The Marketing Funnel

The AIDA Model

The AIDA Model is essentially a funnel that shows the journey prospective customers (prospects) take before making a decision and converting into a lead or sale. There are a couple of key concepts about this model.

Being a funnel, it suggests that a lot more prospects go into the top then come out the bottom as customers. Therefore, it is important that we attract as many prospects as possible, knowing that many will drop off through their sales journey. We then guide these prospects to ensure we convert as many as possible and minimise the number who drop off.

The 4 Stages of the AIDA Marketing Funnel

• Attention: This is where a prospect first becomes aware of your business, product or service.
• Interest: This is where they start to take a real interest in your product or service.
• Desire: This is where they have moved beyond just being interested and are starting to really desire your product or service.
• Action: This is where they take action, by either buying an online product, filling in a webform, starting a chat session or calling the business.

How do we incorporate the Marketing Funnel into our websites

Now we know what AIDA but how do we incorporate that into our website structure.

Attention (or Awareness)

Imagine someone wondering if their switchboard was faulty? They would search "how to know if my switchboard needs upgrading" and if we've done our job they will find the answer our clients' websites. After they've read it and found out the signs on whether their switchboard needs upgrading, they are now aware of our clients' business.

However, this is just the start of their journey and now they're interested and want to know more about switchboard upgrades.

Interest

If we have answered the prospects' initial query well, they most likely will start to show more interest in both our client and their issue. They may start to click around on other pages to find out more on switchboard upgrades (eg. what are smart meters, what is off-peak etc). Or maybe they want to see some of the switchboard upgrades our client has done and what was involved.

The website visitor (prospect) is now becoming much more interested in getting their switchboard upgraded.

Desire (or Decision)

Now the prospect is interested in our clients' products or services, they need to decide whether our client is right for them and whether they should go ahead and take action. So they would look to see that our client does in fact do switchboard upgrades and why they should use them, as well as maybe look at some recent projects.

Now they've made up their mind, they need to take action.

Action

Finally, the prospect is ready to take action. They need to make sure that our client has the product or service they need and that they service their area. Once they know this, they need to know how to get in contact with our client. Marketing 101 suggests that when a client is ready to take action, they don't want to have to think anymore and should clearly see how to achieve this. In other words, make your webforms, chat boxes, phone numbers etc very obvious.

At Probity Web Marketing, we are continually testing and tweaking our websites and other strategies to work out the best way to continually fill our clients' digital marketing funnel and guide the prospect on their journey to a conversion.