Marketing Funnel: Stages, Tactics & Mistakes to Avoid

Wonder why your marketing and advertising campaigns aren’t delivering conversions?

Your offer is solid, your creatives are on brand, and your messaging is on point.

So why isn’t your target audience converting?

If your strategy focuses exclusively on sales, you’re missing valuable opportunities to educate, entertain, and engage potential customers — which help you capture attention and build trust before trying to secure the sale.

In other words, you need a marketing funnel.

I’ll walk you through how I build marketing funnels, including tactics to use at every stage, metrics to measure along the way, and mistakes that can cost you.

Key Takeaways:

• A marketing funnel reveals how customers go from awareness to decision, showing you how to influence the journey.
• With the right marketing tactics, you can guide prospects from the top to the bottom of the marketing funnel. 
• To confirm if your marketing funnel strategy is working, you need to measure specific metrics at every funnel stage.

What Is a Marketing Funnel?

A marketing funnel is a framework that represents the path customers take as they go from discovering your brand to becoming paying customers — and eventually loyal advocates.

Marketing teams use funnels to plan strategies and develop content that engages prospects and guides them through their customer journey toward a conversion.

Most marketers model their funnels on the AIDA framework:

• Awareness: A prospect first discovers your brand
• Interest: The prospect expresses interest in your brand
• Desire: The prospect begins to seriously consider your brand
• Action: The prospect takes action to become a customer (e.g., makes a purchase)

The funnel shape illustrates how the audience gradually becomes smaller at each step of the journey. This happens because in most cases, only a fraction of people who initially engage with your brand actually turn into customers.

It isn’t realistic to aim for a 100% funnel conversion rate. But when you use the right marketing tactics for each stage and you invest in optimizing your funnel, you can improve your conversion rate and get a better return from your marketing efforts.

We’ll cover tactics to use and metrics to measure below.

Sales Funnel vs Marketing Funnel

Both marketing and sales funnels reflect the various stages of the customer journey. But the two terms aren’t interchangeable. Here’s how they differ:

• Marketing funnels cover the customer journey from awareness to action. They target a wide audience, often using a mix of organic and paid campaigns to guide prospects toward a conversion over time.
• Sales funnels focus on the later stages of the journey, after prospects express interest in your brand. They target a much narrower audience, often using outreach to connect with leads and win sales.

Conversion Funnel vs Marketing Funnel

While a marketing funnel includes the entire customer journey, a conversion funnel focuses on a specific aspect.

A conversion funnel explores how a customer navigates a particular conversion event. Which can include anything from signing up for an email list to downloading a lead magnet to purchasing a product.

All marketers use marketing funnels — or they should, at least. In contrast, conversion funnels are more common with conversion rate optimization (CRO) specialists, who use A/B testing and experimentation to drive action.

Stages of the Marketing Funnel

There are a few ways to break down the different stages of the marketing funnel.

Some versions stop at three stages, but I find that the five-stage funnel gives you a more complete picture of the customer journey — and how you can align your marketing strategy with it.

With that in mind, here are the five stages of the funnel.

Awareness Stage

At the top of the funnel (ToFU), prospective customers first learn about your brand, product, or service.

Say you’re searching for an international digital marketing agency for your business.

You’d find our agency at the top of the search results. Which might prompt you to click through and start exploring my agency’s website and services.

Consideration Stage

At the middle of the funnel (MoFU), prospects begin to engage with your brand and your marketing content.

Say you ended up checking out our agency’s website, and our marketing services looked like a good fit.

But you’re researching other agencies and checking with your team about needs and budgets. So you’re still a little way off from making a purchase decision.

Because you’re interested in our agency, you might decide to subscribe to our email list or follow my Facebook page so you can see the marketing insights I share.

Conversion Stage

At the bottom of the funnel (BoFU), potential customers are ready to make a decision and take action.

Say your team read case studies from several different digital marketing agencies and decided ours is the best match for your needs and goals.

