There is a proven sequence of steps you can follow to guarantee your success when you're starting a small business online. I've seen thousands of people start and grow successful businesses by doing the following:
Step 1: Start a business that fills a need. Most people who are just starting out make the mistake of looking for a product first, and a market second. To boost your chances of success, start with a market. The trick is to find a group of people who are searching for a solution to a problem, but not finding many results. The internet makes this kind of market research easy:
Step 2: Write copy that sells. There's a proven sales copy formula that takes visitors through the selling process from the moment they arrive to the moment they make a purchase:
Step 3: Design and build your website. Once you've got your market and product, and you've nailed down your selling process, now you're ready for your small-business web design. Remember to keep it simple. You have fewer than five seconds to grab someone's attention -- otherwise, they're gone, never to be seen again. Some important tips to keep in mind:
Step 4: Use search engines to drive targeted buyers to your site. Pay-per-click advertising is the easiest way to get traffic to a brand-new site. It has two advantages over waiting for the traffic to come to you organically. First, PPC ads show up on the search pages immediately, and second, PPC ads allow you to test different keywords, as well as headlines, prices and selling approaches. Not only do you get immediate traffic, but you can also use PPC ads to discover your best, highest-converting keywords. Then you can distribute the keywords throughout your site in your copy and code, which will help your rankings in the organic search results. Step 5: Establish an expert reputation for yourself. People use the internet to find information. Provide that information for free to other sites, and you'll see more traffic and better search engine rankings. The secret is to always include a link to your site with each tidbit of information.
Step 6: Use the power of email marketing to turn visitors into buyers. When you build an opt-in list, you're creating one of the most valuable assets of your online business. Your customers and subscribers have given you permission to send them an email. That means:
Step 7: Increase your income through back-end sales and upselling.
One of the most important internet marketing strategies is to develop every customer's lifetime value. At least 36 percent of people who have purchased from you once will buy from you again if you follow up with them. Closing that first sale is by far the most difficult part -- not to mention the most expensive. So use back-end selling and upselling to get them to buy again:
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If you are an entrepreneur, you probably know the importance of marketing. Without a feasible marketing strategy, all your efforts may be for nothing no matter the quality of your products/services. And to create a working sales strategy, understanding your online sales funnel is of paramount importance. A sales funnel is a roadmap or a process that leads visitors to your site through a systematic process with the goal of purchasing your products/services. The idea behind a sales funnel is to convert leads into prospects, then prospects into customers, who finally becomes repeat customers, buying over and over again. Having an online sales funnel in place allows you to get the best results out of your sales leads. It also enables you to understand your customers and measure the progress at each stage of the sales process. Why your business needs an online sales funnel A sales funnel helps you to define and understand your customers buying habits better. Understanding how customers find you, why they find you, and why they stay or leave is the key to growing your business. Sales funnels also allow you to identify and target different members of your “Stage 1” audience based upon the initial content that they displayed interest in. Here are a few reasons why your business needs an online sales funnel: 1. An online sales funnel can help you focus on the right leads Creating a sales funnel gives you insights into what leads to pursue. It lets you devote time and resources working with sales leads that are promising, instead of spending too much time chasing bad leads. Including preliminary steps in your leads such as ‘initial phone screening’ or ‘initial email survey’ can allow you to understand and interact with your prospects. Every step of your interaction with prospects gives you an opportunity to learn more about them and figure out who is serious and who is not yet ready to buy. 2. Sort and rank sales leads Having an online sales funnel will help you come up with an organized process for sorting, evaluating, and ranking your sales leads. This process will help you identify which leads require immediate attention, which leads are more likely to buy, and which leads require a long-term nurturing and follow up to convert them to customers. All leads have different opinions and needs. Some will easily convert and become loyal customers. Others are a poor fit and will require a lot of attention and persuasion to build trust and establish a working business relationship. 3. Implement a long-term process for leads nurturing This is particularly useful when you’re dealing with complex big account B2B sales. Such sales take time, typically more than six months before a client can sign a contract and close the deal. In such cases, having a sales funnel with multiple points of contacts over the engagement period is crucial. A sales funnel will keep you nurturing the leads by doing follow up over the entire period until they make a buying decision. 4. Attract the perfect leads to your business An online sales funnel, if enriched with the right content, will attract new leads to your business. In an ever-evolving business world that is saturated with new business opportunities and plenty of options for consumers, it can be difficult to beat the competition. Instead of making the efforts to attract every lead, a well-structured sales funnel can let you speak directly to the right leads. Furthermore, you don’t need to attract every lead, just the right ones. 5. Make forecasts for your sales volume
