FUNNEL BUILDING AND STRATEGY

Why Marketing Funnels Are So Important

Marketing funnels represent the customer journey, and for local businesses, understanding the steps in that journey is everything.

If you understand the logic behind what a customer does, you can start to influence their behavior in the future. They may have been uneducated or indecisive when they were first exposed to your business, but if you execute a successful marketing funnel, chances of conversion become significantly higher.

How Do Funnels Work for Local Businesses?

Marketing funnels are a conversion tactic to grow your audience and increase the quality of your customer base. The goal of any marketing funnel is to guide visitors towards a desired course of action. However, it isn’t as simple as clicking a button on a website or appearing in search engine results. There are various action steps and milestones along the way that are used to measure success.

Marketing funnels are built from the top down, with the top being the beginning of the customer journey, and also the first time they are exposed to your business. Most of your leads will not make it past the top of the funnel without a solid marketing strategy to pull them in the right direction.
Once you understand the data, it will be easier to determine what obstacles or setbacks your leads faced. What stage of the funnel had large drop-off rates and why? How can you refine your strategy to make the conversion process even smoother?

Designed to Entice and Engage Visitors

Let’s go back to the idea of clicking a button on a website. If you want to get personal information from a visitor, like their email address, there needs to be some kind of incentive. The marketing funnel is designed to entice your visitors and prompt them to take action – and you do that by empowering them to make a choice. For many local businesses, understanding how to create a compelling lead generation tool is an ongoing challenge.

A strong marketing funnel will convert your visitors into leads, and eventually, your leads into customers. This conversion becomes significantly easier when you take a value-driven approach to your marketing strategy.

Understanding the Value Ladder

As your visitors move down the marketing funnel, they are also moving up on the marketing ladder – that is, if you can convince them it’s worth their time (and money) to continue on their journey. At the beginning, your business may need to give away a lot of “freebies” to get itself on the radar in the local community. However, over time, you will weed out the people who are only interested in free things and start to define your target market.

Unfortunately, there are no step-by-step instructions on how to create the right value ladder for your business. What motivates your ideal customer to ascend on the ladder will vary drastically based on their motivation and interests. Value ladders are complex and rarely used by local businesses, even when the benefits drastically outweigh the cost.

Funnel Hacking and Growth Hacking Tactics

You are not just creating a funnel to sell a product or service – you are also selling your business and credibility. When visitors come across your landing page, they should immediately see the value in what you are offering them. And will only have a few seconds to convince a visitor that they should take advantage of it.

Since funnels are proven to be effective, growth hacking tactics are becoming increasing popular in the digital marketing community. Funnel hacking allows local businesses to keep a competitive edge in the market by following best practices in their industry. For marketing professionals, it means analyzing what the competition is using and learning to build a better mouse trap. Since local businesses are often limited on resources, gaining access to this industry knowledge is not an easy task.

Building Your Customer Base

Building a loyal customer base is the key to sustaining a local business, but relationship cultivation doesn’t happen overnight. It is an ongoing process with many moving parts that requires keen insight and attention to detail. Not to mention, your ideal customer and target audience is not set in stone. The market is rarely predictable, and your business should be able to adapt quickly if there are sudden changes.

Only a handful of your leads will convert into buyers, but some of these buyers will bring tremendous value to your business. Get the professional insight you need to get your leads across the finish line by creating a tailored action plan today.