Marketing funnel is a system that helps you attract consumers, turn them into leads or prospects, and finally convert them into paying customers.

What is a marketing funnel?

While marketing funnels is the broader term that covers various use-cases, there are several types of funnels you’re like to come across:<ul><li>Lead magnet funnels</li><li>List building funnels</li><li>Webinar funnels</li><li>Social media marketing funnels</li><li>Video sales funnels</li><li>Email funnels</li></ul>As you can see, other than the marketing channel your funnel’s based on, your funnels can also have different goals, e.g.:<ul><li>selling a product or service</li><li>building a list of contacts</li><li>promoting an event</li></ul>Naturally, you might just as well use funnels to collect survey answers or have people sign up for a live demo of your platform.

Types of funnels

Using a funnel and the AIDA model helps marketers visualize the stages and tasks advertising campaigns should fulfill first before the consumer makes a decision to buy a given product or service. If you’re not convinced, take this sales funnel template as an example.Marketing and sales funnels will help you keep your campaigns organized and drive your target audience strategically towards action.For each stage of this so-called customer journey, marketers can choose different tools and marketing tactics to help their consumers advance down the funnel and towards the buying decision.

How marketing funnels work

At the same time, for each of the stages, marketers will be using different metrics and KPIs to report on their campaign progress.To give you a better overview, here are a few examples of metrics you’d likely report on across the three key areas of your funnel – Top of the funnel (TOFU), Middle of the funnel (MOFU), Bottom of the funnel (BOFU).

How marketing funnels work (contd.)

Your audience isn’t yet aware of your brand & your products/services. To change that focus on lead generation.Build a landing page, create a lead magnet, & drive traffic to it.Use social media ads, Google ads, add banners to your pages, send an email to your existing email list (this has to be a target email list consisting of people who you potentially convert at a later stage), sponsor a podcast, or partner up with another business.Remember to pick the right lead magnet for your audience. Not everyone will be interested in an ebook or a checklist.Retarget those who’ve engaged with your ads.

Marketing funnel strategies - Awareness

To help them realize that what you’re offering is the right solution to their problem create an autoresponder email cycle that’ll discuss the different aspects of the topic your subscribers are interested in. Emphasize the strengths of your offer & why your brand should come up naturally when they’re thinking of the topic.During this process, you’ll want your prospects to engage with your brand & products.To step up your game, try email automation. Send them in response to your subscribers’ and users’ actions. You’ll soon see why triggered emails outperform regular emails multiple times.

Marketing funnel strategies - Consideration

To convert your email subscribers into paying customers your email communication should motivate your audience to take action & commit.Emphasize the reasons why they shouldn’t waste any more time. Use the language that works for your audience. Overcome the hesitation by using testimonials, customer reviews, & case studies. If you’re selling an item with limited stock – this is the time to make this clear. If you offer a money-back guarantee, easy or free-returns, a free trial period – all of this should be emphasized in your email sequence.

Marketing funnel strategies - Action

It’s not about driving any kind of traffic to your landing page or squeeze page. It’s about driving the right traffic.Focus your efforts on identifying the audience that’s likely to convert.This means narrowing down your segmentation when setting up social media ads, using lookalike audiences, and observing which users perform your desired action.If you’re seeing that some groups, in particular, are visiting your site and not converting, it’s probably best to remove them from your target group or tweak your ads to fit their needs better.

Marketing Funnel Best Practices - 1. Drive traffic effectively

Your website, landing pages, and emails should be optimized for all types of devices.At the same time, if for some reason the mobile experience for any of those assets isn’t working, ask yourself whether you want to target mobile users at all?See whether mobile users are converting and if not, make a strategic decision whether you want to include them in your targeting.

Marketing Funnel Best Practices - 2. Optimize your communication for all devices

The same lead magnet won’t work for everybody. That’s why you need to understand who you’re targeting and then test your gut feeling.Perhaps a checklist is going to win over an ebook? Or an email swipe file over a 1-on-1 consultation? Evaluate each lead magnet, but don’t just focus on money.Sometimes it’s about how quickly your audience can benefit from the lead magnet and not how comprehensive it is. Ever downloaded an ebook you never actually read because it was too big? That’s what I mean.

Marketing Funnel Best Practices - 3. Choose the right lead magnet

The whole idea behind marketing funnels is targeting customers with the right type of content at the right moment. Don’t ask for a commitment right away.You hint at the address of your order form for those who already arrived with the ‘I’m ready to buy’ mindset. For others, you’ll have to nurture them first.

Marketing Funnel Best Practices - 4. Nurture your leads

This is something we as marketers often get wrong. What we’re looking at are vanity metrics. But what we’re interested in are actionable metrics.Are you really interested in how many people visited your page or how many of them converted? Are you interested in how many people opened your email or how many of them clicked through to your upsell offer?Write down your objectives and then make sure you’re focusing on the right metrics – the ones you have an influence on and which bring you closer to business growth.

