Looking to boost sales for your local business? Paying attention to your sales funnel is crucial.
The sales funnel is basically the customer’s journey to making a purchase. It typically involves 4 key stages including awareness, interest, decision, and action.
By making changes to your sales funnel, you can influence customer behavior. The question is, how can you create an effective sales funnel for your local business?
Here, you’ll discover some great sales funnel ideas for local businesses you’ll want to consider…
Awareness funnel ideas
During the awareness stage of your sales funnel, the goal is typically to drive people to your website. There are a lot of effective ways to do this, including:
- Social media
- SEO
- Paid Ads
- Guest posting
Having a social media presence is crucial for any business. It helps your target audience find you, while also enabling you to nurture customer relationships. Make sure you are posting regularly on your social media channels and consider running ads on whichever platform you use.
You can also use SEO to generate more organic traffic to your site. This includes ensuring your web content is optimized with relevant keywords and inputting correct meta tags and descriptions. You may want to hire the services of a local SEO specialist if you don’t have the time or the knowledge to do this yourself.
Paid ads are an excellent way to generate more awareness of your business. Your site will show up higher on search engine results, ensuring you get a lot more visitors.
Finally, another idea you can use during this stage is guest posting. This will bring in referral traffic to your site. You create a blog post which includes a link to your site and publish it on a relevant third-party website.
Interest funnel ideas
Getting visitors to your website is just the first step. Now, you need to get them interested in your products or service.
The best way to do this is by providing valuable and interesting content. This includes blog posts, videos, and newsletters.
Your leads can stay within this stage for some time, so it’s important to keep providing useful content regularly.
Decision funnel ideas
During the decision stage, the customer is ready to make a purchase. However, they may be considering other options too. To help ensure you get their custom, you can:
- Provide an incentive
- Make use of email marketing
- Provide a professional opinion
- Pay attention to your quotes
Incentives can prove particularly valuable during this stage. They include everything from discounts to free trials and demos. A good example would be something like buy now and receive 50% off your next order. These incentives capture the customer’s attention, while setting you apart from the competition.
You’ll also want to ramp up your email marketing efforts, enabling you to connect with the customer. Emails keep your products and services fresh in their mind.
Another thing that could persuade them to buy, is offering a professional opinion. That is, giving individual customers advice on a particular problem they are currently facing.
Finally, you’ll want to pay attention to your quotes. Provide as much information as possible so that it’s easy for the customer to make a purchase.
Sales funnel mistakes to avoid
As lucrative as a good sales funnel can be, there are a lot of mistakes you’ll need to avoid. Some of the key mistakes to watch out for include:
- Not having a good offer
- Failing to provide a call to action
- Failing to attract enough leads
- Failing to track your progress
If you want to get more customers, you need to make sure they’ll want what you are offering. To do this, you need to build up value, rather than just focus on the sale of the product. Tell them exactly why they need it, and what the benefit of purchasing it will be.
Make sure you add a call to action to each stage of your sales funnel. Without one, you won’t make many conversions. Don’t forget you also need to market your offer and put effort into finding leads.
Finally, you should always monitor your progress. Frequently assess how well each stage of your sales funnel is going and whether any improvements could be made.
If you utilize the sales funnel ideas above, you should start to notice an increase in conversions.