How to a Build a Funnel to Get More Leads
Chances are, if you’ve done any research on marketing your business, you’ve seen the F-word over and over again.
No, not that F-word. This one: funnels.
Every marketing course and website will tell you that you need to build a sales funnel to get more leads and bring more customers into your business. But did you know that your business, in many ways, is a sales funnel? You draw in prospects and (hopefully) turn them into paying customers. The only question is whether you do this effectively or not.
Before you start to create an email campaign, you need to figure out what your funnel looks like, and then you can determine how best to improve your funnel to get the results you want.
Finding your funnel
Determining the shape of your funnel involves looking at the visitors you currently have to your website, the leads you get, opportunities for potential sales, and the customers you have. Are you maximizing every opportunity you have to make a sale? Or are you letting some pass you by, maybe without even realizing it?
Look back at the past month of business and answer these questions:
- How many people visited your website?
- How many leads did you get? How many sales opportunities?
- How many sales did you close? How many did you not close?
- If you have an established database of contacts, are they active contacts? That is, do they visit your site or engage with your social media content?
Determining the answers to these questions will help you see what your funnel looks like and figure out where you need to work to adjust it.
Maybe you have plenty of leads, but you’re not taking the time to properly engage them and get them interested enough in your services to make a purchase.
Maybe you have a lot of visitors to your website each month, but they don’t fill out any contact information or transform into viable leads.
Maybe you don’t have enough visitors or leads, and you need to attract more people to visit your website and interact with your brand.
All of these problems are solvable. That’s what marketing and sales funnels are all about!
Know your customer’s journey
The goal of a sales funnel is to have people enter the top of the funnel as prospective customers and then exit the funnel when they purchase a product or service from you. You don’t want any prospects slipping out of the funnel partway through, so it’s critical to make sure your funnel is effective and meets your prospects’ needs.
It’s important to understand the sales journey each of your potential customers goes through. This way, you will know what they’re looking for at each stage of the journey and be ready to provide it for them. You also have to understand that not every single person will be ready to buy, but you can still provide them with information and nurture those leads so that they become sales in the future.
Next, we’ll look at the ideal process of a marketing sales funnel and how you can best move prospects through the funnel and convert them into customers.
Attract, nurture, and delight
No matter how great your funnel is, it’s useless if you don’t get people into it. There are a ton of ways to attract prospective customers, such as signing up for your newsletter, liking or following your social media pages, and subscribing to your blog. Regardless of how you do it, once you’ve attracted and connected to these people, they’re in your funnel. From there, you have to decide how best to continue to connect with them and keep moving them down the funnel.
This is why it’s essential to nurture your leads and move them toward purchasing. To figure out how best to do this, a little research definitely doesn’t hurt. Talk to former clients and ask them about how they chose your company: what steps they took, what questions they had, and where they went to get answers.
Next, map out your customers’ journey and find ways to add more value at each stage. Point prospects to lead magnets, blog posts, and downloadable content to help educate them and answer their questions before they even think to ask them. They’ll appreciate the information and look to you as a trustworthy source of educational content.
Once you’ve made the sale, be sure to follow through and make sure your new customers are absolutely delighted with your services. You want them to be so happy, they tell all their friends and family about you. The better you understand your customers, the easier it will be to make them happy by giving them the service and products they truly want. Think about little extra touches you can add to pleasantly surprise them, whether that’s delivering their products early or throwing in a free bonus.
Understanding how potential customers move through your sales process can help you tighten up your funnel and create a better sales journey for your prospects!
Need help crafting your funnel into the perfect lead-generating, customer-creating machine? We can help. Learn more about our Managed Marketing Services.
