Breaking Down the 5 Sections of a Successful Digital Marketing Funnel. Part 1 of 5.

Understanding the client journey through the five sections of a successful marketing funnel can provide great insight in creating relevant content tailored for step of their decision making process. In part one, we will discuss the Awareness section. Tune in.

Breaking Down the 5 Sections of a Successful Digital Marketing Funnel (Part 1 of 5)

 

Hello, good afternoon I’m Michael Winn, Chief Digital Officer of Digital Opps, a division of RB Oppenheim Associates. Thanks for joining me today on the virtual lunch and learn tips where we talk about digital marketing to grow your business. Today is going to be part one of a five part series where we’re going to discuss breaking down the five sections of a successful digital marketing funnel. 

 

Now in some circles, I feel like sales funnels have a negative stereotype because it removes the humanity and the human part of the consumer journey. But I do think it’s good to have a basic understanding, where we’re starting off at a broader point and then coming to a more singular decisive action point. But I want to talk about, I feel like many times when you hear the word funnel many times it’s really broken into just three basic components. Typically that first area is awareness where it’s a very broad, very general idea about what the consumer is trying to learn about in a general sense. About the product or service that they’re about to make a purchase or are thinking of it. Then the second one which is most commonly known as consideration, where they’re doing fact-finding and really trying to make a decision on what’s going. Maybe they do some comparisons of vendor versus vendor or product versus product. Then the third part that typically the very point there is the conversion or action point. But I feel like there’s two pieces of a successful marketing funnel that are often left off when it comes to thinking about a more full circle, 360 perspective of your consumers journey. And the next step after conversion, I think let’s talk about it to some degree and that’s loyalty when a client, a prospect becomes a client and they have an experience with you and your team and your product and your service and they demonstrate loyalty. That’s a very important component of that journey. Then the fifth component which many businesses overlook is advocacy.

 

So what we’re going to do in this series, we’re going to go through and today we’re gonna spend a lot of time talking about and breaking down the awareness section of that customer journey for your digital marketing funnel. So let’s dive right into that. There’s five things that I want to kind of talk about and I think it’s important for business owners and marketers or division managers, whatever your title is if you are responsible for growing your business and increasing new business opportunity, the awareness section of the digital marketing funnel is really important. I think one of the very first things you need to have is empathy. 

 

Digital empathy for your potential clients, your prospects who are coming to you. What I mean by that is, you literally need to understand what their pain point is, what is important to them, what has brought them to come out and begin this search to find a solution for the problem that they have. So by first of all using the word empathy I think that starts you off on the right foot because then you can really try to get inside the mind of that prospect in why they’re beginning this search to begin with. It reminds me of, I’m watching that show Homeland, I’ve talked about it before. And how the CIA is trying movements of terrorist and secret cells and they’re trying to understand what’s the motivating factor. But for you and your business really understanding and making those observations in and empathizing with what their pain point is, it is so important. 

 

So once we have the right frame of mind, the right digital sort of glasses to put on, then we can start to make some observations. Our observations can really be broken down into three things. So what we want to do is try to replicate or almost reverse-engineer. Let’s start with the search, so let’s go to Google and type in what we think the client would type in, a general term if they did not know the name of your company but they are looking for the product type or service area that your company provides. So you want to retrace that search and then look at those, don’t just start clicking right away, but look at the search results. Look at what are the ads on the top, what is the title of the ad, what is the description of the ad, what’s in the map pack. And then in the organic listings, what’s there, what are the titles, what are the the descriptions of those and make notes about what that might mean to a person. Because you put on your empathy hat and you understand that the reason why they’re coming there. For instance, it’s springtime, I’m a pool owner and my pool was as green as it could be just nine or about probably forty days ago and so I was doing all kind of searches on how to get my clean get my pool back in order, pool cleaning tips and things of that nature. So understand what’s important and why they’ve begun the search and then figure out what type of search phrases, again not business names but phrases they would put in. 

 

Then from that go to social media, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and do searches there and identify hashtags or tags that would come up that would be relevant to again that search result. So using hashtags, you can then go into comments on various posts, again whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, or YouTube, whatever the platform is. When you’ve identified that topic look for the comment section because a lot of times what will happen is people who are in that first section of the digital marketing funnel and they’re in that awareness stage, they’re going to be asking questions, they’re trying to educate themselves because they want to make a good decision. So they’re looking for clarity, they’re trying to ask questions and so looking at those comments and looking for that can provide you insight into what type of content you should create in order to meet the expectation of that awareness stage. If you deployed digital empathy and if you made observations for search as well as in social and look through the comments and drilling through the hashtags then go ahead and take on the next step. 

 

Go ahead and fill out a request form and see what happens next. Now again this is no different than secret shopping that’s been done for years. When people were trying to understand their competitors but in this case we’re not trying to understand the competitor, we’re really trying to understand the experience of the prospect that’s in the awareness stage. So once you fill out that form, you want to find out what happens next because that is going to be what really segues into stage two which we’re going to talk about in the next episode, which will actually air Monday and that’s going to be the consideration stage of that digital marketing funnel so we’ll pick up on that. 

Just remember tomorrow is Friday and I will resume the episodes where we talk about the book, Traction, as I’m joined by Katie Lilly from LillyField Accounting Solutions. My name is Michael Winn, I am the Chief Digital Officer of Digital Opps, a division of RB Oppenheim Associates. Thanks for joining me and we’ll catch you tomorrow!