Marketing Funnel: Reach Your Customers
The online marketing experts at Bryan Caplan Marketing receive a wide variety of questions from our clients. One of the most common questions concerns a marketing funnel. What is it and how does it attract new customers? Another common question we hear is how does a marketing funnel help grow a business?
Look at a marketing funnel like you look at embarking on a long journey. You start a long journey by figuring out exactly where you want to go. Starting a sales funnel involves the same principle, except you want potential customers to figure out where they want to go.
The start of the customer journey is when he or she learns a little bit more about your business. Subsequent stages in the marketing journey include the buying stage, which represents the point of your customer’s journey when he or she converts from a prospect into a regular patron of your business.
By conducting a detailed analysis, a marketing funnel educates online marketers about what they need to do for influencing consumers at different stages of the marketing journey. For the first stage of your marketing funnel, you need to reach your customers.
The Large End of the Marketing Funnel
Like the funnel you use to add oil to a car engine or to squeeze icing onto a, you guessed it, a funnel cake, you start using a funnel from the larger end. The same principle applies to a marketing funnel, and what does the larger end of the marketing funnel need to do to unleash an effective online marketing campaign?
It needs to target the right audience to engage a broad swath of potential customers. You can never expect to reach the small end of a marketing funnel, without first reaching the potential customers you want to convert into lifelong patrons of your business.
Let’s review 10 steps to help you reach more customers.
Define Your Target Audience
You appear to be doing the right things when it comes to online marketing. Your business website gets plenty of daily hits, your blog reaches new highs in readership every month, and all of your social media channels have a loyal following. Everything is in place for your business to attract a promising number of new customers, except for one thing.
The wrong people are visiting your website, reading your blog, and staying in touch with you via social media.
At the widest end of a sales funnel is knowing your target audience. You cannot expect to grow a business by reaching people that will never buy anything in your brick and mortar business or hit the submit tab when making a purchase at your online store.
Your target audience consists of consumers that need a product you have to offer because it solves a problem. Think about the type of business you search for when it comes to changing out a leaky tire. You certainly do not think about visiting a florist.
When you created the marketing plan for your business, you might not have correctly determined the right segment of consumers that want and need your product. Now, you need to ask one important question.
Who are the consumers that need a product that you offer to solve a problem? Answer that question, and you have narrowed the field to your target audience.
Increase the Awareness of Your Brand
You have identified your target audience. The next step for learning how to grow a business is to give your target audience more exposure to your brand. Yes, branding might appear to be a marketing term reserved for the larger companies that your business competes with on a daily basis. However, branding is just as important for WalMart, as it is for the mom and pop store that competes with the big boys on Wall Street.
You can offer the highest quality products and deliver the most friendly and knowledgeable customer service, and still strike out when it comes to growing a business because few of the consumers that represent your target audience know your business exists.
A strong branding message keeps your business in the minds of prospective customers. At Bryan Caplan Marketing, one of our services involves helping small and medium size businesses develop branding messages that get their products and services noticed in the community.
Branding in 2020 Starts with Social Media Marketing
Online marketing is full of so many statistics that the numbers can make a business owner cringe in confusion. When it comes to social media marketing, there is only one statistic that you need to know.
Everyone is on social media.
It sounds like an exaggeration, but the fact is social media outlets such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram have emerged as the primary social interaction tools for the 21st century. Your customer prospects use social media to build both personal and professional connections.
The time has come for your business to do the same.
To grow a business by building a branding message, you have to make becoming active on social media channels one of the cornerstones of your sales funnel. In 2020, consumers not only want businesses to be active on social media networks, they also expect it to happen.
Present an Appealing Online Store
I’m not talking about going into the deep end of eCommerce. We’ll eventually get to creating a website for selling your products and services.
I’m talking about your business website.
As I mentioned, knowing how to grow a business in 2020 is all about branding. Social media is a great place to start for branding your products and services, but you need to do more to attract your target audience.
An effective business website does the following:
Fast page upload times
Smart navigation
Clear product descriptions
Accurate pricing
Minimal ads
Powerful calls to action
You can spend hundreds, if not thousands of dollars on presenting a business website, and still remain outside the sales funnel because your website does not help visitors solve problems. The primary goal of any website used to grow a business is to deliver content that visitors find useful.
