How to Get It Right with Your Conversion Funnel

One of the unique qualities of digital marketing is that it affords you the opportunity to control the pace of your customers throughout the conversion funnel.

With an effective conversion funnel, you can seamlessly take a cold audience and prospects through various steps until they become buyers. Unfortunately, many businesses and marketers attempt digital marketing with a vague plan or no plan at all.

Merely cluttering the social media with your posts and having a website are not what digital marketing implies. In fact, you can have all these and still not convert with them at all.

Let me define it this way – A conversion funnel is a plan of how you get your audience from not knowing you to where they buy from you.

So, how do you define or create one? I have outlined the elements you need to have a winning conversion funnel in this article.

If you read this post till the end, you are all set to take your digital marketing efforts to the next level.

Let’s get started.

 

Audience Insights

The starting point of your conversion funnel is to know the exact person you’re targeting. For example, your prospective customer might be a Lagos resident, a millennial and c-level executive.

The objective is to get every available information about them, as this will reflect in your complete marketing plan. The digital media has simplified this that you could get to know their interest and the kind of purchase they make.

The Audience Insights platform on Facebook for Business and Audience Network of Twitter are great tools you can use to define your perfect audience. You can segment people based on what connects with your business, and save them as a custom audience.

While setting up ads eventually, you can simply target your contents to these set of people. It increases the potential for sale.

The more data you have about your prospects, the stronger your foundations for an effective conversion funnel.

 

Campaign Stacks

Now that you know who your customers are, the next step is to know the stacks of tools you need to have an effective conversion funnel.

The basic place to start is your website. Irrespective of the type of campaign intended, you usually need a website. In few occasions, you might just need to, perhaps, stick with a Facebook Shop or other similar options on Shopify. Either way, you need to put an effective website or online shop front in place.

Then, the social media channels should be chosen with caution and understanding. It’s easy to get distracted in the buzz and decide to run with every platform, including Russian Vk.com. That’s not going to work.

While gathering information on your prospects, research about the channels they frequently use. We know teenagers are wild with Twitter, and women dominate Pinterest.

It’s your task to get the detailed analysis of users on each social media channels, as this helps you decide where to focus your attention. Although you should have a presence on a couple of them, your efforts should be more on the few targeted ones.

What about email marketing tools? Email still has its efficiency for customer engagement and lead generation. The market has tons of tools you can choose from to help you acquire and manage leads. This article will help you settle with one.

More so, you will most likely need other tools like chat bots and CRMs. ManyChat and ChattyPeople are some tools you can use with messenger apps (like Facebook Messenger) to engage prospects. You can check out HubSpot’s free customer relations management (CRM) software to manage leads and sales pipeline.

These are basic needs, and you will certainly find many others tool that can help connect with your prospects. So, when these are in place, the next phase is the content plan.

 

Content Plan

Inbound marketing relies on content at every point in the conversion funnel. It could be videos, blog posts or graphics, but it is our means of delivering value and building brand credibility.

What you need to do is to create a plan with your contents, which outlines the types you will use and the role each will play in taking prospects through the conversion funnel.

Start with a content map. This is the list of topics related to your product and questions people often ask. For example, a hair store can have hair tips, product reviews, hair fixing guides and beauty tips on their content map.

So, you create a weekly or monthly guide on what content to create at a particular time. The objective will be divided into brand awareness, purchase consideration and sales.

The type of content to use for awareness should be helpful to the prospects without being salesy. It helps build public trust and brand credibility. It’s also the start of your relationship with your prospects.

On another hand, you should have a different category of content that speaks to prospects who are already considering a purchase. It could be product reviews or comprehensive guides. The stages help to simplify the whole selling process.

 

Retargeting

Retargeting makes digital marketing different in ways other media can’t possibly meet up with. It compliments your content marketing efforts by helping you take the same cold audience to being warm, and subsequently, to being a hot audience.

Facebook Pixels, AdWords and other digital advertising tools make it possible to retarget your audience as you take them through the conversion funnel.

For example, you can retarget the people who have seen an ad or have read your blog post. Let’s say you have boosted a Facebook video post to build credibility, you can retarget the viewers with another ad for engagement.

Again, you can run another ad of your product to the engaged audience. With retargeting, you can focus on the audience that matters. You can win them one at a time.

 

Lead Generation Plan

I want to add this so that you can take your activities on social media or elsewhere beyond routines to generating leads.

You should have a definite plan on how you generate leads. This begins with having a lead magnet (or lead magnets). We discussed more on that here.

It could be that you have times on your social media calendar when you mainly drive traffic to a landing page. At this time also, you could use Twitter or Facebook lead generation ads. The point is to have specific efforts that generate leads.

In fact, I recommend that you set a goal for it, as would have goals for sales.

Other options that can help are having side bars and CTAs that attract leads on your website.

You’ve learned a lot up till here, but here’s the peak of the conversion funnel.

 

Sales Funnel

A major mistake many digital marketers and businesses make is to have an active online presence that is not connected to sales.

You can share valuable contents, and get a lot of following, but there won’t be business growth if there is no defined path that makes the sale happens.

So, while maintaining an active social media presence, a good website and high engagement, let everything you do draws back to sales. Even while sharing contents for brand awareness, there should be the minimum CTA or something else that takes the relationship further.

You can’t afford to have a buzzing online presence that doesn’t impact revenue. Don’t be salesy, but sell every time the situation is right.

The digital space is filled with opportunities for your business, and I hope I’ve been able to explain how you can make the best of it. You can also check out this article on how to create a winning campaign plan.

Define your conversion funnel, and get the growth started. Feel free to use the comment box if you have any question.

Please share your newly found tips about conversion funnels with friends.