Marketing funnel
The Marketing Funnel: The Four Stages, What to Publish at Each, and the Metric That Tells You It Is Working
A marketing funnel is the path a buyer takes from not knowing you exist to buying and coming back, split into stages so you can tell what each piece of content is for. The model is over a century old and most versions of it fail for the same reason: they name the stages and stop, leaving you with a diagram instead of an instruction. This guide gives you the four stages in order, what to publish at each one, the metric that tells you the stage is working, and the places the funnel breaks in practice.
Key takeaways
- The four marketing funnel stages are Awareness, Consideration, Conversion and Retention. Each one needs different content and, more importantly, a different metric: judging awareness work on last-click conversions is what kills it in week one.
- The funnel is a shape, not a queue. A buyer can arrive at the conversion stage from a friend's recommendation without ever seeing your awareness content, so diagnose per audience rather than per imagined journey.
- Top, middle and bottom of funnel are labels for the same four stages, and full-funnel marketing simply means running all of them at once instead of only the stage that reports fastest.
- B2B and SaaS funnels have the same stages but a longer middle, more people inside one decision, and an activation step after the sale that ecommerce does not have.
- Retention belongs inside the funnel because it is the only stage that feeds the top of it. A business that stops the diagram at the sale has to buy every customer twice.
What Is a Marketing Funnel?
A marketing funnel is a model of the path a buyer takes from first hearing about a problem to buying and staying, broken into stages so that every piece of marketing has a job you can name. The four stages are Awareness, where the buyer does not yet know you exist, Consideration, where they compare approaches and vendors, Conversion, where they decide whether to act, and Retention, where they either reach the result they came for or quietly leave. It is drawn as a funnel because each stage holds fewer people than the one above it: everybody who buys passed through awareness, and most of the people in awareness never buy. The funnel is sometimes called the marketing and sales funnel, the digital marketing funnel, or simply top, middle and bottom of funnel, and the practical value of it is not the diagram. It is that each stage answers a different question in the buyer's head, so content written for one stage reads as noise to somebody standing in another.
The Four Marketing Funnel Stages at a Glance
One row per stage: what the buyer is doing, the question in their head, what to publish against it, and the metric that proves the stage is working. Brief from the row rather than the stage name, because the stage name is the diagnosis and the row is the instruction.
| Stage | What the buyer is doing | The question in their head | What to publish | The metric that proves it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stage 1: Awareness | Scrolling, searching a symptom, asking a peer. Not looking for you. | “Is this even a problem I have?” | Search-led explainers, short video, founder POV, anything that names the problem without naming the product | New reach and returning visitors, not conversions |
| Stage 2: Consideration | Comparing approaches, reading reviews, asking what else is out there. | “Which kind of solution should I pick?” | Comparison pages, how-to guides, free tools, case detail, anything that explains the mechanism | Repeat visits, tool use, email or newsletter signups |
| Stage 3: Conversion | Checking price, looking for the catch, asking one last objection. | “Is this worth it, and what happens if it is not?” | Pricing clarity, onboarding detail, proof, and a plain answer to the objection you hear most | Signup or trial starts, and the rate from visit to signup |
| Stage 4: Retention | Using the product, or quietly not using it. | “Am I getting what I came for?” | Activation emails, in-product guidance, the next use case, and reasons to tell somebody else | Activation, repeat purchase or renewal, and referrals |
The stages describe positions, not gates. Someone can land in the conversion stage straight from a recommendation, and someone else can sit in consideration for a year. This is why the funnel is a planning tool for your content, not a prediction about any individual buyer.
The Marketing Funnel Diagram, With the Instruction Inside It
Most funnel diagrams are a shape with four words on it. This one carries what to publish and what to judge it on inside each band, because those are the two decisions the stage actually exists to make. The taper is not decoration either: each band is narrower because it holds fewer people, and that is the arithmetic the rest of this page runs on.
Everybody who could have the problem
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Awareness, top of funnel
“Is this even a problem I have?”
- Publish
- Search-led explainers, short video, founder POV, anything that names the problem without naming the product
- Judge it on
- New reach and returning visitors, not conversions
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Consideration, middle of funnel
“Which kind of solution should I pick?”
- Publish
- Comparison pages, how-to guides, free tools, case detail, anything that explains the mechanism
- Judge it on
- Repeat visits, tool use, email or newsletter signups
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Conversion, bottom of funnel
“Is this worth it, and what happens if it is not?”
