"Funnel" has become a hot key term to sell things you may not need.

A marketing funnel refers to a technique used by businesses to turn cold prospects into loyal customers. The marketing funnel has three significant stages that show how potential customers move through the sales process. The three stages include:

1. Top of the funnel

This stage is where customers first interact with your business. At this stage, potential customers visit your website, social media profiles, or other online platforms where you promote your brand. The goal here is to make an excellent first impression and provide valuable content that can create brand awareness and interest.

2. Middle of the funnel

At this stage, the potential customers are no longer cold. They have shown an interest in your products or services and are willing to engage with your business. This usually includes a form fill or information sent to you to show they are interested. The goal of this stage is to keep the potential customers interested, provide valuable information and guidance that can help them orient themselves in the pre-purchase phase. A CRM and business automation are a must have to manage correspondence and communication at this stage in the funnel.

3. Bottom of the funnel

This stage is where the potential customers are ready to make a purchase. They have moved from being mere visitors and are now ready to interact with your sales team directly. At this stage, the goal is to close the sale by providing the right offers and incentives that can motivate customers to seal the deal.

Understanding your marketing funnel and optimizing its processes can be the catalyst for an increased rate of customer conversion. Streamlining the customer purchase path from interest to sale can make the difference between leads lost and sales made. Know your target audience, create valuable content, identify suitable platforms, optimize your website, and continuously test and improve your funnel. These are the key ingredients for a robust marketing funnel and successful customer conversion.

Unfortunately, in this industry, companies may try to use the word "funnel" to sell you something you just don't need. A lot of marketing companies will try to make landing pages a part of this process and sell a product to create them. this is not needed. Usually this can be done within your web solution as long as it is a professionally built one.

Landing pages are good for separating certain products, events or special offerings but ARE NOT required to create a great marketing funnel. They are most effective for targeting specific keywords for pay-per-click advertising and even at this should be created within your current domain and website solution when at all possible.

Your current site should be able to be the base step in your funnel: The place you gather the lead or information to begin the marketing process. This is simply a targeted form that will gather the information you need to begin to organize and marketing to your lead. The "funnel" can basically begin with a designated page on your current site with engaging content, that leads to a form being completed. You can call this a "landing" page, but you don't need a separate tool, software or entity to add this in. As a matter of fact, doing so is a bad practice if it isn't hosted on your own domain.

Managing this information commonly referred to as your lead is imperative. You have to engage and entertain or engage this "lead" immediately and continue to nurture it through the process to the sell. This is almost impossible to do consistently without a customer relation management tool (CRM) and business automation to keep engaging the prospect. (email, social media and other outlets to communicate with your prospect)

There are many of these tools on the market, but you should use caution and research the solution before you waste time and money on something that just won't be what you are looking for. I see clients come to our firm that are so frustrated by trying to use a bad solution, they feel that all automation solutions will be this way.

The first thing to do is to find a solution that will do all you need in one place. Having several different solutions to work with to reach your goal becomes confusing and frustrating. We offer a solution that will handle all your marketing and customer relationship management in one place. The best part about our solution is we don't just sell you the software and abandon you to try and navigate it yourself. We will work with you hand in hand and offer as much assistance as you need to get you started and able to handle your funnel and sales process to the end. Finding a solution that is not only robust and effective is important but having a team to assist you in using it is the key to success.

If you are frustrated by your marketing or sales process, reach out to a professional team to get advice and learn the best course for you to take to make your marketing work for you. It is important to find a team that understands your frustrations and will work with you to alleviate the strain.