Are marketing funnels really necessary?
Well, we have a lot of thoughts on this. In short, yes, marketing funnels should be a factor because they can be incredibly beneficial to grow your business and expand your audience.
With that said, funnel building can easily get overcomplicated and unsustainable. There are platforms out there that promise a simple solution for funnel building, but those likely aren’t the best option if you’re looking to operate your business holistically.
What is a Marketing Funnel?
A funnel is a marketing term for a lead generation or sales campaign. It gets the name because the goal of a funnel is to cast a wide net with your campaign, and move users through several marketing touchpoints to build a connection and ideally convert them into a loyal, long-term customer.
A funnel typically consists of one or more social media campaigns – either paid ads or organic marketing, a landing page, and a set of automated email marketing campaigns. This can certainly get more sophisticated, but that’s the basic structure.
Benefits of Funnels for Lead Generation
Marketing funnels are typically used as a way to quickly grow your audience or increase sales. Depending on what you’re offering, and if you’ve properly planned your launch, they can be incredibly effective.
Because of their effectiveness, there is a whole industry built around “helping” business owners simplify or consolidate their funnel operations.
3rd Party Funnel Building Software
These 3rd party funnel builder platforms offer all-in-one solutions for simple roll out. These programs can be great for business owners who don’t have a website yet, or aren’t able to easily edit their website. If you fall into one of those categories, then a funnel building platform could work well for you.
There are many cons to these platforms though that should be considered.
- Using a standalone funnel builder means you’ll likely be duplicating messaging from your website. If something needed to be updated, now you have two places to make those changes, this is not efficient and could be an issue.
- You’ll likely need to upload all your brand logos and image files to this new program as well, increasing the amount of digital storage space used for your business unnecessarily.
- You don’t own the content that’s stored on a 3rd party website. If they were to close down, would you lose everything? That’s a scary thought but it is a possibility!
If you’d like to operate more holistically and build a sales and lead generation process that’s repeatable and operational long term, then we definitely recommend a different solution – holistic marketing funnels.
Holistic Marketing Funnels
Dandelion’s concept of Holistic Marketing started because we were focusing on lead generation and retention with our client work. We started seeing how well it worked on an individual campaign level, and then we started asking, “what if we applied these ideas to everything in a business?”
Operating your marketing holistically means you already have a website that you’re regularly updating, you have engaging marketing emails and you’re actively working to new and improved offers for your audience. Holistic Marketing treats every piece of marketing almost like a mini funnel because you’re always ensuring you’re giving clear CTA’s to send traffic to your site, and you’re focused on giving them a thoughtful and personal experience no matter how they interact with your brand.
Viewing funnels as just larger versions of your normal holistic marketing efforts helps to cut out the overwhelm!
Let’s get planning! ❤️ Schedule a call with us here!
