Mastering the Marketing Funnel: How To Turn Leads into Customers
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In 2021, social media users grew to 4.26 billion, which forecasters predict will increase to roughly 6 billion by 2027. The numbers highlight the importance of social media for marketers who want to improve their lead-generation strategies.
However, capturing leads is only the first step to increasing your paying customers. Brands will need an effective strategy to convert their leads into buyers, which can be easier said than done. This process requires a clear understanding of the customer journey and the marketing funnel.
Key Takeaways
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What is a marketing funnel?
A marketing funnel visualizes a brand’s customer journey, from brand awareness to the buying stage. This visualization maps routes to conversion and beyond.
Also called the conversion funnel, it lets you know what your brand must do to encourage consumers at specific stages of their buying journey. By evaluating your company’s marketing funnels, you can drive more loyalty, greater sales, and stronger brand awareness.
Marketers began using the sales funnel to easily categorize significant actions or milestones along the buying journey, from awareness to decision, then loyalty. However, today’s journey to purchase is far more complicated than the first time advertisers used the marketing funnel.
Now, only a few customer journeys will mirror the funnel exactly, and the path to purchase is not always linear. In response, marketers began using a more comprehensive approach to their marketing efforts. They rely on full-funnel marketing, which aims to reach shoppers at every stage of the buying process.
The shape of the funnel corresponds with the idea that early on in a shopping journey, advertisers cast a wide net to get the attention of as many leads as possible. Then they nurture the captured leads through each stage of the funnel.
The target audience narrows as you move toward the bottom of the funnel. At the bottom, you have the people most likely to convert and even become loyal customers.
Ideally, the funnel would be a cylinder for marketers, meaning they would convert all their captured leads into buyers and repeat customers. Unfortunately, this is not a reality for brands. However, it is part of a modern marketer’s job to convert as many leads into customers as possible, thus making the funnel more cylindrical.
Importance of marketing funnels
The customer journey is indeed more complex than expressed in the marketing funnel. However, the concept remains essential. However, the concept remains essential.
The path to purchase is anything but linear, and the funnel accounts for buyers entering, exiting, and moving around the funnel. Moreover, their shopping is not limited to a specific geographic area or store.
With your prospect’s ability to shop anywhere, you must think of effective strategies to reach them at all stages of the buying journey.
For example, leads in the consideration phase perform extensive research and comparisons online since they are not limited to buying from a single store.
As a response, businesses adjusted and embraced this non-linear path to purchase by trying to engage with customers in valuable ways across the funnel.
Moreover, the visualization the funnel offers can be crucial for lead generation and nurturing. Companies use campaigns to generate new leads in the awareness and consideration phases. In the decision and loyalty phases, brands rely on campaigns to nurture their captured leads and help convert customers into brand advocates.
Digital marketing and the sales funnel are critical to connecting the dots between content, marketing channels, and tactics. They can drive the most traffic, conversation, attention, and sales.
Marketing funnels can also visualize the customer journey and make it easier for modern brands to follow how their prospects think. They can be solutions that help map out each stage of a client’s decision process, which can help marketers plan the advertising steps they want to take.
Another thing that makes marketing funnels crucial is that they apply to almost any customer interaction. You must have a marketing funnel if you’re going to increase online sales, generate more traffic for your store, or get more clicks as an affiliate. It can be an effective tool to help visualize every stage of connecting with your potential customer.
However, the most significant benefit of using marketing funnels is that they provide measurability. A marketing funnel can show businesses the stage where leads start to lose interest. This advantage can help them improve their campaigns to address these issues.
The Different Stages of the Marketing Funnel
Today, there is still no universally accepted version of the marketing funnel. Modern brands use different funnels with varied stages, including three, four, five, or more phases consumers go through in their shopping journey. In this section, we outline a six-stage marketing funnel to help you understand how the marketing funnel works.
