Understanding Marketing Funnels For Beginner Marketers 

The best and most common way to explain marketing basics to beginners is to use the analogy of a funnel. Marketing funnels are commonly described as the process that you take someone through from becoming someone who has no idea who you are to becoming someone who is a customer and advocates for your brand.

The top of the marketing funnel always starts with awareness. The first job you have when marketing your product or service online is to make people aware that your business exists. If no one knows you exist, they can’t possibly invest in your products and services.

Some companies decide to run awareness campaigns. This is where they will literally pay for advertising of various forms just so that people are aware that their brand exists. Sometimes these awareness campaigns don’t even have any call to actions or desired next steps for the people who see the ad; it is literally just there for exposure.

I personally do not recommend awareness campaigns for smaller brands. It can be extremely expensive to do it right, and the return on investment is usually pretty low for small to medium-sized companies.

There are, however, more effective ways to drive awareness as a beginner in digital marketing. You may opt for the approach of creating content. This might include creating a content marketing strategy for platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, or even blogging. Your ideal customers can become aware of your brand. Content marketing is a great way to drive awareness of your brand for free; however, it can take a while to drive enough awareness to result in sufficient views, followers, and, most importantly, sales back to your business. The alternative to content marketing is paid marketing. You can pay to get visitors back to your website using platforms such as Meta Ads, LinkedIn ads, Google ads, just to name a few. Paying for this type of traffic can be costly at first, but it is an effective strategy for driving awareness and sales back to your business.

Awareness is only the first stage of a good digital marketing strategy; the second stage involves people taking further action and opting in to be part of your ecosystem. Someone can stumble across your social media posts or see your advert online and want to know more, so they make the decision to click the link back to your website. Your job as a business is to ensure that you capture their interest and do your best to capture their name and email address at the very least so that you can market to them again later on down the line.

Email Marketing Basics for Beginners 

It is true that despite all of your marketing efforts, not everyone who comes across your website for the very first time is going to be ready to do business with you right there and then. They may need a little bit more convincing. This is why in marketing, we do what is known as Email Marketing. The aim of the digital marketing game is to draw as much awareness about your business online as possible and convert that awareness into what we call ‘traffic’ to your website. Traffic is a fancy word to describe website visitors. Once you are generating traffic, you want those people to gain so much value from your website that they sign up for your email list. This is where you can best market your products and services online.

This is one of the reasons why most of the biggest brands of our time require your email address before you can use their service. You need an email address to register for Uber, Amazon, Netflix, and mostly every other brand that you use online whether it is free or paid. One of the major reasons why brands do this is because email is still one of the highest converting avenues to sell products and services online. I challenge you to check your emails right now and check how many of the brands that you buy from often are in your inbox offering your products and services on a daily basis. This is because email works, and as a beginner to digital marketing or to marketing your products and services online, it is important that you understand the power of email marketing.

It does not stop at email marketing though; once someone becomes aware of your online presence and they make the decision to come to your website and then they decide to join your email list, you then need to convince them to buy from you. You can obviously do this in your weekly email marketing newsletters, offering them new deals or reminding them about the products that you have on offer.

It should go without saying that the products you offer them should be extremely relevant to your awareness campaign. For example, if you sell perfume, you might create content around different types of perfume and what is the best for certain occasions. You can then funnel your views to your website where they may sign up for a free sample of your perfume and join your newsletter that way. After this, you will then want to sell them either perfume or products that complement perfume. If you sell unrelated products, prepare for your marketing to not convert into sales as well.

The Importance of Repeat Customers in Marketing 

Believe it or not, there is more that goes into digital marketing than just making a sale. You also have to think about nurturing the people who do buy from you. Someone who buys from you once might want to buy from you again. Think about Amazon’s business model. Most people don’t just buy from Amazon one time and never buy again. The majority of Amazon customers buy over and over again. This is what makes the brand so lucrative, and it is a marketing strategy that will always stand the test of time.

Your newsletter emails should not just be used to get people to buy one time, but you can email your tribe of newsletter subscribers often, letting them know about new products or services that you have on offer, giving them the chance to buy again.

As well as this, you want to ensure that your customer service is as good as possible. If someone has a great experience with your business or brand, they are a lot more likely to want to do business with you again. Your product and your customer service are your greatest marketing tools. Again going back to Amazon, their website is so convenient to use; they make it a point to ensure they have the best products on their website. Reviews are used as part of their ranking factor so if a product has bad reviews, it will either be taken down or at the very least be suggested to fewer people. This is because Amazon understands the importance of customer loyalty and how lucrative that is.

As a beginner in digital marketing, it is essential that you do not only focus on one stage of the funnel. Create awareness for your brand and turn that into leads, the most popular of doing that is via email marketing but you can also do telephone or text message marketing. Once you have customers on your database, you then should start the process of promoting your products and services to them on a consistent basis, ensuring that your product is of high quality, increasing the chances of them wanting to do business with you again.

For more in-depth tips, make sure you download and read my free guide ‘The Formula’. This explains the basics of marketing your product or services online as a beginner in digital marketing using various methods such as SEO, Social media marketing, YouTube marketing, and paid ads just to name a few.