If your business has struggled to achieve its goals when it comes to online conversions, it may be time to take a step back and analyze the bigger picture. While it’s easy to jump right into individual marketing tactics, sometimes the wiser move is pausing to create a smarter overall lead generation strategy that will better nurture your target audience and guide them towards your desired conversion goal.
Often overlooked, lead generation is one of the most vital elements of successful marketing. This strategy looks at the “sales funnel” to analyze the best tactics to use for the right audiences at the right times. The sales funnel can be broken into three main sections; awareness, engagement and conversion. These three sections represent the varying levels of knowledge and interest a consumer may have in your business. Once you understand the mindset of your target audience, it’s easy to hit them with the right content that will effectively lead to conversions.
Step 1 of the Sales Funnel: Awareness
The first level of the sales funnel is awareness and discovery. This is the least difficult stage of the funnel as social media has made it especially easy to reach mass amounts of consumers. While it may be easy to reach an audience and make impressions, it’s crucial to spend plenty of time analyzing your target market to ensure you’re reaching the right audience. Making sure your content is getting in front of the right people is extremely important to guide consumers through the funnel and toward the ultimate goal of conversion. If this step in the funnel is skipped or the target audience is poorly chosen, it can throw off the entire lead generation process and lower chances of conversion.
Step 2 of the Sales Funnel: Engagement
After your brand has established a solid foundation of awareness with your target audience, the next step is to spark their interest and create engagement. Once you have their attention, this is your chance to connect with them on a deeper level and convey why your brand can bring them value. In many cases, this means recognizing the pain points consumers are facing and guiding them toward a solution that your business is able to provide. This can be done through a variety of tactics such as checklists, blogs, or guidebooks that not only identify common problems but showcase your business’s knowledge and expertise in finding a solution. This stage of the funnel is all about adapting content to fit the needs of your target audience, nurturing the relationship, and proving your knowledge, therefore establishing your business as a trusted partner and potential solution to their problems.
Step 3 of the Sales Funnel: Conversion
The third and final step of the sales funnel is decision making and conversion. After catching your audience’s attention and establishing your business as a knowledgeable source for a potential solution, the final step is guiding the consumer to conversion. Once your audience is familiar with your brand and how you can offer value, the home stretch to achieving a conversion is getting the consumer to make the decision to choose your business as a solution. In this level of the funnel, it’s important to emphasize the specific benefits of your business or product and dispel any potential objections the buyer may have. This can be done by comparing your product or service against competitors, focusing on differentiating features or offering free demonstrations or trial offers. Once members of the target audience have been led through the entire sales funnel, they will be significantly more inclined to convert than if they were to stumble upon your website without any prior touch points or interactions.
Understanding the process of online lead generation through the sales funnel can help your business reach the right audience with the right content at the right time, driving qualified sales and conversions. While it may seem intuitive to start planning your strategy around the first stage of awareness, it’s actually better to start thinking about your desired end-result and work backward to create an optimal plan of action that will ultimately reach your final goal of conversion.
96% of first-time visitors to your website aren’t ready to buy anything, making the sales funnel crucial to achieving conversion goals.
If you’re unsure how the sales funnel can be applied to your specific business, let our team work with you to create the optimal strategy to reach your conversion goals.
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