Funnel marketing leads audiences along increasingly complex and sophisticated paths to turn strangers into loyal customers, motivate them to purchase and turn them into brand ambassadors.

In other words, an enthusiastic customer who is happy that he or she chose the company’s product or service because, by making the transaction, he or she got something he or she needs. Here are some examples:

• valuable support;
• useful information;
• free content.

The funnel intersects with the method of inbound marketing, the process of finding the right people at the right time, an evolution toward permission marketing that breaks down the disruption model suggested by Seth Godin.

Why, then, use funnel marketing? Let’s look at it below.

Why use funnel marketing
Funnel marketing allows you to develop contacts at various stages of the sales process. The lead enrolls in a contact form (this can also be done via chat) and will begin to receive various messages that will nurture him or her and lead him or her to finalize the business relationship. But that is not all.

Once the sale is made, it will be possible to strengthen the relationship with followers even more. The ways in which you can improve relationships with subscribers depends on your target audience and goals, such as services, special discounts, and offers that are added to your content.

Remember, however, that in such a path you can work on Up Selling and Cross Selling, that is, sales regarding higher and complementary categories. Let us now see what are the basic stages of funnel marketing.

Funnel marketing: the fundamental phases
The stages of funnel marketing are as follows:

Brand Awareness: it is necessary to make sure that the brand is well known in the industry. In other words, it is necessary for the audience to start trusting it. It is quite complicated to do lead generation if the brand is not a well-known one and you spend money on advertising in vain. So, start with the brand. A phase this where it is important to work on tools to help you move in this direction, whether it is limiting the use of social media, focusing on video marketing or working on a company blog. It depends entirely on the context. You just have to find the ideal solution so that you can increase interest in the brand.

Finding active leads: you need to start by getting leads that are fit for purpose. The term refers to consumers who might show interest in offers. You can use several ways to do this, such as blogs and social media (Facebook ADS can be very helpful). But the most important thing you need is a lead-magnet, i.e., research and data, free ebooks, case studies, materials and forms, white papers.

In the next section we look at what lead nurturing is.

Lead nurturing
The lead nurturing process is critical. Once the contact has been acquired, it is necessary to ensure conversion.

Learning the strategy is very important because how you build the lead will change behavior. You may need to move to direct sales or follow a more structured path.

This Moz funnel best describes the work of nurturing leads. Once you get a lead, you can turn them into a potential customer by sending them more specific content, providing a pathway that turns unknown people into interested people and then into potential customers. Breaking down content marketing into specific aspects can be done as follows:

• Top of funnel content: generic and poorly specific solutions.
• Middle of funnel content: pointing toward something more focused.
• Bottom of funnel content: the end of the line.

In the next section we will discuss the pros and cons of funnel marketing.

Pros and cons of funnel marketing
Among the pros of funnel marketing is the ability to maximize the use of various mechanisms designed to automate the sending of messages and emails so that information is delivered to subscribers within a database and without human intervention.

Among the cons is the design, which must be done with great care to achieve the right effect.