Online marketing is a numbers game. And with each marketing exposure, you can quantify the number of customers, then use that data to forecast sales over a certain period of time. When you have a well-organized sales funnel, and you have analyzed the number of prospects whom you have established a working relationship with, you can use it to predict sales volume. There are hundreds of strategies out there when it comes to marketing your brand using social media. These strategies encourage creating content, building a social media marketing calendar and orchestrating creative campaigns to keep your audience engaged. But when it comes to building a customer journey that takes potential customers who are hearing about your brand for the first time to a point where they become brand advocates and recurring buyers, there tends to be a gap. In this article, we’ll break down the five phases of the marketing funnel. By the end, you’ll understand exactly how social media fits into each stage. What is a social media marketing funnel? A marketing funnel is a path that your customers travel through. It starts the moment they become aware of your brand and continues until after they make a purchase. The social media marketing funnel ends with a customer becoming a true advocate of your brand. Different industries and experts might have varying opinions on the phases of a social media marketing funnel. Despite what you call the phases, there is a basic framework to a customer journey that ultimately results in a sale and long-term brand advocacy. The most common social media sales funnel framework, and the one that applies to most businesses, consists of five phases:
If social media is a significant part of your marketing strategy, you’ll be able to incorporate social posts into each stage of the funnel. Depending on the platforms you use, you can guide your audience through the customer journey organically. When implemented together, these phases create a customer journey that continues to build trust with your audience and raise awareness of your brand. Awareness The social media marketing funnel begins with potential customers finding your brand and becoming aware that you exist. As a business, you should be able to identify a problem that your audience needs help solving. Even if your audience is not aware of your brand, you can relate to them by offering a solution to a common problem. This initial touchpoint is not the time for a hard pitch of your product or services. The goal is to offer value and support. This information should be valuable enough that potential customers remember your brand and seek more information on who you are. Show the value of your business through content, such as blogs, videos, guides and webinars. Answer the questions your audience is searching for will bring potential leads to your website, where you’ll have the opportunity to build more awareness and trust. If your budget allows for it, use paid advertising to improve awareness. By targeting a specific audience or interest group, you’re specifically targeting people who may be dealing with the problem you’re aiming to solve. When creating blog content, utilize SEO and content marketing to attract new users organically. Canva does a great job of targeting key phrases that they know their target audience is searching for and creating value-based content around those topics. Consideration As potential customers continue through the marketing funnel, they begin to look for more specific information when considering whether to buy into your product or service. This includes researching why you are better than your competitors. During the consideration phase is when you provide more detailed information to guide potential customers into the action phase. Providing potential customers with the right information such as case studies or webinars can help build more trust during this phase. Zapier uses Facebook Ads to retarget users who have interacted with their website or content. They recognize that users may have visited their site to read their content and watched video testimonials as social proof. In this video, a customer tells her story about how she uses one of Zapier’s features to automate her business, a pain point Zapier was able to address. For B2C companies, the consideration stage might involve customer testimonial campaigns, in-depth product tutorials or product reviews on your Facebook Business Page. Makeup brand The Quick Flick uses their Instagram Business Profile to share dozens of makeup tutorials on how to use their product as a part of an everyday makeup routine. For most viewers, this is not their first exposure to the brand, but these videos work to build more trust and confidence in the product’s uses and capabilities with their audience of makeup lovers. Action If you’ve nurtured the relationship up until this point, customers should feel receptive being sold to at this stage of the funnel. Check the data from your analytics to see how most of your audience has engaged with the previous phases. During this phase, it’s convenient to use a social media management platform like Sprout Social. Sprout’s analytics and reporting features track your data and measure whether your paid social media ads received enough engagement, so you can see if you’re reaching your goals from earlier stages of the funnel. With Sprout, you can view analytics for each platform to determine the best way to generate a sale. Trust that your audience has made it this far through