What Are Funnels? A simple guide

When you start to handle the technical side of marketing, you will soon begin to look at your marketing a bit more strategically. At this point, you will not only think of how you do your marketing but also why you do it. To answer this question, you need to understand funnels.

The funnel is a system that describes how customers move through a series of steps or stages when they make purchasing decisions.

Funnels date back to the late 19th century, and they have always been an essential part of marketing. The revolutionary aspect of funnels in digital marketing is the opportunity to measure how customers move between the stages.

In this blog post, we will introduce how funnels work at a general level.

What Are Funnels In Digital Marketing?

The simplest way to think about funnels is to divide the customer journey into different steps that the customer takes to reach the purchasing decision.

AIDA was the first funnel to get popularised. It describes the customer journey as going through Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. This funnel is still relevant in many cases.

More detailed representations like the pirate metrics that describe the funnel with the acronym AARRR, which stands for Attention, Acquisition, Retention, Referral, and Revenue.

There are many different types of funnels, some of them very low-level and technical. When optimising a single ad campaign, you often look at how many impressions, clicks, page views, and conversions you have.

Although there are many types, the most basic one we can explore is the three-staged top-middle-bottom funnel. The top focuses on raising awareness, the middle utilises campaigns to drive consideration, and the bottom focuses on closing the deal.

How Does A Funnel Work?

The main goal of marketing is to move the customer from the first step to the last step - the purchase. For every action, there are different strategies.

In the beginning, you want to create awareness. At this stage, content that provides information about the problem usually works. Your goal is to get people to engage with your business by watching a video, visiting your website, or reacting to your social media content.

After you have caught their attention, it’s time to make them consider your product or service. At this phase, content that educates potential customers about your offering usually works. Tell them how you solve the problem. Your goal is to turn them into leads by, for example, getting signups and getting them to fill in a form.

The last part of the funnel is about closing the deal. It’s time to produce content about how you are the best. Focus on discussing your solution and how it is different from others. The goal of the last part is to turn leads into customers.

How Do You Build A Funnel?

It would be best to define a conversion that moves people from one step to the next at each stage. There may be some overlap between the steps regarding audiences, but the idea is that each phase has its target audience.

Therefore effective use of data and analytics tools is essential when building a funnel. You can use Google and Facebook data and analytics tools to track customer behaviour.

For example, when you are doing a top-funnel campaign to create awareness, you can use Google Analytics to check the bounce rate of your landing page or measure how many people engage with your post on social media with Facebook Analytics.

Targeting the right audience in your campaigns is essential. For example, in middle-funnel marketing campaigns, you can target people who have engaged with your content on social media or visited some of the critical pages on your website.

How To Get Started?

The first step is to decide what kind of funnel you want to use in the beginning. We recommend you always start with a simple top-middle-bottom system and move into more complex structures when you already have mastered the most basic model.

Start building your funnel by defining goals for different steps and then setting them up on Google Analytics. You could try, for example, to get visitors to fill in a form on your website, or you could try to get people to purchase your product.

You can start to work your way through the funnel from top to bottom. We have created a simple Google Slides template you can use to get started.

At Gaasly, we are happy to help you set up and build your funnel efficiently, moving customers through it.