from customer to customer, and they can enter the journey at any given stage. We should acknowledge this fact and focus on helping customers getting what they’re looking for at any stage and try to bridge them towards the next stage in their journey.
The Influencer Culture
External influential forces have a significant impact on customer journeys and purchase decisions. Not only social media influencers, influences such as peers and colleagues also have a pretty substantial impact.
Social media and the rise of influencer culture make it easier for customers to consult peers, colleagues, and other social media ‘influencers’ for input on their purchase decisions.
This influencer culture allows the customer to skip the early stages altogether and move to an advanced purchase ready stage.
The traditional marketing funnel models often overlook these external influences.
Today, social media and influencers have become the go-to place for brands to market their products and services.
When mapping your marketing funnel stages, it’s a good idea to keep the influencer culture in mind.
How Much Does Your Current Marketing Funnel Cost To You?
The term ‘buyer’s journey’ itself represents the narrow mindset that focuses on the purchase, not what happens after. Most of the marketing funnel stages lack a focus beyond the point of sale.
The success rate of selling to a customer you already have is 60 – 70%, compared to 5 -20% to a new customer. It implies that having existing loyal customers is the most critical asset to a company’s success (well, next to its excellent employees).
Just like the pre-purchase, the customer goes through a series of stages after the purchase, and we must address it and help them become advocates of the business.
If you’re still working with the traditional models, your post-purchase funnel stages will be minimal to non-existent.
But in a world where acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing customer, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity when you’re just chasing down new leads rather than focus on your current customers.
U.S. companies lose $136.8 billion per year due to avoidable consumer switching.
How much does your current marketing funnel cost you just because you’re not focusing on your existing customers?
Mapping Your Marketing Funnel Stages
Shedding the weaknesses of the traditional marketing funnel and adapting to modern trends, Gary from Customer Journey Marketer has modeled the next evolution of digital marketing funnel stages.
The marketing funnel stages consist of 10 stages, with six pre-purchase and four post-purchase stages ranging from engagement to advocacy.
These ten stages envision a more complete spectrum of the customer life cycle, which spans from the very first time a customer encounters a brand to all the way through brand advocacy and every step in between.
1. Engagement – Brand Awareness
The engagement stage is about casting a wider net, but not too wide, and delivering value to the customers. This stage is not directly related to the problem, solution, or product.
Focus on attracting a qualified audience.
The objective is for customers to find the brand, have a positive interaction with the brand, and be open to engaging with the brand more in the future.
2. Education – Problem Identification
At this stage, you should be focusing on pain points, challenges, and opportunities to improve the results. You can also introduce the solution at higher levels in this stage.
The objective is for customers to realize that they have a problem for which they need to find a solution.
3. Research – Investigating Solutions
The research stage is where customers are looking for the solutions available out there. They’re researching the factors they need to consider to make a decision and checking out the alternatives to your brand.
At this stage, focus more on the solution rather than the product. Communicate the key benefits, capabilities, and differentiators without making the product a central focus.
The objective is to reaffirm the value and need for the solution to the customer. Make the customer understand why they need the solution more than they realize.
4. Evaluation – Assessing Satisfaction of Needs
In the evaluation stage, customers will be thinking about how you are going to meet their specific needs and requirements. Focus on your product or services from this stage. Talk about value propositions, technical specifications, use cases, features, and capabilities.
Your product page on the website and the free trial you are offering will come under this stage.
Because of the research they have done so far; the customer will have somewhat of an internal checklist in their minds for the essential items they’re looking for in a solution at this stage.
The objective is to make sure they are all easily checked off.
5. Justification – Justify and Quantify Value
This is the stage where you will get all the classic objections because the customer hasn’t been able to quantify the value.
The prospective customer may even be sold at this stage, but in many cases, unless their boss or other internal influencers are on board as well, the deal is not going to close. That’s why internal buy-in is crucial at this stage.
Focus on the ROI, differentiators, social proof, and brand strength on this stage.
The objective is to justify and quantify the value of your product or service and make sure everyone is on board with the decision with an internal buy-in.
6. Purchase – Transaction, and Transition
As we move near to the point of purchase, there always will be some new questions, concerns, and objections from the customers.
The overhead cost of change and the fear of the perceived amount of time, energy, and resources they need to put in may end up a deal-breaker.
This stage is often underestimated.
The objective is to make customers feel confident in how you will be able to ensure a smooth transition.
7. Adoption – Onboarding and Implementation
Make sure that new customers are able to get up and running as soon as possible and start realizing the value. This is where you deliver on the promises you made on the purchase stage.
Do your best to make the adoption process quick and easy for the customers. A rocky start can cause customers to second-guessing their decisions and leads to churn.
Focus on the kick-off meetings, tutorials, how-to guides, training materials, success checklists, and product documentation on this stage.
8. Retention – Satisfaction and Success
At this stage, you need to make sure that the customers are successful and achieving their goals with your product. They should be communicating that success internally and feeling the love from your brand all the time.
Authenticity is the key here. The customers should see that you genuinely care and help them be successful.
Focus on the educational contents, best practices, product updates, tips, and customer community programs here.
The more value you deliver and show love to your customer, the more you are setting yourself up for customers to return the love in the expansion and advocacy stages.
9. Expansion – Up-sell and Cross-sell
If you have been successful at every stage till now, you’ve earned customers’ trust, and at this stage, they are ready for an up-selling or cross-selling conversation.
You have been successful at every stage till now. When your customer has a problem, they will come to you first to see if you have a solution before looking for other businesses.
Focus on add-ons, upgrades, additional users, other products, and services.
The objective is to make it easier for customers to find a way to expand their business with you. Always be prepared to answer their questions and communicate the value they would get from doing so.
10. Advocacy – Loyalty and Evangelism
Advocacy is the ultimate destination of the customer journey.
A brand advocate is a customer who talks favorably about the brand or product, passes on positive word of mouth messages about the brand to other people. They are the people most likely to give you more of their business and get you referral business with their contacts.
Their testimonials, endorsement, and willingness to spread the word about your business can influence countless others.
Special treatments are often a good idea at this stage – exclusive advocacy group memberships, communities for elite customers, special invites, gifts, and keeping close personal relationships.
The objective is to make sure the customer remains happy, keep them educated about the company’s direction and vision, and finding opportunities to leverage the customer’s willingness to help.
What’s next?
So you have the marketing funnel stages for the entire customer journey, what’s next?
By adopting this model, you may start to see some value and gaps in your funnel stages. Keep an eye out and prioritize them. You will get a better understanding of some stages and tweak your KPIs at different stages of the customer journey.
Map and align the digital marketing areas like – metrics and goals, content strategy and distribution, paid advertising, lead nurturing, lead scoring and operations, product marketing, sales enablement, and web strategy with the customer journey.
Finally, like everything else in digital marketing, improve this model with constant iteration with the feedback, ideas, and comments from both your customers and the team.
The Marketing Funnel Stages Mapping
Download the marketing funnel strategy checklist, resource list, and KPI metrics for your each funnel stages for better marketing strategy.