The issue that many small business owners have expressed to me over the years is that they don’t get many visitors to their website and the ones that do find them online don’t stay.

Many factors lead to people not visiting your website or leaving once they get there. But first, ask yourself, is your website and business optimized to attract your ideal customer and leading them down the path to making a purchase?

Whether or not you need a website is a forgone conclusion at this point. Prospects have become accustomed to searching for information online and expecting to find everything they need with a simple Google search.

Successful business owners understand how to leverage the power of their websites by using it to:

• Build brand awareness
• Collect prospect information
• Educate prospects about products/services
• Generate sales
• Build brand loyalty
• Etc.

Sales Funnel

The bullet points listed above aren’t just random things that successful business owners do at their leisure. They are all components of something known in marketing as a sales funnel.

Marketers have different interpretations of the different stages of a sales funnel but at the end of the day, I think they’re all speaking semantics. I like to keep things as simple as possible, so the four stages I talk about are.

• Awareness
• Interest
• Decision
• Loyalty

Awareness

When it comes to sales funnels, think of real-life funnel, with the top of the funnel being really big and it gets smaller as it gets to the bottom.

The first and biggest stage of the funnel is the awareness stage. This is where your marketing efforts are focused on driving attention and traffic to your website. It’s kind of like a catchall, many people may enter your funnel, but quite a few of them are not your ideal customer. As a result, they may fall out of the funnel early.

So how do you attract people? This is where your marketing skills come into play. If you’re a new business owner, you’re essentially unknown on the internet but you want people to see you. This can be challenging because the internet is a busy place, and everyone is competing for attention.

Successful business owners use a mixture of marketing tactics to drive traffic to their websites. This may include social media, blogging, SEO, paid ads, etc.

Now that you’ve piqued the interest of some potential clients and they have come to your website, what do you do? This is where many new business owners get stuck.

Interest

Assuming your website checks all the boxes (design, color scheme, images, and so on), what are you going to do to keep them there? One area that must be up to par is your content.

Good content goes far beyond your home and about pages. Even though this information is vital, additional content such as blog posts helps to solidify you as an expert in your industry.

Content is also used for one of the most important; yet overlooked aspects of a successful website… collecting prospective clients’ information.

At this point during the sales cycle, the funnel is beginning to narrow. Some visitors realize that your offer isn’t for them. However, for the ones that are interested, you may be able to solve a problem for them, you’re entertaining, or they find you educational.

For these individuals, you can offer them different content in the form of:

• E-books
• Online surveys
• Case studies
• Podcasts
• Etc.

More importantly, before you give them access to this content, you ask for their contact information in exchange. As for how much information you should ask for varies amongst industries, but at the very least you should get their email address.

By obtaining their email addresses, you can continue to build rapport with them through an email sequence until they reach the end of your sales funnel. I’ll discuss email sequence or email funnels more thoroughly in a later post.

It’s important to note that your website should be less about you and more about your buyer persona aka your ideal client. Your content should cater to the people that are most likely to become paying customers.

You’ll start to notice that fewer people are in your funnel at this point, which is to be expected. When someone decides to give you their contact information and download additional content, they are showing a high level of interest. Now you can cater even more content to them.

Decision

Some prospects require more nurturing than others, one of the best ways to push prospects to the bottom of your sales funnel is to present them with testimonials and customer reviews to build additional trust.

You don’t want to lose a prospect that has traveled through most of your funnel because of something such as lack of communication or trust. You should also have CTA’s (Calls to Action) throughout the emails you send them to make the buying process as easy as possible.

Loyalty

The sale isn’t the last stage of the sales funnel. Your goal should be to keep your new client coming back time and time again. You should continue to grow the relationship so that your client will tell others about you.

There is no one size fits all formula for building a loyalty program, it’s industry-specific and ultimately up to each individual business owner.

Conclusion

The implementation of sales funnels can be complex. There are many moving parts and each one needs to be in sync for the best results. Business owners that have a good understanding of their buyer persona are going to put themselves in the best position to be successful.

They can use analytics and statistics to better attract potential buyers and then create the type of content they will find most interesting.

Most business owners don’t have time to fully implement every area of the sales funnel and offer their website visitors everything they need. Successful entrepreneurs understand the importance of delegation and find experts to help them scale their businesses to maximize the power of having a website.

If you need help setting up your sales funnel or managing any part of it, contact me today for a free consultation.