If you’ve ever read articles about starting a business, you’ve probably heard the term "marketing funnel." 

Like most sales-related buzzwords, marketing funnels seem weird and complex at first but are actually pretty simple. And you don’t need a dedicated team of marketers or a professional degree to work a marketing funnel into your business model. 

All you need to get started is this article, and then, once you're done reading, get some expert marketing advice from Whop creators.

You might even be using some elements of a marketing funnel already, and even if you aren’t, I bet you’ll be familiar with a lot of the concepts in this guide. 

After all, a marketing funnel isn’t really some fancy new thing. It’s just a model or a template that shows you how to build a really efficient and effective system for acquiring new customers. 

Now, let’s build ourselves a marketing funnel!

What is a marketing funnel?

A marketing funnel is a model that shows how companies capture leads and turn them into customers. 

It focuses on the customer journey, from when they first discover a brand right through to when they become a repeat customer. Marketing funnels help businesses understand what customers need from them at different points in the process. 

There are various different versions of the marketing funnel, some with more detail than others. For instance, some funnels stop at the "conversion" stage. This is when a lead makes a purchase and becomes a customer. 

Others keep going, focusing on loyalty and even advocacy (when a customer recommends your brand to others, which is easier to achieve with some affiliate marketing).

Key stages of a marketing funnel

Every type of marketing funnel includes the main three stages, often known as Top of the Funnel (ToFu), Middle of the Funnel (MoFu), and Bottom of the funnel (BoFu). I'll walk you through them below.

ToFu

This is the biggest group of people and they all have some kind of interest in the problem you solve. 

For example, if you sell air purifiers, your ToFu prospects are probably interested in topics like air quality, dust allergies, and learning how to make the air in their houses cleaner. 

They probably don’t know about your brand of air purifiers yet so it’s too early to show them in-depth product descriptions and reviews. Instead, you should aim to post informational content that answers their questions and gives them helpful advice. 

When it works well, this content will help build trust and encourage the reader to click on a link within the content or navigate to your homepage to find out more about your product.

MoFu

At this point, a prospect leaves the top of the funnel and reaches the middle. Rather than searching for general information, by this point they’ve usually decided that they want to find a way something to solve their problem. 

To carry on the previous example, they know that they want an air purifier, they just don’t know which one. 

To help them decide, you need to post content that provides lots of information about what makes a good air purifier, what brands of air purifiers are out there, and finally, your own product.

This could include ranking articles about the top air purifier brands, guides on the top features every air purifier should have, articles about different filter types, and other in-depth topics. 

While you should mention your own product in all of this commerce content, you can also create product overviews and detailed content exclusively about your product so your prospects have all the information they could possibly want. 

BoFu

When a prospect reaches the bottom of the funnel, it means they want to become a customer. 

Your content has convinced them that your product will solve the problem they have, and they’re ready to look at the product page. Good job!

The most important thing at this stage is to make the buying process as smooth and professional as possible. 

When they click on a link in your content or type your brand name into a search engine, the page they land on needs to look impressive, legitimate, and welcoming. This is why working with platforms like Whop is a great idea, as you can get a super legit-looking storefront without needing to spend time or money on setting it up.

You also need to make sure you have all your ecommerce bases covered. By that, I mean a good product description, good shipping options, good payment systems, a speedy website, etc. 

If you fail at any of these basics, the prospect could start to doubt your brand and end up looking somewhere else—and no one wants that. 

Why you should have a marketing funnel

Marketing funnels are the ultimate way to make sure you’re doing everything you can to capture and nurture potential customers. By walking through the step-by-step process, it’s easy to see what customers need and how you can provide it. 

We’ve all been there before when buying online. We have a problem (or just a craving) but it’s hard to find the right kind of product we want, or we’ve found a product but there’s a measurement or a feature that we need to know about but there just isn’t any information anywhere.

It's frustrating. That's how carts get abandoned and websites or apps get closed as we move on with our search. At some point, we get tired of Googling and just give up. 

Creating a proper marketing funnel can help you eliminate these kinds of problems and dead ends by making sure you have content, information, tools, and answers that cover every angle. 

It's a more subtle marketing technique than just outright posting ads for your product, but it works very well if it's done properly. You're helping customers make informed decisions, and people really appreciate that sort of transparency these days.

How to create a marketing funnel in 7 steps

Creating a marketing funnel requires a collection of different tools, systems, research, and content. 

It’s a very scalable model so whether you’re a big company or a solo entrepreneur, you can establish a funnel within your means and budget. 

