The Beginner's Guide to Digital Marketing Funnels

A digital marketing funnel is a big-picture view of the path your customers take between discovering your brand, deciding whether to choose you, and becoming a customer. There are five main stages in a marketing funnel.

1. Awareness: Clients know they need someone like you, but do they know about your particular business? Awareness centers on someone discovering you.

2. Interest: Once someone discovers you, they want to know more. Interest is focused on explaining what you do best.

3. Consideration: Clients compare your business to others and weigh the benefits of your different services or products, then decide which business meets their needs most effectively.

4. Evaluation: The customer deliberates one last time.

5. Purchase: Someone successfully buys your services or products. 

Some businesses also include a post-purchase stage focused on creating repeat customers. At an even broader level, you might hear these different stages of the funnel grouped into:

• Top of the funnel (TOFU): Includes awareness and interest

• Middle of the funnel (MOFU): Includes consideration and evaluation

• Bottom of the funnel (BOFU): Purchase and post-purchase

Each part of the customer journey has common related marketing strategies with an end goal—the action you want someone to take at that stage. While every business has a marketing funnel, how you tailor your marketing strategy to that funnel varies from business to business. Here’s how to create a strategy for your own funnel.

Interest and awareness stage marketing strategies

For people to enter your marketing funnel, they have to be able to find you first. The interest and awareness stages are top-of-the-funnel stages where you build brand awareness and generate interest in your business. 

At the interest and awareness stage, focus on:

• Defining your target audience and buyer personas

• Creating brand channels

• Search engine optimization (SEO)

• Paid advertising

Defining your target audience

Knowing your target audience and who your future buyers are will help you focus your marketing efforts. Instead of trying to create marketing that appeals to anybody, create for your target audience to reach people who are more likely to follow your conversion funnel and become paying customers.

You likely did some work to define your ideal customers when you were starting your business or brand. That’s a good starting point to figure out your target audience too. Focus on details like demographics, what their pain points are, and where they spend their time online. If you’re feeling stuck, look at competitors or similar brands to get a sense of who they’re trying to reach.

Get more tips on defining your target audience

Creating unique brand channels

Building an online presence for your brand or business is key. You don’t have to be everywhere at once, but at minimum, we recommend having a website and an email list. Ideally, you’ll have a social media account or two too, but start with whatever feels easier for you to accomplish.

Buy a unique domain address and connect it to your website so that it’s easy for potential customers to find and remember you. Most people use their business name or their own name for their domain. Then add a place to sign up for your email list to your homepage so you can start collecting contact information from interested visitors. 

From there, claim social media handles for your business name too. Choose the best platforms for your business by thinking about which best suits what you’re trying to sell or share. An ecommerce store will want to be on a more visual platform, for example.

Learn how to choose social media channels for your business

Optimizing your site’s SEO

Every day, your ideal customers are searching for companies just like yours. An SEO and content marketing strategy will help your business stand out among online search results and rank higher among the other results. 

SEO and content marketing go hand-in-hand. Your content strategy refers to any content on your website, from the text on your landing pages to any blog posts you write. Including commonly searched keywords for your niche in your website pages helps signal to search engines that your website is relevant to people searching those terms. 

Squarespace has built-in SEO tools to help you differentiate yourself and increase the visibility of your website in search. 

Read our guide to optimizing your website for search

Pursuing paid advertisements

No matter how great your organic reach may be, paid ads can amplify your audience. But how much this is part of your strategy depends on your budget and how quickly you want to ramp up your operations. Paid ads can be expensive, so test out different platforms and audience targets before putting too much money behind a single channel or method.

With marketing plugins like Channable, you can create high-performing PPC (pay-per-click) ads on over 2,500 advertising platforms.

Consideration and evaluation stage marketing strategies

The consideration and evaluation stages are when customers decide to buy from you. This stage looks different depending on what you’re trying to market to your audience. Someone selling physical products, for example, will want to speak to the benefits and features of an item. 

