Stage#1: Find your audience

This step is often bounced or the audience is assumed. That can become an acute mistake. An audience can frequently change specific interests, only be active on certain platforms or be quite a bit different than what was assumed.

Validating the demographics, interests, and activities of your audience may be the most important step in forming a digital advertising strategy. There are some easy methods to find your appropriate audience.

These are:

• Digital analysis
• Survey
• Focus group
• Discovery sessions

Stage#2: Build awareness

Presenting your product/brand in front of the target audience so that they know who you are, what you stand for and what you do. It is all about building both product and brand awareness so that consumers will think of you later on down the road.

Awareness can be built through:

• Video advertising
• Native advertising
• Programmatic advertising
• Over the top television
• SEO educational contents
• Social media advertising
• Building a presence on digital and social platforms

Stage#3: Increase consideration

After getting in front of the target audience, the next step is to influence consideration for selecting your brand, product, or service over others. The goal is to demonstrate value and show why your brand is the right choice. It also depends upon the audience’s choice and usage.

There are the following points to increase the consideration:

• Messaging platform engagement
• Reviews
• Video advertising
• Native advertising
• Social media advertising
• Chatbots
• SEO Educational Content

Stage#4: Drive action and conversions

The next step is to get the target audience to convert on the action that has been promoted. Here you need to be in the right place at the right time with the right message (just like any great advertising).

Action can be performed as:

• Social Media Offers and Incentives
• Search Engine PPC Advertising
• Retargeting and Remarketing
• Shopping Platform Advertising

Stage# 5- Post conversion / build loyalty

Now that your new customers are converted, you are all done, right? Not quite. Now you need to take your newly converted customers and turn them into loyal patrons. Ensuring that customers have a smooth post-purchase process and staying in front of them going forward creates a new ally. Not only will they most likely convert again, but they will help promote your brand through positive reviews and word of mouth. It can be done as:

• Loyalty Programs
• Email Campaigns
• Surveys to Identify Pain Points
• FAQ’s and Educational Content
• Messaging Platforms and Chatbots to Answer Questions
• Reviews to Help Influence Consideration for Others

Typical sales funnels have awareness, interest, decision and action power in it. Another way to remember content creation stages is remembered through acronyms AIDA:

• Attention
  This is similar to the problem/ need recognition stage. Customers have experienced pin points but haven’t recognized problem. It’s important to draw content to attract the customers.
• Interest
  This is the stage at which customers are actively seeking or interested in, information to help them solve their problems. As they move down, their interest is sparked by a solution.
• Desire
  Now customers have desire of the solution. You have to manage it by examining various solutions to their problem, that your solution is the right one for them. It is done by proper convincing method.
• Action
  It’s time for the customer to make the right decision about the purchase of your product. You must make it easy for the customer to say ‘Yes’ to your solution/product. The easier you make it for people to take action, the more sales you will generate in a short span of time through your sales funnel.

The usage of traditional sales funnel and AIDA has same significance. Customers enter the sales funnel and through a process of discernment, choose to either move to another solution or purchase from you. The action at the end of the funnel, or the purchase, concludes the stages of the sales funnel.

Although most people enter the funnel at the top, not everyone does. Some will enter at subsequent stages, but the process remains the same no matter which stage someone enters the sales funnel.

Top brands using marketing funnel.

Now you know exactly how to setup a marketing funnel like top brands. There’s more focus now on lead nurturing and optimizing each stage of the consumer experience to keep leads moving towards the purchase of brands. This is the best strategy for preventing leads from slipping away and buying elsewhere.

The other key principle is that the consumer journey doesn’t end with the first purchase; this is where the customer journey begins and your efforts move to maximize further purchases and customer value.

The whole marketing funnel will be sum up in few words “Building an effective digital advertising strategy with a variety of integrated advertisements at the right time and place will help take your digital campaigns and business to new heights”.