A Foolproof Sales Funnel Marketing Guide For 2023 To Grow Your Business

Having a Sales and marketing system for your business is extremely crucial.

But how to create one for your business?  

The answer is by creating a sales and marketing funnel for your business and utilizing the power of sales funnel marketing. 

Sales funnels are the building blocks of an online marketing strategy for your business.

Sales funnel marketing will help you sell your products to a targeted audience with the help of a well-planned system.

They are a series of steps that you create to convert a prospect into a lead and from lead to paying customer Your sales funnel will ensure that you convert more visitors into customers and drive maximum revenue for your business.

The purpose of a sales funnel is to increase the number of leads for a particular campaign, convert these leads into customers, and finally retain them.

To know more about the topic read this “Foolproof Sales Funnel Marketing Guide For 2022 To Grow Your Business.”

What is a Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel is the marketing term for the journey that potential customers go through on their way to purchase.

If you have a product that you want to sell then you cannot sell it directly to someone, who doesn’t have any idea about you.

Maybe he is not aware of the problem he/she is facing or maybe he/she aware of the problem but doesn’t know the right solution to their problem.

Your sales funnel will sell your product to these people by telling them why they need it and what are the benefits of buying your product.

sales funnel will act like a salesman who will educate and sell the visitors of your store at the same time.

So it acts like a highly skilled and knowledgable salesperson. So you don’t need to hire someone to do this work on the internet.

All you need is to create a sales funnel and put it to work for you 24×7 and 365 days a year.

sales funnel will sell to the visitors of your website following a step-by-step process.

At each step of the sale process, there will be the conversion of those visitors into buyers with your product.

Stages Of Customer Journey In Sales Funnel

The customer journey of the customer is a critical component of any sales funnel. Any person goes through these stages before making spending any money with your company.

The customer journey is divided into 3 steps:

• Informational stage – In this stage, the potential customer goes through an interest or hesitations phase before agreeing to invest in your product or service.
• Solution-orientation stage – In this second step, they focus on what they can receive from investing.
• Purchase– In this 3rd and final step, the customer has decided to purchase your product. The number of steps in a sales funnel will differ based on industry or business model.

These stages are the part of the marketing funnel that you create around your sales funnel.

What Are Stages Of Sales Funnel?

So what is your driving force behind creating a sales funnel?

Is it to make money -or- to save the planet?

Either way, you will end up losing. If you are trying to help yourself then that stuff doesn’t matter.

All of this matters if we want our world and our business around in a hundred years from now.

So let’s get back on track here.

it’s all about making sales, that’s your motivation behind creating a sale funnel!

So you have to keep this thing in mind before designing your sales funnel.

The sales funnel is a step-by-step strategy that consists of the following key stages:

The awareness stage, the consideration stage, and finally the decision stage.

Bypassing the Sales Funnel stage will imply you fail at your business because all of your marketing efforts are head down after being part of the next step.

Now let’s discuss the various stages of sales funnel marketing.

Creating An Irresistible Offer For Your Product or Service

Before even you start creating your sales funnel and planning the various stages the first thing you need is an offer. That is why this is the first stage in your sales funnel marketing.

If you don’t have an offer or don’t have the clarity about your offer then, everything you do after that may fail miserably.

Your offer is the thing that actually convinces people to take buying decision. So spend a considerable amount of time crafting your offer and making it so irresistible and attractive that no one can refuse it.

Many marketers like Dan Kennedy calls it a no-brainer offer. Anyone who is saying no to these no-brainer offers will feel stupid about themselves.

You can make an offer irresistible and no=brainer by packaging different products in a single offer. we call it bonuses.

Add bonuses that are solving one specific problem your customer is going to face while using your product.

For Example, if you are selling them a course on how to play guitar, your offer may include the bonuses like:

List of my favorite top 5 guitars,

My secret method of staying consistent with learning guitar,

How to play in front of a big audience and make living out of your guitar playing skills.

of course, you can come up with better bonuses if you are into guitar playing. I am not, so I have just written what I can think of.

but you got the point. You have to add up things that will increase the perceived value of your offer.

just do it while crafting your offer and you will see a great impact on your sales.

So this is the first stage of sales funnel marketing. you craft an irresistible and no-brainer offer for your target market.

Planning The Frontend of Your Sales Funnel

Once you are ready with your offer, you will start working on the front-end of your sales funnel.

front-end means what you are going to offer upfront to your target audience.

Now you can have a free thing or paid thing.

Both things work really well.

Most marketers and companies use the free strategy but paid is also a great option to start if you are really confident about your product.

