Marketers and Sales professionals have depended on the concept of a marketing funnel to visualize the customer journey for years. The general concepts focuses on taking a broad audience from awareness through purchase consideration to becoming a paying customer. As the process progresses, the field narrows and so do the expectations for customer engagement.
In Social Media and other digital marketing specialties, the danger is to focus on the medium or the particular goals of the platforms in use to gauge success rather than seeing those platforms as part of the larger customer journey. For that reason, I have created a digital marketing funnel that assumes a mix of social media, advertising, email marketing, and traditional engagement methods.
With this marketing funnel, you are better able to understand the role of your digital marketing content at different stages of the customer journey. For example, if you are trying to reach your broadest audience in social media and you sell investment management services, you will want to try to deal with topics relevant to the customer on a daily basis rather than a deep-dive into the comparative merits of different investment strategies. Once you’ve broken the ice with that audience, you are able to provide more in-depth and tailored content for them in a different environment like email.
Once you know the role of your content you are also better able to measure it’s effectiveness. That is why we have a notes about measurement in the graphic. Getting a lot of page views may be good for awareness, but further on you will want you content to drive actual purchases or contacts instead of just likes and shares.
Take a look at the marketing funnel graphic and share it with those you know need a little clarity in the marketing strategy! Feel free to use this anywhere you like and attribution would be awesome.
