A digital marketing sales funnel can help your business run more smoothly and simplify the process of converting new visitors into long-term customers. Digital marketing funnels can be as complex or as simple as you like, and they can be tailored to any online niche. In this post, you'll discover what is digital marketing sales funnel, why it is essential, and how to create your own digital marketing sales funnel step by step. A digital marketing sales funnel can help your business run more smoothly and simplify the process of converting new visitors into long-term customers. Digital marketing funnels can be as complex or as simple as you like, and they can be tailored to any online niche.
What is Digital Marketing Sales Funnel?
A digital marketing funnel is a framework used to help generate website traffic and nurture traffic until it converts to customers. Awareness, discovery, consideration, and conversion are the four digital marketing sales funnel stages of a typical sales funnel. You can use a variety of different strategies to nurture and attract these visitors at various digital marketing sales funnel stages. One thing to keep in mind is that you'll be attracting different visitors to different stages of your sales funnel, and not everyone will always take the same path through your funnel.
Components of a Digital Marketing Sales Funnel?
This is obviously easier said than done, so let's break down the three major components of a digital marketing sales funnel:
- Establishing a Foundation – Defining Your Goal
- Floodgates – Attracting traffic to your funnel
- Sales Funnel – Moving traffic from the top to the bottom of the funnel
∙ Establishing a Foundation – Defining Your Goal
Before you can start constructing your digital marketing sales funnel, you must first conduct research and develop a strategy to ensure maximum efficiency with your marketing funnel. Conducting a thorough competitor analysis, setting SMART goals, and identifying buyer personas are all critical to the success of your funnel. Here are some useful links and resources to assist you in conducting research and developing your digital marketing sales funnel strategy. The next step in the digital marketing funnel strategy is to create your value ladder and funnel mapping.
For brevity, we've provided the following links to help you get started on your value ladder and sales funnel mapping.
∙ Floodgates – Attracting Traffic to Your Funnel
Image is taken from Strikingly User’s website
Traffic to your funnel can come from various sources, including search engines, social media, advertisements, email campaigns, offline events, and so on. The most effective sales funnels use all available sources to drive traffic into the digital marketing sales funnel.
∙ Sales Funnel – Moving Traffic from the Top to the Bottom of the Funnel
Finally, we arrive at the funnel itself. The physical funnel comprises three parts: a lead magnet, an amplified event, and a conversion event. Depending on your goals, you can include upsells, down sells, gated content, and other features in your funnel. Whatever the case, the function remains the same: enticing a visitor to give up their contact information (and/or other relevant information to your objectives) in exchange for something of value to them. Content exchanged can include a free e-book or webinar, discounts on a service or product, a contest/promotional offer, and so on, depending on the visitor's stage in the funnel. The possibilities are truly limitless.
Importance of Digital Marketing Sales Funnel?
A sales funnel assists you in better defining and understanding your customers' purchasing habits. Understanding how customers find you, why they find you, and why they stay or leave is critical to the success of your business. Sales funnels also enable you to identify and target different members of your "Stage 1" audience based on the initial content in which they expressed interest. Here are a few reasons to understand the importance of digital marketing sales funnel:
A. It can Assist You in Concentrating on the Right Leads
Creating a sales funnel allows you to see which leads to pursue.
It enables you to devote time and resources to working with promising sales leads rather than wasting time chasing bad leads. Preliminary steps in your leads, such as "initial phone screening" or "initial email survey," can help you understand and interact with your prospects.
Every interaction with prospects allows you to learn more about them and determine who is serious and who is not yet ready to buy.
B. Sort and Prioritize Sales Leads
A digital marketing sales funnel will assist you in developing an organized process for sorting, evaluating, and ranking sales lead. This process will assist you in determining which leads require immediate attention, which leads are more likely to purchase, and which leads require long-term nurturing and follow-up to convert them to customers. Every leader has a unique perspective and set of requirements. Some will convert quickly and become loyal customers. Others are a poor fit and will require a great deal of attention and persuasion to establish trust and a working business relationship.
