Someone once sent me a photo of the funnel they’d drawn on a whiteboard. Fourteen boxes, arrows going in every direction, three colours of marker, and a small note in the corner that just said “help”.
It looked like a wiring diagram… it did not look like a funnel.
So let’s strip this back. I’m Maggie Stara, I’ve been a digital marketing strategist since 2017 and I’ve taught this to more than 240,000 students, and underneath all the boxes a marketing funnel is a genuinely simple idea that people make complicated because complicated feels more professional.
The short version
A marketing funnel is the path someone takes from never having heard of you to buying from you, broken into three stages: awareness at the top, trust-building in the middle, and the offer at the bottom. The top gets attention, the middle gets an email address, the bottom gets the sale. Most businesses do the top and bottom and skip the middle, which is exactly why their funnel doesn’t work.
- Top of funnel is brand awareness: social posts, videos, blog posts, anything that gets you in front of the right people.
- Middle of funnel trades something genuinely valuable for an email address, so you can build the relationship somewhere you own.
- Bottom of funnel presents the offer and handles objections, usually by email.
- Don’t run paid ads until the funnel already works organically, because ads amplify what’s there rather than fixing what isn’t.
- How many steps you need depends on how much time and money you’re asking someone to commit.
You can watch the whole thing below, or keep reading, both cover the same ground.
Jump to a bit of the video:
0:39 What is a marketing funnel?
1:13 Why is it called a funnel?
1:52 The three parts of your funnel
3:57 Why you shouldn’t run ads yet
4:18 The top of your funnel
5:57 The middle of your funnel
7:29 What a lead magnet needs
8:11 The bottom of your funnel
9:44 How long does a funnel take?
What is a marketing funnel?
A marketing funnel is a framework for turning complete strangers into customers through a series of relationship-building steps. That’s the whole definition… everything else is detail.
Funnels absolutely can get intense and complicated, and I’m not pretending otherwise. But at their core, all you are doing is taking someone who has never heard of your business, your team or your face, and moving them to the point where they know you, like you and trust you enough to buy… and then hopefully buy again.
If you can hold onto that one sentence, the fourteen boxes on the whiteboard stop being scary. They’re just someone’s very detailed version of those same three moves.
Why is it called a funnel when it doesn’t look like one?
Because the name describes the maths, not the diagram. Far more people will see your first piece of content than will ever hand over an email address, and far more will hand over an email address than will ever buy.
That narrowing is the funnel. It has nothing to do with the shape of the thing you draw on the whiteboard, which is why so many of them end up looking like spider webs and everyone feels like they’ve done it wrong.
I do think the word is a bit misleading, honestly. If it helps, think of it as a filter rather than a funnel: at every step, some people fall away and the ones who stay are more interested than the ones who left.
What are the three stages of a marketing funnel?
Top, middle and bottom… each with one job.
- Top of funnel: awareness. Your only job is to get in front of the right people. Social posts, YouTube videos, blog posts, whatever your audience already consumes.
- Middle of funnel: consideration. You take the relationship a step further by giving them something genuinely valuable in exchange for their email address.
- Bottom of funnel: decision. They work out whether your paid offer is right for them, and hopefully become a customer, and then a repeat customer.
That last part matters much more than people give it credit for. If you run a subscription, a membership or anything ongoing, keeping existing customers engaged is a bigger lever than winning new ones.
Should you run paid ads to your funnel?
Not until it already works. Ads amplify what is already happening in your business, they do not fix what isn’t happening. Validate the whole thing organically first.
This is the bit I will not budge on… and it’s the advice people most want to skip. If your offer converts organically, putting money behind it will pour fuel on a fire that’s already lit. If it doesn’t convert organically, ads just mean you’re paying to watch people not convert, faster and at scale.
Test the messaging, the lead magnet and the offer with people who found you for free. Then spend.
What should you put at the top of your funnel?
Content that reaches the right people, on the platform they already use. It does not have to be website traffic and you do not need a live website to start.
Plenty of people say the top of the funnel means visitors landing on your site. Ideally, yes. But I’ve watched people build genuinely profitable funnels with no website at all, because the top of their funnel was YouTube videos, or Instagram, or LinkedIn, and it worked fine. Not having a site live yet is not a barrier to starting.
The thing that actually matters here is relevance, not volume. The worst thing that can happen to you is going viral with the wrong content.
Say your video is the top ten recipes for the best vegan apple pie, and the paid offer at the bottom of your funnel is a course on making your own meat sausages… those two audiences are not the same audience. You’ll get the numbers and none of the sales, and you’ll conclude that funnels don’t work.
So even at the very top, keep the content genuinely connected to what you eventually sell. If you’re not sure what that content should be, my seven-step plan for social media beginners works through it in order.
What goes in the middle of your funnel?
Something valuable enough that a stranger will trade their email address for it. This is the stage almost everyone skips, myself included on occasion, and it’s the reason most funnels quietly fail.
