A Sales Funnel for Your Online Marketing

by Rahimah Sultan

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Online marketing is any form of advertising done on the internet. It takes on many shapes and forms and can be done organically for free or it can be paid for. Either approach features a number of effective strategies and methods to gain the desired outcome.


One of the primary concepts in the digital marketing industry is the sales funnel.


A sales funnel is a marketing concept that maps out the journey a customer goes through when making any kind of purchase. This model uses a funnel as an analogy because a large number of potential prospects may be available at the beginning of the sales process, but only a portion actually become paying customers.


Your prospects pass through different stages of your sales funnel from the first time they hear about your product or service until the moment they make a purchase.


You must have a clear business vision, develop a marketing strategy and define your target audience before you start building your sales funnel.


You can design your sales funnel with as many stages as you want, although there are generally four main ones that include awareness, interest, decision, and action.

Awareness

As your prospects become aware of you through various means such as email newsletter signups, online quizzes, ebooks, social media, Google, and more, they enter your sales funnel.


Your overall goal with this entire funnel and platform is to solve customer problems. When you know the problem, and build content to draw them in and then offer a product or service to solve their problem, things begin to happen. Getting to that stage takes work and you must first make them aware of you.


You’ve secured your prospects’ awareness once they’re in your funnel. That’s the first stage.



Interest

As a marketer, your goal is to move your prospects through the multiple stages that will take them from prospect to buyer. Now that they’re aware of you, build interest by establishing a relationship with them. Although you can use a lead magnet (a great offer) to get their email address, you must create a strong bond by being relatable, honest, and transparent in your follow-up process which is an email sequence.


Email marketing works as well as ever to drive quality traffic to your funnel. Emails are still as profitable as ever and when used correctly, along with your social media platforms, will always be a secret sales weapon.


Your funnel strategy should include sending traffic via organic blog posts SEO and podcasts which are also among the highest-converting forms of content marketing.



Decision

In the third stage, you want prospects to make a decision, and that’s not easy. You’ve done your storytelling and copywriting and have gotten them to click on your links, by using free methods.  If you’re using paid advertising, you can use re-targeting which gets you more exposure.


Now you need to present prospects with a great opportunity. For this, you can use an ongoing exchange of emails in which you offer something of value for free or show how much authority your products or services have, or show scarcity as in an offer for a limited time.



Action

The final stage of your sales funnel is getting prospects to take action. You must continue to follow up with more copy, by tracking, and using more email sequences. You’ve only just begun once your funnel is built. The work has only just begun and there is no shortcut.


You can automate your outreach strategy with various programs. The technical aspects of setting up an internet sales funnel include a lead capture page, a sales page, and an autoresponder.


In summary, a sales funnel is a multi-step, multi-modality process that moves prospective browsers into buyers. You’ll need to put in the time if you’re looking to eventually reap the benefits and results. Don’t limit your funnel traffic to one source unless you want your sales to be completely reliant on one platform. These are a few basic steps for setting up a sales funnel for your online marketing.



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