C. Establish a Long-term Process for Lead Nurturing
Image is taken from Strikingly User’s website
This is especially useful when dealing with complex large account B2B sales. Such sales typically take more than six months to complete before a client can sign a contract and close the deal. Having a sales funnel with multiple contact points throughout the engagement period is critical in such cases. A sales funnel will keep you nurturing leads by following up until they make a purchasing decision.
D. Attract the Best Leads for Your Company
If your digital marketing sales funnel is filled with relevant content, it will attract new leads. It can be challenging to beat the competition in an ever-changing business world flooded with new business opportunities and a plethora of consumer options. Rather than wasting time and effort attracting every lead, a well-structured sales funnel allows you to speak directly to the right leads. Furthermore, you do not need to attract all leads, only the qualified ones.
E. Make Sales Volume Projections
When it comes to online marketing, it's all about the numbers. And with each marketing exposure, you can quantify the number of customers and use that data to forecast sales over a specific period. You can predict sales volume if you have a well-organized sales funnel and have analyzed the number of prospects with whom you have established a working relationship.
How to Build a Digital Marketing Sales Funnel?
We'll walk you through the first six steps to build a digital marketing sales funnel strategy so you can start attracting more traffic and generating more leads online.
1. Exposed
The first step in creating an internet marketing funnel is to raise brand awareness so that you can begin attracting users to your website.
This exposure phase is the "top of the funnel" because it is the broadest part of the funnel in terms of attracting the most traffic to your website. Brands typically cast a wide net in this area to reach as many people as possible and then further qualify these people as they move down the funnel.
2. The Discovery
Image is taken from Strikingly User’s website
Your internet marketing campaigns, if properly implemented, will capture the attention of your target audience and generate interest in your company. At that point, it's time to elaborate on what your brand does and how it can help your audience achieve their goals.
Understanding your target audience's pain points will help you determine how to best assist them and communicate the value of what your brand offers.
3. Take into Account
When prospective customers become aware of your brand and see the potential value in working with you/purchasing your product or service, they will most likely compare you to other options. This is known as the Consideration stage because they consider multiple brands before deciding which one is best for them. You can create content that positions your company against competitors as part of your digital marketing sales funnel. This entails thoroughly communicating your unique selling point, displaying the results you have obtained for previous clients, sharing positive reviews, and so on.
4. Conversion
The fourth step in this process is to create content that will feed your lead generation strategy. This entails creating landing pages, sales letters, and lead magnets to convert website traffic into leads (bottom of the funnel). Again, what motivates a user to act is determined by what they value. With this in mind, you should create sales copy and lead magnets that address their specific pain points, desires, and goals.
5. Relationship with Customers
Following up after you've closed the deal or sale is just as important as the conversion event itself to keep the customer happy and generate more business. We want to strengthen that bond.
You can cultivate this relationship by asking customers if they are satisfied with your product or service, asking clients to leave a review, and/or sending them other valuable information at no additional cost.
6. Customer Retention
Image is taken from Strikingly User’s website
Statistics show that the cost of acquiring a new customer is five times that of retaining an existing one. Customer retention is crucial when it comes to your digital marketing sales funnel. When a lead becomes a customer or client, you should have a marketing strategy in place that focuses on cultivating brand loyalty and trust. This, like the previous step, entails providing excellent customer service, a pleasant shopping experience in general, and treating your customer base like royalty.
Introducing Strikingly
Strikingly is one of the best free blog platforms in the industry for simplifying website creation. It includes a simple website editor and an integrated blogging platform, allowing you to set up your site in as little as 30 minutes. This website builder comes with a large selection of modern, mobile-responsive designs that can be tailored to almost any topic or industry niche. The text editor is straightforward to use. Simply begin typing your text, add images and other graphics, and the platform will handle the formatting and heavy lifting. It's an excellent solution for corporate websites that want to blog for content marketing and personal portfolio websites.
Summary
In this guide, you learned how to create a digital marketing sales funnel that appeals to users at each stage of their buyer's journey. This entails creating content at each stage of the funnel that connects with your audience and ultimately persuades them that you're the best fit for their needs. Of course, all of this is contingent on people entering the funnel initially. That is where an inbound marketing strategy that attracts more traffic to your website will come in handy.
