The marketing funnel is my map of how strangers become customers: Awareness → Intention → Decision → Action, with a virality loop feeding satisfied customers back into awareness. It builds on the AIDA model originated by Elias St Elmo Lewis — plus the feedback loop most textbooks leave out: Word of Mouth / Virality, which turns a leaky funnel into compounding growth.
🔍 Not to Be Confused With
🗺️ The funnel vs the customer journey
The funnel is the marketer’s view: pools of people shrinking at each stage. The journey is the buyer’s view: messy, non-linear, full of skipped stages. I use the funnel to diagnose where marketing should invest; I never mistake it for how any individual actually buys.
💡 Awareness vs intent
Knowing you exist is not wanting what you sell. Less than half of Americans knew Ray-Ban Meta glasses existed, but once awareness rose, purchase intent followed. I diagnose which gap I actually have before spending a pound.
🔁 A funnel vs a growth loop
A funnel leaks by design; a loop compounds. The virality loop is what separates linear acquisition from growth that builds on itself: the difference between renting customers and earning them.
The AIDA + Virality Funnel
Each level narrows. The virality loop feeds back to the top.
🔍 The Four Stages + The Loop
1. Awareness
Question: Do potential customers know you exist?
This is the top of the funnel: the broadest pool. If people don’t know about you, nothing else matters. Brand marketing, TV ads, social presence, PR all drive awareness. For many products I work on, the biggest opportunity (and the biggest gap) is right here.
2. Intention
Question: Are they interested in what you offer?
Of those who are aware, how many actually show intent? They visit the site, search for the product, engage with the content. This is where messaging and positioning matter: my job is to turn recognition into genuine interest.
3. Decision
Question: Are they choosing you over alternatives?
Interested customers now evaluate options. Pricing, reviews, comparisons, trust signals all play a role. This is where competitors fight hardest, and where my value proposition has to be crystal clear.
4. Action
Question: Do they buy, sign up, or convert?
The narrowest part of the funnel: the conversion. I remove friction, optimise checkout, make the CTA obvious. Direct response marketing and performance ads live here. But if my top of funnel is empty, optimising the bottom won’t save me.
🔄 Word of Mouth / Virality (The Loop)
The key differentiator of my funnel versus traditional AIDA.
After Action, satisfied customers become advocates. They tell friends, leave reviews, share on social, creating Word of Mouth that feeds back into Awareness for new customers. This is the virtuous cycle that compounds growth over time. The best products don’t just convert: they create evangelists.
📐 Pool Size Analysis Framework
The framework is simple: measure the size of the pool at each funnel level to find where the biggest opportunity lives, then focus my marketing there.
How to Apply It:
1️⃣ Measure each level. What % of my target market is aware? Interested? Deciding? Converting?
2️⃣ Find the biggest drop-off. Where is the largest gap between levels? That’s my opportunity.
3️⃣ Invest accordingly. Awareness low: brand marketing. Conversion low: direct response. Virality low: improve the product experience.
4️⃣ Re-measure and iterate. The funnel is dynamic: I keep checking where the bottleneck moves to.
“If less than half of your target market knows you exist, you have an awareness problem, not a conversion problem. Fix the top of the funnel first.”
📚 Case Studies
FOCUS: AWARENESS
🕶️ RayBan Meta Glasses
Less than half of Americans knew Ray-Ban Meta glasses existed. But when awareness increased, purchase intent rose dramatically. The data was clear: the bottleneck was awareness, not desire. Once people learned these existed, many wanted them. Classic top-of-funnel problem with a top-of-funnel solution.
FOCUS: AWARENESS
💬 WhatsApp in the US
Despite being the world’s dominant messaging app, maybe half of Americans had even heard of WhatsApp. So we went full-funnel: TV ads, Meta product placements, and more. When the awareness gap is that large in a key market, you go big on getting the word out.
FOCUS: AWARENESS → COMPETITORS FOCUS: ACTION
🌐 GoDaddy
GoDaddy single-handedly grew the entire domain hosting industry through splashy Super Bowl ads. They invested massively in awareness, creating demand for the whole category. Then competitors competed at the bottom of the funnel, picking off customers GoDaddy had paid to make aware. Lesson: your awareness spend can fund your competitors’ conversions. If you create the category, make sure you capture the demand, not just create it.
FULL FUNNEL EXAMPLE
🏨 North Norfolk Hotel
A hypothetical I use to show the funnel works at any scale: a twelve-room hotel in North Norfolk. It walks through every stage, from making people aware the hotel exists, to building intent through beautiful photography, to decision via competitive pricing and reviews, to easy online booking (action), to earning rave reviews that bring new guests (virality).
🧠 Full-Funnel Thinking
The traditional split between “brand marketing” (top of funnel) and “direct response / performance marketing” (bottom of funnel) is a false dichotomy. I have never bought it.
Brand Marketing
Works at Awareness. Builds recognition, trust and emotional connection: TV, outdoor, social, PR. Hard to measure directly, but it creates the pool all conversions come from.
Direct Response
Works at Action. Drives conversions, clicks, purchases: search ads, retargeting, email. Easy to measure, but limited by the size of the pool above it.
“The marketing funnel doesn’t have a big line in the middle of it. Brand marketing works at awareness, direct response at action. But the best marketing is full-funnel thinking: When brand and direct response act as one, the results are incredible.”
💬 Key Quotes
“It doesn’t matter if you are a massive company with four billion people using your services or a bed and breakfast in North Norfolk with twelve rooms to fill – the principle is the same, and the funnel works.”
— Alex Schultz, Click Here
“The marketing funnel doesn’t have a big line in the middle of it. Brand marketing works at awareness, direct response at action. But the best marketing is full-funnel thinking: When brand and direct response act as one, the results are incredible.”
— Alex Schultz, Click Here
🧭 Know Its Limits
My position: the funnel is a diagnostic, not a strategy. It flatters linear thinking, and real buying isn’t linear. People enter mid-funnel from a search, skip straight from awareness to action on a friend’s recommendation, or loop through decision three times before committing. Pool-size analysis tells me where the bottleneck is; it can’t tell me why it’s there. I still need research and testing for the why.
“Fix the top of the funnel” is a direction, not a plan.
And for a brand-new product with no awareness at all, the funnel is trivially “all top”: the framework earns its keep once I have measurable pools to compare.
⭐ Golden Rules
1️⃣
Find Your Bottleneck
I use pool-size analysis to find the biggest drop-off. I never optimise the bottom if the top is empty.
2️⃣
Think Full-Funnel
Brand and direct response aren’t opposing teams. My best results have come when they work as one integrated strategy.
3️⃣
Build the Virality Loop
I don’t stop at conversion. I delight customers so they generate the word of mouth that feeds new awareness. This is where compounding growth happens.