To move forward, you might click the “Hire Us” button on our agency’s website to connect with our team and book a sales call.

Loyalty Stage

Existing customers enter the loyalty stage (also BoFU) when they make another purchase, effectively becoming repeat customers.

For example, as an agency customer, you’d be in the loyalty stage if you decided to renew your contract for another year.

Advocacy Stage

Another BoFU stage, the advocacy stage is when customers begin recommending your brand to colleagues, friends, or family.

As a happy agency customer, you’d become a brand advocate if you regularly referred other business owners to our agency.

Tactics to Use at Each Stage of the Marketing Funnel

For marketers, it isn’t enough to understand the various stages of the funnel. Instead, you need to know how to engage customers at each stage so you can guide them toward the end goal.

I’ll break down tactics for each stage.

Top-of-Funnel Tactics

At this stage, your marketing efforts should be all about increasing brand awareness. This is the time to use content marketing to educate prospects about your offerings and get them to engage with your brand.

Content Marketing

Take this blog post by Sugimoto Tea, for example. It’s a beginner’s guide to matcha that walks readers through what matcha is, how to choose the right kind, and how to use it. It’s about sharing information, not making a sale.

You have tons of options to get your ToFU content in front of your target audience. Let’s look at a few options.

Search Engine Optimization

Use search engine optimization (SEO) to make your content easy to find in search engine results. Like this Old Farmer’s Almanac blog post that ranks at the top of search results for “planting a garden.”

Email Newsletters

Create an email marketing campaign to share relevant content with subscribers. Like this SparkToro newsletter that shares audience research tips and links out to additional content on the company’s website.

Social Media Posts

Publish a social media post that educates prospects about your products or services. Like this Blue Bottle Instagram post, which tells the story behind one of the coffee brand’s newest releases.

Email List Signups

Ideally, ToFU campaigns encourage potential customers to engage with the brand, such as clicking a link to read more or liking a social media post.

For example, Darë prompts website visitors to sign up for the company’s email list by offering a discount code in exchange.

Middle-of-Funnel Tactics

MoFU campaigns take the educational aspect to a deeper level. Instead of simply introducing products and services, this content encourages customers to consider your brand more carefully.

Lead Magnets

Lead magnets like original research reports, exclusive webinars, and downloadable guides are all great for MoFu campaigns. Not only do they provide tons of value, but they also fuel lead generation.

Brands typically offer these high-value assets in exchange for prospects’ contact information. From there, they can nurture leads and guide them closer to the purchase stage.

For example, this LinkedIn post by Sprout Social features a downloadable benchmark report for businesses in the financial services and insurance sector. Prospects can download the report in exchange for their contact data.

Comparison Pages

Landing pages that compare your product to the competition also work well at this stage. For example, this ClickUp comparison page positions the product side by side with Asana so prospects can see how they differ.

Case studies are helpful for getting prospects to take a closer look, too. Since customer stories often speak your customers’ language and touch on their exact pain points and goals, they’re great for illustrating how your product can solve a real problem.

Case Studies

For example, Pipedrive has a library of case studies like this one featuring AI bees. It walks readers through a problem the company dealt with, how Pipedrive helped, and the final result.

Customer Testimonials

Customer spotlights don’t have to be overly complex. For example, this Facebook post by Caulipower features a short, sweet quote that easily captures what the customer loves about the brand.

Bottom-of-Funnel Tactics

BoFU campaigns are geared toward prospects and existing customers who are primed for action. So they should encourage the target audience to take steps like booking a demo, requesting a quote, or subscribing to a service.

Targeted Emails

For example, this email from Perplexity targets a user with a free subscription to the AI answer engine. It walks through all the features included in paid tier to encourage an upgrade. The email has multiple prominent call-to-action buttons encouraging the prospect to become a Pro subscriber.

