The 7 Ways to Create a Marketing and Sales Funnel that Generates Sales
65% of businesses find it challenging to generate traffic and quality leads. They also do not have a lead nurturing process and tools in place.
If you are a business owner, you know the importance of the right marketing strategies. And when we talk about marketing strategies, how can we forget to mention the marketing funnel? Also, known as sales funnel or conversion, the marketing funnel is the core of your marketing plan. It is the best way to nurture your customers and drive sales by increasing brand loyalty.
A marketing funnel breaks down the customer journey into different stages – from the awareness stage to the final purchase stage. The funnel’s top represents the pool of potential customers who come to know about your business for the first time. The funnel’s end represents a small number of loyal customers who come back to you to avail of your services/products.
The marketing funnel lets you know things you need to do to persuade your customer at certain stages to drive sales and increase brand awareness. Now that you understand what is a funnel, let’s discuss the marketing funnel stages and strategies for each step.
Share:
More Posts
Subscribe To Learn More!
1. Identify your market
To ensure optimum conversion, dig deeper to find Qualified Leads (QL) that are most likely to convert. Identify your potential customers by creating buyer personas based on their lifestyle, demographics, profession, age, and gender. Invest time to understand the problems of your prospects. Work on mitigating the struggles they often face.
Accordingly, find the right solutions that address their issues. Plus, also find ways that influence your potential customers to take action.
This will help you find high-quality Qualified Leads (QL) leads that will convert into loyal customers.
2. Marketing
Now, it’s time to garner the right audience’s attention and raise awareness for your offerings. Come up with compelling ways to attract customers.
Exploit the power of email sequences, social media campaigns, paid ads, content marketing, etc. For more guidance, consult an inbound marketing agency such as Leadeal Marketing Agency or any other as suited.
The marketing channels you resort to may vary depending on your business type and place where your prospects are likely to be found. Grabbing your customer’s interest will help you engage them in a relationship with your brand.
3. Lead Generation
Once you have understood your ideal customers, now it’s time to generate leads. Take necessary actions that enable you to fetch their information. However, to accomplish this, there are ample ways that you can choose as per your audience’s personas. Some important ways to help you fetch Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) are providing prospects access to valuable content via newsletters, webinars, case studies, white papers, free trials, or eBooks. Irrespective of the method you use, consider promoting it using social media platforms and search engines.
Also, keep in mind that your content features a link to direct customers to a landing page to furnish their contact details. This will open doors for you to establish communication with prospects until they get ready for purchase.
4. Nurture Leads
Now it’s time to nurture your leads properly.
Now that you have their contact information, you can work on gaining their trust. Nurture your potential customers by using drip campaigns or other effective methods like offering seasonal discounts, product demos, or free access to subscription products.
Your aim is to foster a positive relationship so that your prospects become comfortable to associate with you.
5. Prepare a Pitch
At this stage, the number of MQL’s will reduce significantly compared to the number of people entering the funnel. Now, you need to pitch your product so that your MQLs turn to Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs). You should consider using marketing automation platforms for a better reach out. Moreover, you can also onboard prospects via phone calls or face to face meets.
The less expensive and complete the product/service, the less direct contact you need to establish for pitching.
6. Close the Deal
This is the last stage of your marketing funnel. To lead a successful conversion, make the customer’s journey hassle-free and smooth. Pay attention to each contact stage and incorporate multiple branches in your marketing funnels to guide your prospects efficiently to transform into loyal customers who keep returning.
Make sure you have the right proposals, agreements, and negotiation strategy in place for Closing Qualified Leads (CQL) to maximize your final conversion.
7. Utilize a Marketing Automation Platform with Sales CRM Capabilities
A marketing funnel stages with an easy buying process increases the chances of winning high-quality leads by 62%. Also, 79% of MQL leads do not convert to sales.
These statistics hint at combining your marketing and sales as a wholesome process.
To realize the efficient way of designing a marketing funnel and sales funnel that pushes your sales goals, choose a marketing automation platform with integrated sales CRM. This will allow you to manage and nurture your leads through different stages that we talked about – CL, MQL, SQL, and CQL. The idea behind using such a platform is to have everything in place to target the contacts and turn them into respective lead classification.
Hubspot for Marketing Funnel to maximize the conversion
57% of marketers agree that lead nurturing tools are the most vital component of any marketing automation software. Also, the biggest benefits of automation are saving time (74%), increased customer engagement (68%), more timely communications (58%), and increased opportunities including up-selling (58%) (Adestra).
Hubspot is a MAP, Marketing Automation Platform with Sales CRM that acts as a Sales Optimizer for your marketing and sales funnels. Hubspot enables sales and marketing people to utilize best practices to move opportunities through the sales pipeline with a conversion focus.
Hubspot’s suite of tools is designed for funnels marketing to generate high-quality qualified leads for different contact stages. Let’s take a look at how to turn your sales funnel and marketing funnel into a winner using Hubspot –
Visual Workflow Builder – Visual workflow builder allows you to create an outline for your marketing funnel from the first interaction point to the final conversion. You can create tasks and automate them depending on how and when to trigger the action. This way, you can automatically manage your contacts through the pipeline and manage effectively for final conversion.
Smart Messaging – With every automated task in the pipeline using workflow, you can assign your content and media for effective communication that leads to further down the marketing funnel.
Streamline Task Management – Activity feed and task manager help you avoiding any missed follow-up and provide a quick way to make suitable communication using phone/email.
Team Management – Hubspot sales CRM allows you to monitor your team’s activities and performance for various marketing funnel activities and make them accountable for their respective responsibilities in the marketing funnel.
These are just some of the extensive benefits you get from using HubSpot for your sales funnel & marketing funnel. Close more deals by designing, automating, and optimize your marketing funnel using HubSpot and turn your funnel stages into an Inbound marketing machine.
A well-defined marketing funnel with efficient lead-management gets 4-10 times more response than your generic approach.
