How To Build Funnels For Your Online Business
The first funnel you need to have must be on your official website. You can have the foundational funnel on your ecommerce site or online store as well. The sales funnel on your official website serves as the base for all other online marketing strategies, excluding the sales you may generate regardless or beyond the funnel. An online funnel can be referred to as a sales funnel, marketing funnel and click funnel.
All of these have the same eventual objective but the manner in which the apparatus is set up would be different. The type of content you would use and many other variables will also be distinct. While the basic sales funnel must be on your official website, the marketing funnel would have to venture beyond. The foundational sales funnel is also an integral part of the larger marketing funnel.
What is a Marketing Funnel?
There is one simple difference between a sales funnel and a marketing funnel. A sales funnel takes into account the visitors to your website or online store. This is after the target audience has been redirected to your official landing page, regardless of the source of the traffic. A marketing funnel deals with sourcing of this traffic.
A sales funnel would kick into action only after the marketing funnel has done its job. You can have a sales funnel without a marketing funnel but the impact would be limited. You cannot have a marketing funnel without the basic sales funnel. Ideally, you need both.
How to Build a Marketing Funnel?
Think of a marketing funnel as having a similar flowchart as that of sales funnel but imagine the catchment area to be the virtual world and the end of the funnel or the tip to be the landing page, which is the catchment area for the sales funnel.
The virtual world can be the search engines and their results pages, social networks and social media sites, video sharing websites or article directories and other third party websites.
The front area of the marketing funnel will try and reach out to people who are searching for products or services that you offer. This can be done with the help of search engine optimization, content marketing, video marketing, social networking, social media marketing, pay per click advertising, affiliate networking and others. The initial objective is to get noticed.
Your website, product or service should get some exposure online. Once people notice your presence, they should be enticed with some offer or a solution to their problems. This can be done using all the methods we have just mentioned.
You are effectively drawing your target audience away from the rest of the options to your advertisement, offer, information or solution.
As you establish your presence in the largest catchment area comprising of search engines, social media, article directories, blogs and forums, your next step would be to redirect the audience to your landing page.
You can do so straightaway or you can route the target audience through a qualifying webpage. This may be an official webpage. This webpage should present more information about the product, service, solution or offer. This qualifying phase can be truly effective in most cases and it would aid the eventual funnel conversion.
Finally, you should redirect the target audience that has been already qualified to your landing page. Subsequently you must proceed through a step or two to complete the sale or signup.
Just as you would use search engine results pages and social media or other online treasure-troves as your catchment area in a marketing funnel, you can also use emails for the same purpose. Email marketing can be an integral part of a marketing funnel.
You can use ClickFunnels to build amazing funnels!
