The online funnel, sources, channels and content explained in one huge model

There’s a lot of talking about what content is the best, what source of traffic is the best, which social media gives the best return on investment, how much should you spend on AdWords, what kind of words should you buy, where does seo fit in, and what about all kind of different content should you make on your site and outside of your site?

For someone new in marketing online, whether it is in B2B, E-commerce or at an agency, it is easy to just fall into one field and blindly follow what influencers in that field teaches. Nothing wrong with specialization, becoming an expert in one field is often better than knowing a little about everything, but you need to know where in the big picture your piece of expertise fits in. The same goes for a buyer of marketing, it might nowadays be hard to know where to put the focus and what will give the right kind of results.

There are some models for explaining these things, and here is one made together with my college Joni that tries to visualize the big picture. I am going to explain it to you, feel free to comment or share your own thoughts or models. Here it is:

Traffic sources

We have two types of traffic sources, A: The Search (yellow / orange), which mostly is Google Organic and AdWords, and C: The “Targeted Display” (blue), which mostly is Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. With these channels we most likely reach all in our target group.

The hub for the funnel and content

The green, B; is your hub for everything, your website or ecommerce.

The more to the right we get in the picture, the closer to buy is a visitor.

We start with looking at the content of the site. In this model we have two kinds of content, we have content about people’s problems and challenges (that our product / service would solve), and we have content about the solution, which often are products, product categories, services, etc. Things you can buy or convert via.

B1 is content about challenges & problems, and helping people solve these. This is often blog posts, guides or similar. The idea is to grab long tail search traffic from Google and point them here, long tail organic (A1) or quite cheap AdWords traffic (A2) that not many other are targeting. You can also buy Facebook traffic to this step quite cheap (C1). The goal with the traffic is to get a big portion to move on to next step, the solution / product (B2). The people that drop off (the ones that do not go to B2) gets segmented into an audience that can be described as “have a problem, did not look at solution” (C2) via Analytics & FB pixel.

The product / solution part

B2 is the pages for the thing you sell or offer. This is product pages or product category pages, this is service-pages and lead generation pages. The only goal on this page is that the visitor should convert, buy the product or request a quote, etc. (that they move on to B3).

You get traffic to this step from Google Organic (A3) and AdWords (A4). This is the ideal traffic for this step, it’s people that have searched for a solution or a product, they are one step closer to buying than the ones searching for problems. This traffic usually has a great conversion rate if you are visible on the right words and your product / solution fit the visitors. The challenge here on the other hand is that this field have a lot more competitors doing SEO and buying traffic, and the click-prices from AdWords might be 10 time higher than in the earlier step. If you are in the right niche and have access to great SEO and AdWords optimization and big enough budgets, this might be the only step and only traffic you need to run the business. This is where I personally put most of my focus if the competition-situation still allow a big enough ROI. And by doing at least these things right already takes you very far.

You also get internal traffic to this step from the earlier step in your funnel, from the ones that did what we wanted on the problem/challenge phase.

The third way you get traffic to this step is from Facebook / Instagram (C2), from ads & content talking about the solution (being your product / service), targeted to the “have a problem, did not look at solution” group.

Now you have a chunk of highly targeted visitors on your product / solution pages. The goal is that they convert. Though, you will have a portion of drop-offs here too. Maybe they need time to decide, maybe they are comparing products from many different providers, maybe the timing was wrong, or maybe their kids woke up and they had to interrupt the funnel. The drop-offs on this stage get into the audience “Know about the product, did not buy” (C3).

The ones that did convert on step B2 (put the product in cart, went to signup page, etc.), but did not finish the conversion (did not reach thank-you page or become a customer) will also get into this audience.

For this audience you will post and advertise your product benefits, company benefits, reasons to buy, deals, reviews or tests on Facebook / Instagram &YouTube (C3). The goal with the traffic is the same, they should get a new chance to convert since they did not do that last time they visited.

The customers

The last step is customers. The ones that went through to the end. You might think that they are now out of the funnel since they completed it, but nothing could be more wrong. This group have bought something, they can buy again. This group can refer friends. This group is the one you have incredible amount of data about, which can be used for fine-tuning the other groups, creating lookalikes, letting AI’s pick to pieces and find similar ones, etc.

Good content (ads) to show this audience on Facebook & Instagram & email (C4) is special customer-deals, cashback for referring friends, and anything that will increase their lifetime value and get them to become an ambassador that talks well about you and recommends you to other.

There are probably a lot of other steps and audiences and sources than this, but most of the content and ads you create online will fit into one of these. Knowing your funnels, keeping website as a hub, and knowing the role of the traffic sources for different steps in the funnel are key points.

Next step is to add values to everything. But more about that another time.

We did not even talk about how you can build AI-generated converision-targeted lookalikes or fine-tune bids and AdWords positions based on customer data yet either. :) It was very theoretical. We did not go into how to automate steps and segmens either.

* Disclaimer: Having all of this set up brilliantly does still not help if your product / service sucks.

Do you have thoughts or comments or completely different views on the topic, feel free to comment! If you want to know more about how this way of setting up online marketing would fit your company, do not hesitate to contact me and I or some of my colleagues will gladly come over and tell you more!