How to build the perfect marketing funnel

How much water do you get? 🪣

Imagine five people sitting in a row on chairs, blindfolded. The person in front has a bucket of water full to the brim and passes it over their head to the back. The second person takes it. Because the handover is not perfect, water spills over the edge. The bucket gets emptier from person to person. The last person receives a few more centimetres of water.

In my opinion, this image describes everything that marketing is about: getting the bucket of water full first and then passing it on from person to person with as little loss as possible.

In this newsletter, I would like to introduce you to a simplified marketing funnel that I believe is suitable for (almost) every media organization - and will help you to get your marketing measures under control.

5 steps that every media founder should know

Funnel means funnel. A funnel visualizes the entire customer journey, i.e. the user's journey from initial contact to purchase. The main purpose of the funnel is to provide clarity: what steps does the user go through to complete the purchase?

Below you can see 5 stages that I find particularly important for media companies. They are not one hundred percent congruent with what is written in marketing textbooks on the marketing funnel:

Stage 1: Creating awareness

This is about generating the very first contact between your brand and your future user and making yourself known to the person.

Stage 2: Turning them into prospective customers

The aim here is to intensify the relationship between your brand and the future user. At the end of this funnel step, the person has been in contact with your brand two to five times, perhaps follows you on social media and has visited your website.

Step 3: Turning them into leads

This step is the most important for media offers. The aim here is to turn the contact into a lead. There are several ways to do this. A classic and very effective way is to collect the e-mail address so that you can continue working with it.

Stage 4: Turning them into subscribers

This stage of the funnel is where the purchase is concluded. This is where the prospect decides to take out a subscription from you or buy your product.

Stage 5: Turn them into superfans

In this funnel step, you turn subscribers into superfans. If you do a good job here, your users will renew their subscriptions and buy other products from your portfolio that you suggest to them.

Step by step: This is what the journey through the NN funnel looks like

To make the funnel logic described above a little clearer for you, I'll outline a typical user journey through our funnel below:

First stage:

Frequent first contacts with new narratives are a personal recommendation from a colleague or posts on Instagram or LinkedIn that end up in your own timeline. There is a classic call to read with a link to an article under almost every one of our posts. As a rule, the user does not visit our website directly, it takes several contacts first.

Second stage:

Two weeks later. The user stumbles across another post from us in their Linkedin timeline that they find valuable. He decides to follow us and visits our article page, where he learns more about the topic. At the bottom of the article page, he finds a text about how we work at Neue Narrative. He skims it and then leaves the page.

Third stage:

The user recently visits neuearrative.de more often. On the homepage, they find the option of downloading a complete issue as a PDF. To do this, they enter their e-mail address and sign up for our mailing list.

The user now receives three e-mails:

• one with the free issue as a PDF
• one with an explanation of why we are giving away our magazine in the first place: we are no longer on newsstands and are dependent on new people discovering us. In this mail we also write that many people who hold an issue of our magazine in their hands take out a subscription afterwards.
• one with an offer for our subscription

Fourth step:

Theuser decides to take out a subscription. After a few days, the first issue arrives in their letterbox. As we do not sell our current issues individually, but only offer subscriptions, this is often the first point of contact with our print magazine.

Fifth stage:

We accompany our user through their first time with the product with a mail section. We also invite them to subscribe to our newsletter for New Work. This is important because we only publish three times a year and don't want to be forgotten.

What do you do with it now?

The funnel gives you a basic structure to keep an eye on and improve your marketing measures along the funnel. You should regularly ask yourself the following questions at each stage of the funnel:

• What points of contact do I have with my users at each stage (e.g. social media channel, newsletter, workshops, etc.)?
• What are my most important key figures that I can use to measure success in the stage (e.g. email addresses collected, followers on Instagram, etc.)?
• What are my first measures to improve in this stage (e.g. doubling the frequency on social channels)?

I hope this post was useful for you!

Have a great week,
Martin from Neue Narrative