Awareness stage
Brand awareness refers to a customer’s familiarity with a brand, including knowledge of its messaging, tone, name, style, values, and culture. This awareness starts with consumer research and involves attracting buyers and helping them recognize and remember it.
The goal of boosting brand awareness is to keep the brand at the top of the minds of consumers. To help in this effort, brands aim to get in front of consumers where they spend most of their time. Advertisers use the following marketing tactics to boost awareness:
- Television commercials
- Digital advertising
- Audio promotions through podcasts or radio commercials
- Consistent upload of social media posts on Instagram, LinkedIn, or Facebook
- Content marketing
Remember that the primary objective of the awareness stage is to make your prospects think of you when the time comes for them to buy your product or service.
Interest stage
After becoming aware of a brand, a lead moves on to the next stage. At the interest stage, they discover more about the brand, its offerings, product pricing, and any helpful information that the lead must know before they make a purchase.
This stage allows brands to create relationships with the people in their database and introduce their positioning. Advertisers can nurture qualified leads through email marketing and targeted content, which can help inform leads about the company.
Consideration stage
At this stage, marketers work to increase the likelihood of consumers considering buying a product from their brand when shopping. They can achieve this feat by sending marketing messages highlighting an interest, addressing a pain point, or answering their target consumers’ questions.
Leads at this stage are trying to get to know a brand and learn how it differs from similar brands. Marketers must do what they can to educate and inform leads in this phase to help them understand how their solution meets their unique needs.
Examples of middle of the funnel (MOFU) solutions include the following:
- Case studies
- Webinars
- Positive customer reviews
- Customer testimonials
Intent stage
Leads must show interest in buying a product to reach the intent stage. They can show their intent through a survey, watching a product demo, or placing products in a shopping cart for e-commerce businesses.
The intent stage allows advertisers to make a strong case for why their product is the best choice for a prospective buyer. They can also use a retargeting tactic at this stage for leads that still need to proceed to the next stage of the funnel.
Evaluation stage
At this stage, buyers are about to decide whether to spend their money on a brand’s product or services. Marketing and sales teams work closely together to nurture leads in the decision-making process and convince the prospect that their brand’s product is the best choice.
Purchase stage
The purchase stage is the last stage at the bottom of the funnel (BOFU). When a lead reaches this stage, they decide to buy, and the marketer successfully converts them into customers.
The sales team takes over and facilitates the purchase transaction. Remember that a positive customer experience for the buyer can lead to referrals that fuel the top of the funnel (TOFU).
Tips and Tricks To Get Your Leads in Your Marketing Funnel
Now that you understand how the marketing or sales funnel works, you must be able to apply it to your marketing campaigns. This section will outline the essential tips to help marketers get better results from their organic marketing strategy.
Use tags to consolidate website pages
You may discover several pages featuring similar content when you perform a site audit. If your website has different pages with the same content, try consolidating them using canonical tags or redirects.
Remember that multiple web pages featuring the same content can cannibalize your traffic on search engine results pages (SERPs). You must redirect low-performing pages to a page on your website containing information related to the original content.
Adding a canonical tag can be the best solution if your site has duplicate content. This way, you can keep the copy, but you can tell search engines to prioritize the core page when ranking your site. When choosing a tag, use relevant keywords your audience will look up on search engines.
However, you must be careful when deciding to canonicalize or redirect pages. Remember that these are delicate decisions, and you must only make them when you think it’s necessary.
Listen to customers
Remember that you can only persuade prospective customers to buy from you if you understand their pain points, wants, and needs.
If you want to move leads faster to the bottom of the funnel, ask customers what is on their minds. Do your best to invite feedback when possible and create multiple contact points, such as online surveys, emails, your website, and your social media pages.
You can also involve your customers in your marketing design process by asking them to contribute their ideas. For example, you can use an online feedback form to encourage them to share their buyer story and ask the following questions:
- How did you hear of our company?
- What actions did you take to learn more about our product or service?
- What influenced your decision to buy or sign up?
