The term marketing funnel is misleading. The word funnel conjures up the image of a simple device used to move a messy substance into a container.

A marketing funnel is much more chaotic than that, it’s actually more like that picture ^up there^. People enter the Underground station and face a plethora of choices on how to get to their destination. Will they take the escalators? The staircase on the right, or maybe the one on the left. Perhaps they will stop to grab a bite to eat, or pull some cash out of the ATM.

Your marketing funnel is the device used to get people to proceed down your staircase. To keep them from getting distracted. To help them find their path, and to help them find your product or service along the way.

You see that guy in the gray suit, standing on the platform right above the automated ticket machines? That is your prospect. He has started down your staircase, but now he’s a little lost. How do you get him to go right – right down the funnel to being a customer and a raving fan?

That is what this article is will cover. So grab a cup a coffee and dig in. This is kind of a long one…

What is a marketing funnel, and how do I get one?

The term “marketing funnel” is thrown around a lot, and it has different meanings to different people. There can be marketing funnels for your entire business, marketing funnels for each of your product lines, or marketing funnels for each of your individual products or services. I’m sure there are even more types of funnels, but you get the idea.

In this article, I will describe a general marketing funnel for a typical small business. And I will relate it to online content marketing. As you are here, reading about content marketing, I’ll assume this approach is the most applicable to your current situation.

Let’s think of our funnel as having four sections. The fat part up at the top is what we will call Discovery. Below Discovery, in a slightly narrower part of the funnel we have Know. As your customer passes through Know they move into the third section of the funnel, let’s call this area Like. If you can get your customer to move past the Like section of your marketing funnel, they will enter the Trust phase. Once you have successfully migrated your customer through these four phases, they will be at a point where they are happy to buy whatever you are selling (within reason).

Next, we will tackle each of the sections of our funnel individually, learning what keeps our customer moving down the funnel and what might cause them to leak out.

Discovery

The fat end of your marketing funnel is what I like to call Discovery. This is where all those people out on the internet find you, whether through a Google search or on a social media platform or even through virtual word-of-mouth.

So what leads to discovery? Great content. SEO focused content. Funny and interesting content. Creative content. This content gets indexed by Google, shared by your fans and friends, and leads to browsers on your website. So the trick is to figure out who your business should target and what types of keywords they are typing into the search engines.

This is not the time to worry about analyzing these keywords, or grading them, or making value judgments. Why? Even if these important “first impression” keywords are too competitive to rank in Google, they still need coverage on your website. You will need to create the content anyway. And guess what, if you are creating high quality original content, you will rank for important keywords that you would never have thought of, no matter how much research you do. The robots (algorithms) over at Google are pretty smart, they know good quality content when they see it. And millions of people come up with brand new search queries every single day.

As you fill out the content on your platform, you will get to a point where you need to come up with fresh ideas. This is where keyword research and analysis comes into play. But we are a ways off from that point. You are just getting started. Start writing about the things your customers are searching for and you will be well on your way to Discovery.

Know

So what do you do once traffic arrives at your site? How do you move your potential customers down the funnel from the Discovery phase to the Knowing phase?

To make this a reality, you need one small commitment from your visitor. You need an email address. An action that costs them nothing can be of immeasurable value to you.

Before I go on, I need to make something clear. Just because giving you an email address doesn’t cost your prospect any money doesn’t mean that you should abuse it. It is a lot of work getting someone onto your email list. The last thing you want to do is burn them by being aggressive or spammy.

Stepping off my soapbox now … Once you have a prospect on your list, you can ensure consistency of communication. You can let them know when you post a new video or write a new white paper. You can ask them about their biggest problem and help them solve it. In short, this consistency will help them get to know you.

So, how do you get people onto your mailing list? Well, that is the topic for another post, or more likely a full book. But I will touch on a couple of main points. First, you need some technical stuff like an email service and a landing page. Second, you will need a lead magnet. A lead magnet is a digital product that your prospective customer will gladly accept in exchange for her email address.

