The complete guide to building a sales funnel

Posted by Shane Barker on 9 Aug, 2017
View comments Marketing
A sales funnel leads your prospects through the buying journey. Not sure where to start? In this blog and gifographic we’ll look at the different steps involved in creating an effective sales funnel.

If you are the owner of a B2B, B2C, or a SaaS company you will need to create a sales funnel to effectively convert your leads into customers.

In the following gifographic, you will learn more about the process of creating a sales funnel. But before that, let’s find out the basic steps involved in building a sales funnel.

Step #1: research your target audience

Without a clear idea of your target audience it will be difficult to go about building a sales funnel. To research your audience, ask yourself the following questions:

  • Who is your target audience?
  • What are the problems that they looking to solve?
  • What are they interested in?
  • Which social media platform do they use the most?
  • What are the things they do not like about online shopping?

Step #2: create detailed buyer personas

Creating accurate buyer personas will help you with customer acquisition and procurement. To create buyer personas, base your efforts on these questions:

  • Why do they want to purchase a particular product or service?
  • How will they use it after purchasing?
  • What influences the buyers to purchase the product?

Step #3: strategize traffic or lead generation

The next step involves driving traffic to your website. In order to achieve this goal you will need to let more people know about your product or service. You can adopt the following methods for traffic and lead generation:

  • Influencer marketing
  • PPC campaigns
  • Guest posting
  • Social media advertising
  • SEO
  • Landing page optimization

Step #4: devise a strategy for engaging your leads

Your purpose doesn’t end with letting people know about your products and services. They need to understand how they will benefit from purchasing the product or service you are offering. You can engage and nurture your leads in the following ways:

  • Create useful and relevant blog posts
  • Create interesting and educating videos
  • Use social media to promote your posts
  • Get influencers to create tutorials for and reviews of your products
  • Send email newsletters

Step #5: focus on lead conversion

This is the final step in which you drive your efforts towards converting your leads into paying customers. To ensure lead conversion, you need to make the checkout process easier. Here is how you can do it:

  • Provide single click sign-in and sign up options
  • Reduce the number of steps taken to complete a purchase
  • Decrease form fields

The following gifographic will help you to understand the steps needed for building a sales funnel in a much simpler way. 

Source: Shane Barker

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