Digital marketing can seem like a bit of a minefield, and one of the most common questions we hear from clients is where to begin.
An ideal digital marketing strategy should form a funnel, with each element taking customers on a journey. If you’d like to get an idea of a basic marketing funnel, you’re in the right place, so read on to find out more.
The starting line: your website
The foundation of any digital marketing funnel or campaign is a quality website.
As this is going to be the base of your marketing, you need to ensure your unique selling points (USPs) are clear to potential customers, with your products or services clearly listed.
There should also be social proof in the form of testimonials wherever possible to bolster your trustworthiness, and clear call to actions on each page – what do you want them to do after reading this page? Should they fill in an enquiry form, make a purchase, download a file? This needs to be made clear.
As your marketing campaigns will most likely be sending people through to your website, it needs to be appealing, exude trust, be easy to navigate and guide potential customers to the ultimate goal of converting visitors into paying customers.
Generate awareness through SEO
Once you’ve got a website, the next step is driving visitors to it. This is where SEO (search engine optimisation) comes in.
Through a combination of technical SEO work and publishing regular, quality content to the site in the form of blogs, feature articles and landing pages, your site’s authority will be bolstered in Google, helping it to be seen by more people in search results. What’s more, each piece of content becomes a potential new entry point for visitors to your site, helping to increase your site’s traffic and generate leads.
SEO is an organic marketing strategy tool, and while it is a long-term strategy, it has a better yield over time than paid marketing – you can read more about this here*. As it is a long-term strategy, you’re best kickstarting it at soon as you can, and with it being organic, it makes SEO the perfect starting point in your marketing funnel, building up your site traffic and awareness of your brand. This traffic can result in direct conversions, and can also be harnessed later in your funnel through other marketing forms.
Harness your site traffic through retargeting
Retargeting is an excellent marketing strategy that can yield impressive results. It allows you to target audiences based on actions they’ve taken on your website – be that viewing a page, filling in a form, adding a product to their basket – or on actions they haven’t taken. One of the key benefits of this strategy is that your audience is already aware of who you are and what you do – they just need a little nudge to get them over the line. This makes it a great next step in the funnel from SEO, as the traffic a site receives can be re-harnessed.
Build desire through paid ads and lead magnets
Paid ads and lead magnets can go hand in hand, and are another great strategy for bringing through people to your site who are interested in, and aware of, your business.
Your lead magnets should be educational and enticing – people should want to read them, so much so that they’ll exchange their contact details to receive a copy. These are an ideal subject for paid ads, sending people through to your website to download or receive the lead magnet.
Once you’ve got their details, you can then harness those leads through a retargeting campaign, following them up directly, or by nurturing the relationship through email marketing.
Warm up your leads and relationships through email marketing
As your marketing funnel builds, so too will your email list – everyone who downloads a lead magnet, signs up to your newsletter, or makes an enquiry and indicates they’re happy to receive marketing emails should go into your list. Once people are in, it’s important to keep these people ‘warm’ and aware of who you are, what you do and how you can help them, which is where email marketing comes in.
By sending out regular emails that provide value – whether that’s inspiring them, entertaining them or educating them – you’ll be able to nurture the relationship with your email list. This should be a consistent, ongoing process, because if you stop emailing, your list will forget about you, and when you start emailing again, they may well unsubscribe as they feel you are now irrelevant. By keeping your list warm, you’ll help to build a better relationship with existing customers, while helping to convert potential ones.
This will then make it easier to send out promotional emails that push people over the line.
Combine all of the steps together, and you have a marketing funnel!
It’s important to note that this is just one example of a marketing funnel. While the website should be the starting point for anyone looking to grow their business online, the next steps in the funnel can vary – there’s no one ‘correct’ answer, as every business has different needs, budgets and goals.
In a perfect world, a business would implement all aspects of the funnel running alongside each other, to fully make the most of its online presence. However, simply by ensuring you use a combination of the funnel steps, you’ll guide potential customers on a journey from discovering your brand, to becoming interested in what you do, to wanting to work with or purchase from you, and then, ultimately, to becoming a customer.
Here at Engage Web, we can help businesses to build up their marketing funnels through a range of digital marketing strategies. If you’d like to learn more, please reach out to us today.
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