Because here’s the thing. The middle is where trust actually gets built. Without it you’re asking someone who watched one Reel to buy a $500 product, and of course they won’t.
Getting an email address is genuinely harder than it used to be. People are drowning in email and they’ve learned that most lead magnets are rubbish, so the bar you have to clear is far higher than it was even a couple of years ago.
And you don’t want everyone on your list anyway. You pay for subscribers. You want the people who will open, click and eventually buy, not a big number that makes you feel good and costs you money every month.
What makes a lead magnet actually work?
Three things, and it needs all three. It has to be valuable, actionable, and hyper relevant to your paid offer.
- Valuable enough that they’d have paid for it.
- Actionable, so they get a real result rather than another PDF they’ll never open. Handing someone an ebook and hoping is not a strategy any more.
- Hyper relevant to the thing you sell, so the paid version is the obvious next step rather than a swerve.
Get all three right and the reaction you want is: “I got that much from the free thing… what on earth is the paid thing like?” That question is the entire job of the middle of your funnel.
My own lead magnet is a free personalised marketing plan, and it’s built to that rule deliberately: you put your business in, you get something you can act on the same day, and it’s directly relevant to everything I teach.
What should you do at the bottom of your funnel?
Present the offer in terms of what changes for them, then answer the questions stopping them from buying. That’s it. The bottom of the funnel is mostly objection handling.
Don’t list features and specifications. Show them how their life looks afterwards and what problem stops being a problem.
In practice that’s emails with frequently asked questions, testimonials from people who got the result, and honest answers to the awkward objections rather than the flattering ones. If there’s a genuine deadline or a bonus that really does expire, that’s the one place a bit of urgency is fair.
Retargeting ads also live here, following people around while they’re deciding. Worth reading the freshness note below before you budget for that, because retargeting does not work the way it did when I filmed this.
How long does it take someone to move through a funnel?
It depends on two things: how much time and how much money you’re asking for. The more of either, the longer the funnel and the more steps it needs.
My students ask me this constantly and they always want a number, so here’s the honest version… there isn’t one. But the time-and-money rule gets you close every time.
- A year-long programme with weekly calls and homework? People will sit on that for weeks, sometimes months. You need content for them to consume the whole time so they don’t forget you exist.
- A thirty-minute haircut at the barber down the road? That decision happens on the spot. Your funnel there is barely about the first sale at all, it’s about getting them back next month.
- A $2,000-a-month service on a three-month minimum? Expect to do a lot of convincing.
- A one-off $500 product they can use today? Far less resistance, far fewer steps.
People spend years and serious budgets getting a single funnel right, and then they build a new offer and start again from close to scratch. That’s normal, and it’s worth knowing before you decide yours is broken after three weeks.
What’s changed about marketing funnels since I filmed this?
The three stages haven’t changed at all. What has changed is where the top of the funnel happens and how little of the middle you can measure. Four things worth knowing.
- The top of the funnel is now a citation play, not a traffic play. Roughly 60% of searches end without anyone clicking through to a website, and for searches that trigger an AI Overview it’s about 83%. Your content still does its job, it just does it inside someone else’s answer box.
- AI has taken over discovery. At the early research stage, around 35% of people now rate AI tools as the most useful place to look, against roughly 14% for search engines. That’s a genuine reordering of where awareness happens.
- Attribution in the middle is largely broken. Someone can form an opinion about you inside an AI answer, think about it for a week, then type your name straight into a browser. Your analytics will call that “direct” and give the credit to nothing.
- Retargeting has shrunk. Google reversed its plan to kill third-party cookies in Chrome in April 2025, so they’re still there. But Safari and Firefox have blocked cross-site tracking for years, so your retargeting pool is a good deal smaller than it was in 2021 regardless of what Chrome does.
Here’s what I take from all of that, and it’s not a gloomy conclusion. The middle of the funnel matters more now than it did when I recorded this video, not less. An email list is the one part of this you actually own. No algorithm sits between you and it, no AI answer intercepts it, and no browser update shrinks it overnight.
If anything, the advice in this post got more important rather than less.
Where should you start?
Work out what you sell, then work backwards. What’s the one thing someone would need to believe to buy it? That belief is what your middle-of-funnel content has to build, and your lead magnet is the first proof of it.
Then, and only then, think about the top… It’s much easier to make content when you know what it’s meant to lead to.
Don’t build fourteen boxes. Build three, get one person through them… and then improve the bit where they got stuck.
If you want a starting point built around your actual business rather than a generic template, my free personalised marketing plan is the fastest way in. And if you’d rather speed up the planning side, using AI to build your social media strategy pairs well with this one. Everything else I teach lives here.
Give it a whirl, and tell me which stage you find hardest. It’s the middle. It’s always the middle.
Originally published June 2021, updated August 2026.
