How Creating a Simple Sales Funnel Will Amplify Your Sales
We’ve learned how to build marketing campaign assets and how to create a marketing campaign that boosts sales, but what is the process for locating and catching potential customers so that they become buyers? This is a sales funnel.
In short, a sales funnel is the journey in which a customer travels on the way to purchase your product or service. TechTarget defines this as the sales process from awareness to action.
The goal of every sales funnel is to generate sales. This is different from choosing a marketing campaign goal – like attracting new member sign-ups, building your newsletter patrons, or increasing your follower count. Your goal should be increasing the sales of a specific product or your overall sales.
Once you are ready to catch your potential customers, BeFunky’s Graphic Designer can help you create all of the assets you need.
Why You Should Have a Sales Funnel
Most people will simply create a product, launch said product, and then do one-hundred revisions of ‘trial and error’ until they find who their customers are. This is very inefficient and can be avoided if you take the time to follow the steps below on how to set up a sales funnel. If you do create a sales funnel, it will help you keep tabs on each part of the process so that you can make minor adjustments to each step as deemed necessary, rather than start from scratch when your efforts continually fail.
How to Set Up a Sales Funnel
Setting up a sales funnel is relatively easy. It takes a short amount of time and will save you a host of hours in the long run. We are going to discuss the steps you can do to build your own sales funnel and amplify your sales!
The first step in this process is to create awareness, once you do this, you will want to measure the interactions so that you can determine interest and then see if your customer is taking action or not. This is the process of a sales funnel but we are going to break this down into specific steps to make it even easier for you.
Remember, the goal is to increase your sales. In order to do this, you must catch the right demographic and filter them down the channels of your choosing until they arrive at your goal.
1. Pick a Target Demographic and Capture Their Attention
Choosing a target demographic is vital. Whether you are figuring out the target demographic for your overall brand or simply choosing one for a marketing campaign, the success of each depends on how detailed you are when choosing your target demographic.
When someone says, ‘My brand is for everyone’, it is code for “I don’t know what I’m doing”. Even though you may want your brand to be for everyone, if you don’t specify your unique target demographic it will actually make your business weaker in many ways. The more targeted you are, the better your goals, the more concentrated your campaigns, and the clearer your analytics. Once you have a clear set of analytics, you can see if you need to adjust your target demographic or enhance your marketing toward the one you’ve chosen.
Think of this like fishing. Certain fish like certain bait. If you keep using the same bait for a fish that doesn’t like it, it will not bite. If you choose to go fishing with ten different baits to try to increase your bite rate with a variety of fish it actually lowers your chances of catching a single fish! If you take the time to know the bait your fish like, locate the place those fish reside and are patient when fishing, it is more likely that you will get bite after bite in a single session.
For example, my target demographic for a skincare brand is ‘tween girls between the ages of 11-15,’ when I am making marketing campaign assets I know to create graphics that are marketed towards this specific demographic. Once my analytics come back, I can see if my marketing is reaching this specific demographic. If it is, great, if it isn’t, I can either choose to adjust my marketing assets and try again or choose another demographic for my marketing, such as ‘mothers between the ages of 37-45’ who are generally parents to this age demographic. If I see that a certain demographic is consistently purchasing my products, then I can adjust my marketing assets and message for that demographic and they become my new focus.
If my product is for ‘everyone,’ my marketing efforts are going to be a shot in the dark until I find the right demographic. This process makes finding your target demographic much harder and it will also take more time than doing your best to choose a specific demographic and making minor adjustments as you go.
Once you choose your target demographic, you need to capture their attention by creating awareness and interest. Capturing the attention of your audience is what a marketing campaign is for. What kinds of content do they like to consume? How can you initially draw this audience into the funnel? After you answer this question, you will need to know where to direct them once you catch them.
2. Engage Your Audience and Be Prepared
If you catch the customer and do not immediately direct them to where you want them to go, you will lose them. This might mean creating a landing page for their specific demographic that showcases a hero image designed specifically for them and gives them a CTA (or Call-to-action) to get them to engage.
This is the process of the sales funnel where your potential customers evaluate whether or not they want to purchase. Getting your audience to engage is an important step in this sales funnel. This might look like them reaching out to customer service or filling out a form for more information. At this stage, they are wanting to know how your specific business can solve their needs.
The more you get them to engage and like it, the more they will relate to your brand and enjoy interacting with you, increasing the chance that they will stick around and eventually convert to being a customer. This is why social media has become such a powerful marketing tool. You are able to easily create content for your chosen demographic to catch them and then redirect them to the next step. If you are not on social media, this could look like creating and handing out business cards that link to a landing page on your website where you immediately collect their email and send them a code for purchasing.
It is also important to be prepared for these potential customers. To do this, you may want to create an FAQ page on your website or a form that they can fill out and send to you directly from your site. Make sure that your customer service is up to standard because if it is not, a bad interaction could cost you their sale.
Once they pass this stage, they have decided if they are going to purchase or not. If they do decide to purchase and become a customer, your job isn’t yet done!
3. Take Care of the Catch
Once you get to this part of the sales funnel, your job is to retain your past customers and get them to purchase again. It is easier to get past customers to re-purchase rather than fishing for new customers, so make sure you have a plan in action to lure this group back into the purchase stage.
This might look like sending this audience a specific email newsletter like with a thank you and a discount code, or using holidays to market to them and remind them of their pleasant experience with you.
4. Generate New Leads Into the Sales Funnel
Once you create the initial sales funnel, you are then able to create new leads and direct them into the same or similar funnel. Taking the tween skincare example above, if your first demographic is funneling into your sales funnel, you can then ask yourself what other demographic is an easy catch and then create a unique landing page for them, say, the moms of tween daughters.
Amplify Your Sales With a Sales Funnel
It becomes easier to amplify your sales when you create a sales funnel. Follow the steps above in order to create and monitor a sales funnel. When you are ready to create assets that you can use in your sales funnel strategy, using BeFunky’s Graphic Designer will make your life easier.
