Funnels 101: Mapping the Customer Journey

Let’s talk about funnels and the customer journey. 

Inside this episode I talk about what a funnel is, why you need a funnel in your business, how to design your funnel and what a funnel looks like for an online business. 

If you’ve been puzzled by the word funnel, tune in and I’ll explain it all.

If you want to go deeper and learn more about funnels, check out my course Funnel Fundamentals. 

Connect with me

Website: www.newschoolofmarketing.com
Facebook: @newschoolofmarketing
Facebook group: @newschoolofmarketing
Instagram: @bianca_mckenzie

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Transcript

Episode 159

Hey, welcome to the podcast. If you’re new here, welcome. This is the place where I talk all about marketing, Facebook ads, email marketing, the whole spectrum. I’m super excited that you’re here. If you are a returning listener, welcome back. Really excited that you’re here, too. 

All right, before we dive in, I would love to pay respect and acknowledgement to the palawa people of lutruwita who are the traditional owners of the land on which my business operates. And I pay my respect to their elders, past, present, and the merging. 

How are you? I know it’s a bit tricky. Can’t really answer me. But, yeah, sometimes I wish it was, like, more of a two way conversation. Maybe that’s like a different kind of podcasting, though. I’m so excited because my daughter has gone back to school. I’m so excited about that. And, I don’t know, I reckon she’s more excited. She was so happy. My son wasn’t that excited, but he’s not at school. He’s at daycare. But, yeah, she was super excited. I’m excited. So here I am. Feel like I’ve got all this time back and too many things to do, so I still feel like I don’t have any time, but that’s a different kind of story. 

I want to talk to you today about funnels because it’s kind of like this marketing buzzword, right? Funnels. Maybe you use one in the kitchen, because that’s where funnels kind of are from as well. But, yeah, no, it’s about customer journey is what I want to talk about. And that is basically funnels. It’s about the journey that your customer takes. So let’s have a quick look at what is a funnel. Like I said, it’s a customer journey. It’s like a model of a customer journey. It represents the buying stages that someone goes through after becoming aware of a business. And I like to include the becoming aware, or sometimes they are not aware. It generally sits outside of the funnel, because obviously they’re not in your funnel yet if they don’t know you. So that sort of, like, hovers above it, sending traffic to that funnel. But, yeah, it’s a visual representation of all the steps that a visitor has to go through before they actually purchase a product or a service from you. And visually, it looks like a funnel. So it’s wide at the top and it’s narrow at the bottom. And that is because people who enter the funnel from the top, generally there’s, like, more people going into your funnel, like, leads than there’s customers coming out the bottom, because not everyone will purchase. So the top stage is like awareness. So after driving traffic to your website or promoting your business and your product, someone becomes aware of your business. 

Then the next stage is consideration. So someone’s like, in the funnel, they’re like moving down that sort of narrower part of the funnel. So consideration is where someone moves closer to taking that next step. So they are sort of checking out what you do. They’re looking around, they are in your world, they are getting to know you and sort of like, considering consideration, considering whether or not you are the person to purchase from. Then the next step is conversion. So they first become aware, they’ve considered the options. So they probably looked at what you were doing, they were looking around at other people, and then they decided that your product or your service was the one. So that is conversion. And then at the bottom, like that super narrow area, that’s where there’s loyalty. So they’ve become a customer. And if you do your job well, they will be your customer for life. They will be the one who sends you more work and also more clients. So that loyalty comes into play. Now, there are stages of the funnel, and we talk, like in Facebook ads, marketing terms, we talk about this a lot. So the stages are top of funnel. So the top of the funnel is when people are aware of the problem and they are looking for a solution. So there’s a whole different kind of thing that go into are they problem aware or are they a solution aware? Some people don’t even know that they have a problem. And sometimes it’s not necessarily a problem, but some people are not aware know do they need something? They are actually the hardest customers to acquire. So top of the funnel is they are aware of the problem and they are looking for a solution. Then there is the middle of the funnel. So we also call this mof or mofu middle of funnel. This is where they are aware of the solution and they are looking for options. So they’ve moved from that top of funnel. So tof or to fu, to now the middle of funnel. They know that they have a problem or a desire and they are looking for options. They are literally looking around for how can I get my problem solved or how can I get this desire looked after? Some products, we buy them because we have a desire, not because we have a problem. And then there is the bottom of the funnel. So bof or bofu, that is when someone decides on the solution and becomes a customer. So there’s like different stages that someone goes through before they decide that they purchase from you. And sometimes they are looking at all sorts of different options. They’re looking at yours, but also at your competitors and that kind of thing. 

