Why You Should be Using Marketing Funnels in 2020
It’s easy enough to build a shiny new website with all the bells and whistles, but when it comes time to flip the switch on, do you know where your customers are going to come from?
Building traffic can be one of the most nerve-wracking endeavours as a new business. There are of course a myriad of ways to accomplish this, some are time-intensive and many are financially prohibitive, but ‘throwing spaghetti against the wall' causes night terrors for most business owners. And yet, every good business knows that they need a great marketing funnel. Or wait...do they?
What does a marketing funnel look like these days?
Let’s start with the difference between a Sales Funnel and a Marketing Funnel - because it can be a bit confusing.
Sales Funnel
A sales funnel is the physical steps that your sales team uses to land that big fish. It usually goes like this: Qualify, Meet, Proposal, Close. It’s not dissimilar to the Marketing Funnel is when it’s used in a sales environment. Marketing tends to be a more abstract process versus phone proactive outbound sales steps. But we love using the Sales process to inform our Marketing Funnel. The two are inextricably linked.
The first step is to identify your sales process.
- Who are your customers, audience, where do they come from and how do you attract them today and tomorrow?
- How to qualify them by purchase intent, when their buying time frame is, budget, and who are the decision-makers?
- Your proposal - Product or service, your offers and sales bundles.
- Closing the sale and Aftercare (customer support).
Marketing Funnel
A marketing funnel company refers to how we visually represent the buyer’s journey. Depending on who you ask can anywhere from 3-5 stages. What used to look like a simple funnel now progressed a ‘flywheel’ model. Customers can enter or leave at any one point in the process, but to keep them move within your business ecosystem is the ultimate goal. It’s easier to sell to someone who is already a customer of yours.
“ The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70 per cent. The probability of selling to a new prospect is 5-20 per cent. 80 per cent of your future profits will come from just 20 per cent of your existing customers.” Source
We’ve separated the Marketing Funnel into 3 Main areas: Attract, Engage, Delight
Attract - Awareness/& Consideration
- PPC - Paid traffic on social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin, Google Ads, Bing, Display Ads, Print Ads, Blogs (like recipes or comparison sites, aggregate and news sites.
- Organic Search - This is where your SEO efforts pay off!
- Socials - Influencers, Facebook pages, Social profiles working to get shared and engaged with.
- Referrals partners, co-marketing, Citation or listing sites like Yellow Pages.
- Retargeting with Google Display, Facebook.
Engage (Convert)
- Lead Magnet - white papers, reports, lists, surveys, gamification for data mining.
- Webinars - Introduction Warmth and trust, countdown time offer.
- Freemium version.
- Gated Content Access.
- Automated Drip sequence of emails to build trust and inform.
- Eliminate friction, overcome objections with a 100% guarantee.
- Buy and convert and up-sell.
- Incentives, time countdown, bundled offers.
Delight (Loyalty & Advocacy)
- Up-sells and resells, partner offers.
- Newsletters and added value information.
- Special offers.
- Reviews _ Google, Yelp, Facebook Pages.
- Surveys - customer information, improvement and the offer something special.
- Social media (mentions shares and re-posts.
At each one of these stages, you have to be prepared for touchpoints and to automate your communications.
Funnel Tools & More
Using Customer Relationship Management Software (CRM) to track and maintain contact information in this process is vital and can have a huge impact on your companies productivity, sales & customer satisfaction. CRM’s include your customer database, sales process tracking, and automated marketing integrations like email and chatbots many don’t include the ability to automate all of your marketing conversations.
Hubspot
This is why we love Hubspot. It has a great starter freemium version, with CRM and marketing tools to get you up and running with eDM email campaigns, live chat conversion forms with reporting and analytics.
“HubSpot is consistently ranked the most user-friendly CRM and B2B software (source), with rep adoption, often cited as a key benefit among HubSpot users.”
Its superpowers lay in its learning modules, amazing support for everything, and you can start with the free CRM and marketing tools to dip your toes in. Inbound Marketing gurus - if you want an intuitive, lead nurturing CRM that can be used forever with great sales and marketing functionalities, then Hubspot is well worth your time, effort and investment.
Click Funnels
ClickFunnels is a powerhouse for building high converting sales funnels with books, webinars and complex funnel templates and workflows - it converts better than a website because of its focus on a singular sales goal. If you want a robust yet simple sales tool for a product that get the sales job done, then this is it.
Funnelytics
Funnelytics is a software that works as your visual funnel planner. Once mapped out you then build your campaign in ClickFunnels. It's a very powerful analytics tool that help you understand where the abandoned carts and dropout happen in your process to help you fix the leaky taps. Funnel mapping is great fun with this platform, tool!
You will be able to see a measurable difference between efforts once you set up your marketing funnels and start to automate your marketing processes. You will easily lead your customers along the journey with minimal effort for higher conversions, less lost traffic, and better retention. You are creating a great customer experience that builds loyal customers.
So if you’re thinking about upping your marketing automation game and ready to move your business into the marketing sweet spot, we’d love to hear from you today. Just book a free strategy call to talk with our digital solutions team today.
