According to a Demand Gen Report, 95% of buyers will choose a supplier who provided them with the right content at the right time. Using a sales funnel, you are able to push your potential clients though the buying process, and provide the necessary information needed to close the sale.
Now let’s look at the structure of a solid digital sales funnel, how to set it up and how to maximise its effectiveness.
Step 1 – Create an awesome landing page.
This is your customers first impression of you; you’ve spent time, money and effort to get them there. Keep it simple and related to the link, ad or message that sent them there. If they were searching for ‘Accounting services’ the landing page must have info about your accounting services; possibly what your services cost, why you should be used, and how to get hold of you.
Step 2 – Give an offer.
This can be a promotion, or it can be an offer to give them free advice or information by signing up to your newsletter. Think of pre-sales and making yourself sound like an expert or their first choice supplier.
Step 3 – Upsell or down sell.
Are you too expensive or do they want more; have a Lite version and an ‘additional services’ offer for more complex requirements. The objective here is to hold on to that potential lead and get that meeting, enquiry or sale whilst keeping the quality of the lead in mind. You may offer finance, payment plans or a cut down version that is affordable. Sell the starter if you must, as they can always add a main and dessert afterwards.
Step 4 – Follow up; always.
Keep the momentum going, if the lead does not get back to you remind them on a regular basis that you’re there. We love a simple email or a quick phone call.
Now that your funnel is setup, there are several tried-and-tested approaches that can feed leads onto you or your sales team. You can select the ones, based on your business and budget, which will provide you with the best quality leads.
Three of our favourites which produce good quality B2B leads are:
Google search – What we like here is the ability to target people with intent. When someone is searching for something on Google they are either looking for that service, or are researching it. Targeting also allows us to select areas, devices, time of day and day of week; amongst other elements. But the most important factor is the keyword that triggers the showing of your ad. If a person is searching for “Corporate Tax Specialists” we know exactly what they are looking for and can feed that search via an ad into our sales funnel.
LinkedIn – With detailed information about LinkedIn members we can hyper target demographically. We can target Financial Managers who have degrees and work for companies in Gauteng that employ over 100 people and have an annual turnover of over R100M. You can show them your content when they are on LinkedIn with your services and drive them into your funnel.
Facebook – With behavioural and demographic targeting we can reach people that are interested in a specific item or topic that fall within a targeted group. We can target moms who live in Sandon are employed and are interested in cycling.
Finally, once your Sales Funnel starts sending you leads, you need to act on them. We all know that people get busy and don’t always respond quickly, so you need to follow up. You’ll need to follow up a lot more than you expect. There are usually six follow ups if you don’t have any response and our most effective last message is ‘I’m sorry we couldn’t chat but feel free to reach out to me if you want to learn more about our services’
The goal of your sales funnels starting message is to solve a customer’s problem. When you identify that problem and create content that speaks to solving it, that’s how you draw them in. So, create your landing page, feed it with traffic from paid or free sources and measure the effectiveness of each channel using the analytics and conversion tracking from your various sources. Cut the worst ones and shift your efforts to the best performing channels and change your message and page regularly to keep it fresh. Remember, there are an estimated 6.5 Million LinkedIn and 18 million Facebook users in South Africa. Isn’t it time you got a slice of that pie?
*Demand Gen Report: https://www.ironpaper.com/webintel/articles/20-sales-statistics-that-matter-for-2018/
