The power of digital marketing provides businesses with boundless opportunity in 2019.
However, companies may be leagues ahead of their competitors and yet enjoy none of the benefits of their superior product. Your digital presence has a singularly significant impact in your market’s perception of your business.
Creating a sales funnel is the basis on which to guide your target market from brand initiation right through to clicking on that checkout button.
The customer journey doesn’t stop there though. We’ll be taking you through the revised sales funnel we have created for our clients at Kaiven Sigma Marketing Agency. Most importantly, we’ll show you how to build a digital marketing strategy that increases traction and converts with efficiency.
First things first, you need people to know that your business exists.
You may be a start-up, or perhaps your digital presence could work a lot harder to attract attention.
Even though this is the broadest section of the sales funnel, it still needs to be targeted.
When attracting traffic requires resources, it’s more profitable to have fewer but highly targeted entrants to your brand. The alternative is a vast number of potential leads that in reality have little interest or use for your products.
Obsessing over your number of followers isn’t conducive to success. You need to focus on engagement and demographic metrics.
51% of customers unfollow accounts that produce irritating overly-promotional content. Businesses often focus their content on prospects, those who are close to converting, they might even have a cart ready to check out.
However, traffic comes first.
You need to welcome people to the brand. This initiation involves showing that you can provide value to their lives. You care about your customers and being a part of this community is something that will enrich their lives.
Creating a content calendar is central to what keeps a business on top of their social media schedule during the busy periods. Many companies shape their content ahead of time, except live content of course, but even then it’s worthwhile to have a theme, summary and purpose outlined.
You have to set your team up for success. Having this shareable tool also weaves resources together, so your content harnesses the full benefit of your team’s talent pool.
There isn’t a company out there that over-delivers on video content. High-quality, engaging video content is essential in 2019 to drive consumption. Building brand awareness is a drip feed process.
In this early stage of the sales process, it’s got to flow smoothly. These people are going to be passive, and will often stumble across your brand.
Hubspot gives the definitive answer as to what it takes to qualify a lead:
Visitor clicks a CTA that takes them to a landing page where they fill out a form to get an offer, at which point they become a lead.
An individual amidst the “traffic” clicks on a link that’s strategically positioned to encourage them further down your brand’s rabbit hole.
Once on your site, it’s time to provide them with a value proposition. The aim here to encourage signups, whether that’s to your mailing list or registering an account, this gets them on your system.
Once they’ve reached this stage, you have attained a lead.
What you need to fill in:
Travel across the land of marketing advice on the internet, and you’ll see massive inconsistencies in what gets results when generating leads. Email marketing agencies claim their medium is the undisputed champion with lead generation; social media gurus likewise.
Here’s what works.
Personalisation is how you’re going to entice leads to connect with your company. People want content that is relevant to them, they appreciate companies that use their data to cherry-pick content to provide them with a tailored experience.
Just 22% of shoppers are satisfied with the level of personalisation they currently receive.
Combine this with the fact that 57% of consumers are willing to exchange personal information in exchange for a more tailored experience, and the way forward is clear.
Not only does personalisation make leads feel valued by your company, but it also saves customers time and reduces any chance of them feeling spammed by pushing promotional content on them.
Lead generation requires a specific combination of social media posts, a balance of promotional posts and those that create a community of like-minded individuals. The ratio differs across industries and platforms.
Qualified as leads but not yet customers, prospects is a tricky middle ground for businesses to manage.
This is the toughest part of the entire process, according to 40% of salespeople.
The largest area where prospects are lost is in the checkout phase. If you piece together the surveys on cart abandonment rates in the last two years, the average is at 69.89%.
It can be frustrating to see all those carts, a few clicks away from converting into revenue for your business.
You need to research and target “warm prospects” in this stage, to make sure that you’re achieving a healthy ROI on your marketing endeavours.
You’re going to be giving more detail at this stage into your product or services. It’s at this stage that you’re fighting against doubts. Your copy needs to work hard here, and your customer service desk needs to be active.
Opening up the human side of your company to an audience delivers the best results at the lead-to-prospect conversion phase. You’re tapping into the emotions of this group of people when you reveal your companies background.
Video is a great medium to connect with an audience and build a brand association. Awakening emotions in an individual help to fight resistance and pacify any doubts they may have around trading with your business. Visual communication captures more senses which strengthen the impact.
Whether it’s through referral partnerships, extensive social media marketing, value proposition aligning or community content platforms, brand awareness is an essential step to encourage hot leads to connect further with your business.
We work with our clients to conduct an SEO audit and work out where to invest your resources.
Once that’s decided, we move towards creating innovative branding campaigns to double down on what’s building momentum in your sales funnel and remove any fruitless ventures.
There’s a message you need to deliver with all of your digital strategy work, and it’s this:
Join the club.
This takes skill and consistency. It’s helped a whole lot with UGC in the form of reviews but also you need to have the basics refined.
Having a FAQ is crucial.
It has to tackle doubts and prove your product really is ten times ahead of your competitors.
This psychological trick incites action. This is why flash sales have taken over. Black Friday plays on our desire as humans to stock up when times are good. And people get a rush when they get a deal. It is the premise behind Ebay’s success.
Although this isn’t suitable for every model, we work with our clients to build a personalised digital marketing strategy. This isn’t for business with a static pricing model, such as Apple, but is frequently practised on a per-product basis by Amazon.
This is where we break the sales funnel model.
Affiliate marketing, encouraging your customers to share their positive experience, allows you to connect a hose from the bottom of the funnel directly back up to the “traffic stage”.
This isn’t a new concept.
Word-of-mouth has always been the most powerful form of marketing. The difference now is that people trust the feedback from those they don’t even know. 84% of people trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation.
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