The goal of any small or large business is to maximize the number of sales they make. Hardly for this to happen without a strategic plan in place! This is where sales funnels – the advanced core concept of digital marketing – comes in.
What a Sales Funnel Is
A sales funnel, also known as a revenue funnel, is a concept that businesses use to generate the journey of customers towards the end goal of making a purchase. It is used as an analogy to represent the number of potential customers that begins at the top-end of the sales process and narrows down into a fraction of people who are most likely to sign up with your offers.
Why is a Sales Funnel vital?
One important factor to consider in making your way through the business world successfully is having a sales funnel – a reference for lead generation and sales closure. The absence of an effective sales funnel makes it tough for businesses to move leads, make sales, and even identify rooms for improvement.
A sales funnel helps businesses to foster good relationships with leads and customers while providing a more personalized approach to generate an increase in sales and revenue. It is also essential in speeding up the sales process and making use of the brand’s marketing efforts to its full extent.
The AIDA (Awareness, Interest, Decision, Action) Method
AIDA is a method used in marketing to identify the four cognitive stages your prospect customers go through; from the first time they hear about your brand, until the moment that they decide to acquire your product or hire you for your service.
Awareness
Most brand owners often overlook the importance of brand awareness – assuming that the products or services they offer already have a name in the market – which may or may not be the case. In any event, you must always aim higher and think out of the box – searching for creative ways and making use of the available platforms to let your audience know about your brand.
Interest
As people become aware of your brand, you must now focus on nurturing their interest, which is generally the hardest part of the world of business. However, you can make it happen as long as you make sure your advertisements are easy to read, with interesting subheadings and illustrations – focusing on what is relevant for your target market in relation to the products and services you offer.
Decision
In this stage, the prospective customers are now making the decision of whether to buy your product or not. Hence, as much as possible you must give promos, discounts, or bundle deals to get in the mind of your customers and eventually make that decision of purchasing your products.
Action
This last stage is all about getting your customers to initiate action. If the previous three stages are well executed, then selling and making deals is easy. Your customers will now willingly acquire your products or services.
Steps to Building a Sales Funnel
After knowing why a sales funnel is an important part of your marketing strategy, it is now the time to figure out how you could create an effective one.
Know Your Target Audience
Every marketing strategy ultimately depends on how well you know your audience. Find a way to familiarize yourself with your customer’s most essential parameters like demographics, preferences, expectations, and pain points. And keep in mind that you are not marketing to everybody but rather to people who will potentially buy your product. The more you know about your audience, the more effective your sales funnel becomes.
Consistently Promote Your Content in all Your Platform
Creating high-quality content won’t make any sense unless it reaches the right people and drives results. And this is where the real awareness phase begins. You need to execute a plan to promote your brand through various platforms with your target audience. Diversify with infographics, video advertisements, and other types of content.
Build a Landing Page
Have you ever wondered what happens when someone clicks on your digital ads? Yes, they should be redirected to a page or site. And this page should be a crisp landing page that focuses on a particular call-to-action.
To ensure that these potential customers are satisfied with what you first offer – in this case, your brand’s landing page, having a well-designed landing page helps capture converted website visitors to leads that you can continue to nurture and pursue.
Launch an Email Campaign
Once you have acquired a lead, your next step is to enlighten the audience about your business and build up your expertise – through launching a series of emails. Do so regularly, but not too frequently as people get easily annoyed with spammed emails. Also, make sure to conclude your campaign by creating an incredible offer to those who possess a great interest in what you offer.
Keep in Touch
As you continuously gain customers, it is vital that you don’t forget about the existing ones. Keep reaching out to them, let them experience the perks of having to choose your brand over anyone else’s. You can express a simple form of gratitude through giving promos, or bundle deals and even offering customer support.
Building and optimizing a sales funnel is not easy. It takes time and effort. But it is one effective way to get along with the undying competition in the marketplace. And an effective sales funnel is your sure-fire way to reap numerous rewards and incentives in the long run.