How To Generate Your First Sales Funnel For Your Business In 4 Simple Steps
No matter what business you are in, if you want to learn how to create a sales funnel for your business, with these 4 steps you can create a conversion funnel, increase your sales and above all, increase your list of followers anxious to know more about you.
Decide where you want your potential clients to land for that first contact. For many companies, the indicated place is your corporate website, an online store, or more specifically you should design a landing page or “landing page” where you offer new visitors something of value in exchange for providing their email, such as an eBook, a masterclass or a small discount on the first purchase.
Offer valuable content for your visitors. Keeping your potential customers interested is vital to build trust with you or your company. Include in your website with different content formats such as: articles, tips, success stories, conferences, seminars, tutorial videos or any other example that, depending on the commercial activity of your company, you can provide.
Ask your potential customers or clients to commit more. Once they are interested in the products and or services of your company, continue to involve them in your business with questions and encouraging participation. Remember that it is about creating lasting relationships.
Enhance your offer, because in first-time relationships, almost none of your prospects will buy or become a customer on the first visit. But by cultivating a stable relationship through the content of your blog or website, social networks and email marketing campaigns, you can launch offers to the right person at the right time for each potential customer.
Direct prospects to your landing page, which is the 1st step of the sales funnel. Once you have everything ready and after testing the whole process of your sales funnel on your own, the most fascinating job is to direct more people to your marketing funnel.
Some ideas that you can implement to get traffic to your landing page are:
- Facebook Ads
- Private Facebook groups
- Traditional media, like radio, press, tv, etc.
- (SEO) to appear in google search results
- Writing in reference blogs in your niche
- Paid ads on Google (SEM)
- Special appearances in events, podcasts, Facebook live
The way I prefer to get the most traffic to my sales funnel is through SEO, without a doubt it is the way to take leads to your sales funnel and get a higher return on your investment. Although I advise you to always be split testing your funnel to increase it’s effectiveness. Try to capture leads with some of the ideas that I mentioned above to maximize the number of possible prospects.
The Sales Funnel, Are they for bloggers only or do they work for other niches and companies? Many business owners still question the effectiveness of sales funnels and base their strategy on traditional marketing.
It is not that this is bad, but currently combining the offline world with the online world is one of the best practices when it comes to attracting, converting and selling more through the internet. Especially if we put together Facebook Ads + local business is the return on investment (if done well) can be very high.
The answer is very simple, both entrepreneurs, bloggers, digital marketers, as for SMEs and larger companies, the sales funnels are the methodology of the digital era and work for everyone.
A Success Story
This success story of Domino’s Pizza Spain, shared by the friends of Inbound Cycle, helps us to better understand each of the objectives of the marketing funnels.
We leave them with an image of our business to attract their attention; in this case it is the first part of our sales funnel.
Then we engage the prospects at the beginning of the funnel that have come to our website through a guest article, through Google, or maybe they are interested in a free product of ours.
Then we want to build trust, credibility and ultimately momentum throughout the sales funnel.
We want prospects to realize that they can increase their sales if they have our services; the ultimate goal is to hire us to get more visibility to their business.
The Stages Of A Sales Funnel – 4 Simple Steps To Build Your First Sales Funnel
In order to not over complicate things, if you are not familiar with a sales funnel, I will leave you the 4 essential steps or phases.
Step 1: Attract Prospects (Awareness)
One of the first strategies you should adopt for your sales funnel to reach more people, you can use online advertising through Facebook.
Create advertising campaigns with Facebook Ads. I will show you in this article just how to do it. This way you will be able to show people with an interest in your niche, an ad of yours and take it directly to your website in exchange for a few cents.
Use Facebook Contests to drive traffic to your landing pages. They are one of the best resources to offer your products and to reach more people. It is a publication where, in exchange for a “Like”, share on your wall and tag your friends, the user who has greater participation may be the winner and win a gift. You can do the manual selection, or through some payment tools that are offered.
