Walking You Through the Marketing Funnel

Reposted from the Literary Marketing Newsletter.

Have you ever thought about the process you go through before you take an action?

Think about the last book you purchased. Where did you see it first? What got you interested in it? What made you eventually buy it? Or were you initially interested and decided not to buy it?

The marketing funnel or the customer journey explains the steps someone moves through from not knowing anything about a product or organization to taking an action, like signing up for a newsletter, buying a book, or making a donation. Once you understand the funnel, you can better use your marketing to guide your audience to action.

Depending on who you talk to, a marketing funnel may have five or more steps that analyze the customer journey. To keep it simple, I like to focus on three:

Awareness

Your reader or audience needs to become aware of who you are and what you do, offer, or write. They have to know something exists before they can learn more about it and purchase it!

Consideration

Your audience learns more about you as they evaluate whether to buy or engage. They may do this by reading a book summary or reviews, reading through the website of a non-profit, or attending a webinar about an MFA program.

Conversion

This is the stage where they take action. After learning more about what you do and how you can help or deliver value, your audience is now convinced enough that they decide to buy the book, enroll in the class, or purchase a ticket to the event.

Using the Funnel to Guide Your Content Creation

As you create content to promote your book or your organization, map your efforts to the marketing funnel — and each of this essentially has to be done in order:

Awareness

If your goal is to create awareness about who you are and what you do, then you need to get in front of a lot of eyes so that your audience can find you. This means posting often and on multiple channels so you can increase your reach. Remember that it takes someone seeing something seven times for them to start paying attention!

Consideration

If your goal is to educate your audience and deepen their engagement, focus on communicating how you help your audience and the value you offer. This can be creating content about interesting aspects of your book, posting about your services, highlighting the work you do in the community, and anything else that can help your audience learn more.

This can be done while you build your audience, but can’t be done if the awareness piece isn't in place. You may create great, engaging content, but if no one sees it…

Conversion

Finally, if you want your audience to make a purchase or take an action, include a call to action, or CTA, in your content — phrases like “Donate today” or “Pre-order your copy now” or “Learn more at this link.” Speaking of, add a CTA and link in each of your social media posts or newsletters so your audience can easily take the next step (like I have below!). If you’re on Instagram, remember that you can’t put a link in your caption, but you can add it to your bio and point followers there.

Sometimes someone may take an action the first time they see something (like an impulse buy of literary socks at the bookstore!), but it’s more likely that they need to learn more before they make a decision. This typically happens after the awareness and consideration stage. This means you can’t just ask someone to take an action before they know who you are and what value you offer — you have to spend time ushering them through the awareness and consideration phase first.