Marketing Funnel Best Practices - 5. Get your objectives and metrics right

Even if you know your target audience very well, chances are that you’ve got more than one idea on how to approach them best.Rather than going with your gut, you can evaluate your ideas by running A/B tests. For example, test your squeeze pages or follow up email sequences.When doing so, change:<ul><li> the color of your CTA buttons</li><li>the copy</li><li>the placement of your signup form</li><li>the placement or type of social proof</li><li>videos</li></ul>& more – these elements can help you improve your conversion rates & grow your business, too.

Marketing Funnel Best Practices - 6. Experiment and increase your conversion rates

Do you know what marketing funnels are and how they can help you increase your sales revenue? In this article, you’ll find the definition, examples, and best-practices for creating a high-converting marketing funnel that’ll transform your business.

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Marketing Funnels Beginner’s Guide: Best Practices & More

Hook: Grab attention.Line: Deliver on the promise.Sinker: Make the content resonate.

The Hook, Line, And Sinker Framework

1. The first few bits of consumable content in a piece are there not to deliver information but to make a promise of what's to come.2. Can sometimes be mistaken for "clickbait," and if the subsequent content doesn't deliver on the promise made, or delivers in a subpar fashion, that's a reasonable charge to level.

The Hook: Grab Attention, Make a Promise

1. The Line's purpose is to satisfy the curiosity created by your headline/preview.2. You're producing the meat-a story, an explanation, a dataset, a visual series-that quenches the visitor's thirst for knowledge, entertainment, distraction, or resolution. The key is to do this in a way that triggers an emotional response.

The Line: Deliver on the Promise, Trigger Emotions

1. The Sinker is that singular, powerful, lasting memory that makes a piece stick with you.2. Your job as creator isn't to deliver only one of these potential hits, but to strike those chords again and again throughout your content, then remind the reader/viewer/listener at the end.

The Sinker: Make the Message Last, Inspire Sharing

A simple framework to drive your long-term content marketing efforts.

Despite studying content that overachieves for years, it's only in the past few months that I've stumbled into a mental model I've called: Hook, Line, and

Marketing

Hook, Line, and Sinker: A Model for Crafting Successful, Viral Content - SparkToro

The red carpet event preceding the awards show is always a visual spectacle. Celebrities mill about in their best designer clothes and their outfits are splashed across televisions, magazines, and social media.In marketing, you also have to play up the visuals, because the stats don’t lie: 91% of people prefer visual content over written content. Things like videos, infographics and social media images can help engage the audience and boost brand awareness.

Visuals, visuals, visuals

<ul><li>It's not just about the logo or advertising campaigns. It's the way your brand presents itself to the market and interacts with your audience.</li><li>Be mindful of all aspects of your business from a branding perspective including product design, employee relations, and customer support.</li></ul>

Branding Is Everything

If you’ve seen the infamous 2017 "Best Picture" mix-up between La La Land and Moonlight, then, like me, you’ve probably tried to erase that cringe-worthy moment from your memory.<ul><li>Any data you provide must be accurate for your company to have any credibility</li><li>When your brand generates high quality, reliable data, the benefits include better decision making, improved productivity, lower costs, and higher sales</li><li>Always double-check your work, and be hypervigilant concerning data</li></ul>

Accuracy Is Important

Ellen DeGeneres went into the crowd and brought together some of the night's biggest stars including Bradley Cooper, Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lawrence, Brad Pitt, and more - to squeeze in for a selfieAfter posting the photo on Twitter, it received over 3 million retweets and was used as an advertisement for SamsungThis shows the sheer strength of social media when something goes viral

Social Media Is Powerful

<ul><li>The goal is to find out what appeals to your customers, then to capture their interests through narrative marketing campaigns</li><li>It's about going outside of your product or service and focusing on your company values</li><li>For example, Patagonia established a narrative as a company that "aims to use [their] resources" to save the world from extinction"</li></ul>

It's All About Narrative Marketing

Behind the heavy crystal curtains, the bevy of celebrities, and the swelling orchestra, there's a lot that a marketer can take away from the Oscars.

The glitz! The glam! And the...marketing lessons? That’s right — behind the crystal curtains, there’s a lot that a marketer can take away from the Oscars.

Stashed ideas

The Oscars: The Glitz, Glam, and the Marketing Lessons | AdRoll

How do you replicate presence?Mark says Meta wants to make the most human thing possible: visual presence, spatial audio, temperature, olfactory system, touch, etc.Meetings over Zoom are a great counter-example to some of the goals at MetaMany Meta product elements are developed based on basic functions of psychology: facial expressions, eye contact, and moreThere will be different use-cases for avatars: photo-realistic vs expressive identities. There is personal and functional utility in being able to customize your avatarThe market for creative commerce around digital clothing could be huge.