the funnel and that sales will come in during this stage. Continue to nurture potential customer relationships until they are ready to convert. It’s okay to gently nudge your customers to take the leap and make a purchase, like offering purchase incentives like a new customer discount or free shipping. In fact, about 67% of consumers said they would most likely engage with discounts or offers. During the action stage, use remarketing paid campaigns to target users who have shown interest by engaging with previous parts of your funnel. Casetify uses discounts and holiday promotions to give shoppers an incentive to buy their phone cases. As an example, they promote these offers with Instagram ads that target users who have previously interacted with their brand. Engagement It’s important not to forget about your audience once you’ve made the sale. It’s common for brands not to focus as much time on this part of the funnel. It might seem like since a customer has made a purchase that they’re a lifetime fan, but that’s not always the case. You still need to continue to nurture the relationship to stay top of mind. Stay connected with your customers and make them feel like they are a part of your tribe. Do this by creating social media content that supports them based on the purchase they made. Essie created their #essielove hashtag to encourage people to post photos of their nail polish in action. The hashtag gives customers the opportunity to share their content with Essie’s 2 million followers. Hashtag campaigns can make users feel like they are a part of a tribe and encourage continued brand loyalty. For less visual brands, you can also use a similar strategy on Twitter by creating a hashtag or organizing a Twitter chat. SEMrush conducts weekly #SEMchats on Twitter. These chats attract SEMRush users as well as other people in the digital marketing space. Advocacy
You’ve made the sale and added value following your customer’s purchase. It’s time to take the funnel one step further. Now is when you convert your customers from fans into brand advocates. Show gratitude to your customers and reward them for spreading the word about your brand. Gather customer testimonials and reviews or offer incentives that encourage customers to share their journey with their friends. Dropbox exemplifies this phase by incentivizing their customers to invite their friends in exchange for more storage space. Continuing to nurture the relationship will take your customers from fans to brand ambassadors.who will organically influence their network to trust your brand as well. Continue to build valuable content and nurture your existing customer relationships. Make it easy for customers to share their stories and advocate for your brand. Allow customers to share reviews or testimonials on your website or Facebook Business Page to voice their praises. At the advocacy phase, work with existing customers or power users to create content. Shopify works with users to create blog posts that share their stories of how they use the site. This content acts as a case study of sorts and positions the user as an advocate of the brand. The user gets exposure for their brand and Shopify gains social proof that they can use as marketing material. What is a Sales Funnel? Sales funnel is the purchasing process that businesses lead their customers to go through when buying products and services. Sales process or revenue funnel are other names Sales funnel is being called. Sales funnel is divided into steps. These steps are different depending on the respective sales model of a company. Funnel is all about raising conversions and earnings irrespective of their simplicity or complexity Benefits of Having Sales Funnel for Your Business The best way to boost your sales and get more customers is for you to put additional steps in-between first contact and the actual sale. Businesses need to be aware of this; as this is the most basic market concept. The space you give your potential buyers as becoming familiar with your business and becoming a customer is called Sales funnel Increase Conversion Rate: The number of people will reduce when they move down a business’s sales funnel. You are more likely to get offerings by the people that stay. Your conversion rate is more boosted by people that stay. Makes Marketing Easier: A sales funnel tells you exactly what you need to do step by step according to the interest of your audience. You have to first build an audience persona and make it as precise as possible. It will then work with the funnel to drive sales. Marketing becomes easier when you know what you are doing Lesser Risk and Better Forecast: A lot of people go into the funnel and only those come out who will actually purchase what you offer. There won’t be any extra effort or waste of time and resources on people that are not your prospects. With one or two experiments of funnel, you would know exactly what percentage of visitors make it to the other side of the funnel CONSISTENT SALES: As a business person, you need to have consistent revenue flow to be able to run your business effectively. Ups and downs in revenue stream can mess up your business and prevent you from planning ahead because you don’t know what the future holds. A sales funnel allows you to bring in new clients and filter them towards the end of the funnel. You can market your business without putting in too many efforts and at the end come up with some customers. IDENTIFY PROBLEMS: In the business world, there are so many errors that you can do without realizing it. Most of these mistakes affect your customers. Through your customers, you can identify any problem and tackle it before it goes out of hand. A marketing sales funnel will help you identify these problems better. For instance, when a potential customer exits the sales funnel at any given stage, you can trace the root cause of the exit. This way, you can take necessary measures to correct it and also create a better marketing strategy. The success of a business stands on its sales funnel strategies. Without proper planning, long-term prosperity is hard to maintain. This is where your sales funnel success comes to the front of the line. Now, what is it? Simply put, a sales funnel or sales process is the planned sales strategy narrowed and tested by analytical sorting for converting business leads into paying customers. But the hard truth is that 68% of B2B organizations have failed to identify their sales funnel. This is the reason most new businesses fall apart after a short time. Certainly, you don’t want to be listed on the same page with them! So, let’s take a serious look at this issue before building your sales funnel. 