In digital marketing, funnels are essential. Mapping out the stages of your customer’s experience makes it easier to improve. A funnel that’s easy and pleasant to use can reduce drop-off rates and increase conversions and sales. Yet the most useful principles of digital marketing also include understanding your audience, staying adaptable and adjusting your approach as necessary. Funnel analysis in marketing, which involves all of the above, helps keep your strategy strong.
Your marketing funnel represents the buyer’s journey, from discovering your product to becoming a loyal customer. Typically, the stages are ‘awareness’, ‘interest’, ‘consideration’, and ‘action’; however, how this looks in practice depends on your business. For example, ‘consideration’ could mean the potential customer is downloading a white paper, watching your YouTube videos or even adding an item to their cart. Your funnel starts where your customer’s journey does, and it can be a complex or straightforward progression.
So what is funnel analysis in marketing, and why is it so important? Anchor Digital lays out the answers for you in this guide to performing a successful digital marketing funnel analysis. A full-service creative marketing agency, Anchor has helped many brands succeed, including by optimising their sales processes, and we can do the same for you.
Why Analyse Your Marketing Funnel
There are several benefits to creating and building a marketing funnel, including improvements in efficiency, user experience, and conversion rate. Yet like most marketing activities, it’s not a ‘set and forget’ procedure. In marketing, funnel analysis helps you identify which tactics are working and which ones aren’t, and what kind of changes would benefit your brand.
Every e-commerce business loses out on potential revenue every day, as web users enter the sales funnel and then drop out somewhere along the way. A funnel analysis helps you identify these weak spots and address them, potentially increasing your revenue without requiring you to spend a single extra dollar on ads.
In digital marketing, a funnel analysis helps you figure out if you’re reaching the right audience and if your message is resonating with them at every stage of the journey. It can lead to stronger relationships with your customers, which goes hand-in-hand with long-term loyalty.
How to Perform a Marketing Funnel Analysis
Before we move on to the process itself, it’s worth pointing out that there are different ways to undertake funnel analysis in marketing:
- Conversion rate analysis: Your conversion rate is the percentage of people who complete a desired action (e.g. making a purchase or booking an appointment) after being exposed to your marketing efforts. For example, if 1000 people visit your product page but only 50 make a purchase, you have a conversion rate of 5%. Calculating these rates for every stage of the funnel and comparing different traffic sources allows you to find the weak spots in your process.
- Drop-off analysis: Using analytics tools, this form of analysis finds the stages in your funnel with the highest exit rates and the forms that your users abandon partway through.
- Cohort analysis: This method involves tracking and comparing different groups of customers to see the differences in when and how they convert. This helps you identify long-term trends about the time of day, week, or year when most of your customers convert.
If you need more details about what funnel analysis marketing is in practice, here’s a step-by-step plan for you to follow:
Create buyer personas
Different types of people will buy your products for different reasons, and they’re likely to have different journeys too. Buyer personas are representations of your ideal customer types, based on data and research, that provide information about their challenges, pain points, and what they can gain from your product or services. When you know what these archetypes are, you can chart a course to reach them.
Map out the funnel’s stages
When you have your buyer personas down, you can plan the user journey for each of them. While they may experience the main stages of the funnel in much the same way, they’re likely to experience different touchpoints in their own unique way and perform particular actions.
Track the right metrics
Funnel analysis in marketing involves tracking relevant marketing metrics for each stage in the funnel, such as paid ad clicks, downloads, case study views, or free trial sign-ups.
Carry out the funnel analysis
There are digital tools you can use to analyse your funnel, or you can engage a marketing agency’s services.
Use other analytics reports
While funnel analysis can identify drop-offs and sluggish spots, it may not be able to identify the causes behind the problems. For this, you may need to conduct more in-depth research and draw on additional forms of data.
Tips for Optimising Your Marketing Funnel
Here are some suggestions for getting the best results out of your digital marketing funnel:
Create the right content for each funnel stage
Content that appears at different phases of your marketing funnel serves different purposes. Top of the funnel (ToFu) content makes people aware of the problems you can solve before they realise they need your services. Middle of funnel (MoFu) content sparks interest in your services or products, while Bottom of Funnel (BoFu) content focuses on selling your products and encouraging conversions.
Balance ToFu, MoFu and BoFu content
While it’s worth working on lower-funnel before upper-funnel content to maximise conversions, focusing too narrowly on this one area will limit your reach. Aim for a productive and complementary balance between the three main types of funnel content.
Know your target audience
It’s important to identify the kind of demographic(s) that are likely to use your products so you can tailor each stage of the buyer’s journey to appeal to them. Audience research benefits your brand and your strategy in a number of ways, and you can carry it out with analytics tools, feedback forms and surveys, among other tools.
Maintain customer loyalty
Don’t forget to retarget customers who have already gone through the purchase process once. You can provide mailing list updates to inform previous customers about the latest products and features, and even offer exclusive content to existing customers.
Turn Clicks into Conversions with Anchor
No matter where your strengths or weak spots currently lie, Anchor Digital can provide marketing funnel strategy services that convert web users into loyal customers. Our funnel strategy keeps up with changing trends in the digital marketing industry, evolving and adapting to new developments. If you still need to build your brand funnel from scratch, we can help you with the essential first steps, including collecting data on your target demographics. If you have an existing funnel that requires optimisation, we can work on strengthening its weak points while you get on with running your business.
Performance is about more than your website’s speed, although that’s certainly a crucial factor. It encompasses nearly every aspect of the user experience, including page loading time, responsiveness, and visual stability. Anchor can boost performance with an integrated approach to marketing services that includes search engine optimisation (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC), and social media advertising.
Strategy, speed, and performance are all essential elements when it comes to designing a sales funnel that potential buyers can smoothly navigate. Using a seamless blend of all three, Anchor can optimise your marketing funnel for success.
To find out more about the Anchor approach to strategy, including funnel analysis, call 1300 971 392, email info@anchordigital.com.au or contact the Anchor team online.