Here’s what you need to do.

1. Define your target audience

target persona

Because marketing funnels are all about capturing your audience, it’s super important to know exactly who you want to capture. 

The phrase "target audience" can be a little misleading, though. It’s not about who you as the business owner want to target, it’s about your product and who can benefit from it.

You might make a product thinking about a certain type of person using it for a certain reason, but chances are there are more use cases than you first anticipated. Thinking about this is the first step as you create your target persona.

Going back to the air purifier example, the first use case you would think of is using the air purifier to improve air quality in your house, possibly because of allergies. But they can be used for other things, too. 

For example, air purifiers can be really useful for cat owners because they do a great job of filtering out particles and smells from litter boxes. 

By discovering extra use cases such as this one, you can start targeting a whole new group of people and ultimately sell more products to more people. 

2. Figure out what problems your audience is trying to solve

Whatever your product is, it will be connected to a wider range of topics and areas. To set yourself up as an expert in the field, you should create a catalog of content that covers all sorts of areas related to your product. 

Some of the problems you cover will link directly back to your product, but not all of them should. 

Your readers need to look at your trove of useful content and find lots of different, relevant tips. You don't want to offer thinly-veiled ads—you want to help people and convince them that your product or service is the best because you really know your stuff.

By helping potential leads solve the problems they have, you can establish yourself as a subject expert and a trustworthy brand. This will make people aware of you and increase the chances that they’ll come back when they need to buy something! 

3. Create ToFu content covering this problem space

whop blog

ToFu content sounds like some sort of a recipe blog, but in reality, it can come in a range of forms. In fact, you can make any kind of content you want as long as it meets certain criteria. 

Here are the main points:

  • It should cover a topic related to your product or service.
  • It should address some kind of problem or pain point and offer a solution OR provide information and explanations.
  • The focus should be on providing high-quality and valuable content.
  • There should be no (or minimal) mentions and details about your brand’s product.
  • There can be information about your general product category. 
  • You shouldn't be trying to sell anything. The idea is that you're offering something valuable for free. 

In terms of content types, you can make blog posts, infographics, webinars, podcasts, ebooks, social media clips, and basically anything else you can think of. 

The main goal of top-of-the-funnel content is to build your reputation, which means you need to provide as much value as possible to create a good impression and offer it up for free to reach as many people as possible.

If you need any help with content creation, there are all sorts of courses and communities on Whop that focus on mastering social media

From faceless reels to influencer marketing, you can learn how to game the algorithm and make videos people want to see. That's just a hop and a skip away from creating a solid foundation for your marketing funnel! 

4. Consider how your product solves the problem

Moving towards MoFu content, it's time to start thinking more about your own product and not just your general niche. 

If you’ve got some ToFu content or some brilliant ideas already, a good tactic is to work through them and consider which problems your product or service can solve, which it can be helpful for, and which are unrelated. 

You can also scope out some competitors to see what their MoFu content looks like and what angles they use to market their products. 

In the beginning, you should aim to cover all your bases, writing content for every kind of customer situation you can think of. 

As time goes by, you can use analytics and surveys to see where your customers are coming from and what they mostly use your product for. When you have this information, you can expand on the most popular areas to bring in even more organic traffic, which is the backbone of every digital marketing strategy. 

5. Create MoFu content that shows your product as the solution

whop blog mofu

MoFu content is all about educating readers about your brand and your product. It’s mostly aimed at people who have already shown some interest in your brand by visiting your home page or signing up for your email newsletter

Here are the main criteria for MoFu content:

  • It should focus on building relationships with leads who have shown an initial interest.
  • It should provide in-depth information about your product, from what it is to how it’s made and how it compares to its competitors.
  • It should use research and data to build trust and authority.
  • It should be transparent and honest, providing readers with an accurate sense of what your product can and can’t do.

This kind of content comes in the form of email marketing, product videos, research reports, online classes or tutorials, and product comparison guides. 

While this kind of content is definitely about your product, it should be more informational than promotional. You’re helping leads with the research they’ve chosen to do, not trying to push your stuff onto them.

You can also put some MoFu content, like product videos or tutorials, on social media sites or team up with influencers to create their own videos and tutorials using your products. 

This particular tactic kind of merges ToFu and MoFu concepts because it provides in-depth information on your product but also reaches new audiences that aren’t aware of your brand yet.

6. Create a great landing page

whop sell

Because Bottom-of-the-Funnel tactics aim to convert leads into customers, it’s about more than just content. 

