How to Develop an Effective Marketing Funnel Strategy Powered by AI and Automation

Why do some online shops have tens of thousands of monthly visitors, but only a handful of them are actual buyers? This is because a lot of brands have not optimized the customer’s purchasing journey. That is why effective marketing funnel strategies are a must-do, for any brand looking to increase sales.
However, creating a marketing funnel strategy that can make a brand competitive is not as easy as it once was. But, with the technological boom in AI and automation, we can utilize these technologies to create the perfect funnel strategy for our businesses.
In this article, we will delve into how to develop such a funnel strategy with the help of AI and all the benefits coming from this kind of automation.
Let’s have a look!

Why Marketing Funnel Strategies Matter

Even though AI can be a huge help in developing marketing strategies, we still need to have a good understanding of the concept and the importance of why we do it. So, let’s expand on why marketing funnel strategies matter.

Boosts Brand Awareness

Every business looks for ways to boost its brand awareness because it is one of the more effective ways to build trust with customers. It’s no secret that many consumers make their purchasing decisions based on the popularity of the brand name. This is because customers need to trust a brand before they purchase their products.
A effective marketing funnel strategy targets an audience with the right ads, social media posts, emails, and questionnaires that can build brand awareness.

Improves Conversion Rate

With a stronger brand presence, a website will get a lot more visitors. However, for a business to see actual profits, these visitors need to be converted into buyers.
An effective funnel provides visitors with targeted discounts or other offers to boost the conversion rate.

Returns Customers

An effective funnel can also have a significant impact on customer retention. This is usually achieved through offering high-quality products/services, loyalty programs, free shipping, and establishing an overall smooth customer experience. These returning customers are then more profitable, effectively increasing business profits.

The Five Effective Marketing Funnel Strategy Stages

Usually, marketing funnels are explained through five different stages for easier understanding of the process. So, let’s have a look at those five stages so we can figure out how to target them with AI and automation:

Awareness – this is where we build the customer’s awareness of our brand name or product. AI can be of help here by analyzing data and segmenting the audience.
Interest – the stage when customers see interest in a brand and the products they offer. For this stage, AI can provide valuable insights for personalization.
Consideration – the stage when customers start considering purchasing the products. Here, AI insights can help smoothen a customer’s browsing and purchasing experience.
Intent – here, customers’ decisions will point toward a purchase. The usual signs of this are: adding to cart, trying coupons, and contacting the sales team. AI chatbots are the perfect solution for this stage.
Purchase – the point where the customer finalizes their purchase. Here, we provide the customer with a smooth checkout experience. AI can further improve this experience by analyzing customer behavior and making real-time changes to the checkout store.

Defining Your Goals

With a deeper understanding of the importance of effective marketing funnel strategies and their stages, the next step is to define the goals that we want AI to help us achieve. Once we have these goals set up, we can work towards optimizing the AI to improve the funnel.

Generally, with a marketing funnel strategy, we’re looking to improve on the following: brand awareness, site traffic, lead generation, engagement rate, conversion rate, and customer retention. However, we can’t expect that a funnel strategy will improve every single goal in mind. So, that is why focusing on specific goals can be useful.
For example, if a business is looking to increase its brand presence, it should focus on increasing its social media presence to improve brand awareness which will lead to increased website traffic. Once the website traffic reaches the expected goal, the effective marketing funnel strategy can be optimized to focus on finalizing purchases and retaining customers.

Effective Marketing Funnel Strategy Insights Through AI Data Analysis

One thing is for certain: AI excels at data analysis and this is the perfect tool for optimizing almost every aspect of a effective marketing funnel strategy.
AI can provide a deeper understanding of an audience by analyzing their behavior, interactions, previous purchases, and interests. Demographics can be an important bit of information as well. With this analysis, the audience can then be segmented (based on their preferences) and targeted with specific marketing efforts. This can significantly improve the awareness stage we previously covered.
AI can also be used for predictive analysis, i.e. predict customer behavior, which businesses can use to further optimize social media profiles, website designs, ads, and more.

