Creating a complete marketing funnel is essential when it comes to turning website visitors into prospects and eventually paying customers for any product or service you choose to offer. This is a powerful method and one that is used by many of the 'top' marketers online today. As you are probably aware, people don’t like somebody else selling to them, but what they do like to see is a great offer and especially something for 'FREE' that has a high perceived value.
"Marketing funnel" refers to the marketing strategy used by businesses both offline and online to channel fresh prospects to their business with the sole intention of creating customer-business relationship with them. Marketing funnels have been around for many years though they are becoming more streamlined as online marketing begins to take prominence.
If you’ve been doing business for some time and generated sales in one form or another you have in essence created a marketing funnel. Some are discrete and others are more defined. The basic idea behind a marketing funnel is to find creative ways to drive people to your offer, website or store. These visitors are called leads and these leads can be turned into prospects and then to consumers of your product or service.
The following are some basic actions you can take to get started on creating your very own marketing funnel:
Establish an Attractive Website
The first step is to create an attractive and engaging website. You want to grab the attention of your visitors to such an extent that they will be intrigued to stay on your page to at least check out what you are offering. Aim to captivate your viewers, your site does not have to be pretty. Go beyond the call of duty and provide an excellent offer of value in exchange for their name and email address depending on the criteria.
You want a website that looks reliable and authentic. Try not to cut corners as if your website looks cheap it can create risk among the viewers. In order to make your page look like this you will need to have such features as review portals, newsletter, tips and tricks, articles and even a video education slot that you can showcase yourself personally to people. This will make you more reliable and worthy of further investigation by your viewers.
To put it simply, if you can offer your visitors something of great value that they will want at the drop of a hat, you will be successful in converting visitors into fresh leads. The type of value can be totally customizable. You can offer a free e-book, a video training series about your product, service or related offerings. Make sure your offerings radiate worth in order to maintain your viewers confidence and continued viewing.
A website that offers value will create a perception of reliability and authenticity in the mind of the viewer. This is what you want so choose carefully what you will have on your website.
Utilize Lead Capture Software In Your Website
It is paramount that you set up a lead capture page in your website. Remember if you cannot do this yourself there are many professionals and companies that can do this for you. A nicely laid out page with attractive graphics and easy to fill in information boxes will increase your chances of gaining more leads.
Large opt-in information boxes have shown a larger conversion rate over smaller ones, simply because the easier something appears to be, the more enticing it becomes in the mind of the viewer.
There are a variety of lead capture software to choose from. There are some that track the pages that visitors read most often, the products that they are looking for and the likes. So depending on your site’s needs will decide which capture software your choose.
Strategies for Reaching Your Target Audience
There are many different strategies you can use to reach your target audience. It is wise that you get as many different platforms as possible as this will give you a better chance and more of broader reach in terms of viewership.
Some of the online strategies are video hosting sites where you can create videos and upload them to spread the message about your site. You can also use sites like Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, Blogs, YouTube, Vimeo, discussion and marketing sites etc. Of course you can also use offline strategies too like classifieds, notice boards, flyers, brochures and business cards. You can use several of these strategies at the same time.
When setting up your LCP (Lead Capture Page) you will have access to back office statistics such as number of visitors per day, week and month and if you employ analytics of some kind you will much more of a defined scope of visitor information. Use this information to better tweak your offer and web page layout. Your products and services should be made in such a manner that they will serve the interest of the visitors.
The idea of funnel marketing is to bring visitors to your site, otherwise known as the front end of your funnel process and pull them through your funnel system by initially offering them a great value product for free if you can. Once they are in your funnel you can then introduce them to more products and services.
The back end of the funnel is where your customers buy your main product that you are offering. This obviously costs more than the initial offering or product and is the goal of setting up the funnel in the first place. Funnels work! They work if they are thought out and executed well. Marketing funnels can generate more sales for your business than any other strategy out there.