Another way to get customer feedback is to send an open email requesting help. Doing so lets your existing customers advise on improving transactions or product modifications.
You can also hold a trial and invite new customers to assess your inbound marketing funnel. This strategy helps you learn if your design was helpful to your buyers.
Use CTAs as often as possible
Ensure your pages are specially designed to convert site visitors. Remember that optimizing your content or social media pages to rank in search engines will not be enough if your pages are not optimized to convert visitors.
Remember to aim to maximize conversion opportunities by using well-written CTAs. Produce content relevant to leads in the different marketing funnel stages.
Think of it this way: every page on your main website is a crucial opportunity for conversion. To make the most of them, you should strategically place CTAs so they align with visitor search intent.
CTAs can be exciting as they offer more insight and valuable information for visitors—who you can assume are on your website to learn something new.
Perform a technical SEO audit
The best marketers regularly perform a technical SEO audit. This process helps check for new opportunities that can help boost visibility and for gaps that search engine bots can detect.
Remember that search engine bots need to understand what your site offers online searchers. The bots check the content and evaluate how your site is set up. If your website is unorganized and difficult to index, your landing pages might not rank in the SERPs.
This issue highlights the importance of site setup for SEO. These technical aspects include the following:
- Page speed
- Uniform resource locators (URL) structure
- Extensible markup language (XML) site map
- Pagination
- Site architecture
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Convert Your Leads Faster With SearchEye
Converting leads into loyal customers can be easier if you visualize the buyer’s journey. By developing a marketing funnel, you can create strategies to help move your leads from one stage to the next.
If you need to increase your conversion rate, check out SearchEye today. Our SEO experts can help boost retention and awareness for your brand through solid link-building strategies and other effective marketing methods.
Using the marketing funnel effectively can help marketers achieve their specific goals. Try SearchEye today and see how our SEO tools can get you the boost you need to rise above the competition.
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Frequently
Asked
Questions
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Globally, there are 5.18 billion Internet users as of April 2023. The fact that more people are spending more time online emphasizes the importance of digital marketing. These days, potential customers browse the web for specific products or services.
But the likelihood of losing those prospects is high if they can’t find your products or services online. Most likely, your competitors already use digital marketing to meet target audiences and drive online sales.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is pivotal to any successful digital marketing campaign. It helps improve the visibility and ranking of your online site and content in search engine results pages (SERPs).
A SERP refers to the page users see after entering a query into search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Bing. People search for a product on a search engine before purchasing it on Amazon. They also start looking for a hotel before booking a new vacation.
The higher your e-commerce website or content appears on the SERP, the more likely it is that users will discover and engage with it. An optimized website is the starting point for relevant search queries and increased visibility. Several components make up SEO. But understanding and targeting the keywords people use is critical to any SEO strategy. Do you want to enhance your chances of appearing in the SERPs? This guide will walk you through the basic concepts and step-by-step process of SEO keyword research.
Key Takeaways
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Understanding SEO Keyword Research and Its Benefits
Regardless of your efforts, you will only generate traffic if there’s search interest for any piece of content you’re creating online. Unfortunately, many e-commerce site owners make that mistake. Likewise, it’s part of why 90.63 percent of web pages get zero traffic from Google.
When thoroughly researched and optimized, keywords enable users to find what they’re searching for online. But which words or keyword phrase do people use when looking for products, services, or information related to your business?
Effective SEO keyword research is the key to targeting relevant keywords that your potential customers are searching for online. It primarily refers to finding and analyzing popular search terms and queries that people type into search engines.
Before starting your keyword research journey, learn more about how it can benefit your business.
Improves search engine visibility
How well is your site performing in search engines for specific keywords and phrases? When users search for a particular keyword, how likely are they to come across your website?
Search engine visibility is a metric that determines how visible your site is for a given search query or keyword phrase. Measuring it may vary slightly depending on the tools used. But generally, it’s calculated by the number of keywords the site ranks for, their search volume, and the domain’s SERP rankings.
