Running an online business has become fiercely competitive today. An essential part of running a successful business is having a strong marketing strategy in place. You must correctly position your company, attract, and engage potential customers, and then, of course, encourage them to buy from you or at least enquire with you. After you’ve gone past the attraction marketing and lead generation step, the next step is to convert these leads into paying customers and nurture them into loyal, repeat clients.
As a business owner, your ultimate goal is to increase sales, and grow your business, right? It doesn’t matter if you’re a start-up founder, app developer, entrepreneur, or eCommerce website owner. The one secret weapon that can skyrocket the growth of your business is a good sales strategy. If you think only getting more traffic to your website will be enough, you’re not seeing the whole picture. You need to convert your website traffic into paying customers. And for that, you need a kick-ass sales funnel.
What are a sales funnel?
A sales funnel is the route you take potential customers down. It begins when they learn about your brand or items and concludes when they make a purchase and become a customer.
A typical sales funnel has four stages |
- Awareness
- Interest
- Decision
- Action
You can use the five steps below to create your first sales funnel or to optimize an existing one for maximum conversions.
- Research your target audience
The first stage in creating a sales funnel is to conduct market research on your target market. You must understand |
- What pain points do they have?
- What are they interested in?
- What expectations do they have?
- Which online platforms do they use?
- Create different buyer personas
To create accurate buyer personas, start by asking yourself these questions |
- Why do they want to buy a product?
- How will they use the product?
- What inspires them to purchase a product?
- Plan an effective lead generation strategy
Now that you’ve identified your target audience and built buyer personas it’s time to focus on your website traffic and lead generation. You can increase traffic to your website and generate leads with the following methods |
- Pay-per-click campaigns
- Guest posting
- Social media advertising
- Influencer marketing
- Search engine optimization
- Landing page optimization
- Devise a strategy to engage and nurture leads
The next stage is to engage and nurture those leads after you’ve developed a strategy to boost traffic and generate leads. To achieve this goal, you can |
- Create useful, engaging blog posts
- Create informative, interesting videos
- Use social media platforms to promote your posts
- Have influencers create reviews and tutorials of your products
- Use email marketing to promote your content
- Convert leads into paying customers
Converting prospects into customers is the final phase. Make it as simple as possible for people to finish their transactions to enhance your conversion rate. You can do so by |
- Providing one-click signup and sign-in options
- Minimizing the form fields
- Simplifying your checkout and payment processes
You undoubtedly spend a lot of time as a creative business addressing questions about your services and goods. It’s great if you’re getting a lot of inquiries, but keep in mind that inquiries are not sales. It simply signifies that someone is interested in your company’s offerings. Many professionals in the creative sector don’t want to think of themselves as “salespeople,” yet we spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to convert inquiries into paying clients. So here are five things you can do to book more clients.
- Show Your Prices
We understand that setting rates for services is difficult for many business owners, but it is an area of your organisation that needs to be highlighted. Yes, it’s a puzzle. Low prices may attract more customers, but they may not be the type of customers you want to engage with, whilst higher prices may deter potential clients. Unfortunately, not stating your prices at all will most likely turn people away. People are far more likely to acquire your services or buy your items if they know how much everything will cost upfront. It will also save you a lot of time and energy because you will be able to focus your efforts on enquiries from those who are interested in working with you rather than those who are just looking for your rates!
- Know Your Customers
It’s critical to always be aware of your client’s demands and how you may assist them in achieving their objectives. You may offer items and services that will assist you to establish a firm that is specialised in your clients’ demands if you actually “know” your client base. As an expert in your profession, you most likely have a good notion of what will appeal to your clients and what they expect from your company. Of course, you should always pay attention to what your consumers have to say and never rush them into making a purchase you know they will regret.
- Create Awesome Customer Service
Excellent customer service extends beyond your email and phone manners. It also involves responding to all messages as quickly as possible, listening to problems and coming up with a wonderful solution, as well as writing thank you emails. Also, when writing product descriptions or service details, strive to be generous try and include everything a client could need or want to know.
- Talk to Customers
Our primary mode of communication nowadays is email or instant messaging. As a result, many of us have developed the practice of responding to one email and immediately moving on to the next. However, this is not the greatest practice. Everyone enjoys feeling unique and talking about themselves. So, strike up a discussion to learn more about possible clients and how you can best assist them. Calling potential clients will demonstrate that you are a real person who cares about their experience with your company and appreciates the business they give you.
- Seal The Deal
Many books will tell you that putting pressure on a client to sign a contract as soon as possible is the finest sales approach. People, on the other hand, are more willing to collaborate with you if you give them time and space. It’s reasonable to inform them that you’re on a tight schedule and that you have other people waiting but giving them some time to make their own decision frequently results in the highest turnover.
Summing-up
For any business to grow and acquire more leads that can be turned into customers, it needs to fine-tune its sales process. Sales is not an overnight thing. You have to work through the sales funnel to finally convert a lead into a customer. There’s no shortcut to it. And one of the most important ways to achieve this is by creating a positive environment where every sales rep in your team feels excited, motivated to grow, and excel, feels responsible and looks forward to overcoming challenges that may arise. If you’re wondering how this can be achieved or how elaborate a process this can be, don’t worry we’re here to help you.
Shergroup recommends online sales coaching program by the sales wiz, Bruce King and has added it to its marketing and sales hub. We can tell you by our own experience that taking Bruce’s training has greatly helped and improved the performances of our business solutions advisors. It has changed the way they approach a prospect and deal with them understanding their pain points and helping them with solutions that could help move forward their business.
Bruce King as the world knows is a sales conference speaker and an international bestselling author. For over 17 years Bruce has been presenting his keynote conference speeches and one-to-three-day Sales Master Classes at events around the world. His speeches are informative and have a lasting effect on the audiences.
So, if you are looking to change the way how your sales team performs, presents your brand to the prospects, and convert them into customers then check out our link below and get yourself or your entire team enrolled in our partnership with Bruce King. His bite-sized online videos will inspire and motivate your sales team to achieve greater heights.
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