Content is King
The quickest way to turn off potential customers is to present website content that bores them to tears. When someone from your target audience visits your business website, he or she wants to learn something that will help solve a problem. Whether you explain how to unclog a sink drain or describe the most effective methods for training a puppy, your business website must be chalk full of useful content.
If visitors to your website find the content boring at best and misinformed at worst, do you think they will give your online store a second chance?
Of course not.
Presenting useful content builds the level of trust you need to achieve for turning interested consumers into loyal customers that drive your sales. Growing the base of loyal customers is the most effective way to grow a business.
Emails Can be a Customer Magnet
On the other hand, emails can turn your target audience off as fast as a politician turns off a base of loyal constituents.
Around since the dawn of the Internet, emails offer your business the ideal method for staying in touch with your target market. You just have to know what type of information to present and more importantly, how often to present useful information.
Think about how you feel whenever you receive junk electronic mail, otherwise known as spam. You hit the “delete” button on your keyboard and move on to an electronic message that appeals to you. Your target audience does the same thing, which means that just like the content uploaded to your business website, the emails sent to subscribers should contain useful information.
Notice I say “subscribers.” Your email marketing list should be exclusively comprised of people that want to hear from you.
Surveys Wrapped in Emails
Just about everybody wants their voice heard. No, I’m not talking about another election cycle. I’m talking about giving your customer prospects a chance to chime in on the questions you ask on surveys sent in your business emails.
By presenting surveys in your business emails, you will get a much better understanding about what makes your target audience tick. You will learn the interests of your email subscribers, as well as receive feedback on how to improve a product and/or a service. Maybe you have set price points that are too high for your target market or you need to stay open later during the day.
Like a riddle wrapped in an enigma, surveys wrapped in emails help you solve the most important business riddle of all.
What does your target audience want from your business?
Sending out an SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO).
You’ve heard of SEO, but all it makes you want to do is send out an SOS. To grow a business, you need to find ways to market to your target audience online that does not drain the marketing budget.
SEO is the way to go to achieve that business goal.
Reaching your target audience is made possible by getting your business ranked high in the three most influential search engines, which are Google, Bing, and Yahoo!. If you find yourself stuck deep within a sales funnel, the most effective strategy for getting unstuck is to implement the best SEO practices.
SEO costs you only the time it takes to follow the guidelines set by Google.
Participate in Online Communities
You have made it a point to make your business better known in the community. From setting up a booth at a special event to joining the small business organization in your city, you have reached out to your target audience in the community.
Use the same approach to get closer to your online community.
Websites such as Reddit, Facebook, and Slack offer you the opportunity to connect with your target audience. The key is to find online groups that share the same common interests that you and/or your business share with your target market. For example, an online discussion group on Reddit that touches on a topic relevant for your business is a great way to reach potential customers.
Just make sure to follow these protocols:
Understand community guidelines
Provide value in the form of useful information
Participate consistently
Never spam your target audience
Spam can consist of many annoying online behaviors. When it comes to your online communities, the most annoying spam are the pleas to buy one of your products and services. Your goal is to build trust, not turn off your target market by making blatant hard sales pitches.
Analyze Your Sales Funnel
As you will discover throughout your sales funnel journey, you will have one powerful friend that can make a huge difference between reaching your customers and turning off a large number of potential patrons of your business.
Your Best friend is Google
One of the most important tools offered by the search engine giant is called Google Analytics. The online marketing services offered by Google gives you the basic information you need to fine tune your business sales funnel.
At the beginning of your sales funnel when you want to reach out and touch your potential customers, you should review the following reports:
Demographics
SEO
Website bounce rate
Customer conversion
All three reports will give you a better idea of what makes your customer prospects tick.
The Bottom Line: Reaching More Customers Starts the Marketing Funnel
As we will see in the next article, some of the ways we have established for reaching your customers also engage your customers. The larger end of the sale funnel is the magnet that attracts more customers to help entrepreneurs grow a business. Going deeper within the sales funnel, your will discover that engaging potential customers is the best way to keep them moving through the sales funnel.
What should business owners get out of this article? Reaching more customers is how you enter the larger end of the sales funnel.
Have a marketing question? Contact us today!