How to Build Your First Digital Marketing Funnel

An important aspect of any company operation is its marketing efforts. Companies market themselves in order to build brand awareness and turn leads into customers. But in most cases, these leads may not become customers right away, and they may need more time to get to know your brand and what you have to offer.

This is where a digital marketing funnel will be essential to your company. A marketing funnel is a great way to improve your sales as it will allow you to build some sort of relationship with your customers.

A marketing funnel is a series of online pages and actions that bring new users into your site so that you can capture their information and build a relationship with them for future sales.

A marketing funnel should not be confused with a sales funnel. Even though the structures of both tools are the same, the end results of each are what makes them fundamentally different. A marketing funnel is used to generate leads for future sales and a sales funnel is used as a buy now strategy.

Why Do Marketing Funnels Work?

The first interaction with a potential customer does not always result in an immediate sale. By getting these potential customers into your marketing funnel you are able to try again.

You have the opportunity to gather information about your potential customer and deliver targeted content which will increase the chances of a sale in the future.

Studies have shown that a large percentage, 82% to be exact, of customers, have a positive outlook towards a brand after reading their customized content. Customers like to know that companies take time to customize their content to reflect their needs.

This is why marketing funnels are so successful. This tool can be used by all companies no matter how big or small and no matter where they are in their company development. Now that you know why they work, let's look at how you can build one for your company.

How to Build a Digital Marketing Funnel

Step 1: Create an enticing lead magnet.

In order to attract potential leads into your marketing funnel, you need to give away something for free in order to get their contact information. So, in essence, you give them something and they give you something:their name and email address.

This strategy is called the freemium company model. But this strategy will only be effective if the 

lead magnet you offer provides high value for your leads and can potentially solve a problem for them.

Secondly, your lead magnet should take little time to go through. The truth is that many people just don't have the time to go through long documents or videos anymore. So they need a value that does not take too much of their time. 

Step 2: Build a landing page.

A landing page is a standalone web page created specifically for a digital marketing campaign. We spoke in-depth on a previous blog post on what is a landing page and how to build one. You can visit this in-depth blog post for more details on landing pages here.

Your landing page will contain the form you wish your leads to fill out in order to get their free value. This page should also highlight the value they will be getting when they provide their contact information.

And don't worry thinking this is not enough. The truth is that your landing page should be very basic. Especially since your aim is not to sell them anything now but only to capture their contact information.

Now that you know what should be on your landing page you need to decide where to host your landing page. There are many services out there that host landing pages or marketing funnels; however, hosting your landing page on your website is best practice. This will allow you to control what happens to your landing page. Another great benefit is that hosting your landing page on your website will help generate traffic for your website.

Step 3: Build a thank you page.

This page is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a page just to say thank you to your leads for providing their information. It shows your leads how much you value their information and that you will use it wisely.

On your thank you page you should have a note telling your lead that their free item has been sent to their email. Now you may be wondering why the lead's email when you could just provide the free item right there on that thank you page.

Well, I promise you there is a method to the madness. Emails sent from your company will probably end up in the promotion or the social folder of their email and not the main inbox. If your leads are not looking for emails there, your company's emails can easily be mistaken for junk and your leads may never see them.

 

“Growth is never by mere chance; it is the result of forces

working together.” - James Cash Penney

You want your email to end up in the main folder, and the only way that is going to happen is if your lead opens that email and downloads your free item. By doing this, they will whitelist your email address. This will let their email provider know that they in fact want emails from your company. So going forward your emails will go directly to their primary inbox.

That is why we send the free item to their email and not provide it directly on their thank you page. But that's not to say that the thank you page cannot be utilized for additional functions. What many companies fail to realize is the value of this page. In addition to saying thank you, your company can have a video, or document sharing more about your company. You may even add a call to action which can direct your leads to a purchase.

Your company needs a digital marketing funnel. Today.

Building a digital marketing funnel for your company is an excellent way to grow and scale your company. Marketing funnels are not hard to create, and they are ideal for all company sizes no matter where they are in their development stages.

What is important in order to gain any sort of benefit from this tool is that your marketing funnel has the right components such as a free value offer, a landing page, and a thank you page. And always remember that it's the grassroots marketing efforts such as this that will allow you to skyrocket your sales.