- Publish
- Pricing clarity, onboarding detail, proof, and a plain answer to the objection you hear most
- Judge it on
- Signup or trial starts, and the rate from visit to signup
-
Retention, after the sale
“Am I getting what I came for?”
- Publish
- Activation emails, in-product guidance, the next use case, and reasons to tell somebody else
- Judge it on
- Activation, repeat purchase or renewal, and referrals
Customers who stay
Read the widths as the argument. If your conversion stage needs a hundred customers and one visitor in fifty ever signs up, the awareness band has to reach five thousand people who have never heard of you, and it has to do it again next month. You cannot fix a narrow bottom by optimising the bottom, which is the entire case for working the whole funnel instead of the stage that reports fastest.
What Each Stage Is Actually For
The same four stages, in the situations they actually describe. The photographs are here because the stage is a person doing something specific, and naming that is most of the diagnosis.
Stage 1, top of funnel
Awareness
The buyer does not know you exist and, often, does not yet know they have a problem worth solving. Everything published here has to earn attention on its own terms, which means it names the problem in the reader's language and leaves the product out of the opening. This is also the stage teams starve first, because it is the only stage that cannot show a conversion in the week it ran.
Stage 2, middle of funnel
Consideration
The buyer accepts the problem and is now choosing between categories and vendors. The winning asset here explains why your approach works when the thing they already tried did not, and it is specific about the mechanism rather than the promise. A free tool does more work at this stage than an article, because it lets somebody test the claim instead of reading it.
Stage 3, bottom of funnel
Conversion
The buyer has chosen the category and is deciding whether to act now. The obstacle at this stage is almost never information about what the product does, it is one unanswered objection, and that objection is usually already written down in your support inbox. Re-explaining the product here reads as though you have not noticed they already decided.
Stage 4, after the sale
Retention
Most funnel diagrams stop at the sale, which is why so many of them describe a business that has to buy every customer twice. Retention belongs in the funnel because it is the only stage that feeds the top of it: the customer who reaches their first result is the one who refers, reviews and renews.
Notice what changes across the four. The product is absent in the first, argued about in the second, priced in the third, and used in the fourth. A piece of content that talks about the product in the first frame is not early, it is in the wrong stage.
Work Out What the Top of Your Funnel Has to Carry
Enter the customers you want a month and your two conversion rates. You get the visitors the top of the funnel has to reach to make that number, the signups needed in the middle, and how many visitors one customer currently costs you. Free, no account, nothing stored.
Your numbers
The share of visitors who give you something: an email, a trial, a demo request. Take it from your analytics rather than from a benchmark.
The share of those signups who go on to buy. Both rates have to cover the same period, or the answer is fiction.
What the top of your funnel has to carry
Visitors needed a month
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Signups needed a month
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Visitors per customer
—
The first figure is the one that decides whether the plan is possible at all, and it is almost always larger than people expect. The second is the one you can check against your own dashboard this week.
Top, Middle and Bottom of Funnel: What Each Label Means
Top of funnel, middle of funnel and bottom of funnel are not extra stages. They are a shorthand for the same four, grouped by how much the buyer already knows. Top of funnel, sometimes written upper funnel, is the awareness stage: reach people who do not know you and do not yet want anything. Middle of funnel, or mid funnel, is consideration: help the people who accept the problem choose an approach. Bottom of funnel, or lower funnel, is conversion: remove the last obstacle for people who have already decided what kind of thing they want.
The labels are useful for one reason and misleading for another. They are useful because they force you to say which group a piece of content is for before you write it. They mislead because they sound like a queue, and they get used to justify spending only at the bottom, where the reporting looks best. A retargeting campaign will always show a better return than a cold video, because it is charging you for demand the cold video created.
An inbound marketing funnel is the same four stages with the top fed by attention you earn rather than attention you buy: search, content, referrals and word of mouth instead of paid placements. The stages do not change and neither do the metrics. What changes is the lead time, because inbound compounds slowly and then keeps delivering after you stop spending, which is the opposite shape to paid and the reason the two are usually run together rather than chosen between.
The practical fix is to hold each group to its own metric. Top of funnel is judged on new reach and returning visitors. Middle of funnel is judged on repeat visits, tool use and signups to something free. Only the bottom is judged on conversion rate, and if you want to work out what a change at the bottom is actually worth, our conversion rate calculator does that arithmetic in one step.
