marketing funnel
A model that describes a customer's journey from first awareness through consideration to purchase and loyalty.
Definition
The marketing funnel is a simplified picture of how people become customers. Stages are commonly named awareness, consideration and decision, sometimes extended with retention and advocacy. It helps teams match channels and messages to where people are in their journey, for example broad video for awareness and comparison content for consideration. Real journeys are less linear than the diagram suggests, so use it as a planning aid and not as a rigid law. Many teams replace the funnel picture with a loop or journey map, which is fine as long as the stages guide decisions about content and budget.
In a sentence
The agency mapped content to each stage of the marketing funnel.
Retargeting ads focused on people near the bottom of the funnel.
