As a B2B, your sales cycle is longer than a B2C. Trying to shorten that cycle is a goal for many organizations. To be successful, it is important to understand your sales funnel and the buyer’s journey.
Unlike a B2B, a B2C buyer spends less time in the middle of the funnel and requires less nurturing and engagement before making a purchase.
What Is A Sales Funnel?
Not to be confused with a sales pipeline, a sales funnel is a consumer-focused marketing model that illustrates the buyer’s journey from awareness to retention. In other words, it is the process that a customer goes through when deciding to purchase a product or service.
The goal of the sales funnel is to solve your customer’s problem. When you know the problem, you can build your content to draw them in and solve their problem with your product or service.
Why Is It Useful?
A sales funnel is useful as it can show you stages of your pipeline that are converting well, and highlight holes where prospects drop out, float away and never convert.
Buyers rarely make a purchase during the first visit of your website, especially if they’re just becoming aware of you.
By understanding your funnel, you can influence how your prospects move through it and the time they spend at each stage.
Creating Content For Each Stage
A lot can happen between the time a prospect enters your funnel and the time they successfully make a purchase. By understanding each stage and the type of content to produce, you can improve the number of people who move through from one stage to another.
- Top of the funnel – An individual begins their journey in an “unaware stage”. This is where you can show your prospect why your product or service in particular are the best. The goal is creating awareness and trust. Buyers are looking for answers and conducting preliminary research. Search queries contains questions such as ‘why‘, ‘how‘, ‘who‘, etc.
- Middle of the funnel – When a prospect moves down the funnel, it means you’ve captured their attention and are considering your offering. The prospect is conducting more research on whether or not your offer is a good fit for them. Your aim should be to educate around the product or service. Search queries include specific brands or websites, and product modifiers such as ‘cheapest‘, ‘best‘, etc.
- Bottom of the funnel – At this stage the prospect is ready to buy, but that doesn’t mean they are going to buy from you. Give them a reason to act now. Search queries contain words such as ‘price‘, ‘buy‘, ‘coupon’, etc.
Real-world Benefits of A Sales Funnel
Let’s consider an e-commerce website that sells books.
The prospect will visit the website for the first time and browse the books for sale. Searching for a specific genre, loading a shopping basket is a movement down the funnel. Moving to the checkout page and making a purchase is the final stage of the funnel.
By analyzing the sales funnel, you can see where customer drop off. If most of your visitors don’t move beyond the checkout stage, there could be a chance to better optimize that page to make it easier for visitors to complete the purchase.
In conclusion…
Most of us are too focused on the top of the funnel and end up neglecting the bottom. But remember, whether you’re blogging, producing video or podcast, targeting all stages of the sales funnel is important.
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