A sales funnel is one of the marketing strategies that show how prospects turn into leads and finally buyers. A sales funnel process, on the other hand, is your business-oriented strategy. Each business needs one in order to optimize its sales and stay on top of the market. So then how do you create a sales funnel?
Understanding the sales funnel process will enable you to create one that is effective for your business. Here are effective steps of creating an effective sales funnel:
1. Identify Your Potential Customers
Do you know your target audience?
- Which problems they are facing?
- Which social media platforms they hang out on?
- What their interests are?
- Their dislikes about online buying?
2. Filter Your Prospects
Anyone who fits in your customer profile may not be a buyer. You will need to filter your customers after successfully identifying them. The most common method of qualifying your potential customers is poll-taking. You need to talk to your prospects so that you are able to know what interests them and identify their pain points at the same time. Alternatively, come up with a product for your targeted audience and take note of those that buy.
3. Capture Your Audience
Putting value content out there is one of the sure ways of luring your prospects into buying your services or products. Increase the quality of your content by including images, videos and infographics. Post your content on your social media platforms as much as possible. You may also use ads to attract more audience to your business. Identify which platform is suitable to run your ads on. It should always be where your audience hangs out.
4. Take a Look at Your Competitor
Competition analysis is vital in creating a sales funnel that works. Identify their strength and weaknesses. Copy what they are doing and apply it to your business. Look at their lead magnets offers to get an idea of what the market needs. The easiest way to do this is to list your top competitors and the lead magnet they use. You may consider using lead magnets so that you are able to lure some customers to your brand.
The next step is coming up with a plan to beat your competitors. Your main focus as a startup should be to offer meaningful information absolutely free. Your customer is likely to buy from you after being convinced that you are kind.
5. Create a Landing Page
A landing page is where your potential customer leads from any of your traffic sources. A landing page mainly serves the purpose of collecting the prospect information in exchange for an ebook, template or any product you would love to give for free.
Remember that at this point, your prospects have less trust in your products. The landing page should capture leads instead of trying to make sales. Your landing page should be fully optimized; you need clear instructions on what they need to do. Use an eye-catching call to action button.
The common type of lead magnet capture is an email address and name. Qualify your audience depending on your needs. Ensure that your lead magnet:
- Has a minimal number of form fields
- Has fewer step for completing a buy
- Offers one-click for sign-ups
A thank you page is a confirmation that your prospects have successfully completed an action. You may also make use of a thank you page to invite your audience to follow you on social media.
Tools such as Leadpages and WordPress pages can help you create beautiful and purposeful landing pages. You should also make use of automated email responders such as MailChimp to engage your prospects after submitting their information.
6. Work on Your Content Plan
Now that you have an audience, work on engaging them with your content. Tell your audience about your products and services using avoiding salesy tone. Your content should focus on informing the prospects of how your products or services are of value.
Your content plan should be targeting your audiences’ interests and needs. After you have your content ready, decide how to market it to reach most of your audience.
7. Evaluate Your Sales Funnel
The evaluation will tell you what works and what doesn’t. Making assumptions will not bring the success your business deserves. There are several tools out there such as google analytics that can help you know the value of each effort you make.
Evaluate your call to actions by using the A/B tests. Google Analytics shows you where people on your website come from and the path they take through the website. All this information will help you adjust some strategies in order to increase the conversion rate.
Regularly use data from your tests to help you improve your sales funnel. Creating a sales funnel is a continuous process. Remember your audiences’ needs will change with time and that will prompt you to come up with new strategies on how to reach them.
8. Stay Around
After successfully creating a sales funnel, you need to stay around and engage your customers. This is especially important for startups that are just branding themselves. You need to constantly offer value to your buyers so as to have them purchase again.
The best way to nurture your customers after a purchase is by sending them a coupon code for their next buy. You may also send them free products such as templates. All these tricks will help you keep your customers around.
Another way of retaining your new customers is by creating an automated email campaign to help engage with your new customers. A drip campaign helps you send several pre-written emails as scheduled.
Wrapping Up
The funnels sales process never ends. Remember your customers need change over time. For this reason, you will need to find other ways to keep them around. Create your sales funnel with the end in mind, this is the only way you can get your customers to buy.
Want to know more about creating sales funnel?
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