8.3 million – this is how many users trust Visme. Visme provides tools for creating presentations, graphs, charts, infographics, video, and more. Now, they’re joining us for our “Learn from” series to talk about the power of visuals across the marketing funnel.
Visme, the stage is yours!
There are cases when business owners create a product or service that seems quite competitive on the market. But it doesn’t get any recognition among consumers.
Why does it happen?
One simple reason: those businesses didn’t create a marketing funnel that would reorganize an entire business strategy.
How to do this?
In this post, you will find out how to create a marketing funnel from scratch and sustain a buyer’s journey with the help of visuals.
Let’s cut to the chase.
The Essence of a Marketing Funnel
Right before you start creating a marketing funnel for your business, you should know what it actually is.
The marketing funnel (or a sales funnel) represents a system of attracting and converting potential leads into paid customers.
As a rule, a classic marketing funnel includes four main stages – awareness, interest, consideration, and conversion. However, some marketing experts prefer to add one more stage called “retention” as well.
Why is this marketing mechanism compared to a “funnel”? Because there is a tendency that your potential leads might “drop out” at a certain stage of the funnel. And here is an illustrative example of what it means.
Let’s look at this Single Grain funnel. It has “Sale” instead of “Conversion”, but the logic behind stays the same. Also, there is an example of how you can map your content marketing strategy across the funnel so that you don’t leave anyone out.
Now, imagine you launched a website that offers tools for creating infographics.
One of your target keywords has 200 searches per month, worldwide. In other words, 200 people are searching for “infographic tools”. 
Let’s say your website shows up in the first organic results for “infographic tools” and that 70 out of 200 people click on your website and see that you offer a 50% discount for purchasing the second month of using your tool. Consequently, 50 out of 70 people show an interest in this discount, and 30 out of 50 use it eventually.
Now, here’s our funnel: 200–>70–>50–>30.
Any marketing funnel has its difficulties that you must know about. Now, let’s run through each stage of the marketing funnel and find out how to use visuals to make the buyer’s journey more eye-appealing.
1. The Awareness Stage
The marketing funnel starts with the stage called “awareness.” At this stage, people get familiar with your brand or product for the first time.
There are different ways people could hear about your brand. Let’s review the most common ones:
- Facebook advertising
- Finding your brand on Google or Bing organically
- Product reviews
- Listening to some podcast where your brand gets mentioned
- Watching some video on YouTube where your product has been reviewed
- Recommendations (aka word of mouth)
- Reading a piece of content where your service has been featured
Now, how can you persuade your target audience that the service you offer can solve the issues they have?
And how can visuals help out?
Let’s find out!
- Keyword Ranking on Google
You wouldn’t deny that the first place people come to find the information they need is Google. This search engine is a cradle for whatever people need. Therefore, people try to find solutions to the problems they have.
Since your service solves a certain problem, it must be displayed on Google for sure.
But before Google starts to show up your brand, you must explore what search queries your potential customers use.
Thanks to having an opportunity to use different marketing tools, you will be able to find these target keywords easily. For example, the Keywords Explorer tool from Ahrefs helps a lot.
How to find target keywords your audience type on Google?
Let’s say, you’ve created a help desk software that helps bring personalization to customer interactions by using a help desk solution. You know that there are a few seed keywords related to your service, like “help desk”, “online support”, “WordPress support chat“, etc. 
Your goal is to explore as many business-related keywords as you can and use them in your strategy.
A single query “WordPress support chat” has 17 keyword ideas. The result isn’t impressive but you can spread up your list of keyword ideas by analyzing other keywords.
When you will have target keywords, you must prioritize them and brainstorm topic ideas for your content marketing efforts. These topics can be used in different forms of visuals.
For instance, you can create a flowchart that would illustrate the benefits of using live support software.
- Don’t forget about building brand awareness on YouTube
YouTube is an ideal platform for building awareness visually. You can’t neglect this fact promoting your product.
