What is a Marketing Funnel?

What the heck is a marketing funnel anyway?
It’s a marketing and advertising model that describes a choreography or scripting of a best-case scenario customer experience to find, qualify and convert your best prospects from leads into sales. It’s a cohesive marketing model that incorporates and addresses the real and actual customer buying cycle.  Here is an excellent example of a comprehensive integrated sales and marketing funnel.

What does it include?
A typical funnel will incorporate your social presence, sales activities, events, offline and online advertising, partnership and sponsorship marketing and tap all of those reach strategies and tactics into a seamless ‘question and answer’ or ‘problem and solution’ two way communication pathway. In turn, the customer experience created drives the customers further and further into engagement with the brand and or its products or services. A great digital marketing funnel includes powerfully engaging webpages, dynamic messaging, variable messaging, and rich and engaging content that includes amazing graphics, video and imagery that connects that prospect emotionally and fiscally to the brand, product or service. And all of this must be created from the buyers’ perspective and based exactly on their particular place in the buying cycyle at the time.

And why do some people call them smarketing funnels?
It’s probably the same reason some people call that thing we stack boxes on a pallet and others a skid. We also call them advertising funnels, content marketing funnels, online funnels, customer experience pathways and segmentation funnels. You might want to check out the original book on neuromarketing and how Neuromarketology has recently adapted. Marketers have been empowered by the new the tech and methodology that’s been around since the late 80’s when the big brands introduced us to the fusion of inbound catalogue marketing and the start of online merchandising. The big brands needed a way to transform as they looked for a path to efficiently segment their sales, marketing and communications into “channels” as they expanded their core offerings. Think of Coke adding 242 types of drinks that include water and juices, etc. Or Nike adding 34 sport types of sneakers. Marketers simply need a method that was more dynamic and more personalized to assure when someone was responding to buying basketball shoes, they did not end up hearing about golf shoes or were required to go through all the other products they were not interested in to find and buy what they really wanted.

Why should I build a smarketing funnel to convert my inbound sales or advertising traffic?
It’s a 4 for 1. If you want to end the game of chasing the elusive marketing and advertising dragon, this is the way. Well built smarketing funnels  achieve and exceed results, grow your brand and take or create market share or create or extend your ability to communicate a competitive advantage. There is no more efficient way on the planet to get the job done of converting your online and offline sales confidently every time. It’s scalable, repeatable and costs less than the conventional fragmented methods that rule the day (when built, planned and used properly).

1. Online smarketing funnels create reach through online organic rank, when done right, even the biggest budgets cannot compete with a smartly built funnel. It allows you to build many levels of reach more than all your advertising budgets combined can do.
2. Online smarketing funnels are built with the idea of converting the leads first and foremost – so they convert more leads to sales.
3. Online smarketing funnels provide brands the space to differentiate themselves and create added value as they provide the digital space that could never be afforded by buying the messaging one ad at a time.
4. Online smarketing funnels provide attribution you can count on and with correlated values. No more listening to the ‘blah blah blah’ and buzzwords of the marketing guys. Once built properly, you can see it all and its interworking on integrated real time dashboards. The smarketing funnel methodology allows you to finally understand what parts of your marketing are working great and what parts need to be tuned and with absolute fidelity and confidence that cannot be achieved when the activities are fragmented on different platforms and with different companies.

Here is a link to our integrated agency that’s been creating and maintaining best of class marketing and advertising funnels for almost 3 decades. In every industry and for every sized company. It takes 28 separate disciplines and a ton of experience to do it right the first time. But,  it’s sweet when it’s rolling!