For someone selling digital products or services, free opt-ins can be an effective strategy for reaching your ideal market and catching their interest. Free opt-ins help establish your authority, grow your email list, and give your audience a better idea of what they’ll gain from working with or buying from you. 

Some common examples of opt-ins include:

• Downloadable guides
  Example: See the Top 10 Gifts Moms Want This Fall—Free Guide!

• Downloadable checklists
  Example: Get the Free Checklist for Choosing Your Event Guestlist

• Downloadable how-to manuals
  Example: Download the Free Manual for Improving Your Copywriting

• Excerpts from published books
  Example: Peek Inside The First Chapter of the Book for Free

• Audio recordings
  Example: Improve Your Morning with a Free Meditation

• Video recordings
  Example: Watch a Free Mindfulness Webinar for Wellness

Including the word “free” directly in your opt-in title immediately conveys the value to your audience and encourages them to sign up. Even though it can feel counterintuitive to give away some of your best information for free, your opt-in is exactly the place to prove how much value you can deliver to your clients. It’s worth investing the time to ensure it showcases your expertise since it’s a direct driver of future bookings and sales.

Purchase stage strategy

Once shoppers feel confident in their purchase, collecting payment is the next core piece of your digital marketing funnel. While you might not consider the payment process part of your digital marketing strategy, the user experience in this part of your funnel can lose you a sale or earn you loyal customers. 

At the purchase stage, focus on making it easy for someone to become a buyer. That means connecting with payment processors, providing clear information about return or cancellation policies, and optimizing your checkout page for simplicity.

Payment processors handle the details of payment transactions, ensuring every detail of the payment is secure and legal while tracking the transactions for your financial bookkeeping. Whether you’re selling products or services, automatic payments optimize your funnel by allowing people to purchase immediately, with no back-and-forth. 

Keep in mind that payment processors need to be selected separately for your Squarespace website and any other integrated Squarespace services like Acuity Scheduling.

Post-purchase marketing strategies

Don’t move on to new customers entirely once someone’s made it through your marketing and purchase funnel. The post-purchase stage is a great opportunity to collect testimonials or work on customer retention.

Follow up with customers or clients and ask them for their feedback. For service providers, this can come as a testimonial request. You can use their feedback to improve your services and share their positive feedback on your website. New customers will trust you more if they see opinions from existing customers. 

If you sell products, ask customers to review your products. Like testimonials, new shoppers will feel more confident about buying something if they can see honest feedback from others on a product page.

To encourage repeat purchases, make sure you’re keeping existing customers up to date on new products, services, or discounts with your email newsletter.

Get our tips for building year-round loyalty

How to set your marketing objectives

The ultimate objective of most marketing funnels is to guide potential customers toward buying a product or booking a paid session with you. But now you’ve broken that process into different marketing campaigns for each stage of the marketing funnel. For each stage and marketing effort, think about what next step you want it to lead someone toward. 

Every piece of marketing should end with a clear call to action (CTA) for what you want your target audience to do next. For example, if you run an online store and send email marketing about a new product (awareness stage), your objective is for people to click through to that product landing page (consideration and evaluation stages). Your email should have a clear link to your store page. 

Or say you provide a service and share how you can solve new customers’ pain points in your social media marketing. Your posts and profile should have a link to book your services and a CTA explicitly encouraging people to do so.

Measuring marketing funnel performance

Having a set objective for each piece of marketing you do will help you measure what works over time. It can be helpful to sit down once a month and look at your metrics across the funnel and across different pieces of marketing. 

Did each piece of marketing you put out successfully guide people to the next stage of the funnel? What’s your conversion rate across the funnel and from one stage of the funnel to the next?

Having a full picture of your performance will give you an idea of what types of marketing are working well for you and which you could improve on. For example, if you’re losing a lot of people between consideration and purchase, your checkout process might be an issue. If you’re losing people from awareness to consideration, then you may want to change the way you inform people about your product.

Ready to build your marketing funnel and grow your reach?

This post was updated on June 13, 2023.