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Marketing

Marketing Funnel

Sales Funnel | Conversion Funnel

Portrait of Lukas Horvath, co-founder of Roelu Studio
Lukas HorvathCo-founder

What is Marketing Funnel?

A marketing funnel is a model that maps the stages a prospect moves through on the way to becoming a customer. The classic version starts with awareness at the top, moves through interest and consideration in the middle, and ends with conversion and retention at the bottom. It is called a funnel because each stage has fewer people than the one before it.

Why it matters

The funnel metaphor is older than the internet and still useful, even though buyers no longer move through it in a straight line. It forces a marketing team to answer a basic question: at every stage, what is the next action we want the prospect to take, and does our site make that action obvious? Most B2B sites are top-heavy — beautiful brand pages, zero infrastructure for the middle and bottom. The visitor lands, gets impressed, and leaves with nowhere to go. Mapping the funnel exposes the gaps. Fixing the gaps is where revenue lives.

How it works

Marketing defines the stages — for B2B SaaS, often something like visitor, lead, MQL, SQL, opportunity, customer. Each stage gets a primary asset and a primary metric. Awareness might run on SEO content and paid ad campaigns, measured by sessions. Consideration might run on case studies and comparison pages, measured by demo requests. Conversion runs on the sales page and pricing page, measured by closed deals. Retention runs on email and product onboarding, measured by activation and renewal. Analytics tools track how many people make it from one stage to the next. Wherever the drop-off is steepest, that is the next thing to fix before anything else.

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