A what? A sales funnel? I know what it is. It is the steps which a person takes in order to become aware of your business, interested in what you offer, a desire to own it, and taking action.
That is called the AIDA (attention, interest, desire, action) marketing model. It is the basics of sales funnel.
BUT; way before creating your sales funnel you need to decide on 3 things:
- Who is your ideal client? This is also called avatar, or persona
- What is your message? What are you offering?
- What channel will you use? How will you get your message to your ideal client?
Once you know those three things you can move to the next step.
Not everybody is ready to buy. Only 3% of the market is considering to buy. This means you need to create a funnel for different levels of interest.
We typically look at 3 levels:
- Top of the funnel: This is where people are becoming aware. They do not know yet; but they are looking or browsing.
- Middle of the funnel: They are getting an understanding of their pain.
- Bottom of the funnel: They are ready to buy.
For each funnel we need content or information.
- Top of the funnel content: What works well here is video, blogs, and podcasts. They almost stumble upon your content.
- Middle of the funnel content: Free guides, trip-wire offers (this is a small deal; easy to buy; solves a single problem)
- Bottom of the funnel content: This is your main or core service. Sales pages and product information are typical examples.
The goal of your marketing should be to move people down the sales funnel. The trick is knowing where they are in the funnel process. We determine this by user behavior. For instance, if we see someone visits our blog; we know they are top of the funnel. If they watch a video; top of the funnel.
When they visit a lead magnet page; or small deals page; they have moved down to middle of the funnel.
When they visit sales pages we know they are now at the bottom of the funnel.
You want to align your marketing according to this. How?
We use 3 methods to achieve this:
- Re-targeting: Using paid advertising we can re-target people according to pages they visited
- E-mail: We can use email to follow up with people
- Marketing automation: We use marketing automation to automate and improve the sales funnel process
Planning your sales funnel and measuring the results are very important to ensure they work and deliver the results you want.
