As a business owner, you've likely heard of the sales funnel and the consumer journey. These terms are much more than buzzwords and are used often for excellent reason. The sales funnel and consumer journey have specific functions to better engage your online audience and should not be overlooked.
The consumer journey overlaps the sales funnel. However, each offers different insights. They serve distinct but complementary purposes that help develop your advertising strategy. Next, we'll look at the marketing elements that connect each stage of these two essential marketing models.
The consumer journey illustrates the customers' buying process that provides critical and strategic marketing insight. It reveals how the customer interacts with your brand as they move through the different stages from consideration to purchasing and beyond as they return for subsequent purchases. Mapping the consumer journey is particularly helpful with digital marketing. It consists of five stages:
Where the consumer journey maps the path the consumer takes from awareness to sale, the sales funnel matches the proper techniques to each stage of the process so that you can turn visitors into customers. Like the consumer journey, building a digital sales funnel that converts a high number of customers starts with awareness at the top of the funnel, research and consideration mid-funnel, and conversion and re-purchase at the bottom of the funnel.
Now that you know the consumer journey and sales funnel, you can see that your advertising method creates a bridge between the two. To illustrate with a practical example, imagine you are looking for new athletic shoes. You want quality, value, and performance, but you also want style. You don't want to have to sacrifice comfort for style or value for performance.
To get the features you want, you must conduct research. You do an online search and come across a brand's content marketing. Now that your interest is piqued, you find a mid-funnel blog post and consult the online customer reviews. Finally, as you decide to purchase, you get an SEM ad on your search engine that cements your decision to buy from that brand's site.
While many marketers and business owners tend to focus on the sales funnel, the real strength of your digital strategy recognizes how your customer makes a buying decision so that you can effectively guide them through the sales funnel. Together they give you everything you need to know about how they found you and what steps they took to convert from a visitor to a customer. That knowledge gives you the blueprint you need to design and implement an informed, responsive, and highly effective marketing strategy. To ensure the best results, work with an experienced digital partner.