To begin with, it is important to know what a marketing funnel or sales funnel is. Most brands, when asked about this concept, don't know what to answer because they have no knowledge about it or how it works. Does this happen to you too? Well, this is your post! We are going to explain what this concept is and why it will be so useful for your website.
The marketing funnel or sales funnel is a concept that is used especially in marketing when we launch an online website and can also be applied to blogs or forums that have a commercial intention, that is, to achieve a final sale after having gone through a series of phases that convert users into our customers.
A sales funnel is, therefore, the process that a brand will follow from the moment users come to it in search of information until this user becomes a customer, and therefore, a sale for our online website of one of our products or services.
advantages of the marketing funnel or sales funnel
Once we have managed to create a sales funnel for our brand, it is important to know what advantages it will offer us to create it and why it will help us to boost our sales and better understand the users who are going to become our customers.
This is why we want to detail what are the main advantages of applying the marketing funnel in the right way:
- We will obtain a highly qualified lead: this means that once we have gone through the whole process of our sales funnel, the final customer we will obtain will be one who is very convinced of our brand and the services and products we can offer, so it will be very easy for us to get a purchase from them.
- The effectiveness of our sales will increase: although you have to have an initial marketing cost that you did not count on when creating the funnel, later it will be easier to get sales, so the costs will be reduced since there will be many more purchases.
- The process of obtaining customers is streamlined: this means that for each sale you will not have to follow up the customer manually, but by creating the sales funnel this whole process will be automated and there will not be a process of attrition in the sales of your brand.
- What you also get with this type of funnel is that although at the beginning there may be an economic effort to carry it out, from a more global point of view you get to lower costs at the level of customer acquisition. What you end up getting is a constant source of new customers and in a much simpler way.
To create our sales funnel it is important to first have a certain base on other knowledge, these are TOFU, MOFU and BOFU, do you know them? Let's see them in detail.
Each of these concepts corresponds to one of the stages of the sales funnel or marketing funnel. They are English terms that refer to what is at the top of the funnel (TOFU), in the middle (MOFU) and at the end (BOFU). In English they would refer to the stages of attraction, decision and purchase.
- TOFU: will be the top of our sales funnel. It refers to the first stage of the sale, the attraction stage. When users start to consider that they need to find a solution to their problem or need and start looking for brands, this is where the work of the first stage comes into play as the user does not yet know anything about our products or services.
- MOFU: in this second stage, the decision stage, the user has already decided what type of product or service they need to solve the problem for which they have been looking for help in the first stage of our sales funnel. However, they still need to evaluate various options before making a decision: take into account the prices offered for the same services by our competitors, for example. This stage is key to determine whether our user will finally become a lead, i.e., it is the first business opportunity we will have.
- BOFU: this period corresponds to the end of the funnel, where the user has already become a lead and will make a purchase of our products or services. It is at this moment when commercial strategies come into action and we will have to offer the best of our brand to achieve a highly satisfactory sale.
Once we are clear about these concepts, we can begin to create the right marketing funnel for our brand and improve the sales of our website.
steps to create your marketing funnel
Now that we have all the knowledge on the table, we have all the information we need to create our marketing funnel, it is time to put it into action and create a strategic plan that can generate a future business opportunity.
To do this, we can take the following steps:
- Know our buyer personas: we must start by knowing who our ideal customers would be, so we will build a database in which we can segment the different customer profiles and highlight their most representative characteristics.
- Prepare your website: when we start this process we have to take into account that one of our tools to sell our brand will be our website, so we have to prepare it for customer service, create it visually attractive with the insertion of videos and images, creating ebooks related to our brand or our work, etc.
- Do a proper follow-up: once we have our website up and running we cannot leave it in the background. We will have to monitor: analyse how much traffic the website is capturing, measure the duration of the visits and consult the number of sections visited in each of them or know the route of the users through our page before completing a purchase. This will help us to understand how the sales process of our products or services is and, above all, it will help us to understand how our customer acts.
- Having a presence on social networks: in addition to having our website, the use of social networks is also a very important factor. Positioning ourselves in the networks that our buyer personas use will help us a lot to create a more direct contact with them, closer and that will help us to guide more traffic to our website.
Once we have gone through all these phases, we come to the lead nurturing process, which will be the part of the campaign in which we will get our ideal customers. Through the previous phases we have collected a series of data and parameters that will help us to start our emailing strategy.
This strategy is nothing more than a campaign that consists of a series of emailing actions through which we filter our customers and see which ones are really interested in consuming our brand. This process is called nurturing campaigns because during the time that the campaign lasts, we will be able to mature the profiles of our customers and finally know which of them are really interested in buying and becoming firm customers of our brand.
This is why we call this whole process marketing funnel or sales funnel, as the whole strategy will lead us to a filtering process in which we will go from having many users to knowing which of them will be qualified customers for our brand. Visually we imagine this process as a funnel that helps us in our Inbound Marketing strategy and that, in turn, will help us to understand our audience and know how to act to achieve new sales.
