Tag Archives: marketing funnel

The Sales Funnel for Beginners

The Sales Funnel for Beginners
If you spend any amount of time researching online marketing, chances are you’re going to encounter the term “sales funnel.” It’s not a new term, but if it’s new to you, then you’ve come to the right place! This is everything you need to know about sales funnels.

Stages of Purchasing

Sales funnels are built around the accepted notions that people need multiple interactions with a brand or product before they purchase and that there are several stages to the purchasing process.

Awareness

Awareness is the first stage of the sales funnel. It’s very much advertising driven. At this stage, new customers who’ve never heard of you see ads or articles about your products.

Interest

If you’ve ever heard that it’s the visitors that return to your website that count this is what they’re talking about.

Interest is when people who visited your site once, as the result of an ad, make a repeat visit (or 6!) They read articles, look at reviews and product data, and immerse themselves more in your products and services.

Decision

After enough contact with your company via your website, reading articles and reviews, and hearing good things about you, eventually, customers reach the stage where they will make a decision.

They might be looking at more than one option. If you’re credible, your products and services are high quality and meet their needs; chances are, they will purchase from you.

Action

Action is the last step of the customer driven sales funnel. This is where orders are made, payments exchanged, and delivery details agreed upon. This is a big step for any customer, so make it as easy as possible.

Use large, clear, easy to find buttons to direct customers to your online store or contact page. Offer multiple payment options.

After Sales

Many people forget this crucial step in the sales funnel, but you’ll do a lot better if you don’t! The truth is, the sales process doesn’t end when you’ve taken payment or delivered the item in question.

Follow up with customers after sales, stay in touch and keep them up to date with new products and deals is a great way to boost your bottom line.

Make sure you automate the after sales marketing to existing customers process and keep them coming back, time and time again!

Website Best Practices for Lead Generation

Website Best Practices for Lead Generation

The ultimate goal of an inbound marketing campaign is lead generation. Your site can attract a lot of visitors, but if all they do is browse and leave, then your efforts have failed.

To be successful, think of your website as a series of pages with elements that work together to turn a visitor into a potential customer. Lead generation follows a pattern which begins with a blog post, followed by the homepage, ‘about’ section, contact form, and a ‘thank you’ page. Every page corresponds to a step in the marketing funnel, starting with searching for info and ending with a submission of contact details. Let’s take a look at each one:

Blog Post

The blog post is the front liner of your website. It’s what people most often see first when looking for information on search engines. Traffic can come from a link posted on social media. The job of a blog post is to make people aware of your business. It should contain relevant information your target audience finds useful. It should be optimized with the right keywords to rank on the search engine and shared on social media.

Homepage

If your blog post generates interest, visitors will be curious about your business. They’ll go to the home page to learn more about your business and what it does. Make sure your homepage clearly explains what you do and how you do it to make visitors stay on your site and explore more pages. But what kind of details?

Visitors don’t necessarily know what you do. Provide a clear explanation of what your business does and how they help people. So on this page, share testimonials from satisfied customers and site any media attention you’ve gotten. Visitors will find it easy to see the value your business offers from people who have experienced it firsthand.

‘About’ Section

At this point, visitors already know what the business is, but not why it exists and who’s behind it. They want to know your objectives, your values, your vision, and mission. This should be included in your ‘About’ section. This your opportunity to earn visitors’ trust. Humanize your business by introducing yourself and your staff, talking about how the business started and share your vision for the future. People are careful about who they align themselves with. So if a business seems shady, they won’t trust it. Be transparent and open.

Contact Form

If you’ve filled out the first three pages, then it’s a quick step for your visitors to take action like filling out the contact form and leave their contact details. Once you have these, congratulations, you got yourself a lead. You can nurture your leads through email marketing and convert them into paying customers.

‘Thank You’ Page

Although the process of lead generation ends after the submission of a completed contact form, a new process begins right away — nurturing leads. You can start right away by showing heartfelt gratitude beyond the generic “thank you.” On this page, write a personalized message and offer additional value such as an Ebook download and links to more resources.

Do all leads follow this simple flow? Not necessarily, but it should give you a general idea of how visitors behave on websites.

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How to Use Video for Lead Generation

How to Use Video for Lead Generation

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, you can imagine what a video is worth when relating an idea. And because of this, more and more businesses are using videos for marketing. Conversations are often overheard beginning with, “I saw the best video on YouTube…”

Businesses are taking full advantage of the medium. Either they’re creating videos themselves, or using them for opening a dialogue with potential clientele.

