What is a Digital Marketing Funnel?

 The most important concept of digital marketing in my opinion. When someone first broke down the funnel to me, I was shook. Everything started to make sense. It was a whole new perspective. It’s like you’ve been working on a puzzle without looking at the box, and then someone showed it to you. Then you suddenly realize what your job really is. Never underestimate how lost a rookie can be. 

Source: https://www.smartinsights.com/lead-generation/marketing-automation/build-the-perfect-conversion-funnel-with-marketing-automation/

Ok this is the most simple image I could find. If you studied marketing, then you should be somewhat familiar with AIDA (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action). It describes the process of  how customers engage with a brand.  They would go through this awareness -> interest -> desire -> action process. What advertisers do is to make sure the ads are present in each stage and try to push customers further down the funnel to reach business goals. The ideas are the same in digital marketing. Surprise!

Let’s break down the funnel a little bit more. In digital marketing, there are different channels where advertisers interact with their target audiences. Display advertising, which is basically all the image/video ads you see online, is usually determined as the upper funnel in digital marketing. It is the most upper funnel because the target audience has the lowest intent. The audience targeting can be based on user behaviors, and is more loose compared to other funnels. Advertisers usually focus on getting awareness here, which is usually measured by impressions, when they run ads on display channels. Often time advertisers would also run brand lift study to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns. 

After you have a pool of audiences who are aware of your brand or your product, the next step is to develop their interest and learn more about you. At this stage, advertisers would focus on promoting ads on social networks like Facebook, Instagram, and others. Advertisers want to interact with their audiences through more engaging creatives. The targeting gets a little more focused on user profiles just to really focus on people who are likely to interact, like demographics, interests, job titles. 

The bottom of the funnel in digital marketing is search, like Google or Bing Search. Audiences at this level have the highest interest of all, because they are actively searching for something. They are not just browsing on a random website or scrolling through their social network, they have something in mind and are looking for something to fulfill their needs. Advertisers would bid on keywords to have their ads be present when their potential customers are searching for them. 

For someone who has never heard about your product, they would enter your digital marketing funnel through display advertising. Then, you interact with them again on their social network for them to develop interest. Finally, as they’ve remembered and learned about you, they would search for you and then convert. 

In the pink upside down pyramid, there is also retention at the bottom. That means for your existing customers to become loyal to your brand and stay being your customer. In digital marketing, we use remarketing campaigns to 1) retain existing customers 2) encourage prospects who interacted with the ad but not yet convert. The latter is critical because customers don’t always make a purchase as soon as they see your ad. They might need time to think about it, or just need to be reminded over and over to eventually take an action. 

R

This concept is so much harder to explain than I pictured in my brain. Someday I might come back to revise and polish this article a bit more. Or not.