What is the Digital Marketing Sales Funnel?

Learning the art of the digital marketing sales funnel is a must for anyone putting together a digital marketing campaign or completing a digital marketing course.  Google Analytics goes hand in hand with it as the platform monitors the movement down the funnel to maximise your return on investment.

The aim of any digital marketing strategy is to ultimately turn traffic into sales. This is where the digital marketing sales funnel comes into play.

What does it take to build an effective digital marketing sales funnel?

To build an effective digital marketing sales funnel you need to develop brand awareness. Sales cannot be achieved unless consumers know about your brand.

There are five main components of building a digital marketing sales funnel. These are:

1. SEO – (search engine optimisation) to ensure your brand gets found in an organic search.
2. Content marketing – creating content that is worthy of sharing is what you need to be aspiring to.
3. Building a community – an audience or community that shares your content is the ultimate sales tool.
4. Banners – digital brand awareness is created through the optimal digital positioning of your brand’s banners.
5. PPC – (pay per click) is a paid digital advertising model used to direct traffic to a website

Getting started with your digital marketing sales funnel

Awareness

There are many online options available to create awareness of your brand, such as AdWords, YouTube marketing, influencer marketing, e-mails and webinars.

Consideration

Once leads are generated, and they become interested in your brand, they will want to know how this relates to them.  Consideration takes place through content like bogs, whitepapers, landing pages and ads.

Evaluation

In this part of the digital marketing sales funnel the prospective client decides to use your brand.

Conclusion

The traditional sales funnel is still applicable to the digital marketing sales funnel. Customer retention is important to keep in mind at this stage as it is five times more expensive to replace a customer who leaves your digital marketing sales funnel than it is to keep one.

Optimising conversions

In this age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the traditional marketing and sales funnel still very much applies to attracting leads and converting them into customers.  This is now a multi-faceted process with many engagement points and possibilities.

A few conversion optimisation techniques are:

• Limit your scope – Your website landing pages must be designed to most efficiently answer search queries.
• Create content that converts – Craft your content with clarity and conversion in mind.
• Rely on visuals – Website visitors do not want to be met with a wall of text. Incorporating images can dramatically improve your conversion and decrease your bounce rates.
• Flash forward – Do not use heavy amounts of Flash on your website. This is because Flash hampers mobile and tablet users from accessing your full site.
• Perform regular testing – Set a benchmark to improve your conversion rates. Identify your top pages through Google Analytics, identify the top areas of your site where visitors usually exit and then improve content on that page regularly.

The bottom line is that being a diligent guru in online marketing guarantees the success of your digital marketing sales funnel design.

The online sales funnel is a straight forward process that you can adopt to successfully and consistently reach new customers online.  Each step has a different objective and is designed to not always be about the ‘sale’.

Remember that your digital marketing does not end with your customer at the point of sale. You need your existing customers to return and positively spread the word about your brand and business.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

It is increasingly important for all digital marketers to cater for all stages of the digital marketing sales funnel as this will lend you a competitive advantage to build an efficient digital marketing strategy. To learn how to become an effective digital marketer, sign up for the Digital School of Marketing’s Digital Marketing Course today!