Content Marketing Funnel: What to Publish at Each Stage
A content marketing funnel is the same four stages with the content type filled in. At the awareness stage, publish against the problem rather than the product: search-led explainers on the symptom your buyer would type, short video that names the frustration, and anything a person would share before they are ready to buy anything. At the consideration stage, publish the mechanism: comparison pages that name real alternatives and say what each one is better at, how-to guides deep enough to be used rather than skimmed, and free tools, which outperform articles here because they let somebody test your claim instead of reading it. At the conversion stage, publish the answer to your most common objection, in plain language, alongside pricing clarity and what the first week actually looks like. At the retention stage, publish activation guidance and the next use case, because a customer who reaches a result is the one who refers. The most common failure of a content funnel is not thin content, it is a library where every piece is written for the consideration stage, because that is the stage marketers naturally think in.
B2B and SaaS Funnels: Where They Differ
A B2B marketing funnel has the same four stages as any other, and three real differences. The middle is longer, because the buyer is building a case rather than making a choice. There is more than one person inside a single decision, so the consideration stage has to serve a champion who wants depth and an approver who wants a one-page reason. And the conversion stage is rarely a checkout, it is a call, a pilot or a security review, which means the asset that closes it is often a document rather than a page.
A SaaS funnel adds a fifth thing that ecommerce does not have: activation. A signup is not a customer, it is a trial, and the gap between the two is where most SaaS funnels actually leak. That makes the retention stage start immediately rather than after a purchase, and it moves the most valuable content in the whole funnel to the first session in the product.
The B2B content marketing funnel follows from that. Awareness work still has to name the problem without the product, but it is often published under a person rather than a brand, because a buying committee trusts a practitioner faster than a vendor. The consideration stage carries the comparison and the proof. And the bottom carries the objection, which in B2B is nearly always about switching cost rather than price.
How to Build a Marketing Funnel From What You Already Have
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1
Sort what you have already published by stage
Before you plan anything new, put every page and post you own into one of the four stages by asking what the reader has to already believe for it to make sense. Most libraries come out lopsided in the same direction, heavy in the middle and empty at the top, and you cannot see that until the list exists.
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2
Name the question each stage has to answer
Write down the actual sentence a buyer would say at each stage, in their words rather than yours. Your reviews, support tickets, sales call notes and the comments under your ads are where those sentences already exist, which makes this a reading exercise rather than a brainstorm.
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3
Give every stage one metric and only one
Awareness gets new reach. Consideration gets repeat visits or use of something free. Conversion gets the visit-to-signup rate. Retention gets activation and repeat purchase. A stage with two metrics ends up judged on the one that looks worst, and a stage judged on the wrong metric gets cut.
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4
Fill the emptiest stage first, not the most interesting one
The stage with the least content is nearly always the one capping the rest of the funnel, and it is nearly always awareness. Fixing the bottom of a funnel that nobody enters changes nothing, which is the whole argument for full-funnel marketing over bottom-funnel spend.
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5
Link the stages to each other on purpose
An awareness page that does not offer the obvious next step leaks the reader it just earned. Each piece should carry one link to the natural next question, not a menu of everything you have written, and the link should read like the next thought rather than a call to action.
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6
Review by stage, on a schedule
A funnel is not a project that finishes. Once a quarter, re-sort what you published, check whether the emptiest stage moved, and look at whether the stages are still answering the questions your buyers are actually asking, because the questions change faster than the diagram does.
Marketing Funnel vs Sales Funnel
A marketing funnel and a sales funnel describe the same buyer from two different desks. The marketing funnel is organised around what the buyer knows: it starts with people who have never heard of you and it is measured in reach, engagement and signups. The sales funnel is organised around what a deal is doing: it starts with a qualified lead and moves through stages named for the seller's actions, such as contacted, demo booked, proposal sent and closed. The marketing funnel is therefore much wider at the top and largely anonymous, while the sales funnel is narrow and has a name attached to every row. In a self-serve business the two collapse into one, because the signup is the sale, and the whole path is the marketing funnel. In a business with a sales team the join between them is the part that leaks: marketing counts a lead as a win and sales counts the same lead as unqualified, and both are measuring honestly. The fix is not a better diagram, it is one agreed definition of the handover point.
Four Ways a Marketing Funnel Breaks in Practice
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Judging every stage on the same metric
Awareness content earns attention and cheap reach, not conversions in the week it ran. Held to a last-click number, it always loses to retargeting, which is charging you for demand the awareness work created. This is the single most common way a funnel collapses into nothing but bottom-funnel spend.
