Growth Hacking Your Marketing Funnel: A Guide

Navigating the complexities of business growth is challenging, but a well-structured growth hacking funnel can be your roadmap to success. While 65% of all businesses fail within the first decade, your venture doesn’t have to be part of this statistic. The key to longevity and prosperity lies in optimizing your marketing funnel to capture leads, acquire new customers, and ultimately, boost your revenue.

So, what exactly is a growth hacking funnel, and how does it integrate into your existing marketing strategies? This guide will delve into the intricacies of funnel growth hacking, offering actionable insights to fortify your business for the long haul. Keep reading to unlock the secrets of sustainable business growth.

Narrow in on Your Target Audience and Capture Leads

Before you start learning about growth hacking, you should first understand what a marketing funnel is. A marketing funnel is a marketing plan that aims to capture potential customers and turn them into real customers and perhaps even repeat customers. It is called a funnel because of the way the model of this plan is shaped.

At the top of the funnel are the widest extent of your company’s reach and your wider goals.

For example, brand awareness might be at the top of your marketing funnel, as this is quite an expansive goal. As you move further down and into this marketing funnel, the goals will become more specific and meaningful.

At the middle of the funnel, you might focus on spurring potential customers to make purchases from your brand. You can do this by sending out emails, discounts, and so on. At the bottom of the funnel, you will find the most specific goals and goals that you would not be able to achieve without first achieving the other goals at the top of the funnel.

The Top and Bottom of the Funnel

For example, the bottom of your marketing funnel may consist of customer loyalty. In this case, customers like your brand so much that they decide they will only shop from you and not your competitors. Of course, this is a hard goal to achieve, but the goals at the bottom of marketing funnels tend to be difficult anyway.

If you want to growth hack your entire funnel, you will need to consider a few important factors. You will still need to focus on a certain target audience, but you will want to ask yourself a few essential questions about your audience.\

For example, what kind of problems do buyers typically have?

What can customers live without, and what do they need? You can answer these questions by gathering significant data from those who may buy from your brand in the future. By doing this, you can learn about what kind of product customers tend to buy, how much they usually spend, how often they buy products, and so on.

Getting a Clear Picture of Your Audience

This is really the only way you can get a clear picture of your target audience. Once you capture and identify your target audience in this way, it will be much easier to market to them. Keep in mind that a marketing funnel is all about directing potential customers to the action of making a purchase from you.

To accomplish this, you will need to persuade them and guide them in different ways so that your brand in particular looks more appealing than your competitors. This first stage of the growth hacking funnel is sometimes known as the acquisition stage, or the suspects stage. This is the point at which you will identify your target audience so that you can conduct more targeted marketing efforts later on.

After you rein in your target audience and attract them to your brand, you’ll then need to find a way to urge these potential customers to perform meaningful actions on your company site. This is often known as the activation stage.

Taking Advantage of the Activation Stage

The activation stage does not necessarily involve turning potential customers into real customers, although it can certainly lead to that. Instead, this stage focuses on getting the potential customers even more interested in what your brand has to offer. Keep in mind that these people will already be somewhat interested in your brand.

Suppose that your brand produces onboarding software. If your target audience consists of people who need onboarding software, these people will obviously be interested in your brand without much nudging on your part. The challenge is showing that your brand is much more desirable compared to competing brands.

After all, regardless of what business you have or what industry you’re in, there will always be competitors on your heels ready to steal your potential customers. To make sure that you stay in the lead, you need to figure out how to engage your target audience. You can do this in several ways, such as getting them to sign up for newsletters, email lists, and so on.

Engage Your Target Audience

You can also urge them to sign up for free demos of your software or whatever else your brand might have to offer. The point is to get these potential customers involved to a superficial degree. This involvement will get them slightly more interested in your brand, and it will give you an edge over the competition.

These potential customers might input their personal information into the site as well. Whatever the case, as long as these people engage with your site in some way, you can start gathering even more data from them. You will learn more about their searches, product preferences, budgets, and so on.

