What is a Marketing Funnel and Why is it Important

This is a short introduction to the marketing funnel and how you can use it to increase your sales in your business.

What the ‘funnel’?

So what is a marketing funnel? The easiest way to express it is: “The sales process from the beginning to the end”. The marketing funnel can be used to express the customer’s journey from not knowing a product, all the way down to conversion.
A marketing funnel is a good tool for you to map where to put your different marketing initiatives into action.

This blog post will be focusing on, where you can use your HTML5 banners in the different phases.

Awareness

The first phase in the funnel is the awareness phase. The awareness phase is when you are letting your future customer know, that you exist. The most important thing, when you start a business, blog, or actually anything else that you want someone to engage with, is that you have to create awareness out amongst the audience. You need to let your audience know who you are and what you are selling. This is essential if you want to succeed as a new business.

When creating awareness, display banners are exceptionally effective. You can increase your reach a lot with a relatively small budget. HTML5 banners will let the audience interact with your banner and hereby be exposed to more of your material, why it is a good idea to consider creating a movable and/or interactive banner. If you haven’t made an HTML5 banner before or even don’t really know what it – don’t worry, we have a guide right here!

Remember that your audience does not know you yet, so keep your communication simple. Do not put too much information or outrageous pictures on your banners at first. Try to catch the audience’s attention with a creative little twist. But remember, this is a turtles game. It will be slow and tough but be consistent and you will succeed.
Here is an example. We try to keep it simple, we do not want anyone to buy anything, we just want our audience to know we exist and what we do. This is a common website banner that you can use on almost any website.

We made it a moveable banner, that will change frame after a second to this one, where the product will be presented and explained.

The reason for this is, that we know a lot of people do not care about HTML banners at all. The ones who do might stay for the second frame. These people want to see what this ad is regarding. We will use this attention to present our product and insert a CTA-button.
This is how we have done it. It does certainly not mean that it is the only way.

Only your imagination sets the limit in the awareness phase!

Interest

The second phase in the marketing funnel is the interest phase. Your audience has seen your HTML banner and knows that you exist and they have shown interest in your kind of product. Sadly it does not mean, that the customer is interested in buying from you. But do not worry, we just need to get the customer pushed further down the funnel. We will give an example of how you can do it with website banners.

At this phase, you need to focus on your brand position. Who are you and what differentiates you from the competitors? You can of cause also you banners here! Your customer might have been on your website browsing but they haven’t bought anything, yet! This is where you need to put up a remarketing system. Expose them for the products, that they almost purchased. This will increase the chance of a sale!

Decision

Now, this is the final phase before your sale – the decision phase. In this phase you need to lure your customer, that is on the edge of buying your products. The hard part is over. The customer knows who you are and they have evaluated your product and are considering to buy something from you.
This can be done by offering exclusive discounts, promotion codes, free delivery, etc.
If you have your remarketing account set up for this, you can create online banners with specific information about these offers.
You can also try to set up a reward system on your website or sending out newsletters. There are in other words plenty of ways to push your customers down into the action phase. The word here is again to be fast and react to your customers’ needs. If the customer is ready to buy, you’ll have to catch them before it’s too late.

Action

Congratulations, your initiatives in marketing funnel have worked to the fullest and you have accomplished a new customer. Now the mission is to create loyalty among your customers so that they skip the upper funnel and go directly to the decision/action phase.

This can also be done with various initiatives with HTML5 banners. Use your banners to get people to sign up for newsletters or offer a promotion code. Maybe you want to promote a loyalty program, where your customers can earn points when they purchase your products. The choice is yours!

Do you want to start creating successful and engaging ads? Then sign up for a free trial with Zuuvi and begin now!