You need a working storefront with a secure payment system, customer support, FAQ pages, user guides, and anything else a person might need to press that "checkout" button with full confidence.

The first part of this is your landing page, and if you don't have a website, then your storefront page on your marketplace of choice. This is the page your customer is taken to when they click on your link from a search results page or when they click your link in an article. 

The purpose of a landing page is to encourage people to take some kind of action. 

Lead-generation landing pages aim to get personal information from the visitor (usually an email address) for purposes like email newsletters or events. 

Click-through landing pages, on the other hand, want the visitor to click a button that will take them to a specific page—usually to start a free trial or to buy a featured product. 

Landing pages are important because they give visitors a simple and eye-catching focal point the moment they click on your link. 

You’re not throwing menus in their faces, bombarding them with small text, or giving them multiple things to look at—everything is focused on the single "desired action" you want your visitors to take. 

Your landing page should include a hero image, a headline, a value proposition, and a CTA (call to action) that makes things really simple for the visitor. 

7. Encourage customers to buy with BoFu marketing strategies

bofu marketing

Another thing you might expect to see when you first visit a website nowadays is a little popup offering you a discount in return for your email address. 

This kind of thing is called a "lead magnet," and they’re designed to encourage visitors to make a purchase now rather than later (the discounts don’t last very long). 

Lead magnets are a type of BoFu marketing tactic and you can tell because we’re finally getting salesy. 

No more "informational" or "non-promotional" content. When your leads are at the bottom of the funnel, it’s time to go hard and convince them to buy. 

The trick here is to provide the lead with all the information they could possibly need about your product. There’s nothing wrong with a product page that’s positively bursting with information, and that's because the people who aren’t interested just won’t scroll down that far. 

If your product is complicated, you can link to in-depth user guides and videos; if you’re big on sustainability you can link to information about materials and manufacturing. 

Include a FAQs section covering the questions people ask you the most, links to customer success stories, or even influencer marketing campaigns so customers can see your product in action and hear what people have to say. 

Include reviews (real ones only!), insert a comparison table if you have direct competitors you want to address, and include lots and lots of product images. 

Use Whop as part of your marketing funnel!

whop u

At its core, the marketing funnel is about two things: your content strategy and your ecommerce platform

The content captures your audience and pushes them down the funnel, and your platform helps you seal the deal by providing a safe and secure way to shop. 

That means, of course, you need an ecommerce platform that you can trust. That’s where Whop comes in. 

If you’re selling digital products, Whop has everything you need to create an amazing storefront. This storefront also doubles as a landing page that shows visitors your hero image, your product headline, a description, and a CTA to purchase. 

You can add discounts and sales for new customers using Whop’s popup promotion feature. This gives a limited-time discount to anyone who stays on your page for 45 seconds, encouraging them to take the plunge. 

You can also offer free trials or freebie content to let customers try before they buy (another great BoFu strategy)! 

Backing all of these features up is a safe and secure payment system that will keep your customers feeling comfortable and give them instant access to their digital goods. We'll take care of fulfillment and payments—you just focus on growing your business.

Whether you’re selling an exclusive membership, ebooks, downloadables, coaching services, or all of the above, Whop is the easiest and most flexible platform around. Oh, and did I mention that it's free to use? Whop just takes a percentage of your sales, so Whop doesn't make money unless you are making money.

Level up your marketing strategy and score more sales with Whop today.


FAQs

What is a marketing funnel?

The marketing funnel is a model or a plan that charts a customer’s journey with your company. It starts with them searching about a topic related to your brand and reading informational content you’ve posted, then you slowly introduce them to your brand and show the customer what your products can do for them. 

The more interested they get, the more in-depth the content gets. Then they’ll click on a link to your site, get drawn in by an exclusive offer, and buy your product. This is pretty much the "ideal" situation when it comes to customer acquisition, and a marketing funnel helps you maximize the number of times it happens. 

What kind of businesses use marketing funnels?

Pretty much every business! It doesn’t matter if you’re big or small or whether you sell physical or digital products; everyone can benefit from a marketing funnel. After all, it’s just a template—you can fill it with all kinds of ideas that are relevant to your company and your product. 

Is a marketing funnel something you buy?

It can be. You might see marketing funnels being sold as products, but what you’re really getting is more like a marketing funnel kit. 

These products usually come with some premade assets and visuals for lead magnets and maybe even a content schedule and social media templates. But it’s still up to you to plan out your funnel and fill these templates with content that’s relevant to your product.