Marketing funnel with influencers: from awareness to conversion

Marketing funnel sounds like a fancy term, but its basic features have existed since 1924 and describe nothing more than the customer journey from the first point of contact to the purchase. Why do brands still attach such great importance to marketing funnels today? The basic concept of a customer journey was, is and will remain unchanged. It just depends on what you do with what you know about this journey. The basis is always 3 phases:

• Awareness: Your brand gains attention from potential customers and enables initial touchpoints. Your target audience will realize that they have a need or problem that can be solved.
• Consideration: Potential customers recognize that your brand can solve their previously identified problem and get to know products or services.
• Conversion: Your brand convinces interested parties that your product or service is the best solution, so that at the end of the journey there is a successful purchase.

Since it is possible to lose prospects at any point on this journey - they decide that a problem does not exist, the product is not the right solution for them or there is simply no trust in the brand - companies are faced with the challenge of keeping as many prospects as possible in the funnel. Influencers can help with this for several reasons:

• They build trust with their followers instead of using traditional advertising pressure.
• Their presence on multiple platforms or cooperation with multiple influencers creates multiple touchpoints where potential customers can come into contact with your brand and products.
• Influencers are particularly close to the target group because they have carefully built their community. Micro and nano influencers in particular have a high level of influence in their niches.

In order for a marketing funnel with influencers to achieve the desired success, different content formats and types of influencers are needed at different phases of the journey. As Influencer Marketing Agency, we have perfected which methods work when and which KPIs brands can use to track them through numerous campaigns with brands like Emma or HelloFresh and are giving you an overview today.

The first step is to create awareness of your brand. The goal here is to make the brand and products or services known. The target group receives initial information and answers to their questions. In this phase, influencers have the specific task of generating visibility, making the brand known through storytelling and creating initial points of contact.

What is most important is that the aim is to arouse curiosity and interest with the content. It's not about convincing the target group to buy. For example, Instagram stories, integrations on YouTube or Twitch, in which general information about the brand and services are shared, are suitable. Unboxing videos, for example, are suitable for products.

These KPIs can provide insights into performance and success:

• Follower growth on the brand page
• Impressions
• Range
• Brand Search Uplift

The second phase of the funnel is all about strengthening trust in the brand and encouraging the target group to engage with the products or services. Ultimately, this should encourage purchasing interest by making potential customers understand that your product is exactly the right solution to their problem. Influencers have the necessary closeness to their followers and can strengthen trust in the brand through storytelling and experience reports across multiple touchpoints. Suitable content formats include:

• How-to videos
• Product comparisons
• Long format content via YouTube
• Series & recurring creators
• Giveaways
• Behind the scenes content

Success tracking in this phase is about increasing engagement and ensuring that prospects stay with the brand for longer. This can be tracked using various KPIs:

• Engagement rate
• Likes to Comments Ratio
• Followers on the brand page
• Length of stay
• Saves
• Clicks to the website

In the final phase, interested parties can become customers. It is therefore important to make it as easy as possible for potential customers to make a purchase and, ideally, to feel committed to the brand afterwards. In this phase, influencers clearly communicate the offer, encourage people to buy and offer incentives such as discounts. Experience has shown that success is particularly evident with influencers who have a high level of trust from their followers - these are often micro and nano influencers who have fewer followers but a particularly strong community on social media platforms such as Instagram. Various content formats are possible in this phase:

• Product reviews
• Testimonials
• Offers and promotions
• Discount codes
• Affiliate links
• Story Ads

Tracking, on the other hand, is now about actual sales. Possible KPIs are:

• Clicks
• Purchases
• New customers
• Leads

The more positively your customers rate their entire customer journey, the higher the likelihood that they will become existing customers and buy again.

Our tip: Optimize and scale the marketing funnel across phases

In practice, the individual phases of the marketing funnel are often blurred. Awareness campaigns can be running while other influencers are already achieving conversions. Here it always depends on the specific goals of influencer marketing, as well as factors such as schedules and budget in the company. The most important thing is that you are aware of the phases you are currently in, what goals you are focusing on and where you want to go. In our campaigns with brands like Emma, mymuesli and HelloFresh we have learned:

• It's worth thinking funnel phases together. This way we create recognition and can learn from previous campaigns, creating a learning curve.
• Testing structures significantly increase the success rate. Different platforms, different influencers, different hooks and CTAs are tested so we can clearly measure what works and what will work differently next time.
• If a campaign was particularly successful because the influencer greatly increased brand awareness or achieved a particularly large number of conversions, it often makes sense to book them again after a while.

A smart marketing funnel with influencers accompanies your potential customers from the first touchpoint that generates interest to the final purchase and, in the best case, even beyond. The trick is to really understand the customer journey and implement the right content formats at the right time with the right influencers. Also important: Think of the marketing funnel as a coherent story, not just as individual levels. This way you can build your influencer marketing campaigns on numbers and performance and learn from each individual phase and campaign.

Would you like to know how you can specifically use marketing funnels and influencer marketing for your brand and find out what wins are possible for you? Then let’s start with a non-binding conversation!