Video Lead Generation

The whole point is to lead your viewers from passively watching to actively engaging and ultimately purchasing. Some viewers become leads at the initial contact and some after they’ve viewed the video.

Free Videos

When your potential customers are able to watch a video that solves their problem or challenge, they’re more receptive to giving an email address to receive more info. You’ve given an enjoyable experience and something of value which helps them.

Video Gates

Requiring an email in exchange for the ability to view a resource video is very effective. If you use analytics, you’ll capture a viewing history which allows for more precise marketing. Carefully choose how many fields on your email form. The more fields, the less chance a viewer will fill out the form.

Call To Action

During your video use a pop-up or slider to capture the viewer’s information. In this instance, you’ll want only one field – the email address – as your viewer will want to finish the video.

Where To Place Your Lead Generation Video

Your videos should be placed on several sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, and Twitter. Once you have attracted a viewer, draw them in and send them to your landing page.

Embedding a video in the middle of a text page is very effective. This method entices a potential consumer using 2 forms of media, bringing in a larger audience. Younger crowds migrate toward videos, and older people prefer a more traditional way to consume information.

How To Share Your Videos

Be creative, and keep your brand and message in mind. For example, a site selling plants would offer tips on when to fertilize and how to fix a sick plant. The key is to capture the audience that will most likely purchase from your website.

Optimization

Text has keywords, use them for video as well. To the search engines, images can be a big hole. Use text descriptions and tags to help the search engines find your content.

Why Use Video for Lead Generation?

Studies have shown the benefit of using video. Businesses using video marketing grow quicker than their counterparts that don’t use video.

End Results

When video marketing is used to capture an audience your potential customers are engaged, and they’ll want more. They’ll move through the sales funnel and onto your landing page. They’ll become the lead you need and move on to purchase from you.  Waftio can be used as the “gate” to capture name and email before giving them access to the video landing page.  Give it a try today!

The Digital Marketing Funnel Explained

The Digital Marketing Funnel Explained

For those relatively new to SEO and online marketing, one of the most important tools for structuring your marketing is the digital marketing funnel.  This six-stage process describes every step on the journey of finding leads, turning them into sales, and retaining them as customers.

This process is visualized as a funnel or an inverted triangle.  You start with a great many potential leads at the top, but at each step, only some will choose to move further on in the buying journey.  Many leads enter at the top, but only a relative few exit at the bottom as steady customers.

The Digital Marketing Funnel Explained

A Quick Guide To The Six Stages Of The Marketing Funnel

I. Attract

This is the heart of content marketing.  You should have a wide variety of materials, such as blogs, videos, and infographics, designed to bring people to your website in the first place.  Good SEO helps ensure these are near the top of Google searches, where they can be easily seen.

II. Engage

Getting visitors to your website isn’t enough.  The materials there must actively engage them, both by being interesting enough for them to view, and compelling enough they want to share them with friends.  Understanding your market, their needs, and the searches they’re likely running on Google is the key to engaging them.

III. Capture

To move further down the funnel, leads must take the next step and engage with your website in a more active way.  This could be contacting support with questions, or signing up for a newsletter, free ebooks, webinars, or other giveaways that require trading their email address or other customer data.  Once a lead has given away some personal information, they’re far closer to becoming buyers.

IV. Nurture

Once you have means of direct contact with leads who haven’t yet become buyers, it’s important to keep reminding them of your existence.  Emails with special offers, coupons, newsletters, and even social media outreach can all be effective ways to do this.

If they aren’t ready to buy right now, they need to have this drip-feed of content to ensure your business will be the first they think of when they are ready to buy.

V. Convert

This is the actual moment they become customers and is generally handled like any other sales conversion.  They’ll reach out directly to sales staff, and be guided through the final stages of the purchase process.

This also illustrates one way digital marketing is different from offline marketing:  This may be the first time they actually have contact with a live human being at your company, with all other business contact being via website materials and automated emails.

VI.  Measure

Digital sales conversions is a cyclical process which should be continually refined.  Keep track of the results of each stage of the process, and see which methods produce the most conversions. 100% conversions are a practical impossibility, but keep trying to push the percentage higher!

Understanding the marketing funnel will help you gather better leads at the top, and ensure that more of them complete the journey to full-fledged customers.  With this tool, you’ll be on your way to far greater conversions and ROI on your online marketing investments.