1. Sterling Landing Page: The First Impression Landing pages are the first direct connection between your leads and your business. And, when the competition is stiff, the first impression is definitely the last impression, right? Target optimization and your promotional specifications must reflect the promise presented in the targeted ad your viewers clicked on. Here is an example of message-matching for conversion oriented design: “An example of of a bad message match Ad: Get 50% off a Dell Inspiron 9000 Landing page message: Welcome to Dave’s Computer Store An example of a good message match Ad: Get 50% off a Dell Inspiron 9000 Landing page message: Get 50% off a Dell Inspiron 9000 at Dave’s Computer Store.” 2. Live Chat Software Stack: The Best Communication Tools “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” – George Bernard Shaw When your focus is on converting as many visitors into customers as possible, why not select the most personalized way of communication? Yes, I’m talking about live chat software stack. No one can resist its impact that is so similar to face-to-face interactions. Your clients want to consult with you about every doubt they have. They want in. Let them in, into your team, like a big family. This effect of emotional attachment builds a bond of trust. Now your clients are likely to pay you more instead of going elsewhere. And this is the standpoint of the 80/20 rule in modern business, which says that 80% of business revenue comes from only 20% of your loyal clients. 3. CRM: Always Stays in Touch Here are some breathtaking stats regarding global usage of CRM tools.
4. Write Awesome Blogs: Help Your Customers Modern customers don’t always like to ask you for everything. Self-service is their first priority before shaking hands with you for the first time. And the most efficient way to quench their thirst for information is with business blogging. Tell your story before being asked, and share industry news, informative writing, and analytical data. Share your professional insights with your customers and serve them, even when you are not serving them personally. B2B marketers who blog glean 67% more leads than those who don’t. But before starting, strain out your clients, who they are and what solution they are seeking from you. Then write your information on the edge of solving their problems. Tell them what you can offer to them. Tell stories about how you solved issues for your existing clients. Let them feel that you know them and build trust from the start. 5. Activate Retargeting Ads Retargeting or remarketing ads helps your brand not to lose sight of bounced traffic once it leaves the web page. Since only 2% of the audience can be converted in their first visit, activation of retargeting advertising is the only hope you have for the other 98 percent. It’s a cookie-based technology with JavaScript coding to track down your viewers all over the internet. There are two types. Pixel-based ads re-display your elements to an anonymous viewer. These will encourage awareness of your offerings to your audience in no time. The list-based retargeting works after getting the contact info for your visitors. Before starting it, be sure to sort your list and set your purpose. Look upon the performance of your destination URL to plan a specific retargeting campaign. 6. Go Social: Invite Communities When most of the internet’s users actively use social media, you certainly don’t want to miss any of your clients by ignoring this channel. This is the wide platform where you capture the attention of your leads. Know your clients and narrow down the media channels most of them use. Create an attractive profile with professional media channels. Express your ideas there. Invite potential prospects. Show your expertise in problem-solving and seek others who are similar. Create a community. It’s the field for discussing every possible opportunity. Ask opinions from others. Link your landing pages with your media accounts. Tell short stories about your offerings. And don’t forget to ask your existing clients to leave feedback in media channels. Your happy customers will not fail you since consumers likely share brand names with their circle 90 times/week on average. 7. Specialize Your Strengths Until now, we were discussing the ways of creating your sales funnel. But to strategize any sales process, first, we need to know the strengths and weaknesses of the company. You can use SWOT analysis in this process. Get your ideas from completed SWOT reports. Organize short meetings with every department and employee to get their perspectives. Ask for feedback from both employees and clients. Question your strengths in financial resources, key players, employee management, physical elements, human resources, market position, company reputation, growth conditions, intellectual prospects (like patents, copyrights, or trademarks), and every other crucial aspect you can list. These are the pro tips you need to build your sales funnel stages best practices. But the success of your sales process solely depends on the sincere, analytical research of your sales history. 1. Create a great landing page.
