Digital Marketing Sales Funnel – Nurturing Marketing Strategically

Funnels play a critical function in turning web traffic into customers on automation. A digital marketing funnel is a combination of marketing tactics to generate traffic and nurture them to transform into loyal customers.

Digital marketing sales trend has undergone a sea change. Old techniques do not work anymore. If you are stuck to the traditional digital marketing tactics, it is time for you to change.

But, why have the traditional marketing strategies gone downhill? One of the reasons is the absence of ways to measure the effectiveness and return on investment.

Modern digital marketing has changed how businesses promote their products and services to generate leads. With many platforms, internet marketing presents endless opportunities for businesses to reach and establish relations with their target audience.

The irony is that many businesses worldwide are yet to implement digital marketing as part of their business strategy, let alone the implementation.

What is Digital Marketing Sales Funnel?

The concept of digital marketing sales funnel is not difficult to understand. It is all about transforming a person who knows nothing about your business into a loyal customer. He even goes to the extent of sharing his experiences about your business offerings with his family and friends.

How Does a Digital Marketing Funnel Work?

To understand the working mechanism of a marketing sales funnel, it will be helpful if you visualize a funnel.

What do you usually do with it? You place the funnel where you want to pour into something and then pour it into the funnel to fill the container.

There is not much difference between a digital marketing sales funnel and a regular funnel. The underlying concept is the same.

You start with targeting a specific audience, say, likely consumers who could buy a particular product from your business. Then, apply digital marketing tactics to drive traffic from the top to the bottom of the funnel to fill it with traffic. It will result in traffics becoming your customers and also becoming loyal to your business.

AIDAA – Digital Marketing Funnel Formula

Interestingly, you can regard AIDAA as the typical funnel definition–Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action, Advocacy.

Each letter of the formula represents a stage in the digital marketing funnel. To convert a visitor to a customer who will eventually be a loyal customer of your brand, you have to nurture him from the time he enters the funnel until he becomes a customer.

But, there is also one thing to note. Not every visitor who enters your digital marketing sales funnel will turn into a customer. Yet, you can utilize the formula to establish a long-term relationship with the prospect.

What Are The Components of a Digital Marketing Sales Funnel?

Three main components make up a digital marketing sales funnel, and those are:

1. Foundation

It is the defining component of the funnel. You have to do extensive research and formulate an effective strategy to ensure your sales funnel’s maximum efficiency.

As part of your strategy, you need to conduct a complete competitor analysis, develop intelligent goals and identify buyer personas.

Next in the line is creating your value ladder and mapping your funnel.

2. Floodgates

It is the stage of filling the digital marketing funnel with traffic. There can be many sources of traffic to your funnel. Search engines, social media, advertisements, email campaigns, and offline events can generate traffic into the digital marketing sales funnel.

# Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is an impactful way to bring visitors into your funnel. In the social media marketing funnel, you can keep them updated with your new offerings.

It will help if you follow the three E’s rule of posting to generate social media marketing traffic.

• Educate: Educate your social media followers with content relevant to your business.
• Entertain: Post enjoyable content about your business culture.
• Engage: Respond to messages, comments, and questions. And engage with your audience by creating polls, surveys, and questions.

Do not fail to post on social media platforms regularly following the 3-E rule while delivering excellent content and information. And include your company logo on all your images on social media.

# Search Engine Optimization

SEO is one of the best approaches to getting a high traffic volume into your digital marketing funnel. The objective of any search engine optimization strategy is to rank your website higher in search engine results so that visitors can find your website and hence will come to know about your business offerings. When they click on your website, they will be in your funnel.

# Paid Advertising

You can regard paid advertisements as paid marketing campaigns. And advertising can come in many forms, from Facebook ads to Google Adwords. Regardless of your advertising medium, the objective is always the same–filling your funnel with relevant traffic.

# Marketing Events

Marketing events can be in many formats, from online webinars to in-person charity events, potentially traffic sources for your digital marketing funnel. With such events, you can connect with your prospective customers, generate awareness for your brand, and encourage people to check your website. And these will push visitors into your funnel.

# Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the best ways to nurture digital marketing funnel traffic. Do not fall behind in collecting at least the name and email of the visitor who downloads, subscribes or signs up for something on your website.

Once you collect the emails, tools like ActiveCampaign can provide a decision-tree-styled automation system to send email campaigns to them.

Ensure that you incorporate email automation campaigns into your digital marketing sales funnel to prompt prospects to move to the funnel’s next stage.

3. Sales Funnel

The last step is to move your digital marketing traffic from top to bottom. The physical funnel consists of three components– a lead magnet, an amplified, and a conversion event.

You can have things like upsells, downsells, and gated content, depending on your funnel’s objectives. But, the aim will be just the same–to prompt a visitor to leave behind his contact information in exchange for something of value to them. The exchange can include many things, such as a free ebook, webinar, discount, or contest.

There are several tools for you to set up the lead magnet for your digital marketing channels, such as Leadpages, Clickfunnels, Divi Builder, and Instapage.

The lead magnet draws visitors into your funnel and prompts them to stay in the funnel. The magnet hooks the visitor to compel him to take action with you. Videos, testimonials, reviews, webinars, and demos are great amplifier tools.

As a general rule, the more difficult it is for a visitor to find the content he is looking for, the more likely he is to leave the website and go elsewhere. Therefore, you should make your content visitor-friendly and easy to access.

Implement the following steps to set up your forms to get visitor conversion:

• Ensure that it is easily found. Typically, the best places to include a form or button are the top of the screen or the bottom of the screen.
• Collect the information you need.
• Refrain from asking for too much information. As a thumb rule, only the name and email will suffice.

Conclusion:

A sales funnel is a complete process in which a prospect customer finds out about your business, learns about it, chooses what product to buy and then finally make a purchase. 

In today’s intensely competitive business landscape, a digital marketing funnel must run an effective digital marketing campaign. Besides, it is also an integral part of the customer journey and can help you see excellent results.

As the owner of an online business store, you must make sure that you define the process of sales funnel distinctly and create a game plan for your customers which helps them to move from one stage to another smoothly.