You will obtain the desired website traffic, engagement, and conversions with adequate search engine visibility. Thankfully, keyword research helps businesses gain insights into related terms people are looking for on search engines.
With that, you can create a type of content that matches their needs and queries. Consequently, it will help your website rank higher and increase its visibility to searchers.
Incorporates keyword-rich content
Search engines like Google use content to determine the usefulness of a page. They also rely on keywords when understanding and organizing the content on a web page.
When your content is relevant or answers the related search queries, your page will be displayed with other related content. So to boost your site’s position on SERPs, you must incorporate relevant keywords into your content.
By performing keyword research, you can get rich data about what your potential customers want to know about your niche, products, and services. As a result, you can create keyword-rich content that’s relevant to what the audience is searching for.
Focuses on the right audience
Who will most likely become your customers? Targeting the right audience for your website is essential when making your business discoverable online. These people are searching for websites like yours whose interests and needs match what your site is offering.
But how do you attract the right audience to your website who will be your ideal customers? You must be able to deliver content that answers their questions or solves their problems. The good news is that keyword research allows businesses to focus on and connect with the right audience.
By conducting thorough keyword research, you can better understand the target audience’s needs, preferences, search frequency for a particular keyword, and how they like to engage. You can also check out Google Trends to find out what your audience is searching for.
Key Elements Needed When Conducting Keyword Research
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The primary goal of any effective SEO strategy is to optimize your content to ensure that you appear in relevant search engine results. But that’s only possible by knowing what keywords to target.
Your keyword research is the starting point for developing a strategy that helps people find your business. It’s worth noting that a website visitor decides whether to stay or look for another site or content within a second.
Performing thorough keyword research can help you craft content that meets your potential customers’ needs.
Moreover, it allows you to increase visitors’ levels of engagement and convert them into actual and loyal buyers.
But when you do keyword research, you must consider the following elements to evaluate the viability of the search terms:
Search volume
Search volume represents the number of search queries for a particular keyword within a specific period, typically a month. Targeting keywords in your content that have actual research volume is essential. Otherwise, your content will not be discoverable.
A high average search volume indicates that many users are actively searching for it on search engines. But it doesn’t equate to more people seeing your website. It will be challenging to compete with bigger sites if you only target keywords with a high search volume.
Indeed, monthly search volume is a valuable metric for keyword research to estimate traffic. It can also help you determine which keywords and search queries to prioritize for optimization. Still, it would be best not to use this keyword metric as the only measure of value or consider it for a single keyword in isolation.
Instead, examine the search volume for a cluster of topics. You may also consider using Google Keyword Planner when estimating search volume. Because it directly comes from Google, it’s widely regarded as the best data source for keyword search volume.
Competition
Also known as keyword difficulty, keyword competition measures how easy or challenging it is to rank a particular keyword on search engines. Several sites seek to rank for the same keyword when it generates good results. It then creates competition around that specific keyword.
Remember that a keyword that’s difficult to rank will require significant time and attention before reaching your desired rank. Hence, assessing keyword difficulty can help determine whether the keyword or page you want to rank for is realistic.
After all, you wouldn’t want to invest your time and resources in keywords that won’t give you tangible results. But several factors go into determining a competitive keyword, including domain authority, content quality, backlinks, and competitors.
As much as possible, avoid targeting keywords dominated by high-authority sites. If you want to rank high quickly and get traffic, finding relevant, low-difficulty keywords will increase your chances. Focusing on long-tail keywords may also be beneficial if you’re just starting.
Although such keywords often have lower search volumes, they’re more targeted and not difficult to rank. Likewise, monitoring your competitor’s keywords and leveraging them to create high-value content is a good practice. Tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, and Moz can help you get started on competitor analysis.
Relevance
Search engines like Google use keyword relevance to determine what a web page is about. How relevant or helpful is a particular keyword or phrase on your web page? Target keywords related to your business and well-aligned with your target audience.
