When it comes to building a business, whether it is a clothing brand or a food outlet, one needs to have a certain understanding of why marketing is important. The absence of a proper marketing strategy is bound to doom your business, as there would not be any customers.

An effective sales funnel strategy is one important aspect of your overall marketing plan that will systematically grow your business once the funnel is in place.

Understanding and Building a Sales and Marketing Funnel

However, before learning how sales funnel content will build your business with ease, let us first understand what it is.

What is a Sales Funnel?

The sales funnel, also known as the revenue funnel or marketing funnel, refers to the buying process which a company leads customers through while making any purchase. The sales funnel is further divided into several phases, depending on the type of sales model.

Awareness Phase

The customers become aware of a particular product or service that could meet their needs.

Interest Phase

The customer shows an interest in the product or service and does thorough research on it. The customer may read product reviews and ask current and previous customers about the product. 

Evaluation Phase

This phase begins when your business examines products and services offered by your competitors. Such an evaluation helps you create effective funnel conversions by gaining an understanding of those things that will attract your target customer. In turn, this helps you guide your customer’s evaluation of your product or service.

Decision Phase

The decision phase is when the customer decides to buy the product. This may include price negotiations.

Purchase Phase

The customer finally agrees to buy the product at a price reached through negotiation with the company.

Reevaluation Phase

In the course of business, contracts and subscriptions come up for regular renewal. With a contract ending, the customer evaluates whether or not your product is still needed.

Repurchase Phase

If the customer is satisfied the first time around, he or she will typically come back to buy more as long as your funnel coaxes them successfully through reevaluation. In short, the customer becomes loyal to the brand.

However, there have been instances where, despite plenty of sales funnel content, businesses were not able to understand what the customer wanted and had to close shop.

Sales Funnel Foundations

There are some essential steps which need to be taken to build an effective sales funnel.

1. Choose the Target Audience

Many businesses fail to launch properly as they prefer to introduce their product or service before understanding the right audience for it.

One way to gather more customers is to give them an incentive to give you their email addresses. It helps you connect with the right target audience based on what they fill out in the online form. Another way to discover your audience is by walking in their shoes and thinking about how your product or service would be most helpful.

2. Create a Break-Even Funnel

Create a sales funnel where you can acquire maximum customers without having to pay anything. You can do this by creating a front-end or trip-wire funnel in which a low-cost product is sold which covers the cost of advertising and promotion. In the end, it all comes down to what you are offering and to whom you are offering. The goal is to grow your list of customers and increase your business at the same time.

3. Scale Wide and Deep

Scaling wide includes cloning the first sales funnel and swapping products. You can scale wide with a tripwire funnel for selling inexpensive products. However, you can also scale wide with a lead generation funnel, if you have multiple services.

To scale deep, you would need products and services with varying price points and value. However, this would require multiple funnel models.

4. Build a Brand

If you have several sales funnels that are all generating profit, then your work is done. However, if you are looking to turn your sales funnel into something more, then you might need to develop your brand. This includes establishing a logo, color scheme, and overall personality for your business or product.

Final Thoughts on Sales Funnels

Think about how to incorporate sales funnels into your overall marketing strategy. Understand your target customer and the phases you expect them to go through on their way to a purchase. You can start with a simple break-even funnel for a low-cost product and scale up from there.

Our guest author Mark Ashley is a certified digital marketing expert, passionate about helping small and large-scale businesses reach their full potential. After working in the digital marketing industry for more than a decade, he now uses his talent to help companies execute large-scale sales campaigns. He can help your business by offering his expert opinion on sales funnel content to get maximum online exposure and users.