It will appear in Google organic searches. For example, if you have an online store selling beauty products you can write a good article, such as “The 5 best wrinkle creams.” There are searches daily in Google for “best wrinkle creams”, if those people go to the blog of your store, then you have achieved the first goal, which is for them to get to know your brand.
Step 2: Get them to take you into account (Consideration)
At this stage it is important that you become the first purchase option of the people who already know you from the previous step.
As the owner of your business, it is important that you are attentive to answer every question you receive, to clarify every doubt that arises and to prepare yourself for criticism.
If you do not have the time to stay 100% connected to social networks because of the many things you have to attend to, then you could hire a social network management company, a Community Manager who is responsible, under your guidance and indications to keep your social media accounts updated.
How can you make the consideration stage a success? Below are some recommendations:
Advertising on Facebook allows you to reach people who have already interacted on your page, have seen a video of you or are related, in some. Create a Retargeting strategy so that your content always stays fresh in the mind (or profiles) of your prospects.
As I mentioned before, try to respond to each comment and if you cannot do it, train or hire someone to do it for you.
Do not focus solely on your products or how wonderful they or you are. When someone makes a query on your social networks, they are already showing interest in what you do. You can talk about what your users will get if they choose your product or service. Focus your marketing efforts on counting the benefits of working with you or buying those products from you.
Step 3: Lead them to Make a Purchase (Action)
Now that they know you and trust you, they are at a step closer to purchase some of your products or services; you only need the final incentive:
You can offer special discounts on the first purchase. Here your users are so close to taking out their credit cards that if you do not show them something to highlight the offer of the week, they will go to the competition that is doing it.
Things like: 2×1 promotions, free shipping, 24 hour offers. All of these are powerful strategies that will help your prospects take action and become customers through the purchase of your product and or services.
Offer a gift bonus for using your service. For example you can give a 30 minute consultancy to the first 10 clients
Step 4: Loyalty is Vital (Advocacy)
The purchase of your product or service is not the last in the marketing funnel of your business. The customer’s loyalty is less expensive in money and effort, than getting new customers.
That’s why the last step in a sales funnel is to get your customers to make recurring purchases. In this way, being recurrent your customers will become ambassadors of your brand.
They will be the first defenders of your business and, of course, they will help you with the mission of attracting new customers to the widest part of your sales funnel. What content do you use to achieve loyalty in your customers?
Facebook advertising is still a powerful tool to perform Retargeting and send exclusive content for customers who have already made a purchase.
It will also help you to promote products or services that complement what your customers have already purchased. “Cross Selling”.
Another action you can take to build loyalty with your customers is to plan, design and launch a strategy to offer special discounts in exchange for your customers inviting their friends to your offers.
What tools do you need to create a Sales Funnel?
There are several tools that you will need to create a good sales funnel for your business.
The first step will be to know which target audience you are going to direct your message and at what stage of the shopping tour you are (Awareness, Consideration, Action and Advocacy).
Remember that the message is different for each of the steps or stages. These are the tools that I recommend you use for your first sales funnel:
Organic or paying for traffic. With a good content strategy and presence in all social networks you will have more opportunities to take prospects to the top of your sales funnel.
Online advertising is recommended to enhance the digital presence of your business, as it will help you reach the right people at the right time, through good segmentation. Therefore you will need a blog or at least a “landing page”.
There are tools that will allow you to automate the entire process. This is very important because humanly we are not in the capacity to maintain ourselves 24/7/365 in total connection with our prospects or clients.
Here’s A List Of Tools That Will Help With Your Business:
First you will need a hosting service such as Hostgator and your own domain, I advise you to use WordPress to create your own website.
Your social networks are a free platform to create effective sales funnels. Use the groups to deliver value content adapted to each purchase path of your potential customers.
You will also need to create landing pages or pages that allow you to obtain the data of your clients: Name, email and any other information you need to know them better.