So why do you need a funnel? I feel that a funnel can sometimes come about organically because not everyone sits down and deliberately creates this. But you can deliberately design a funnel, and I definitely recommend doing that, thinking about who is your customer, who’s your ideal customer? How are you going to guide them from that awareness stage to conversion and loyalty stage? And really, the main thing is that you recognize the stages that your buyer goes through. And also you need to recognize at what stage your service or your product comes into play. So is your potential buyer problem aware or are they solution aware? And like I said, people who are not problem aware are often a much harder nut to crack, so to say. So people who are solution aware, it’s easier to, in a way, speak to them. Often you might have to have messaging for both of those people. So think about where does your product come into play? Is it something that people are widely aware of? It’s kind of like with health. Most people know when they have a health issue because something is playing up. So they are problem aware, but they might not be solution aware. Give you an example. I don’t know. My phone is definitely listening, and so is yours. My little doggie, who’s about ten now, so he’s getting on in age, one of the two dogs, and he’s been sort of limping on and off. But whenever we check his legs or his feet, there is nothing visible. There is nothing really going on. It’s almost like when my legs fall to sleep kind of thing. When you’re sitting on it for a while and you get up and it’s like, uncomfortable and the blood needs to get back to it. Yeah. So he’s been limping a little bit, and I was like, oh, okay. And then an ad pops up in my facebook and it was about hip and joint powder for dogs. And I was like, oh, maybe that’s what’s wrong with him. I don’t know. I’m like, I’m not a vet, but there you not. I was sort of problem aware, but I didn’t know what the problem was and I also didn’t know how we could resolve it. So, anyway, we’re giving it a go. We’ll see how we go. Right. So, yeah, figure out where your potential buyer is at, and then where your product or service comes into play fits in with that so having a clear view of a customer’s journey will allow you to identify roadblocks. So, for example, you can track every single step of the funnel. You really should track every step of the funnel. But you might find that there’s a hiccup. Like something on your website is not working because people are getting stuck at a certain point. So making your website more user friendly, really getting rid of those roadblocks. For example, creating social media content and getting it onto the right platform. Like, there’s no point in hanging out on Facebook if the majority of your audience are on TikTok. Most of them are kind of everywhere, but I should have probably used LinkedIn or something like that as an example. Another one is promoting on different sort of channels. Like really, you need to know who your customer is, where they hang out, where you get in front of them, and then what is that journey that they’re going to take? So how do you intentionally design a funnel or design a customer journey? Your first step is to do your research. You really need to know your audience and you need to know what stage of the funnel your offer comes into play. I already said that, but it’s important to know. So do you need to educate them first? Are they problem aware? Are they solution aware? What kind of content do you need to create for them? Knowing as much as possible about your customer or your potential customers means that you can help them navigate each step of the funnel. And from your marketing campaigns, you need to create awareness and then lead them through those steps of becoming aware to then being confident enough to buy from you, to sort of recognize that you have the solution. Like, you can say, yeah, I can help you, but how are you going to do that? How are you going to convince someone that you really have what it takes and what they are looking for? And this is often where nurture emails come into play. Sales emails, sales pages. You have to really like someone. If they can’t touch the product and physically see it or know, have absolute certainty in the outcome. You need to design how you are going to communicate that to your customer. So every single step becomes intentional. So the awareness stage, or this stage, the awareness stage, customers should be becoming aware of your product. So what you need to do is track this. Track metrics such as website visits, like website traffic, social media engagement, email, open rates, because you need to know if what you are doing, like what you are intentionally designing and what you’re intentionally doing, you need to know if that’s working. So you need to track stuff like that. So that’s the awareness stage, then the consideration stage, which is where customers are considering your product or your service, and they’re comparing it to competitors. So if the competitors are doing a better job of convincing them, then you might lose out. So again, track, test the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Track every single stage. Like click through rates, conversion rates, bounce rates. And this is like one of the things. If you’re getting heaps of people, for example, a product, or even an online, like a digital product, if you’re getting heaps of people that are putting their stuff in the cart, taking those next steps, but they don’t take the final step, figure out how you can make improvements so that they actually do go all the way through. Or if people literally just drop off after reading part of your website, which you can track with software like Hotjar, you can see where people go on your website, where they drop off. If they are dropping off, find out why. Maybe your messaging isn’t strong enough. Okay, so that’s the consideration stage, and then finally the decision making stage. So when they’ve reached that stage, they are like making a final decision to purchase your product or service. And at that stage, you really need to focus on metrics such as sales, conversion rates, return on investment, and you need to know what the cost per acquisition is of getting someone to purchase. There’s no point