Since lots of B2B and B2C companies use visual content to amplify their brand awareness, you shouldn’t be an exception in this case. Plus, videos are one of the most working types of visual storytelling marketing approaches you should be armed with.
First things first, you must find out what your target audience is searching for on YouTube. What video content they prefer to watch. What keywords they use to find the information.
If you are out of video content ideas, check out what your competitors upload on their channels. This will give you some hints in what direction to move.
How often do you need to upload the videos?
It depends on your time, budget, and team that could handle this.
Try to stick to uploading a few videos per week. That would be fine for your start.
One more advantage of using YouTube for building brand awareness is that makes the process of content creating far easier in terms of suggesting the topics.
For example, here at Visme, we repurpose some topics that we cover on our blog into video content. 
We refresh the topic by adding some new tips, strategies, or whatever useful information it requires. And record a video.
As you can see, YouTube is the “first-go” platform for building awareness with visual video content.
- Build awareness across online communities
Online communities exist to help people find answers to the questions both Google and YouTube can’t deal with. Especially if people want to discuss some topic in detail.
If you spend your time on Reddit or Quora, you will see that people discuss whatever topics they want. Yet they are looking for some solution to the issues they have.
While your service or product is the solution people search for, you should let them know about it. However, these online communities have strict rules when it comes to product promotion. Thus, you should be familiar with the rules and suggest your service gently.
For example, you can participate in some discussion and illustrate a visual element that would reflect data or the information you want to share in the thread.
In the example above you can see a map that provides certain information related to the topic of the thread. While this information is important to the audience, there is a space for a slight promotion. Like mentioning a free map generator tool that helped create this exact map.
You don’t violate the rules of the community and create a buzz around your service at the same time.
2. The Interest Stage
The second stage of the marketing funnel is “interest.” At this stage, your target audience already knows about your product. What’s more important, people start to connect your product with the issue they have. Consequently, your potential customers want to explore more in-depth information on the subject.
How could it be reflected in terms of search queries people type on Google?
Instead of searching for “how to conduct keyword research”, people would be interested in exploring “what is search volume”, “what is keyword difficulty.”
Furthermore, your target audience starts to show their interest to the experts within the niche by delving into the subject. Therefore, you can become an influencer they would love to follow.
To conclude, the stage of interest has two priorities you should be focused on – rank for the specific inquiries and become an expert within the niche.
Let’s see how to accomplish these two goals.
- Becoming a niche influencer
The true influencer possesses the strength of words. This person must improve people’s knowledge and cover all the aspects related to the business.
Remember that you can’t consider yourself as the influencer if you promote your product or brand only. Your activity must go beyond focusing on your brand.
You should guide your target audience through the marketing funnel by creating strong friendly relationships. You must convince people that you want to help them solve their issues. But not to force them to buy your product.
Therefore, communicate with your target audience using social media channels. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are the most important channels where you should be present. But if your business requires you to promote your product in a visual way, you should use Instagram and Snapchat.
For example, you own an online store that sells music equipment. From a technical standpoint, it makes sense to write blog posts that would cover some music features. But from a consumer standpoint, it would be far better to represent this type of product unit via visuals.
How can you use these “visually-appealing” social channels as a niche expert?
- a) Tell more about the industry you’re involved in
- b) Don’t shy away from mentioning your competitors (any expert must not hide a fact of other competing brands within the niche)
- c) Invite brand ambassadors to be featured on your channels
- d) Talk to your audience and solve the issues people have
- Rank for the specific inquiries
What does it mean to be a good businessman?
It means having a complete understanding of the issue your target audience has. However, there are cases when your potential customers might need your additional help in exploring their consumer problems as well.
For instance, the representatives of your target audience are interested in creating their information more eye-catchy. They are aware of mixing written posts with some visuals. They, even, know that repurposing their content into infographics would help them hit the jackpot.