So you put up a landing page that has two functions – it describes your lead magnet, and it has a simple form to collect the prospect’s email address. That’s it. There is nothing else on the page, nowhere else to go. Once the prospect fills out the form, her email address goes into your database, you send her the lead magnet, and you can start building a relationship.

Use the email address to help your prospects get to know you. Send them emails when you publish great posts on your website. Point them to great resources from other websites. Make them look forward to receiving your emails.

Like

Ok, so you have a group of prospects on your email list. How do you get these strangers on the internet to Like you? It’s no different from what you would do out in the real world.

Step 1 – Be nice. Send them valuable information. Don’t waste their time.

Step 2 – Introduce yourself. Let them know about you on a more personal level. People don’t “Like” businesses, they like the people who work at businesses. Let your prospects know you are, in fact, a real person.

Step 3 – Ask about them. Ask them to write you back and let you know how you can help. What are their struggles related to your service? What product or service do they really need? How have products like yours failed them in the past? Start a conversation and see where it leads.

So, how do you go about implementing these three steps into your business? With a tool called an autoresponder sequence. Don’t let the long complicated name throw you. An autoresponder sequence is simply a series of emails that you set up in advance and send out to your prospects in a pre-determined sequence. The technical aspects of this are easily handled through your email service. The hard work comes when you set out to write your emails.

You should try to have at least a few emails in your autoresponder series, and you should space them out over the course of a few weeks. The key is to put in the work writing these emails. Make them long enough so the prospect gets a sense of your personality, but not so long that they are time consuming to read. And stick to the themes outlined in the three steps above. You can mix and match within the emails or make each email specific to one of the steps. Do whatever feels the most comfortable to you. This will be obvious in your writing and will help your prospect connect with you.

Trust

After your prospect gets to know you, they can move down the funnel to the trust stage. This is a critical point in your process. It is pretty unlikely that the prospect will ever pull out their credit card if they don’t develop this trust.

So how do you help them develop this trust? It’s just an extension of all the strategies listed above. You will need to continue creating content that speaks to your target audience. Keep in touch consistently with high-quality emails, and never take advantage of the email address that they so generously provided.

This is also the perfect opportunity to introduce a type of content called social proof. Here are just a few great examples of social proof…

• Social Media Likes, Mentions, Shares, and Reviews – these are all great ways to let your prospects know that your small business is an up-standing citizen. The only problem is, your prospects may see none of this social proof if they are not following you on these social media channels. So be sure to ask them to follow you in at least some of your autoresponder emails.
• Customer Testimonials – It would be a great idea to have a page on your website dedicated to customer testimonials. It’s even possible to set up a WordPress plugin to collect the testimonials for you. Once you have your testimonials page setup and your form built, it is just a matter of emailing your customers and asking them to let you know what they think of your product or service. Then direct them back to your testimonials page, and assuming that you are doing your job in terms of customer service, they will write you a quality review.
• Case Studies – Describe how your current customers are making more money, saving time, helping the environment, etc. Case studies are your opportunity to have others toot your horn so you don’t have to. They are like good old-fashioned word-of-mouth advertising, but better because they are highly relevant to your prospects. In reading them, your prospects will be able to envision themselves having the same type of success. They will understand that these other people or business trusted you, and were better off for having done so.

Wrapping it up

So there you have it. A 30,000 foot view of your small business marketing funnel. Of course, only a small percentage of your prospects will work their way all the way from Discovery, through Know and Like, to finally reach Trust; but those who do will be your best customers. They won’t have to be sold, they will be excited to buy. And they will enthusiastically tell their friends about your product or service.

And what about the ones who don’t make it all the way down the funnel? Don’t give up on them. Keep sending them quality content and trying to build that trust. They may just be slow movers.

In a future article we will talk about plugging any leaks that you may have in your funnel, but you need to remember that not every prospect is right for your product or service. A good marketing funnel is just as effective for sorting out bad prospects as it is for turning good prospects into buyers.

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Photo courtesy Anna Dziubinska / Unsplash