You may need a payment gateway in place to sell more products & or services on the Internet. Some of the most common ones that are available is PayPal, ThriveCart, SamCart or Sendowl and are included in some funnel builders..
Next you’ll need a sales funnel builder or if you know how to code with html, php, javascript, etc., you can build it yourself (very tedious and time consuming to get it right).
Some of the most popular funnel builders and ones that I have used or am currently using to configure each stage of the sales funnel are:
ClickFunnels, LeadPages, ThriveThemes (which is the one I’m using on this site), BuilderAll, then there’s my new favorite builder introduced recently by the company I’m presently working with is The Power Lead System, which is extremely powerful, easy to use and I’m in the process of converting all of my funnels to.
ClickFunnels pricing is $97 & $297 (for the full blown version) per month.
You can take it for a test drive with their 14-day free trial here => ClickFunnels.
LeadPages is $37, $79 & $321 (for the full blown version) per month. You can also save up to 39% off with annual billing.
You can test drive it with their 14-day free trial here => LeadPages.
You can also check out my review of ClickFunnels vs. LeadPages by clicking here.
ThriveThemes plugin prices vary depending on the plugin and the number of sites you want to install them on. It can get very complicated and only works with WordPress.
They range in price from:
- 1 site: $39 – $67
- 5 Sites – $47 – $147
- 15 sites – $97 – $399 (except Thrive Architect)
- Unlimited Sites – Thrive Membership (more on that below)
Here’s A Pro Tip: If you think you’ll need a bunch of these plugins or have lots of websites, then you’ll want to consider the membership. For one or five site prices will only make sense if you have a limited number of sites and don’t have use for any of the additional tools.
Yearly Membership Pricing:
Individual Website Owner: 25 Sites, ** Unlimited Support, All Plugins and Themes, $19/month (paid yearly) $228/year.
Agency / Developer: 50 Sites (Yours or Clients), ** Unlimited Support, All Plugins and Themes, $49/month (paid yearly) $558/year.
They don’t offer a free trial, but do have a 30 day money back guarantee.
You can check them out here: www.ThriveThemes.com
BuilderAll has 3 plans: $9.90, $29.90 & $49.90 monthly
You can check them out here: www.BuilderAll.com
And last, but certainly not least is my new favorite builder The Power Lead System, which is extremely powerful, very easy to use and more incredibly you can start out free for life (so no complicated options to try and figure out just what you will require). It includes everything you need to build your funnels, including an autoresponder with ready to go emails.
You can check them out here: The Power Lead System
Next you will need an autoresponder, there are many of them and ClickFunnels $297 and BuilderAll’s $49 monthly plans and The Power Lead System will include their own.
I’ve used all of the most well-known autoresponders on the market today. But, for simplicity and deliverability (in-boxing), I’m only going to list a couple here that I would recommend. For power, ease of use and great pricing for such a powerful autoresponder I recommend ActiveCampaign, I just love this autoresponder and they offer a 2 week trial with plans starting out at only $9 per month, paid yearly or $15 monthly.
You can take them for a test drive here => ActiveCampaign
Then there’s AWeber, probably the most well-known of autoresponders on the market today. However it is much less user friendly then ActiveCampaign and extremely less powerful. They have a 30 day trial and their plans start at $19 per month.
You can test drive them here => AWeber
AWeber & ActiveCampaign have the best deliverability of the numerous autoresponders I’ve used in the past.
Conclusion
Sales funnels are a powerful tool to help people to get to know your business and help them feel comfortable and secure when buying your products or contracting your services.
The main values that you must bear in mind when creating this strategy are Loyalty and Trust. Cultivate a relationship before launching yourself to sell firsthand.
This will help you to show you are sincere and reliable. With a sales funnel you will discover new ways to reach people through your social networks.
In this way you can convert them into a real cash register, not only monetarily speaking, but also in terms of cultivating your relationship with people.
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