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Treating the stages as a queue
The funnel is a shape, not a mandatory sequence. Buyers skip stages, arrive halfway through on a recommendation, and go backwards when a competitor confuses them. Diagnose the stage per audience segment rather than assuming everybody entered at the top.
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Publishing only for the stage you find interesting
Most content libraries are built almost entirely for the consideration stage, because that is the stage marketers naturally think in and the one where the product is easiest to talk about. Sort your existing pages by stage once and the gap is usually obvious immediately.
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Stopping the funnel at the sale
A funnel that ends at conversion describes a business that has to buy every customer twice. Retention is the only stage that feeds the top of the funnel, through referrals, reviews and renewals, and it is almost always the cheapest growth available.
How Selzee Helps Teams Fill the Top of the Funnel
The stage most funnels are starved at is awareness, and the reason is almost never strategy. It is that top-of-funnel work needs a constant supply of content built on what customers actually say, and producing it every week is the part that does not fit into anybody's day. Selzee is your AI content team: it researches what your audience is already talking about, turns that into concepts you can approve or reject, creates the content, and learns from what performed so the next round is better. Because the research step reads real customer language rather than inventing it, the awareness content it produces names the problem in the words your buyers use, which is the only version of it that works on people who are not looking for you yet. It runs in its own interface, so the research, the concepts and the finished content live in one place instead of three.
Marketing Funnel: FAQ
01 What are the 4 stages of a marketing funnel? +
The four stages of a marketing funnel are Awareness, Consideration, Conversion and Retention. Awareness is where the buyer does not know you exist and may not know they have a problem. Consideration is where they compare approaches and vendors. Conversion is where they decide whether to act. Retention is where they either reach the result they came for or quietly leave. Each stage answers a different question in the buyer's head, so each one needs different content and a different metric.
02 What is a marketing funnel in simple terms? +
It is a way of describing the path from somebody never having heard of you to becoming a customer who stays, split into stages so that every piece of marketing has a job you can name. It is drawn as a funnel because each stage holds fewer people than the one above it: everybody who buys passed through awareness, and most people in awareness never buy.
03 What is the difference between a marketing funnel and a sales funnel? +
A marketing funnel is organised around what the buyer knows and is measured in reach, engagement and signups. A sales funnel is organised around what a deal is doing and uses stages named for the seller's actions, such as contacted, demo booked and proposal sent. The marketing funnel is wide and largely anonymous; the sales funnel is narrow with a name on every row. In a self-serve business the two are the same thing, because the signup is the sale.
04 What do top of funnel, middle of funnel and bottom of funnel mean? +
They are a shorthand for the same stages grouped by how much the buyer already knows. Top of funnel, or upper funnel, is awareness. Middle of funnel, or mid funnel, is consideration. Bottom of funnel, or lower funnel, is conversion. The labels are useful for forcing you to say who a piece of content is for, and misleading when they get used to justify spending only where the reporting looks best.
05 What is full funnel marketing? +
Full funnel marketing means running all the stages at once rather than only the stage that reports fastest. The argument for it is arithmetic: the bottom of the funnel is capped by how many people entered the top, so optimising conversion on a funnel nobody enters cannot move the total. It also means holding each stage to its own metric, because that is what stops the top-of-funnel work from being cut every quarter.
06 How is a B2B marketing funnel different? +
It has the same four stages with a longer middle, more than one person inside a single decision, and a conversion stage that is usually a call, a pilot or a security review rather than a checkout. That means the consideration stage has to serve both a champion who wants depth and an approver who wants a one-page reason, and the objection at the bottom is nearly always about switching cost rather than price.
07 Which stage of the funnel should I fix first? +
The emptiest one, which is almost always awareness. Sort everything you have already published into the four stages and the gap is usually obvious. Fixing the bottom of a funnel that nobody enters changes nothing, and a starved top with a healthy bottom is the standard shape of a business that has plateaued.
08 How do I know which stage a piece of content is for? +
Read the headline and ask what the reader has to already believe for it to make sense. If it names a feature or a price, it needs somebody at the conversion stage. If it compares approaches or explains a mechanism, it needs somebody at consideration. If it names a frustration with no product in sight, it is written for awareness. Then check whether that is the audience it actually reaches.
Fill the stage your funnel is starved at
Selzee researches what your audience already talks about, turns it into concepts you approve, creates the content, and learns from what performed. Start free, no card required.
Start free with SelzeeKeep exploring: the five stages of awareness, which sits underneath the funnel, the problem aware to solution aware jump, what a creative strategy is, the free conversion rate calculator.