A business will remain stagnant if it is unable to consistently convert leads into customers or have a marketing funnel which brings in new leads that follow the different stages. Although retaining customers and reducing churn rates are essential, you need to bring in new customers into your business to ensure steady growth market.
Maintaining a steady growth marketing funnel is the smartest way to grow your business in 2019. If you want to use this method, you need to understand the different stages that the marketing funnel entails. You also need to select the most effective outreach that will move leads at each stage and implement this approach consistently.
In this article, we will discuss the fundamentals of building your marketing funnel stages. We will also enlighten you on different productive strategies at each stage.
Developing A Great Marketing Funnel
There are different approaches to growing your business and building your marketing funnel. Not all of the strategies are a one size fit all. Some strategies work for some companies and are unproductive for others. Nevertheless, some approaches have been proven reliable enough to be applied to any business. These strategies we will discuss below.
Do A Customer Exploration and Create a Buyer Persona
You must know your ideal customers before setting out to plan your marketing funnel strategy. After defining your ideal customers, you can then outline the stages that suit your customer's needs and provide the appropriate solution. Not taking time out to know your customer's needs at each point means you are going into the market blind and will be an unproductive move.
The initial step is to know the necessary information about your ideal customers, such as demographics, needs, interest and challenges. You can achieve this by generating a buyer persona. Creating a buyer persona means giving an imaginary profile to each of your ideal clients. Buyer personas include lots of details about these imaginary customers. Creating a buyer persona is labour-intensive and requires a lot of analysis. However, the effort is worth it as it helps to determine your content, your interaction with your potential client at every stage, and more.
Determine the Stages of Your Marketing Funnel
As a company, you need to develop unique marketing funnel stages tailored to suit the model of your business and your customer's needs. You must know the needs of a lead at every step so you can convince them to continue to engage with your brand. No particular standard exists for building marketing funnels. We put together some marketing funnel stages to give you a hint on how you can start. Before we delve into the stages, let's talk about content marketing. Content marketing is a vital part of generating and moving the leads through the different funnel stages with the ultimate goal of conversion.
Strategising Your Content
You have to be strategic about reaching out to your leads. You need to nurture them and build trust first before introducing any product to them. The best way to do this is content marketing. You need to use different content at different stages to engage your leads. You can't approach a cold lead with the brochure of your product without even trying to convince them or make them know what they are missing if they do not have your product. Besides, you have not given them a reason to trust you yet. Plan to use different contents at every stage to make them continue moving up the stages. The first thing you need to do is determine the type of content that is suitable for each stage.
Now, to the different stages of the funnel. The funnel is divided into three major stages; the top, middle and the bottom.
The Top: Awareness
The top is the stage where you get new leads in your database. They identify themselves by giving you their contact details when they are offered something in exchange. Your target, at this stage, is anyone who is a potential fit for your brand. When leads are at this point, you can provide them with inbound content to gain their trust. If you give them top-notch content, they begin to regard you as a force to reckon with in your niche. If you provide them with a solution for common problems in your content or enlighten them on recent trends, then they will come back to you for guidance. This will have a significant impact on the reputation of your brand. Other strategies can engage in new leads and convert them. They include:
• SEO keywords that will rank your content at the top of the search engine
• Infographics
• Putting up exclusive offers, ads, and content on social media to get their attention
• Videos
• Providing more value in your blog post compared to your competitors
• Podcasts
Eventually, any strategy that will help you generate more awareness is essential when you are trying to build awareness.
The Middle: Consideration
Once you have got customers attention and made your brand known to them, you can now move on to the next stage, which is consideration. At this stage, you convince them that there is a problem they have that demands an urgent solution. Then, you make yourself available as a perfect solution to the problem. Most times, clients might not know they might be missing an essential element that is affecting their growth negatively. Some types of content that convinces leads in the conversion stage are:
• White paper
• eBooks
• Resources that will give them more insight into your brand
• Informative webinars around the latest trends
• Email marketing campaigns to increase brand awareness
The aim is to for potential customers to identify with your brand identity.
The Bottom: Decision
After taking your leads through the first two stages and trying to convince them to stick with your brands, they will want to know more. To decide the best, they will likely compare you to your competitors. This is the decision stage. Your major focus in this stage should be to accentuate your value scheme and showing your prospective customers that you can offer them a rare and exceptional service or product. In the final stage, leads require more attention than you gave in the first two stages. You can call or message them directly to answer their questions. There are some other bottom-funnel marketing strategies you can use to convince clients; they include:
• Testimonials from past customers
• An in-depth exploration of the benefit of your products which can be done through webinars.
• Case studies of customers/clients that have used your product or service before.
If you can execute this stage flawlessly, you will be able to convert a lot of leads into customers.
Measuring The Success Rate of Your Marketing Funnel
It is imperative to measure the outcomes of your efforts at each stage, which will help you make better decisions on how to improve your company's growth. Many tools are available that can help you measure the speed at which you are transitioning from one stage to another. These metrics and reports are beneficial for evaluation.
If you notice that leads are piled up in a particular stage and not moving to the next stage, you can evaluate the problem of that stage, solve the problem and keep the flow moving. Ensure to do an accurate measurement of your efforts through the stage and act accordingly.
Understanding Your Marketing Funnel Through Trial and Error
In conclusion, knowing and observing your marketing funnel can improve lead generation and conversion. Creating a buyer persona is essential because it gives you an idea of the content needed at every stage. Afterwards, create compelling content that will move your leads from one stage to another.
If you discover a block at any stage, address it with immediate effect. Businesses that do not take effective action towards conversion typically perform lesser than their competition. However, those that have detailed marketing funnel stages and consistently monitor the movement of each lead will take a leading position in their niche and improve their growth.