In case of free, you offer a free resource to your target audience. This free resource is termed as “Lead Magnet”.

If you are into marketing you may already know about it, I guess.

This lead magnet will generate leads for you and you will convert these leads into paying customers by offering them your paid products.

you can offer your paid products immediately in the next step of your sales funnel or you can wait for a few days and let them try your lead magnet.

Meanwhile, you follow up with them and nurture them with email sequence and social media content.

Then after nurturing, you make your offer to them and now they know you and they are getting value from you. So there are high chances of saying YES for them.

This is a great strategy for your front-end that is used by many top marketers, influencers, and companies across the globe.

There is another approach where you offer a low-ticket product in the front end. This low-ticket offer is called a self-liquidating offer that recovers your cost of acquiring a customer. 

So, it means you are generating leads without spending any money. This offer will recover all the money you invested to generate the leads.

The best part is you are not only getting leads but you are getting paying customers. 

These people have already invested a small amount with you. So you attract better quality leads and it’s easy for you to sell your high price products to these leads.

So this is the 2nd stage of your funnel.

We call it the front end of your sales funnels.

Planning The Middle of The Funnel And Core Product

This is the most crucial stage as in this stage you will sell your main product.

This is a very balanced product that you have for your target market that anyone can buy as it is not very costly and also not so cheap that you cannot make a profit out of it.

In this state, you sell the main product that you want to make a household name in your industry.

Let’s take the example of Clickfunnels. One funnel away challenge is one of the front-end products they offer and from there they take them to their main product i.e subscription to ClickFunnels Tool. 

This is their main product and this is what they offer in the middle of the funnel.

Till this stage, you have a decent trust with your audience and they are ready to take that leap of faith to do a higher value transaction.

They want more from you and so you offer them your most useful product that can actually help them to solve the real problem they are trying to solve and that is why they are in your world.

So plan this stage very tactfully as it can make or break your business.

This is the 3rd stage of sales funnel marketing and we call it the middle of the funnel of your sales funnel.

Setting Up The Backend of Your Sales Funnel

The backend of your funnel is like the backbone of your business. Backend means whatever is not visible upfront when someone becomes your lead or enters your world.

In the backend of your funnel, you actually follow up with your leads and paying customers, and try to build deeper relationships with them so that ultimately you can sell the next product in your value ladder.

Imagine a ladder wherein every staircase you have one of your products. As you go up the ladder, the value you offer increases and so does the price of your product.

See the picture below to get clarity about the concept of the value ladder.

In the backend, you segment all your leads so that you can find out which person standing on which staircase of your value ladder, and then you will follow up with them to take them to the next step of your value ladder.

You do it with help of things like:

• Email marketing
• Retargeting ads
• Social media content
• Free webinars and workshops
• Special one time offers etc

Email marketing and having an email sequence is the most important part of your backend. I highly recommend you to have a long email sequence for every stage of the funnel so that you can convert more people into high-paying customers and generate more revenue and profit in your business.

It also helps you to build a strong tribe and trust with your leads and customers.

This is the 4th stage of sales funnel marketing and we call it the backend of your sales funnel.

Traffic Sources For Leads and Sales

As there is a light at the end of the tunnel and there is traffic at the end of the funnel.

Yes, traffic is the last piece of the puzzle and probably the most important one as most of the people fail here.

Most people struggle with traffic. Getting traffic is not easy and also not very hard if you know the right strategies to get it.

Traffic is part of the funnel. Many people consider traffic a separate thing but it is not true.

Without traffic your sales funnel is nothing. It’s like fuel for your car. Without it, nothing will move and will stand still in your place. So take it very seriously and start thinking about it when you are designing and planning your sales funnel.

I classify traffic into 2 broad categories:

• Search based traffic
• interruption-based traffic.

search-based traffic is the traffic that can be obtained by ranking on search engines like google, YouTube, Bing, etc.

These platforms are great to get highly targeted traffic who are entering keywords related to what you are offering.

But these platforms are not enough.

The problem with search-based traffic is that it’s very time-consuming and difficult to get traffic from these platforms.

Also, the competition for getting traffic from these platforms is very high and you need to put a lot of effort into it to get results.

Interruption-based traffic refers to the people who will just come and enter your website or blog without doing any research on what you have to offer.

This type of traffic is from Twitter, Facebook, etc which are mostly single-page app platforms but also coming on other sites through search and social media influencers promotion.

When you run ads on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc, it also comes under interruption-based traffic.

Here you are interrupting people who are scrolling on their social media feeds and trying to get their attention.

If you can do that, then many of them will click on your ads, and when they do that they convert into traffic to your website or landing page.