All of these analytics are vital for focusing on your target audience. The more specific you are with your marketing, the more likely you will be to turn your potential customers into real customers. This, of course, will not happen overnight.

Gather New Customers

You may need to wait weeks and sometimes even months before you gather enough data to move further down the growth hacking marketing funnel. You may need to change a few of your marketing strategies along the way to make sure you stay on top of your target audience. Once you do that, you will notice that more and more people will start to buy goods or services from your brand and become customers.

Once you start to amass more and more customers, you will have to start thinking about how you can keep those customers coming back to you for more. This is the next stage of the marketing funnel, often known as the retention stage.

How to Retain New Customers

Getting new customers is not all that difficult, but keeping them around tends to be a much harder task. After all, why should a customer come back to your brand when there are so many competitors out there to try? It is important to retain customers because a person who shops at your brand only once won’t be much help to your brand’s overall success.

On the other hand, if you have hundreds or thousands of returning customers, you will have a steady flow of business. The trick is to tempt your customers with something that will urge them to return to your brand and do more shopping at a later time. Email marketing is an excellent way to do this.

Suppose that a customer places an order for one of your products. As soon as this happens, you should target this customer at once by sending out an email. For example, an email with a discount for the customer’s next order is almost always an enticing offer for most customers.

Offer Discounts

You can offer a certain percentage off the customer’s next order or offer free shipping for a limited time. Whatever the case, discounts of this kind are very helpful because customers love to save money wherever they can. Of course, you don’t always need to use discounts as a crutch in your marketing funnel.

You can use other methods, such as simple welcome emails or thank you emails. By making a customer feel appreciated and welcomed, that customer will be far more likely to shop with your brand in the future. Keeping your customers informed is also significant.

Suppose that you are going to have a site-wide sale for all of your products. Of course, you will want your previous customers to know all about such a sale. In fact, they should be the first to know.

Keeping Your Customers

If they have already gone to the trouble of placing an order with you in the past, they will be more likely to make another order in the future compared to potential customers. By sending out emails to keep your target audience informed, you will find that you will have much better luck keeping your customers around.

Keep in mind that you don’t need to send all of these emails out on your own. There are automated types of software that will let you do this with ease. There are other ways you can automate your marketing funnel as well, such as with sales, notifications, and so on.

Referrals and Increasing Your Profits

Once you have returning customers, your marketing funnel will be in great shape. It will be easier than ever to keep your business thriving. However, you shouldn’t get too comfortable at this stage, since there are still many ways in which you can improve your marketing funnel with effective marketing and growth hacking.

Once you have a steady supply of customers, there will still be room to branch out and reach new potential customers. You can make this much easier by using referrals. Referrals use the power of your existing customers to attract potential customers.

If one of your customers refers someone else to your brand, that new person will be far more likely to give your brand some business. This will take some weight from your own marketing plans and make the whole process much easier. Of course, you shouldn’t let referrals do all the work for you.

Analyze Previous Strategies

It is still important to stick to the foundation of your marketing strategies, be it organic or paid. Besides referrals, you will always want to keep track of your profits and find ways to keep increasing your income. You can do this by analyzing the parts of your marketing plan that made the biggest impact and most revenue.

Some marketing strategies, of course, will work better than others depending on your target audience. Some might prefer email promotions, while others might prefer text notifications and so on. Whatever the case, it is critical to look back on what parts of your marketing funnel helped your brand the most.

Once you figure that out, you can recreate some of these factors and keep your business going strong. That way, you can be sure that your business will be in good shape for many years to come.

Improving Your Growth Hacking Funnel

If you want to give your business a serious boost, a growth hacking funnel is what you need to try. If you don’t have a plan for marketing your business, your brand won’t go anywhere. But if you target your audience, engage them, and turn potential customers into real customers, you’ll have a great launchpad to work from.

From there, all you need to do is retain your customers and keep using strategies that work best for your brand. To learn more, contact us here at David Taylor Digital.