Abandoned Cart Emails

For B2C companies, retargeting consumers with the items they’ve shown interest in can be particularly effective. By using dynamic content, brands can automatically insert the specific products customers have viewed into social media ads and emails.

For example, this abandoned shopping cart email from Jellycat features dynamic content that encourages the customer to finish checking out and reach the end of the purchase funnel.

Limited-Time Sales

To drive sales, it’s often helpful to create a sense of urgency or set a time on the promotion. This Facebook ad by Holland America Line promotes a limited-time special that’s designed to get travelers to book a trip.

Loyalty Programs

Many brands have loyalty programs to encourage additional purchases. For example, American Eagle’s RealRewards program  automatically g

Metrics to Track Success Through the Marketing Funnel

How do you know if your digital marketing funnel is actually getting results?

First, monitor keyword rankings at each stage. This measures how well your SEO efforts are working throughout the funnel and helps you identify areas that need improvement.

For example, your SEO team might be doing an incredible job with ToFU keywords. But if your BoFU content isn’t ranking, you may need to invest in optimizing your conversion, loyalty, and advocacy content for search.

SEO metrics are just one aspect. I also recommend tracking specific marketing funnel metrics at each stage.

ToFU Metrics:

• Impressions: How many impressions are your brand awareness ads and organic campaigns getting? An increasing number suggests that awareness is going up.
• Organic Traffic: How much website traffic comes from organic channels like search and social media? Which channels are driving the most clicks?
• Followers: How many social media followers does your brand have on each social network? Are your audience numbers growing steadily?

MoFU Metrics:

• Engagement Rate: How frequently do people interact with your marketing content? Measure this metric across your website, email marketing, social media marketing, and other channels.
• Average Engagement Time: How long do people engage with your website content? Longer engagement times typically signal deeper engagement.
• Specific Page Views: How many people have viewed comparison pages, case studies, lead magnets, or other MoFU content? Track the views and the campaigns that generate them.

BoFU Metrics:

• Conversion Rate: How frequently do prospects complete actions like booking a demo or making a purchase? Track conversion rates for channels, campaigns, and content to see what works best.
• Cost per Acquisition: How much are you spending to acquire each new customer? Do the costs exceed the value of the customer? Track this metric across channels and campaigns.
• Return on Ad Spend: How much revenue do your ad campaigns generate compared to what you spend to run them? Track this metric for each campaign and ad platform.

Common Marketing Funnel Mistakes to Avoid

There’s no one way to build and optimize your marketing funnel. But there are a few things you definitely shouldn’t do. Watch out for these easily avoidable mistakes.

Disregarding Your Audience

An effective marketing funnel uses content and messaging that speaks to your audience’s pain points and goals.

If you don’t understand your audience’s needs and objectives, your messaging is likely to fall flat no matter which tactics you use.

Before building out your marketing funnel, take time to research your audience and their journey so you can make data-driven decisions about your marketing investments.

Ignoring the Top and Middle of the Funnel

It’s tempting to focus your marketing efforts on BoFU campaigns. After all, they tend to have the biggest payoff.

But if you don’t invest in the top or middle of the funnel, you’ll be stuck selling to prospects who aren’t ready to take action.

Instead, you need a full-funnel marketing strategy. Use your knowledge of your audience’s customer journey and the tactics I shared to develop a funnel that targets each stage.

Ending the Funnel at Conversion

For many marketers, the conversion stage is the main goal. But as important as this stage is, it doesn’t have to be the end goal.

By incorporating loyalty and advocacy into your funnel, you have the potential to create so many more opportunities for your business.

In addition to driving more revenue, it can increase customer lifetime value and decrease cost per acquisition.

Final Thoughts on Marketing Funnels

Building a successful marketing funnel isn’t rocket science. But it does require the right tactics for your target audience.

To get started, audit your customer journey. Identify where prospects are dropping off.

Then, use the tactics I shared to improve key parts of your funnel. Monitor metrics as you go, and keep iterating to improve your results.