Improving your business has never been easier.

So. you’re a business owner who is stuck on a plateau. Not knowing where your next customer might come from, making you heavily reliant on references and word of mouth. This makes it incredibly hard to scale predictably. It’s the nature of things, we’ve all been through it. Of course you aren’t the type of person to roll over and give up so you start looking for ways to make sure your business will keep growing. Well, this is your lucky day because this is the place you have been looking for and our free advice is just a taste of what we can do for you.

As we all know when it comes to marketing, proper planning is essential. Creating leads and retaining those leads through your sales process is incredibly important, and the success you find in retaining customers will translate directly to higher profit margins. This is why making an effective sales funnel is paramount.

Some of you might be asking what a sales funnel is. A sales funnel is the process by which you guide leads from discovering your business/product to purchasing your product or service. Each stage of the funnel brings customers closer to making a purchase. The effectiveness of this process is crucial, not only because it will increase sales but because the plan behind your funnel will define the actions you must undertake to expand your business.

In this post we will expand on what the stages of a funnel are, how they can be optimized and what steps you can take to expand your funnel and bring more customers to your business.

 

Defining your funnel

 

The goal of a sales funnel is to find prospective clients and push them towards the bottom of the funnel, where a purchase will be made. In general, a funnel will have four steps: awareness, interest, desire and action. The goal is to have as many people as possible enter and exit the funnel. This is expected of each stage:

Awareness: This is where you create the lead by making the individual aware of your business and show them what services or products you offer. This is often the result of marketing through paid promotion, ads or offline actions. It is key that you use this stage to impress potential customers and show your strengths as a business.

Interest: When potential customers move to this stage, they will try to determine if they need your product or service and whether other companies can match or exceed your offer. This is a research phase where you have to inform your customer, showing them why your offer is superior. This is also where you, as a salesperson, need to build trust with your customers.

Desire: At this point in the funnel the prospective client knows they are going to make a purchase, they just haven’t decided if they are going to purchase it from you. This is where you have to show that your quality-price ratio is superior to your competitors. This is also where emotions are most intense for customers. After all, they know they are going to be making a purchase already. Playing into these emotions is essential as a salesperson.

Action: You have gotten your lead through the funnel, and they are ready to make a purchase. Now it is important to offer any necessary assistance in making the purchase. This is also the perfect opportunity to upsell, encourage repeat purchases or offer extra services.

The funnel is always going to be different depending on the business, some funnels have to be more complex than others. Still, having an effective funnel will always improve your business model.

 

Improving your funnel

 

So, now you know what a funnel is and what aspects of a sale to focus on during every stage. Now it’s time to start applying that knowledge to your own business. This might be challenging, every business is unique and finding the right clientele is often difficult. That’s why we are going to give you some tips & tricks on how to build and improve your own funnel.

 

Define your target audience

 

When looking for prospective clients it is all-important that you find the right audience to market towards. You can make this easy for yourself by defining certain factors about your audience and comparing these factors with your chosen method of promotion.

For example, imagine you sell festival cup holders on your own web shop. Your audience will be predominantly 18-25 years old, active and into party culture. You can imagine that Facebook, where over 70% of users is above the age of 25, is not the most productive place to advertise your product. This is the method of thinking you should apply to your own product or service.

To help you define your target audience, these are a few common factors that influence the effectiveness of a marketing strategy.

• Age
• Gender
• Location
• Income
• Profession
• Hobbies

The most important thing to take away from this is that to sell your product effectively, you have to think critically and realistically about your product, it’s defining characteristics and which platform and marketing strategy fits these characteristics the best.

 

Create individually engaging content

 

Once you have decided where and how you will be advertising your product it’s time to start creating content. Unfortunately, people often fail to turn views into clicks. There are a lot of strategies to engage viewers and get them to participate in a way that moves them towards interest in your product.

When advertising on social media the goal is always to move prospects from that platform to your own website or social media page. You can engage viewers by giving them a reason to move to your page by rewarding them in the short term in ways that don’t require money or a large time investment. For example:

 

If you’re interested in our product, check out our website!

should be

View our latest deals and offers on our product page!

 

Please check out my Instagram page

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DM me on Instagram for a reward

 

The goal is to convince the prospective client that moving to your page will be rewarding on its own, regardless of future investment. This is called a magnet, a piece of information or reward that pulls people towards your business. An ideal magnet captures a prospect’s e-mail address because having an avenue to start further communication is essential to creating interest in your product and expanding your customer relationship.

 

Don’t let a ‘No’ stop you

 

A central aspect of a funnel is that you are going to lose some people along the way. Not all prospects will move to the next part of the funnel and some might get to the end and drop out anyway. While it is very important not to spend too much time and money on each individual that enters the funnel (The lower the cost per prospect is, the better) losing someone along the way doesn’t mean your time was wasted.

This is why we want to capture the e-mail address. The moment someone enters their e-mail they will be a prospect for every product, service, contest and reward you will ever try to share. They might lose interest in the product that got them to give up their e-mail address but now you get to upsell them on every product you put out. The chances that someone will, eventually, come across a product they are interested in increases astronomically when you get the chance to put these products in front of them every chance you get.

So, what’s a good way to capture and e-mail address? That depends on your product, but generally it’s effective to offer free information or rewards with signing up with an e-mail address as the only requirement.

 

Always follow up

 

Once someone moves down the funnel and gets to ‘interest’ it’s often required to follow up on that prospect. You can’t expect leads to create themselves, you need to show that you are willing to put effort into the client and convince them that your product is what they need. This can often be done with automated messages and e-mails.

Statistics show that it’s often more effective to re-engage failed clients than it is to find new ones. 46% of leads need 3-5 points of contact before turning into actual prospects. So, don’t be afraid to reach out to failed prospects and give it another try.

 

Learning more

 

All this advice should get you started in setting up your sales funnel and improving your business, but you might be hungry for more information so that you can apply all this knowledge to your own situation. If this is you, we recommend you get in contact with our team at Digital Profits, where we help people like you grow your presence and increase your profits.