Search engines also decide the ranking of web pages based on their relation to a search query. So instead of merely putting keywords into content, you must also aim to provide helpful information.
Remember that the algorithm will examine other pages users click on for a specific query. That’s where search or user intent comes in. It refers to the user’s purpose in entering a query into a search engine.
Your content will only get a high ranking for a keyword if it addresses the searchers’ needs. Thus, the more you align your page with search intent, the better your chances of ranking. Search intent can be informational, transactional, or navigational.
The search is considered informational if a user searches a keyword to learn something or learn more about it. Meanwhile, it’s navigational if they type a specific website or brand name into a search engine. The user’s intent is transactional if they want to buy something behind a search term.
A Step-By-Step Guide for SEO Keyword Research
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Knowing how to conduct in-depth keyword research properly is as crucial as understanding its benefits. Thus, you need to be intentional about placing specific keywords that attract your target audience. Otherwise, your content will only result in low-value or zero traffic to your website.
That’s where a keyword strategy comes into play. It’s a systematic approach to how you identify the list of keywords to target and what you do after narrowing them. This way, you won’t have to guess what your target customers want to see.
Here’s a guide to help you start the SEO keyword research process.
Generate relevant keyword ideas
Brainstorming ideas for relevant keywords is the first step in keyword research. You can list keywords based on what you know about your business. But it can be overwhelming, especially if you don’t know where to start. Below are different ways to help you create a new keyword list.
- Audience: What words and phrases would your target audience use when looking for solutions to their problems? You can understand their pain points and preferences by visiting where they hang out online. From there, you can uncover what topics they’re talking about.
- Competitors: You can also find opportunities for the keywords your competitors are currently targeting. What are the competitor keywords that perform well in search results? What are those keywords that they targeted but failed to rank? Gaining these insights will help you enhance the content optimized for your website’s keywords.
- Site queries: Does your site already have an online history? If so, you can get information about the relevance of your site through Google Search Console. It’s an excellent way to find new keyword opportunities relevant to your business.
- Seed keywords: You can also unlock potential keywords using seed keywords. These are words or phrases that describe a topic broadly. It’s a great starting point to explore variants and related queries. When developing seed keywords, consider what people type into search engines to find what you offer.
Analyze and select the best keywords
After compiling a list of keywords, the next step is to get more data about each keyword and sort them by value and opportunity. When analyzing and selecting the best keywords, you can use keyword metrics.
Search volume will help you determine if a specific keyword is worth pursuing. A low search volume may indicate no market or you’re using the wrong keyword. With keyword difficulty, you can find potential keywords that no one has targeted yet. This approach lets you get ahead of your competitors and rank high for that keyword.
Likewise, understanding the business value of a specific keyword is essential when selecting the best keywords. Can you reference your products or services in a blog post about the topic or the targeted keyword? What would you get from ranking for a particular keyword?
Prioritize target keywords
Targeting the right keywords is crucial to attracting visitors and potential customers to your site. But how do you prioritize which keywords to target? Discovering the methods to effectively target the keywords you want to rank for is the last step of the keyword research process.
To do that, you must understand the role of primary and secondary keywords. The primary keyword determines the central theme of your content. It has the highest search volumes and must be added to various article elements. On the other hand, the secondary keywords are closely related keywords to the primary search term you’re focusing on your page.
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Level Up Your Keyword Strategy With SearchEye
The keywords that attract users to your business website are as vital as your product and services. But what keywords can potentially bring you the highest number of visitors? You’ll need an efficient strategy to identify keywords that will help you rank pages and generate website traffic.
Whether you want to level up your keyword research approach or implement tech-driven SEO strategies, SearchEye offers SEO services tailored to your business. Contact us now and see how we can help you achieve improved site rankings and increased traffic.
Ready to delve further into keyword research? Find out how SearchEye experts can help you get better results.
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