Automated Content Creation

Content creation is one of the most powerful tools for creating leads, boosting SEO, and growing brand awareness. It also educates customers and opens up room for engagement which then creates trust.
However, creating unique content, search engine optimized, and paired to fit well with the brand’s voice is both a difficult and an expensive process as well. Fortunately, with the latest advancements in generative AI, content creation has been considerably simplified.
Even though AI-generated content can be easily detected, it can still be utilized as a baseline when creating blog posts, videos, or posts.
But, that’s not all!
AI can also be utilized to further optimize content by ensuring it’s grammatically correct, improving its readability, and helping with SEO. AI can use algorithms and workflows to perfect scheduling, publishing, and content distribution. This will considerably reduce the resource requirement for businesses, allowing them to focus time on other aspects of the marketing funnel strategy.

AI-Powered Customer Support

Customer support is an essential feature of any online shop. It retains customers, improves customer loyalty, increases word-of-mouth marketing, and increases sales which means it can have a huge impact on company profits.
One way customer support every business can optimize their customer support is through live chat. Most customers prefer live chat support over any other form of support. In fact, live chat has the highest customer satisfaction than any other communication channel.

AI Chatbots

To be one step ahead of the curve, businesses can power their live chat with AI. Specifically, with AI chatbots. AI chatbots can provide 24/7 support to customers by answering the most commonly asked questions by adding chatbot for whatsapp, website and other social media platforms and guiding customers to finalize their purchases. They essentially remove response and wait times, which is a huge plus for any customer.
Considering that the intent stage of the marketing funnel is where a lot of customers are lost, an AI chatbot can be a game changer.

Use AI to Create the Optimal Shopping Experience

Website design and user interface are two very important factors when it comes to conversation rates and customer retention. The whole shopping experience needs to be straightforward, smooth, and as detailed as possible.
Fortunately, AI can help here as well as it can analyze and predict user behavior which can then be used to further optimize the website’s design that best fits the customers. Some hosting websites provide AI tools that can generate website designs, retouch (enhance) images or videos, generate titles, and product descriptions, as well as do search engine optimization.
AI can also tweak the site’s settings to optimize performance and loading speeds which can also have a significant impact on customer satisfaction.

AI-Analyzed Performance

To further enhance a marketing funnel strategy, we need to have a good understanding of its performance. Analyzing its performance shows us exactly how and where we can make further improvements to consistently boost profits.
With AI improvements over the last couple of years, analytics is both accessible and affordable for smaller businesses as well. Tools like Google Analytics or Power BI can be used to quickly turn data analytics into digestible visuals.
Here are some key performance indicators we can track with AI to analyze overall performance:

Social Media Engagement

Social media presence is an integral part of a successful marketing funnel, so analyzing the performance here can be very valuable. We can track profile growth, likes, shares, comments, and redirects. By measuring the success here (or lack thereof), we can get an understanding of which changes are needed to improve engagement on social media profiles.
Website Traffic
Another huge factor that points toward a successful marketing funnel is the monthly or yearly website traffic. Not only do these visitors equate to potential buyers, but they also lead to increased visibility in search engines and social media platforms as well.
Website traffic analysis can help brands gain insights into their audience, and their behavior and then tailor the website’s design, payment process, as well as the entire marketing funnel strategy.

Website Traffic

Another huge factor that points toward a successful marketing funnel is the monthly or yearly website traffic. Not only do these visitors equate to potential buyers, but they also lead to increased visibility in search engines and social media platforms as well.
Website traffic analysis can help brands gain insights into their audience, and their behavior and then tailor the website’s design, payment process, as well as the entire marketing funnel strategy.

Automating Workflow

To successfully execute a well-developed marketing funnel strategy, businesses have to optimize their workflow. However, manually optimizing the workflow within a company is a very time-consuming and costly process as well.
This process can be simplified with one of the many workflow automation tools. They can save time by taking over many menial tasks, freeing up time for managers and other higher-ups to focus on other more important tasks.
Here is a short overview of some of the benefits of workflow automation:

– Removes human error from the equation – with an automation tool, the risk of human error is considerably reduced which can improve productivity and wasted resources which leads to a more effective marketing funnel strategy.
– Easier task completion – Automation tools provide all employees with a clear overview of all their finished, upcoming, and pending tasks. So, this kind of automation not only does it makes management processes easier, but also makes things easier for employees.
– Improved collaboration – automation tools also provide communication channels for employees which can effectively improve collaboration and productivity between them.

Conclusion

To summarize, businesses can leverage AI and automation in many aspects which in turn leads to an effective marketing funnel strategy. Most importantly, AI should be implemented for data analysis to understand customer behavior, their needs, and preferences, and to optimize the customer’s experience based on this information. Better customer experience then leads to considerably better conversion rates and more returning buyers.