Marketing Funnels

Guide users through the buyer’s journey and convert leads into paying customers.

Digital Marketing Funnel Services for Professional Organizations

Having a broad understanding of the marketing funnel is an important aspect of being a successful business owner. Customers don’t just wake up one day and decide to purchase your goods or services. Instead, they go through several steps before making the decision to become paying customers. 

The marketing funnel is the general process your customers go through. It’s shaped like a funnel because the earlier stages have a lot more people than the later ones — not everyone who shows interest in your company actually becomes a customer. 

At Black Dog Marketing, we have over 25 years of experience in the marketing industry, and we’ve seen how marketing funnels have changed in that time. We’ll help your business implement effective strategies to target users at every stage of the funnel, guiding them from prospects to leads to customers.

Let's Craft Your Perfect Funnel Today!

A well-crafted marketing funnel can fill your sales pipeline consistently by providing valuable content and information to prospects at all stages of their customer journey.

What Is a Marketing Funnel?

A marketing funnel is the process people go through between when they first learn about your product or service and when they become paying customers. 

As a business owner, you likely know that awareness isn’t enough for people to purchase your services or products. Instead, you need to convince people that they need your offerings and that your business is the best option to meet that need. Marketing funnels (also known as lead conversion funnels or sales funnels) home in on the necessary steps consumers must take to become customers. 

Every customer goes through some version of the marketing funnel to make the decision to buy your products or services. By refining your marketing funnel with the help of our digital marketing experts, you can avoid losing too many consumers along the way. Each stage of the funnel will engage the consumers within that stage and guide them to the next step until they eventually become customers. 

Stages in the Marketing Funnel

When we help your company develop a marketing funnel, we’ll tailor the stages to your specific industry, services, and customer needs. Many marketing funnels include the following stages, so we’ll start with this process and build off of it as needed:

1. Awareness

The customer journey begins when consumers become aware of your business. Awareness can happen through numerous outlets:

  • Search engine results
  • Paid ads
  • Social media posts
  • Recommendations from friends

The more people who are aware of your business, the more people who will eventually transition to customers. But many people who make it to the awareness stage of the funnel have no interest in your company or will need a lot more information to make a purchase. That’s why the other stages in the marketing funnel are just as important. 

2. Interest

When consumers are simply aware of your products or services, they may not have any opinions or feelings that would lead to a purchase. Your marketing funnel also needs to foster interest amongst those consumers.

You can generate interest in your brand through organic and paid advertisements about how your goods or services can meet a specific consumer need.

3. Consideration

The main difference between interest and consideration is that consumers may be interested in your type of products or services, but they should ideally consider your business over competitors. During this stage, potential customers will conduct research to determine whether your business is the right choice for their needs, or whether another company would be a better fit. 

You’ll need effective strategies in place to position your company as the best option. Social media channels, email marketing campaigns, coupons, and search engine optimization all play a valuable role in creating desire. 

4. Conversion

To transition consumers from the desire stage to becoming paying customers, you need to provide an offer that your target audience can’t resist. New customer discounts, free shipping offers, complementary quotes, and package offers can all help seal the deal, leading consumers through the end of your marketing funnel. 

How Can Black Dog Marketing Help?

Understanding marketing funnels may feel overwhelming, but our team at Black Dog Marketing makes the process of optimizing your funnel simple. We’ll conduct the following services to ensure that your marketing funnel generates the most conversions.

1. Examine Your Current Marketing Funnel

We’ll start by looking at data from your website and social media profiles to determine where users are currently becoming lost in the funnel. For example, maybe your social media posts reach thousands of people each month, indicating excellent awareness about your company. But your actual website traffic is much lower, showing that most users didn’t take advantage of your call to action.  Understanding any issues within your marketing funnel can help us tailor your marketing strategy to address these problems. 

2. Understand Your Buyer Persona

An effective marketing funnel targets your ideal customer and provides the information, resources, and offers they need to make a purchase decision. We’ll conduct research into your target audience and develop a buyer persona, which is a semi-fictional description of your perfect customer. This research can help us determine the right marketing activities to effectively convert more potential customers. 

3. Optimize Each Stage in Your Marketing Funnel

Finally, we’ll get to work perfecting all of the above stages in the marketing funnel by combining our most effective marketing strategies, including:
  • Email marketing
  • PPC ads
  • Landing pages
  • Search engine optimization
  • Lead and demand generation
Once we roll out new strategies, we’ll monitor them closely to determine how they are affecting your website traffic, social media followers, interactions, and overall engagement with consumers. Then, we’ll make changes as necessary to further optimize your funnel. 

Leave Marketing Funnels to the Experts

Creating a well-performing marketing funnel takes expertise and thorough research, and as a business owner, you probably don’t have the necessary time to dedicate to this process. Instead, leave your marketing funnel in the hands of our seasoned marketing team. 

Contact Black Dog Marketing today to begin the process of perfecting your marketing funnel.