Funnel Strategy for Small Businesses
Funnel strategy is simply your customer’s journey from the beginning to the close of sales, and with the right strategy it could lead to the next business deal, or you could be operating in the leagues of big business.
Many small businesses are building funnel strategies for accelerated growth that can help you to double or triple your sales. Firstly is the holistic view or process on how customers get to know what you do and the next steps to take are key determinants in your sales funnel.
Organisations have used sales funnel even though they might not have named it this way, they sure had a way of getting leads and following them through till they convert to paying customers.
STEP 1: Creating attention
A lot of revamping will be crucial at the initial stage because it is where the customer will meet you first. Things like your website, landing pages, or telegram or WhatsApp groups. The pages and home must be optimised for effectiveness as they must use your “WHY”.
For example: Why should people buy from you, benefits, features, about you, etc. All these details must be prime to determine if people would even consider doing business with you.
The next step is to get people to you by driving traffic to your landing options. Drive this target by creating campaigns through word of mouth, your social media pages, WhatsApp status, Facebook ads, google ads to your landing options. Once prospects reach your optimised pages, then they register their information once convinced.
STEP 2: Educate your leads
This is perhaps one of the generous parts of the system because it involves giving out information and educating your prospects about your services. Some businesses do it via phone calls to ascertain their exact needs and know if it fits into the services you offer and cutting off those that don’t or are not ready to buy.
If you prefer emails as a mode of information and educating your prospects. Then use them frequently by sending a minimum of one – week and if you are pressed for time, then automate the emails to them.
In this period – you can show prices of your products and share testimonials of those who have done business with you to reassure them and allow you service to pick their interest.
While doing all of the above, make sure to measure which one is producing more results and replicate them into your funnel system.
STEP 3: Engaging with Customers
At this stage, you want to find out why your customers are not buying from you. You also want to know if they entered your Direct messages to make inquiries but never called back. This is an important step in implementing your funnel strategy.
This would allow you to find out if someone “abandoned ship” or “cart”. It might be a price rejection or issues related to logistics. Today we have Facebook pixels and Goggle applications to help track what customers are doing. They also provide reasons why they are yet to make decisions to buy.
If you find this out then you can implement changes that can improve your conversion copies (written benefits and features on your website or templates). These changes will help you close your sales faster.
STEP 4: The Final Push
This is the point where you apply pressure to make that sale. Implement payment options (for example Paystack and Flutterwave have payment options you can integrate with your website at a low rate). Send out these payment links to your prospects, or send your business account details via text or use WhatsApp pay. This gives them ease of paying for your service.
There are strategic implementations at this stage which involves offering discounts off certain purchases, price using the N39.99 instead of a whole figure, upselling product bundles together can ignite final purchase decisions.
STEP 5: Tracking and Measurement
The final stage of the funnel strategy is for you is to test and measure what you have implemented in your funnel. Gaps can be identified and fixed immediately by you because you could lose out on cost and resources if you are not monitoring your activities.
Starting your funnel costs little and you could employ the services of digital markets from N5000 and above you. Let them take a quick run on it and do ensure you let them know what exactly you want to achieve. Depending on the business you do; your end goals could be consultations, free calls, product purchases, etc let that be your guide in creating your funnels.
Finally, here are some of the tools to help you out on this funnel journey.
MailChimp – for lead pages and emails.
Wix – Creating websites without known anything about coding.
Hootsuite – To manage your social media accounts.
