How to build marketing funnels for your small business

Wondering how to build marketing funnels for your small business? If you have a WordPress website, you’re in luck. WordPress, the world’s most popular CMS platform, makes it easy to create marketing funnels. But before we get into the “how,” let’s take a look at the “what” and the “why.”

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What is a marketing funnel?

First of all, a marketing funnel is not to be confused with a sales funnel. While they are similar in how they function, their goals and methods are a little different. The easiest way to explain it is, a marketing funnel is the method to which a company drives potential customers to their business or website. A sales funnel is the method in which the company starts at the end of the marketing funnel to drive the consumers to purchase the product or service.

B2B vs. B2C marketing funnels

Business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing funnels have the same goals: convert and commit. The strategy of how you gain the commitment, however, is slightly different.

B2C customers are typically alone or in small groups. These groups are primarily made of family members or friends and typically consist of four people or less.
B2B customers are typically made up of company stakeholders who are making a decision based on what the business needs. B2B customer groups are typically made of five or more people.
B2C customers typically do not interact with a company representative, whereas B2B customers generally interact via a sales representative.

A marketing funnel for websites is a pipeline that helps you to track how a customer made their way to your site to complete a purchase or specific task, like signing up for a newsletter. Let's call this our “goal.”

Stages of a marketing funnel and sales funnel

These are the traditional stages marketing and sales funnels:

Marketing campaigns
Awareness
Interest
Evaluation
Commitment
Sale
Repeat

Let’s take a quick look at each stage.

Marketing campaigns

These are all the methods in which you promote your business or website on platforms ranging from social media to online ads.

The best way to track how well your marketing campaigns are working is through analytics.

Most social medias have built-in analytics, like Facebook and Twitter. Google Analytics? has a feature called Acquisition that will allow you to track how people get to your site and how they complete whatever goals you have set up.

Learn more about using analytics tools to track and measure results:

Awareness

With your marketing campaigns, you should be building awareness of your brand, product or service. One way is with online advertising. You can buy advertising on websites through Google AdSense or other ad services, or via ads on social media.

The idea is to have the customer see your ads and grow familiar with your business. You can do this by targeting your ad campaigns to your consumers with keywords, by geography or ZIP code, by gender, and through many other targeting options.

Social media marketing can help you to engage with your consumer to build a positive message about your brand, product, or service. Create engaging images and messages that you post on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media sites through your company’s social media account or page. When your fans interact with your social media posts, you should respond as quickly as possible to show you are available and responsive to your consumer.

Interest

Once a consumer has gained awareness, it’s time to earn their interest in your brand, product, or service. How? If you understand your ideal customer, you can craft marketing messages that demonstrate how your product or service can meet their unique needs — as only your product or service can.

Once the consumer has seen your ad enough times (this will vary depending on the campaign and the consumer), the consumer will click through to whatever URL you have placed for your click-through in your campaign. Typically, this is your website, or a specific page on your website.

Evaluation

Let’s keep moving through the marketing funnel …

Now that the consumer is on your website, you can track through your analytics how that consumer moves around on your website. Where do they go after they click through to the landing page specified in your campaign? How long are they staying on the site (time on site)? When and where are they exiting your site?

Commitment

Obviously, an immediate sale is an immediate commitment. The consumer is interested enough in what you are offering to purchase your product or service. It’s not always that easy, though.

A few tactics to encourage buyer commitment might include:

A free trial offer. Ask visitors to sign up for free trial so they can experience your product or service before purchasing.
Social proof. Display testimonials from happy customers on your campaign landing page.
Video. Show visitors how they will benefit from your product or service through a video prominently displayed on the campaign landing page.

If potential buyers are abandoning their shopping carts prior to checkout, use these strategies to entice them back to purchase.

Repeat

Now, if you have your site analytics all set up, you can keep track of what campaigns and strategies work for your company. When you start to see what works, focus your marketing on that strategy.

WordPress and marketing funnels

Taking a strategic approach to marketing by creating marketing funnels takes time and effort. WordPress makes it a little easier through available plugins to help you automate different parts of your strategy.

OptinMonster

Optinmonster works with the marketing funnel to help with converting visitors into subscribers with a lead magnet. Use the page-level targeting feature to send targeted emails to your subscribers, and you can A/B test your opt-in forms. Key features include:

Grow your email list.
Increase your pageviews.
Reduce cart abandonment.
Targeted website messages.
On-site retargeting.

CoSchedule

CoSchedule is a great plugin to use for scheduling your blog posts in advance to publish to your social media accounts. Key features include:

Import content from your Google Docs.
Pre-schedule for publishing your posts for a day, week, or month’s worth of content and social media promotion.
Drag-and-drop features.
Collaborative abilities, allowing multiple users to work on various content projects at the same time, even if they are remote.
Syncs to your social media platforms.
Built-in analytics.

Thrive Leads

Like OptinMonster, you can use various widgets to build an email list. The key difference with Thrive Leads is that you can also add two-step opt-ins for your lead magnets and content upgrades. Key features include:

Trigger opt-in forms based on the consumer’s site behavior or the length of time they’ve used the site.
Condition-specific pop-ups that catch prospects before they exit the site.
A two-step opt-in process for more conversions.

Leadpages

The Leadpages plugin lets you optimize offers, capture leads, and build an email list quickly. Key features include:

A/B split testing so you can see which offers work best with your consumers.
Drag-and-drop landing page design features like countdown timers, buttons, images and text.
Integration with popular social media, analytics, email marketing and payment platforms.
Detailed conversion analytics for each opt-in form and landing page.

Easy Pricing Tables

The Easy Pricing Tables plugin helps to ensure your pricing is clear and easy to understand when a potential consumer opts-in to see how much your products or services cost. Key features include:

10 premade, customizable pricing table templates.
Add icons and tooltips by hovering on your table when editing it.
Mobile-friendly so you can adjust your pricing tables on the go.
Measure the success of each pricing table with the Google Analytics Add-On.

Start more targeted marketing campaigns

With a basic knowledge of how marketing funnels work, and the power of WordPress plugins to help automate the process, you’re well on your well to developing more targeted marketing campaigns. Start moving those prospects through the funnel!