What Is A Marketing Funnel?

Video Podcast Transcript:

Hello, Tyler DeWitt here. We’re going to talk about what a marketing funnel is. A marketing funnel is basically part of the customer journey. We’re going to talk about one of the more basic well-known marketing funnels, which is called AIDA. It stands for attention, interest, desire, and action or it could be awareness, interest, desire, and action. Different people, different companies, call it different things. And people have created their own marketing funnels over time. But don’t try to get too advanced with it. Just focus on the basics of attention, interest, desire, and action.

Let’s talk about the top of the funnel, the biggest part of the funnel. Clearly, you know what a funnel is. It’s small at the bottom and it gets larger at the top. At the top is where all the attention and awareness is being driven. How can you drive that attention? How can you drive that awareness? Well, you need to start contributing content, producing content. This could be videos, written articles, blog post, contributing to other content in your industry. Some way you want to drive some attention and awareness into that funnel.

Well, let’s back up. Actually, there’s several ways of creating attention. Think of every marketing channel as an attention getting channel. Whether it’s a cold call, an email, a pay per click ad, a social media, a blog post, a LinkedIn share, a Facebook share, whatever it may be, there’s several different channels that you can market through to drive that attention.

Once you drive that attention, you need to build interest. And how do you build interest? Your interest is built based on the specifications or the benefits of your products or services. And that’s what kind of pulls them in deeper into the funnel.

Think of dating, you’re out walking around, you’re at the gym, you’re at the nightclub, the bar, wherever it may be that you go, and you catch somebody’s attention. Now, you got to generate interest. And you do that through communications, right? Because sometimes you might grab someone’s attention, they look, they kind of give you that look, they look again, and then they look again. And you’re like, “Okay, this person is interested. They’ve made it clear to me. They’ve been making eye contact and they’re always looking or getting close.” How do you drive the interest? Well, I can’t answer all your dating questions. But in marketing, you drive interest, and you communicate based on the specifications or the benefits of your products or services. You’ve got to communicate value. That’s got to be built into their attention and their awareness.

Once you’re in the interest part of the funnel and this person feels like your product or services are for them, you start to create emotion, that’s the desire. Now, you’re all the way down to desire. You went from attention, interest, to desire. You’re pulling them into that funnel. You’re almost there.

So, once you got the desire, hopefully, hopefully, that turns into an action. That action will be them buying your product or services, signing up, or whatever it may be for your desired action.

So, that is what an AIDA funnel is, attention, interest, desire, and action. Now, sometimes people will lose their interest in the funnel, or they might get into the desire state where they back out. Sometimes when they kind of back out, you have to figure out how to pull them back in. And you have to figure out why did they left your funnel? Why did they walk away? What caused them to lose their interest or desire? Why did they not take action?

And there’s several things that you can do within your marketing to pull them back in. For example, let’s say someone had interest in your products or services, they filled out a form, they started to desire it, maybe you got them on the call, they just weren’t taking action. You need to figure out what you need them to do to take action. Sometimes it might be cost. Maybe you need to offer them like a 15% discount. It could be anything.

It’s probably best that you even ask them, so you can figure out why people are leaving. Everybody’s not going to be honest with you on why they’re exiting your funnel. But the select few that are direct with you, where you can actually get a clear answer from them, will help you resolve everybody else. Because sometimes people just don’t tell you why. They’re just like, “I don’t know. I thought I needed it. I was thinking about it. I was considering it.” But for a big majority of the people, it can be price. Or maybe there was not some type of benefit or specification within your product or your services.

For example, maybe you’re a consultant. Somebody had an interest. They were moving into the desire. And then, all of a sudden you got to talking about how your reporting works, your consultations, your meetings, your response time. Maybe your response time was to slow. People like to see work with consultants to have a response within 24-hours. So, once again, you just have to focus on providing solutions all throughout that funnel for the AIDA model of attention, interest, desire, and action. Some people, like I said call it, awareness, interest, desire, and action.

If you look up marketing funnel, you’ll see some complicated funnels. But I would focus on the most well-known model, which is AIDA. It’s the most popular and the most simplified funnel. No reason to get one that is too complicated. Because if you get too complicated, you’re going to confuse yourself and you might even confuse the people that are buying off you. I mean, you never know.

That’s just like a landing page funnel. Usually, a landing page funnel has three to five steps, the shorter the better. You make that funnel to long, people are going to exit. And the same thing with your AIDA funnel. You don’t want to overcomplicate things. You want to get them to buy. So, you want to focus on attention, interest, desire, and action. So, that should be it. Thank you.