Metaverse

All the work that I do is at the intersection of Psychology and Computer Science

The goal of the metaverse is not to build technology for people to interact with; but rather, to build technology for people to interact with each other

What grabs someone’s attention in the near term is not going to grab it over the long term.Making a user angry isn’t going to retain that user, Facebook doesn’t have an incentive to do this. Products are not just their function and utility, it’s their feeling.Subscription products cater towards their audience, they don’t have an incentive to be in the middle–this fuels polarization. Advertising models at least make consumer services free, giving everyone an opportunity to have a voice. Greater polarization has been found in groups that are least likely to use the internet or social media.

The Social Dilemma

An accurate characterization would have been that teens using Instagram are generally positive for their mental health, but of course, that was not the narrative that came out. Mark argues that other tech companies don’t even bother to perform the researchThey want to do the research to improve, not to sweep it under the rug“Objectively speaking, there’s hunger [in the press] to say negative things about social media. And, I don’t understand how that leads to an open conversation about the positives and negatives of social media.

Instagram Whistleblower

You can only build Facebook/Meta if you have the idea that people having the right to express themselves is a good thingVoice + Connection = Opportunit.The challenging thing with free speech is that there is a line, the thing that everyone disagrees on is the definition of real harm. The blame for improper censorship should also be directed at the institutions of the United States that fail to define harm accurately and honestly.Balancing the AI system that proactively regulates harmful content is challenging. It’s no longer a technical problem, simply a philosophical one.

Censorship

I don’t think pressure from advertisers or politicians directly affect how we think about this, these are just hard topics

Think about what you’re excited about for the future. Always keep sight of things that bring you joySurround yourself with people you want to be like. Mark only hires people that he could see himself working for in an alternate universe.This advice expands to your friends and relationships.

Life Advice

All children are artists, the challenge is how do you remain one when you grow up

Mark Zuckerberg is CEO of Meta, formerly Facebook. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - Paperspace: https://gradient.run/lex to get $15 credit - Coinbase: https://coinbase.com/lex to get $5 in free Bitcoin - InsideTracker: https://insidetracker.com/lex and use code Lex25 to get 25% off - ExpressVPN: https://expressvpn.com/lexpod and use code LexPod to get 3 months free - Blinkist: https://blinkist.com/lex and use code LEX to get 25% off premium EPISODE LINKS: Mark's Facebook: https://facebook.com/zuck Mark's Instagram: https://instagram.com/zuck Meta AI: https://ai.facebook.com/ PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ Full episodes playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4 Clips playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOeciFP3CBCIEElOJeitOr41 OUTLINE: 0:00 - Introduction 5:36 - Metaverse 25:36 - Identity in Metaverse 37:45 - Security 42:10 - Social Dilemma 1:04:16 - Instagram whistleblower 1:09:01 - Social media and mental health 1:14:26 - Censorship 1:31:35 - Translation 1:39:10 - Advice for young people 1:44:58 - Daughters 1:47:46 - Mortality 1:52:19 - Question for God 1:55:25 - Meaning of life SOCIAL: - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman - Reddit: https://reddit.com/r/lexfridman - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman

Mark Zuckerberg: Meta, Facebook, Instagram, and the Metaverse | Lex Fridman Podcast #267

BAT is a token on the Brave browser that was built on top of the Ethereum token.Users with the brave browser have their interactions with digital ads stored on a blockchain ledger. From this information, BAT tokens are distributed to users and publishers on behalf of the marketing budget of the business. This allows for the right content to be served to users at the right time drastically increasing ad ROI. Publishers can also receive BAT tokens from users who find their content worthwhile. People's attention is more important than ever. Brave pays users for it. Read more about <a href="https://www.evolvbam.com/post/the-future-of-small-business-advertising">Brave.</a>

BASIC ATTENTION TOKEN & BRAVE BROWSER

It's important to constantly be keeping up to date with what the future of advertising beholds. This is my compilation of new SAAS companies, new advertising tactics, & marketing strategies. 

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Marketing Funnels Beginner’s Guide: Best Practices & More

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The Oscars: The Glitz, Glam, and the Marketing Lessons | AdRoll

Mark Zuckerberg: Meta, Facebook, Instagram, and the Metaverse | Lex Fridman Podcast #267

The future of Advertising

Bite-sized knowledgeto upgradeyour career

#advertising

TOP STASHERS

RELATED TOPICS

IDEAS ABOUT #advertising

Marketing Funnels Beginner’s Guide: Best Practices & More

Hook, Line, and Sinker: A Model for Crafting Successful, Viral Content - SparkToro

It's time to

READ

LIKE

A PRO!

The Oscars: The Glitz, Glam, and the Marketing Lessons | AdRoll

Mark Zuckerberg: Meta, Facebook, Instagram, and the Metaverse | Lex Fridman Podcast #267

The future of Advertising

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career