Good question and you’re right, probably I can be more clear in explaining the concept of the marketing funnel, thanks, I’ll probably create a specific post for this, so stay tuned.

In a nutshell, marketing funnel—or sales funnel— is the ‘flow’ or ‘journey’ designed on your website, where a specific visitor should navigate from step a, b, c, and so on until they finally convert or leave your site. The steps should be designed according to the buyer journey’s stages, which I have discussed in the article: awareness, interaction, interest, and action.

For example, it can be something like this:

Awareness stage, step a: the site visitor stumbled upon your content or advertising and visit your site
Interaction stage, step b: we offer something valuable, for example, an ebook in exchange for the visitor’s contact information, mainly email address
Interest stage, step c: we promote other content pieces or offers that might interest them
Action stage, step D: we give this customer a limited-time offer to create a sense of urgency so they can finally convert

There can be more steps included and there can be many different ‘flows’ you can design. The main principle is that the fewer steps included in the funnel, the more people you can keep and convert.

This is just the basics of the marketing funnel, but hopefully, it’s clear enough to cover your needs. Again, stay tuned for our content covering this marketing funnel topic.

Thanks for the cool article, enjoyed it. Yet, I’m a little bit unclear about the marketing funnel section. What actually is a marketing funnel? Is it some kind of software we put on our site, or?

Hi there Winda, thanks for visiting!

You’re right, more and more queries now have featured snippets in their SERPs, but even when we rank for these spots, most of the time they won’t bring any traffic to our sites since the user is already satisfied with the information included in the snippet (which is the intention of the featured snippet in the first place).

However, there are indeed cases where being ranked as a featured snippet can be a very effective source of leads, for example, if you are a local business, being ranked on Google Maps result (a type of featured snippet) is very effective in generating traffic, leads, and sales. Also, being featured as the answer to a very relevant question for your niche can generate a lot of organic traffic indirectly due to brand exposure.

Hope it helps, and thanks for the suggestion.

I’d probably add that nowadays since many search queries on Google now result in rich snippets, we should also aim to get ranked in these rich snippet spots. Depending on your content and industry, there might be opportunities to generate leads from them.