Sales Funnel: Why You Need it For Any Marketing Strategy

What is a Sales Funnel?

Do you know what a funnel is? And no, I am not referring to a household object. In this context, I am referring to a marketing or sales funnel. If you don’t know what a sales funnel is, have no fear for it is pretty easy to understand! But, a sales funnel can be tricky at times.

Just like any business model, a marketing funnel is a step by step process to take a potential lead and turn them into a customer. A funnel can be long and complex or short and simple depending on the buyer’s journey. Regardless of length, the funnel helps to make things easier when implementing a marketing strategy.

A sales funnel has four core components: attract, engage, convert, all while nurturing. When you are creating a funnel, it is most important to focus on the end goal. How your business operates determines your specific goal. Some businesses may have an end goal of gaining long-term clients. Other goals may be to convert customers quickly and place them back at the top of the funnel to purchase additional products. Either way, it is key to understand each stage of the funnel and the tools you can use to walk strangers into customers

Top of the Funnel: Attract Visitors

At the top of your sales funnel, your potential leads are still strangers to you and your offering. These strangers are in the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey, they know they need something and are looking for a solution. Nearly 85% of your website visitors fall at the top of the funnel. It’s important to know who they are and what they are looking for.

Law of Attraction

Those who are in the top of the funnel are in the research stage and getting a lay of the land. To attract these strangers try to provide helpful and useful information about the problem they are facing. Use tools like blog posts, social media, keyword ranking, and specific landing pages to provide relevant content.

Try to steer away from being too “sales-y.” This stage is about research and learning, and these visitors are not ready to buy just yet.

Middle of Funnel: Engage Visitors

Those in the middle of the funnel make up 10% of the visitors on your site. These visitors are called “shoppers.” Shoppers are still in the research stage. Begin to nurture shoppers by providing information to their problem. Use call-to-actions, landing pages, and forms to gain information from your shopper and for them to engage in your content.

Bottom of the Funnel: Convert Leads

This is where your leads become buyers. These visitors have done their research and finally have their credit card in hand, ready to buy. You can evaluate where your leads are at using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software and lead scoring. Emails and automations come into play during this time. Use these tools to nurture and build a relationship with your leads.

Nurturing

At this point, you want to ensure you spent the time to build a relationship with all your visitors. By doing this you’ve nurtured your prospects into leads and those leads into happy customers.  You ultimately, want to create brand advocates from happy customers to help you turn their friends and family, who may be strangers to you, into customers. Create customer buzz using social media, reviews, and referrals.