Eventually, there is a dilemma. Either hire a graphic designer who would help with creating infographics or go to Google to find the solution.
Likely, you offer a service that helps create content more attractive by enriching it with various visuals. Among these visuals, your target audience might find out not just about implementing infographics but charts, flowcharts, graphs, maps, etc.
Therefore, people start searching on Google such queries like “how to create infographic”, “how to make presentations with images”, and lots of other queries related to your business.
Your goal is to give the answers to these questions. And since you want people to choose the right service that would help solve their issues, you can promote your toolset slightly.
Just like here at Visme we do.
We created a post that covers the process of creating flowcharts for whatever business you need. We promote our own flowchart maker tool and show how to use it in this post.
This type of product promotion looks organically. Since we answer the direct question of our target audience “how to create flowchart” and educate them along the way.
As you can see, you kill two birds with one stone. You educate and help find the right solution. Your target audience gets interested in your service.
3. The Consideration Stage
This stage is critically important. At this stage, your potential customers decide whether to choose your product or opt for the competitors.
Assume that a person knows that your service can solve the issue that appeared. Nevertheless, this consumer also knows that there are other alternatives he or she can review.
Your goal is to persuade people to choose your service.
How to achieve this goal?
By following these two tips.
- Prove your audience that your service stands out against other same products
Practice shows that the services offered in the same niche are almost the same. Except for some features and marketing strategies used to promote the service.
You must prove to people that your product is the only solution they need so badly.
Show your uniqueness. Remember that actions speak louder than words. For instance, our company has some great achievements that help us stand out against our competitors.
a) 16+ animated graphs and charts
b) Opportunity to insert video and third-party content
c) 900+ layouts slides library
d) Opportunity to build custom infographics from pre-made content blocks
What’s more important, our focus is on the educational aspect of the work. We create guides, tutorials, and video content that have a single goal – educate our target audience.
- Dominate in the SERP with modified keywords
You as a consumer of whatever service or product use modified keywords to find the best option for yourself.
The same do your potential customers. They want to find the best solution for their issues. Thus, they use modified keywords like “best”, “top”, “vs”, etc.
Optimize the content you create for such specific keywords. This hack is not one of the global SEO trends but you will benefit from it for sure. Visually you can create a comparison chart or infographic that would show the difference between your service and your main competitors.
4. The Conversion Stage
The final stage of the marketing funnel is conversion. At this stage, people become your paid customers. And your goal is to induce potential customers to get converted.
How to do this?
You must offer something valuable to people who are willing to become your customers but haven’t done this step yet.
Offer some discounts, perks, or using free tools. It is completely up to you.
For example, our company follows a policy that allows any person to use Visme services free of charge. This person is supposed to create an individual account and there is no need in providing information on a credit card. But if there is a necessity of using premium tools, the person must upgrade the account. What’s more important, Visme suggests an option that saves 40% of your money if you choose an annual plan.
As it has been already stated, it is completely up to you how to lean potential customers to purchase from you. Meanwhile, take into account these suggestions:
- Create demo videos to show how to use your service in a step-by-step manner
- Offer trials
- Run “Black Friday” days
- Ask people to invite their friends who would become paid customers (give them some reward in return)
How can you use visuals at this stage?
Create any kind of discount or a “Black Friday” event with the help of using design templates.
Give a final nudge to your potential customers by applying such kinds of visuals in the practice. And you will see that it helps you drastically.
To Sum Up
It is impossible to imagine a business that doesn’t have a marketing funnel crafted. It helps move your business ahead and attract more customers.
Visual components in this process are critically important. They affect people and incline them to choose your product.
The goal of this guide was to show you how you can mix your marketing efforts with various visuals at every stage of the funnel. Use these tips in practice and get more customers you deserve.
Sergey Aliokhin
Sergey Aliokhin is a Community Outreach Manager at Visme. When not at work, he likes to spend his time with family, read books on science-fiction, practice playing the bass, and visit the gym.
