The Marketing Funnel

The digital marketing funnel illustrates the steps that prospective customers take on their journey from awareness to advocacy. The Digital Marketing Funnel helps to understand the distinct stages that customers go through, even if the digital world has made these distinctions a little more blurred than they once were.

Each individual customer will have different needs and adopt different behaviours throughout their journey with a brand – there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to digital marketing. We do know that there are some general patterns in the way customers make decisions in each of these stages, which helps marketers to make better decisions about where to invest their organisations resources, especially across the digital landscape. Here, the choice of digital tools and tactics employed by marketers are reflected in the various funnel stages.

In the Digital Marketing Funnel, the five broad stages of the customer journey correspond with the response that marketers try to achieve. For example, Search Engine Optimisation helps to attract prospective customers in the awareness stage, capturing search traffic from the prospective market. Whereas email automation facilitates the customer to convert their consideration and interest in an offering into a purchase decision. In the Retention stage, marketers try to build long-lasting relationships with customers and develop strong associations with the organisation.