If you run an online business, it’s essential to create a marketing funnel so that you can properly see where each type of customer is at during their buyer’s journey and how they can turn into paying customers. Doing so will allow you to assess how you can cater to each customer’s needs so you can bring them a solution and address their pain points.
What is a marketing funnel?
A sales funnel, also known as a conversion funnel, is a marketing model that maps out the customer journey. It shows how your audience begins as visitors and eventually turn into paying customers as they discover and then get to know your brand.
There are four stages in the funnel:
- Awareness: The top of the funnel where visitors first discover your brand as a solution to their problem
- Interest: Visitors start to gain interest in your brand and what it offers
- Decision: Your audience starts to ponder what buying option they should invest in
- Action: Visitors take the plunge and turn into paying customers
Let’s look at how to build a high-quality marketing funnel that will allow you to serve your customers better.
Understand your ideal customer
Without knowing your audience, you can’t know how they’ll move through your funnel, at what pace, or if they’ll even make it to the last stage. It’s essential to know as much as you can about them so you can become a brand they rely on.
To understand your ideal customer, you need to do your research and find out as much about them as possible. All of these details will allow you to create buyer personas for each type of customer so that you know how to market to them, how to refine your products, and what step to take next in your business venture.
Send out customer surveys to your existing audience to ask them about the details that will help you get to know them better, such as their age, location, career choice, education and income level, buying behaviors, pain points, and more. Email your subscribers directly asking them to respond with answers to your questions or use social media to talk to your target market. There are lots of ways to go about gathering data and research on your audience so you’ll never run out of information.
Your buyer persona might end up looking something like this:
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Plan your lead generation strategy
Next, you need to plan ways you’re going to grab your target audience’s attention and capture their emails so you have access to them in the future. You’ll do this mainly by creating compelling content that captivates your audience and convinces them to take the action you want.
This is the part where you create interest in your visitors by offering them something for free, also called a lead magnet. It should be good enough that your audience is eager to subscribe to your freebie because it offers them value and a solution to their problem. This could be an ebook, checklist, template, video, etc. The goal is to get their email so you can continue marketing to them and pushing them down the funnel.
There are also other ways to go about your lead generation strategy, including:
- Guest posting on other blogs
- Creating content on your own blog
- Optimizing SEO
- Optimizing your landing page
- Posting on social media
- Social media advertising
Engage your audience
Once you have access to your target audience, it’s time to keep them engaged and educate them about your products and services. The more information they have, the likelier they are to become paying customers because they feel more secure in their buying decision.
The best way to gain their trust enough to move them to the last stage of the conversion funnel is by creating compelling, authentic, informative content that serves the purpose of educating them on your business. The more high-quality your content, the better your sales funnel will be at pushing visitors further down.
Utilize video to promote your products and tell consumers about your brand. Create engaging blog posts that teach them something and have interesting topics or answers to their questions. Send out email campaigns or newsletter so they become familiar with your brand. Improve your social proof marketing so you boost your credibility.
Convert leads
So, you’ve finally gained your audience’s trust and proved to them you’re worthy of them purchasing from you. To make sure they go through with it, you must optimize the buying process for visitors. The key is to make it as easy and simple as possible so that it’s smooth and swift.
You can do this by:
- Optimizing your products page or landing page
- Minimizing the number of steps users have to take to checkout
- Decreasing the number of form fields users have to fill out
Did you know that reducing the number of form fields from four to three can double your conversion rate according to HubSpot? It’s the little extra steps you take to make the process easier for consumers that really count at the end of the day.
If you care about your potential customers and catering to their needs, it’s time you created a marketing funnel that carries them through the buying process swiftly with ease. It’ll do wonders for your business growth.