Understanding Sales Funnel to Create Content that Sells

When starting a business, one needs to understand the vital role of marketing in its success. With a marketing strategy, a company will likely succeed due to minimal customers. 

Marketers need a sales funnel to bring in visitors and turn them into customers. The main goal of your sales funnels is to move people through the different stages of sales and guide them to buy your products or services. With a sales funnel in place, it can systematically make your overall marketing plan grow your business.

Before we dive deeper into it, let's take a look at the basics of the Sales Funnel.

What is a Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel represents the customer's purchasing journey. It shows the sales process, from the customer becoming aware of the product to taking action of actually buying your product. 

The marketing funnel is a way to think about how potential customers interact with your brand and go through different stages. To better understand the sales funnel, we need to categorize the other customers across each step through the following:

• Top sales funnel. You'll find a wide range of people who might be interested in your courses or products. This includes your ideal customers and people who might not be interested in what you offer.
• Middle Funnel. The pipeline for conversion gets smaller and includes only leads who are more likely to sign up for your course and buy your products. Those who weren't interested have left this criterion, and those still there are actively thinking about you as one of many ways to solve a problem they are having right now.
• Bottom Sales Funnel. Leads in this stage are very interested, and even fewer are ready, willing, and able to buy from you. These people are most likely to buy, and losing these leads will cost you more.

Knowing and identifying your leads across different phases can help you smoothly move prospective clients through the sales funnel steps and turn them into paying customers.

Benefits of having a Sales Funnel

Businesses can benefit from making a good sales funnel. As the definition suggests, the ultimate goal of the Sales Funnel is to move more people from top to bottom. Here are several reasons why it's essential to use a sales funnel:

1. Targeted messages. Reach the right people with the right content, in the right way and at the right time. When you know who is buying and where they are in the process, you can make your messages and offers more personal and less generic.
2. Attracts Customers. The goal of the sales funnel is to move a business's target audience from one phase to another and eventually result in becoming customers.
3. Create more Business Opportunities. Find opportunities and create touch points along the customer's journey where you can upsell, downsell, or cross-sell other courses or services you offer.
4. Improve Sales Friction. Friction knows where to move customers through the sales cycle faster and easier by looking at where they get stuck (or where they leave the process) and taking steps to keep them moving.
5. Creates Referrals. In addition to getting a core group of customers and a target audience, a sales funnel encourages happy customers to refer to other prospects who may not have been in the original target audience.
6. Follow and evaluate success. The sales funnel takes a little bit of science and adds it to the art of sales. It tells you in cold, complex numbers whether or not your sales process is working the way you want it to.
7. Organizes Marketing Efforts. With a sales funnel, a business can focus on a smaller number of prospects, making it easier to reach people in the target audience and turn them into paying customers when they reach the end of the funnel. A sales funnel can also help rid prospects who aren't likely to buy by restrategizing them to go through a series of steps to guide them to purchase.

Marketing Content That Sells

If you think about it, how do you put together and put up your own sales funnel? Most of the time, it's best to start with what you have and what your customers will get from it. Here are the basics of creating content, and we'll go through each step in more detail. 

Set a Content Goal

It's simple: You need to know what you want from your content to figure out what to put into it. It would be best if you also set goals for each funnel stage. For example, let's say you have many bad prospects at the top of the funnel. You might decide that qualifying for better leads is the most important thing to do at the start. If many people drop out of the sales process right before you close the deal, you should work on keeping people in the process better.

The number of marketing efforts you put into each funnel stage will depend on the goal (or goals) you set here. It will also tell you how to measure how well your strategy works and how to make changes.

Know your customers

Sales funnels are customer-focused, so you'll need to figure out who you want to sell to the most. This means you have to know who your ideal client is. This is called your Ideal Client Profile (ICP). Your ICP are individuals with problems your business or organization directly solves, a need right now, and the motivation and resources to sign up for one of your courses.

Knowing your client's needs will help you make a stronger impression on audiences who will likely be converted at each stage of your sales funnel.

Organize Your Sales Funnel

It's no surprise that no two sales funnels look the same. However, as consumers progress through their journey, the stages of your sales funnel should generally be in sync with their behaviors and demands. To build effective marketing content, use these five organic tactics:

• Awareness: How will potential clients discover you?

Use organic tactics such as doing Facebook Live, creating Social Media Content, Blog posts, Participating in Community/ Groups, engaging in Youtube, and creating visuals like infographics

• Evaluate: How will customers compare you to your competitors or similar products?

More than just getting noticed is required. Collect more reviews, create case studies, and other trustworthy information to convince people to buy from you. Organic Tactics that proved effective: Podcasts, Video Testimonials, Product demonstrations, Collecting positive reviews, and creating catalogs.

• Action: How will you get them to buy or sign up?

 Help your prospective customers leap buying your product with these tactics: 

Send email sign-ups and offers, create social media contests to encourage customers to buy, Offer coupons, Offer promotions

• Engage:  How will you stay in touch with this customer?

Finding customers takes a lot of work. Keeping in touch with your already paying customers is essential. Use these organic tactics so that you can sell them new things in the future:

Hosting regular chats and answering queries and concerns with live videos.

• Advocate: How will you get them to refer you to their friends?

Make it easy for customers to talk about how great your products are and how much they like them. These organic tactics will make your business look more trustworthy and brings in new customers:

Create Social Media Groups and communities for your buying customers and create a customer advocacy program.

CONCLUSION

Creating an effective sales funnel takes time. As a business, you need to have a clear vision of who you're trying to reach before you can find and convert leads in your marketing and sales funnel. You can also use the strategies in this article consistently and see a big jump in the number of people who buy from your sales funnel. Start with one method and see how it works before moving on to the next. 

Creating a smooth customer journey and successfully converting them into paying ones may pose a significant challenge for businesses. But, it can give your business precise data and insights into what marketing works and is not. 

Our team can help you create a smooth sales funnel of your customers and build your business marketing so you can focus on other important matters. 
Let us help you in your business journey. Schedule a call today!