Every year businesses start with all the best intentions in the world, and unfortunately also collapse a short time later after running themselves into the ground.
It’s something I am all too aware of. Having watched local product and services start-ups for a number of years, I have seen and heard pretty much every reason why they have failed.
Sales funnels are time consuming but a necessary evil and I feel that the better that they adopt these, the more measurable success they will have.
Awareness
All funnels start with awareness; it’s where the journey begins. By making this first and foremost, it ensures you build up knowledge of your audience, who responds, and what they respond to. Awareness is not one-way traffic. It’s something you can analyze and we encourage it.
Having a social-media-level of awareness is great. Analytics are available on every platform out there and many other third-party providers like schedulers can also create analytics.
How Do You Create Awareness Though?
It is one of the most powerful and frequently asked questions we get. There is still sometimes an attitude of “we’ve built a website (which we always recommend), now they’ll come.” This isn’t so though. You could have built a very expensive website with multilayer fields of information and SEO all over it. However, if you never update it again and your competitor updates their basic sitemap website on a weekly basis, your website will disappear down the searches fairly rapidly.
All it takes is to have a section that you can update, like a blog or a calendar. This means you’re adding fresh SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and images, and this will ensure the algorithm returns to freshly index you and bring your website back into search results.
You can also do paid advertising. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and even Google Ads can all drive your chosen audience to view your business in a fresh light.
Generating Interest and Turning It Into a Prospect
Consider ebooks and newsletters as well. By making these accessible by download, it means you can create awareness and either request their email or not. It’s your choice.
A lot of companies these days create a special landing page. This means they can add a Facebook pixel to the page and then go on to re-target the person and hopefully continue talking to them after the initial visit.
There is no harm in giving away your knowledge either. Make it as wide-spectrum as possible to appeal to a larger audience. I have been doing social media for years now and don’t feel that a two-minute read for someone is giving away everything I know. It’s worthwhile displaying your wares and giving hints and tips that will be useful.
Help Them Make a Decision
As we all know, this is the hard part! Getting them here can take a fair bit of time and a lot of repeated messages, calls, and ads. We constantly have to fight against a plethora of distractions these days and our attention span isn’t great, to be honest.
We don’t know what is influencing our customers all the time either. Do they have a budget to spend in a certain time frame? Have they been read the riot act by a government body or manager?
Whatever their reasons and motivations we need to make it as easy as possible to bring them over the line. This could be a free consultation, a free trial or demonstration that then brings an opportunity to improve your relationship further.
Once the decision has been made to get this far, it’s not normally very hard to push them over to action.
Action Equals Client
This is where you solidify and convert all of your hard work from awareness to client. Simply put, this is where you make someone a hoped-for ambassador. Here they can click and pay on an ecommerce site and purchase your product or service. Not only that but they can leave reviews and testimonials as well.
However you start your customers’ journey to action, please bear in mind that your audience will always place you top of mind if you remain polite, responsive, and unique (i.e. personality, not just price). Understand that every client, no matter how small, will become an ambassador and you won’t go wrong.
If you need any help to bring your client/customer on this journey, please do not hesitate to contact me.
In late 2016 Melanie started writing for Irish Tech News and now travels to locations throughout Europe and reports, blogs and Live Streams her experience of events whilst she's there.
Her interests span Social Media (of course) Event Planning and Co-ordination, Start Up Business Support, Mentoring and Sponsorship on the job. However, off the job she's into SciFi / Sci Fact, STEM and Space. Oh and Cats rule.
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