This is what interruption-based traffic is all about in brief. These topics can be discussed in-depth and have a lot to cover.

Maybe I will write one new post on both types of traffic in the future. For now, let’s focus on the sales funnel and sales funnel marketing.

You can also organic traffic strategies like facebook attraction marketing, Instagram Marketing, LinkedIn Marketing, etc which are platform-specific and based on relationship and community building.

Read: How To Use Facebook For Affiliate Marketing And Selling Affiliate Products With Free Traffic?

Marketing Funnel And How To Link It With Your Sales Funnel?

Let’s talk about marketing funnels. But the question is what is the difference between a sales funnel and a marketing funnel.

My answer is a sales funnel is more focused on selling, upselling, and down selling your products so that you can increase the average order value (AOV) of your funnel and make more profits.

While the marketing funnel is more like a funnel where you take a cold audience on a journey to become hot leads.

your marketing funnel is designed with the objective to amplify your message by reaching out to more and more people, making that aware that you exist, arousing their interest in your product and services, and finally persuading them to buy your stuff.

There are 3 core stages in a marketing funnel. Let’s discuss them one by one.

Awareness Stage

in this stage, you try to create awareness about your business and products. It’s more like a brand awareness stage where a person who doesn’t know anything about your business finds you.

There are both organic and paid methods to achieve this objective. Your focus on this stage depends on your target market. If your target market is mature enough and already solution aware then in that case you don’t need to focus much on this stage.

People are already aware of other solutions available in the market and they only need better ones with the better price that they can afford.

So you can simply come up with an offer and grab the market share.

But if your market is immature and needs to be educated then you need to show them educational content so that they can understand why they need your product or service.

Now let’s see what is the next stage of the marketing funnel.

Consideration Stage

This is the 2nd stage of the marketing funnel where your target market is aware of you and your business. So in this phase, you build trust with them by engaging with them and showing them valuable educational content that can help them to solve their problem.

In this way, you build a relationship with them and they start considering your products as the solution to their problem.

This is the phase where people try to gather more information about your product or service by typing the keywords on google like “product name reviews” or “product name price” etc.

So an important stage as a business and marketer is to convert your audience into leads and follow up with them so that you can take them to the next phase.

Let’s discuss the 3rd stage of the marketing funnel.

Conversion OR Decision Stage

This is the phase where you focus on selling. Your target market is now fully aware of your business and also about your products and services.

They are also getting a lot of value from your content and have to build trust and relationships with you and your brand. So you make an offer to them so that they can buy from you and become your customer.

Everything you do in this phase focuses on selling by giving offers, discounts, deals, etc.

This is how a marketing funnel looks likes.

Now, after the 3rd stage, your sales funnel takes over, and start selling your products to all the hot leads that are generated by your marketing funnel.

This information is pure gold as it took me a very long time to understand what is the difference between the sales and marketing funnel and how to connect both together.

I hope you get clarity on the whole topic of sales and marketing funnels.

Why is sales funnel Marketing important?

Sales funnel marketing is important because it provides a clear path for a customer to purchase your product. With the sales funnel, you can determine which leads are more valuable and put more effort into focusing on them.

At this point, you should learn what actions customers take when buying an item to view how long does it take for them to make a purchase decision. It can also help determine which items charge instant purchases.

In order to understand your customer’s journey in buying a product or service, you must have a sales funnel. This is a clear path for customers to purchase your product or service.

A sales funnel helps you to convert visitors into paying customers. Your funnel act like a salesman who guides them on what to do and what product they need to solve their problem.

So, sales funnel marketing can make your business profitable and help you to generate more revenue by building your brand, creating awareness about your products, building trust and relationships with the people, and finally selling your products.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) About Sales Funnel Marketing

Conclusion

The sales funnel is a crucial marketing tool that allows you to nurture leads into customers.

Before creating a sales funnel, you must first determine the goals of your business and then plan out how to get from point A to point B.

This blog post has given you a general idea about what is a sales funnel and how to create one for your business.

It’s important to understand the sales funnel and how it works before you can create a successful marketing strategy. This blog post explains what a sales funnel is, why it’s important, and how to create one for your business.

You can sign up for an account of systeme.io that will let you create and launch your first sales funnel for free as you are getting done for your sales funnel if you create your account by clicking any link on this page. 

This Funnel will help you to launch your first product. This done for you funnel is created by a product launch expert. This funnel made about $1B of sales collectively for everyone who launch their product. 

So use it and start your funnel marketing journey right away with overthinking and wasting time on the less important stuff. The best way to get the result is to take action and do the real things. 

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