Your website's landing page is the first impression potential customers will instantly have of your business. Therefore, take time to make sure that it looks great. A good landing page will also encourage visitors to sign up for some sort of list, or subscribe to the website. This gives you that all-important contact information, which becomes your first line of communication. 2. Present a front-end offer. The next step is to present potential customers with the opportunity to buy a product or procure your service. "When constructing your main front-end products and associated upsell offers, you should be engineering them with the additional mindset of . . . how will this help create more desire for the next [backend] offer [you're] going to present them with," at this step you should be “pre-selling” on the next step in the funnel. 3. Give an upsell offer on the back end. Offer your customers who just bought or are about to buy a product or service the opportunity to upsize, or upgrade, that service. For example, create an offer that will deliver even more benefit to the customer if he or she upgrades. This strategy is called an upsell. Consider this the steak dinner to the regular offer’s appetizer. You are offering your customers more substance if they choose to upgrade. Of course, that also means you make more money because an upsell typically involves a larger or more expensive item or service. 4. Offer a downsize option. In the same way that you encouraged customers to upgrade services in the upsell step, this element of the funnel calls for you to offer a downgrade option to certain customers. No, a downsize option doesn't represent a failure and should not be looked upon as the loss of a sale. Instead, consider this a way to keep a customer unable to buy from you due to budget constraints. Keep in mind that those constraints may change. Be considerate and offer cheaper options for these individuals to keep them as potential customers. 5. Keep it going. The last step in the sales funnel is to keep your momentum going. Follow up with all the new customers you have acquired and ensure they are happy with their product or service. A great way to accomplish this is to offer a membership-based rewards program. This will allow you to remain in contact with customers, giving you the perfect means for telling them about new deals and services. The steps listed here are geared to a business with an online presence. Of course, this might not describe your particular business. However, every business can benefit from the sales funnel model. Sales Funnel Definition A sales funnel is a graphic representation of the sales stages a customer goes through when buying a product. This concept is based on the idea that all customers are led through more or less the same phases when making a purchase, the first step of the traditional sales funnel being the awareness stage, while the last one is the post-purchase evaluation. Although the number of levels assigned to a sales funnel can vary from one company to another, the classic model includes the awareness, interest, evaluation, decision, purchase, and post-purchase evaluation phases. The number of prospective customers that are attracted in the awareness phase decreases in the next stages of the sales funnel, so the end result is a much smaller number of actual customers. The efficiency of a sales funnel can be evaluated based on the number of prospects found in each stage and on the conversion rates of the stages. Why are Sales Funnels Important? A lead who has just come into contact with your brand for the first time is highly unlikely to become a customer right away. Therefore, pitching them an offer as soon as they land on your website is quite an ineffective sales tactic. Conversely, failing to engage a first-time visitor whatsoever could potentially result in missed selling opportunities. Creating a sales funnel will serve to determine how close to buying your product each prospect really is. You can leverage this information to devise a comprehensive marketing plan that addresses potential customers based on their proximity relative to the moment of purchasing. Depending on the nature of the products you’re offering, the sales cycle may take anywhere from hours to months. Since this can be a long and convoluted process, to increase your chances of selling, it’s vital to understand and direct your customers’ journey as much as possible. A funnel allows for greater control over the entire sales process. Based on how far along the funnel they are, your clients have a different state of mind and a different attitude toward your product. Therefore, ideally, you should design a marketing strategy that includes content tailored to support communication with prospects arriving at each particular stage of the funnel. Or, if you already have a marketing plan in place, a well-thought-out sales funnel could help you evaluate its effectiveness and tweak it where necessary. For instance, the information that a new lead may find relevant won’t be as interesting for a client who has already purchased your products in the past. Understanding how well-acquainted your potential customers are with your brand and gauging their levels of interest relative to your products will help you design content that both your prospects and existing clients will deem valuable. Additionally, if you fail to interact with your potential customers in a meaningful way throughout the sales process, they could quickly go adrift or lose interest, exit the cycle, and turn their attention to one of your competitors instead. The sales funnel lets you carve a clear sales path for your prospects and enables you to guide them through the funnel from one stage to the next until they’re finally ready to buy. What’s more, the sales funnel enables you to collect a large volume of valuable data that you could then employ for lead prioritization, assessments, and forecasts. Regarding prioritization, think about it this way: if you’re selling fitness programs, and your data suggests that, in spring, a majority of your audience spends more time reading your fat loss content, then, from March to May, you might want to prioritize potential customers who are specifically interested in fat loss. As far as assessments go, you could utilize the data in question to evaluate your sales teams’ performance or learn whether your products and services need improvements. 5 Stages of a Sales Funnel
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