Do You Want To Acquire More Customers?
I’ll take an educated guess and say your answer is a yes. And how about doing it far easier and far cheaper than you ever have? That is also probably a resounding yes.
The real question is – how do you achieve that?
Where do you start? How do you sift through all the marketing noise to confidently know what strategy will work best for your business? How can you begin at a budget that makes sense now but is scalable as you grow?
The answer lies in one remarkable fact. More than 96% of online users need between 6-8 touch-points to convert to either a qualified lead or a sale. Now more than ever consumers are savvy about their purchases, bookings and commitments and make decisions based on their own personal perceived value.
And their perceived value is influenced by the amount of trust and familiarity they have with a business or brand.
So you see the key to acquiring more customers is influencing their perception. And not just the amount of trust and familiarity they are able to obtain in your business, but in the lead you establish over your competitors in their mind.
Now ask yourself honestly…
Do you provide your web visitors with at least 6-8 touch-points?
And do you use today’s technology and accessibility to make those touch-points automated and logical?
If the answer is no to either of those questions you are leaving money on the table everyday of every week. Money your competitors will and are happily snapping up.
But you can rectify this by ensuring your products or services are supported with a marketing funnel that progresses your visitors towards the ultimate goal of either an appointment, booking or sale.
So whilst the 1st and most obvious benefit of a marketing funnel is more leads and sales we are going to give you 9 other reasons why building a marketing funnel should be the next investment your business makes.
2. You can Automate It
By utilising technologies and software such as landing pages, email drip feeders, CRM’s, remarketing ads etc you can largely automate the journey your prospects take from their visit all the way to the end goal sale or booking. This saves, depending on your business size, dozens to hundreds of hours in manual lead follow ups and organisation each month.
No leads slip through the crack and your prospects are fed content, media or ads based on their last interaction with your business or their online behavior. This frees up yours or your sales team time to focus on closing and on-boarding qualified leads. Your funnel is your 24/7 sales agent.
3. Your Lead Quality Improves Significantly
Your funnels primary goal is to turn as many web visitors into leads as possible by providing them content and media that will resonate with them and draw on their emotions, needs & goals and pain points. With each touch-point their trust and familiarity with your business enhances and their likelihood to make a purchasing decision with you grows.
There is no more qualified lead than one that you have nurtured with content and information of tremendous value to the point where your business becomes an easy, confident choice for them. Less impulse leads lacking buying intent. Less price hagglers. Less window shoppers. Less information hunters. More ready to buy leads.
4. Increased Average Order Value and Customer Lifetime Value
One of the huge advantages of funneling is that at strategic intervals you can direct your prospects towards an upsell offer. This might be a similar or add on product, a continuity service / subscription or a premium / additional service. And this can be presented them to at a point in time where they will be most susceptible to opting in for the upsell.
Your funnel can also be structured to start with a trial offering of your service, a tripwire product or free item of great value (lead magnet) and nurture your prospect towards your high ticket offering and upsells.
5. The Snowball Effect
Because a marketing funnel requires the utilisation and testing of various online channels (Organic Search, Search Ads, Social Ads, B2B Outreach, Email Marketing etc) and split testing of digital assets (landing pages, lead magnets, adverts, media, content etc) to be successful it opens your business to discovering new lead sources that you might have otherwise forever neglected.
Perhaps you have primarily focused on SEO for generating leads but your funnels proves LinkedIn is a far more proficient channel for generating leads for your business. On a full scale funnel, this can have a snowball effect where your ROI snowballs as you more effectively market yourself online.
6. Your New Tap – Scale Up Or Down
The beauty of a sales funnel is that once it matures i.e. it has been thoroughly tested, optimised and is producing consistent leads and sales for you, you can control it’s productivity through scaling your advertising budget and content output up or down. Factors that might cause a need to scale up or down might be seasonal events or downtime, expansion plans, personal leave time, product supply issues or simply a desire to keep generating more leads and sales.
A marketing funnel gives you confidence of knowing that you have an asset you can effectively turn on and off like it was a tap negating any over commitment or lost opportunity issues.
7. More Referrals
Throughout their journey in your funnel your prospects will be digesting content and information that will turn them into believers of your product or service before they even purchase. These aren’t simply people that chose you based on one factors such as price or locality, they chose you because your marketing resonated with them on a personal level. And buyers with that built in rapport are likely to turn into advocates of your business to their friends, family, neighbors or colleagues.
They are also much more likely to leave a positive review for your business and thus in turn help your business acquire more customers.
8. Data and Insights Galore
By it’s very nature, a marketing funnel relies heavily on acting on data and insights. Whether that be altering content, media or designs based on split test results, refocusing efforts towards traffic sources proving more cost effective or knowing which adverts to display to a prospect based on their behavior a funnel can only reach it’s ROI potential if the abundant data and insights that analytical software can show you is acted upon.
This forces your business to, in simple terms, do marketing better. You will acquire data and insights about your customers, into your business, into your website and into your marketing assets and how to all revolve and intertwine to form either a successful or unsuccessful marketing campaign.
The data and insights you acquire are a valuable asset to you that can be utilised in all future marketing endeavors to maximise your ROI going forward.
9. It Motivates You To Give Your Business More Love and Attention
One often overlooked aspect of a matured marketing funnel is that it is something to be very proud of. If you believe in your products or services then you can give them no better support then by building a funnel around them. A completed and working funnel is in a way a beautiful thing to look back on and appreciate.
When you map out your funnel in a visual way and look at the logic behind it’s linear structure you will feel a sense of accomplishment. The emails, videos, blogs, case studies, adverts, landing pages etc that you build as part of funnel will give you a renewed sense of pride in your business and inspire you to continually hone and improve upon how you do your marketing.
10. Your Funnel and All It’s Assets Are Reusable and Replicable
And finally but certainly not least. Your funnel and all that it encompasses is yours forever. Everything is an asset. The wealth of data and insights, the digital assets such as landing pages and email templates, the ad copy and audience segmentation, the videos and case studies…. the list goes on.
You can simply replicate your funnel for your other products or services or utilise different assets for other marketing endeavors you might undertake. So rest easy knowing that every dollar you put into building a marketing funnel is going towards the acquisition of immensely valuable marketing assets for your business.
So there you have it – 10 reasons why you should probably either be
a) instructing your in-house marketing team to start building you your first marketing funnel
or
b) clicking the below button to schedule a call with one of our funnel strategist who can discuss with you what Entelech can do for your customer acquisition needs.