in you acquiring a new customer if it costs you more than what you’re getting back, right? So track every single piece of the way. You also need to know your goal. So you need to determine what it is that your funnel needs to do. So are you actually going to have a funnel that you track from awareness to lead, or from lead to sale, or literally all the way from awareness to sale? Obviously, that’s all the steps that you need to track. But your first step might be, I want to attract 1000 leads and then the next step will be, I want to nurture those thousand leads and have 20 of them join my group program or something like that. So really be intentional and focus on every single step, every single step of that journey that they are going to take. So what does this look like for an online business? Because it looks different for every single business. And while a funnel can and should be created for every type of business, it kind of becomes essential for an online business because there is no face to face touch point, right? Everything is online. So you need to carefully craft and work out the customer journey and each interaction with your business. And funnels can come in different shapes or forms. And you may have heard of some, like sales funnels, webinar funnels, email funnels, lead magnet funnels. There’s so many different ones and they may all have different names, but they basically track the same thing. So they track the steps from not knowing a brand or not knowing you to them purchasing from you. And marketing funnels have many other purposes. You can put funnels all over your website to see how visitors move through, like a specific website flow. Like there’s so many different options. So you might want to track newsletter sign ups, which means someone views the newsletter sign up form, then they submit the form, then they get a confirmation email. So that is a funnel. There’s like a few steps. It’s a journey, right? They view a form, they submit the form, they get an email. That is a few steps in a customer journey. Or maybe like page conversion. So they look at a sign up page and then they sign up and it’s like, okay, well, what is the conversion for that? So how many people go to the page and then how many people sign up? So figure out your goals and what you want your visitors to do on your site, and then you can create a funnel for it. And every single thing that journey, that’s basically a funnel. You need to think about what kind of steps does someone need to take, especially once they come into your world. And this is where email marketing funnels and that kind of thing comes into play. The final piece is to drive traffic through your funnel. So you need to get traffic to your funnel and then you need it through your funnel. So you can do this in many ways, but essentially you’ll need to create content or another way to attract traffic. For example, you could run paid ads to drive traffic to your funnel, but you can also use paid ads to drive traffic through your funnel. And this is where we get into the top of funnel ads, middle of funnel ads, bottom of funnel ads kind of thing. You could be a guest speaker on a podcast. You could do a letterbox drop if your customers are local. Essentially it comes down to knowing who your audience is, where they spend time, so that you can get in front of them, so that you can get their attention, so that you can get them into your funnel, into your world. And not everyone will become a buyer. So also think about how you will take your newly acquired leads and prospects from getting to know you to them buying from you. A lot of us tend to focus on that top of funnel, like driving traffic sort of in, but there’s no point in driving traffic to something that is not going to convert and this is where the whole leaky funnel term comes into play. There’s no point in driving traffic to a funnel that has holes in it that is not performing and not converting. So yes, you need both. You need traffic to be able to test whether or not it’s converting, but you need to also track each step of that funnel, where are people dropping off, where are the roadblocks and then address those. A funnel doesn’t need to be complex. You need to know who your prospective customers are and how you’re going to get their attention, and then how you’re going to keep their attention, how you’re going to build trust and how you’re going to get them to buy from you. If you want to know more about attracting leads, because we all need leads into a funnel, go back to episode 145 because in that episode I talk about eight ways to attract more leads for your business. So I’ll link it in the show notes because then it’ll be easier to find for you clicking on a link. Yeah. So a funnel is essentially a customer journey, and it is leading someone from getting to know you to then purchasing from you. So don’t forget that part. Don’t only focus on the top of the funnel like driving traffic to your funnel. Also, look at your funnel and intentionally design the steps for someone to going from getting to know you to them purchasing from you. It’s so important because yeah, that consideration stage, people will be looking at other options as well. So how are you going to make yourself stand out? All right, if you love listening to my podcast, I would really love it if you could leave me a review. I spend a lot of time creating content for you and I can see my podcast stats which are really just numbers, but I really would love to see the personal messages about what type of content you love and what you think of the podcast. So if you can take a few minutes out and leave me a review, I would be so grateful. Thank you so much for joining me again on this episode of the new School of Marketing podcast. I hope it was helpful and I can’t wait to share more marketing tips with you next week. If you are ready to take your business to the next level with Facebook and Instagram advertising, make sure that you visit newschoolofmarketing.com to download practical free resources. Check out my free new masterclass about selling more of your online courses with meta ads. And remember, subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss an episode. I can’t wait to go on this journey with you until next time, take care and market your business every day.