When you first start a business, there’s no doubt you will get all excited and enthusiastic about all the things that you are about to do and all the goals that you are going to achieve. I suppose you have set out some clear and specific goals, because that’s the only way you will be able to drive your business towards success. Entering the market blindly and simply hoping for the best is not a very smart idea, but I assume you already know that. At least, I want to believe that you already know that.
Starting a business is also a pretty scary time, isn’t it? You hear about all those failure stories and statistics don’t really speak in favor of newly founded companies. All of that can get you discouraged and make you think that you are predestined to fail. That’s definitely not the way you should think. Staying positive and optimistic and really believing in what you are trying to achieve will certainly play a huge role in your overall success.
Yet, belief can only get you so far. It’s not like you can enter any industry with nothing but faith to play in your court. Achieving your goals takes a lot of work and effort and simply sitting around and hoping for the best won’t exactly do the trick. In fact, that’s probably the reason why so many new companies fail rather quickly. It’s also the reason why you should step up your game and actually work towards succeeding instead of sitting around and hoping that things will work out all on their own.
Here’s the harsh truth. Things will never work out all on their own. And this is your business we are talking about here, so you might as well put in some effort into making things happen. It’s true that it takes a lot of work, but I believe it’s safe to assume you are ready to do the work given that you have taken that crucial step and actually started your own business. So, find a useful source or two to help you learn how you can turn your company into a successful one and say “take this” to the statistics that aren’t really favorable when new firms are in question.
Marketing Is Crucial
If I were to ask you what the most important thing is you can do in order to ensure the success of your business, I’m pretty certain you would say something along the lines of: “I have to keep making sales”. While I cannot argue with that logic, the truth is that what you are saying is a goal and what you need to do to achieve that goal is called a strategy. Every single company needs a strategy aimed at selling those goods and services. More precisely, every single company needs a marketing strategy.
It’s completely logical that you cannot make any sales without effective marketing. It’s not like people will just appear out of nowhere on your website or in your physical store and start placing orders on the goods and services you are selling. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but this is definitely not how things work in this world of ours. Plus, there’s no “fake it ‘till you make it” in the world of sales. You have to start making it from the very beginning.
Even the birds know by now that marketing is the crucial factor in making it. You can do everything else just fine, but if your marketing is lacking, you are sure to experience a failure. On the other hand, great marketing can turn even the low-quality products into great-selling ones. Not that you should ever compromise quality, though, because selling low-quality services and goods is possible, but it is definitely short-lived. So, quality + marketing is your success equation.
We can’t speak of marketing and sales without ever mentioned the sales funnel, can we? It’s the crucial marketing strategy that every business needs to employ in order to succeed in this jungle that we call the market. In case you aren’t that familiar with this amazing concept, let me quickly explain what it is and then we can proceed to elaborating why it is so important and why ever business, including yours, needs a sales funnel strategy.
What Is It?
Basically, a sales funnel strategy is a method consisting of taking the prospective customers through all the stages they need to go through in order to turn from prospective into actual ones. It includes the whole process – from people becoming aware about a particular brand and the goods and services they are trying to sell, through becoming interested in those things, then realizing that they need them and finally taking action towards buying them. This is all more clearly explained by a concept known as AIDA, which will not only help you understand the process, but also teach you how to create a sales funnel and thus generate a large number of loyal and long-term customers.
Let us take a quick look at the AIDA concept that I have mentioned before we continue to understand why you need to create a sales funnel. So, the first thing you must understand is that AIDA is an acronym and it stands for the following terms: attention, interest, desire and action. Those terms are the respective stages through which prospects go before they turn into your customers, so let us try and explain them more clearly.
The attention stage, as the name says it itself, is when a particular brand starts grabbing attention of potential consumers leading to them becoming interested in what those brands are offering and developing a desire to exchange their money for the goods and services sold buy those brands before they finally take action and make the actual purchase. As you can see, this is actually a logical course of thoughts that occurs in every new customer. Keep in mind, though, that the explanation is rather simplified and that this model has its intricacies and complexities.
You might now wonder what the actual business has to do with the consumer’s course of thoughts. Isn’t AIDA simply an explanation of how customers think? Well, it definitely is an explanation of how people think, but that’s precisely what makes it so special and valuable to actual sellers. It allows them to influence those thoughts by learning how to grab attention, spark interest, trigger desire and provoke action. Doing all of those things is exactly what makes a marketing technique successful.
Read more about it: https://www.feedough.com/aida-model-explanation-examples-variants/
Why Do You Need A Sales Funnel Strategy?
After figuring out what sales funnel strategies are and how they work, I suppose that you are now rather interested in what it is that your business can gain from those. In other words, you want to know why these are so necessary in today’s world. That’s exactly what we are going to look into right now. Below you will find several reasons why a sales funnel strategy is necessary for every single business out there that wants to be successful in making sales.
#1 It Helps You Pick Advertising Strategies
Marketing is a pretty complex field, isn’t it? You surely know that it takes more than simply realizing how your customers think in order to succeed in making those sales. You need to know exactly which parts of their thinking to focus on when launching your next advertising strategy. I suppose you might say that you will just try focusing on all of those parts and see what happens, but that doesn’t only carry the risk of being unsuccessful, but it’s also a huge waste of money.
Picking the right advertising strategy takes a lot of work. If you want to make sure that it is successful, it also takes one more important thing – taking the sales funnels into consideration. This way, you will know exactly which consumers to focus on at a particular point of time. For example, you might want to attract new ones and try to raise awareness of your brand, or you might want to focus on sealing the deal with those people that are already way down the funnel, in the decision-making stage. The sales funnel will be extremely helpful when the time comes to decide on your next advertising strategy.
#2 It Helps You Make More Sales
Does this reason come as a surprise at all? I suppose not. It’s perfectly clear that you will be able to make more sales and generate a higher profit when you focus on all the stages in the sales funnel (more info) and make sure that you keep them in mind at all times instead of just presenting your products to prospects whenever you feel like it, without any actual and precise plan. You always need a plan and the sales funnel model can help you make a perfect one in no time, while making sure that you are thinking about all the right things in the process.
#3 It Helps Build Trust
It goes without saying that people buy things from companies they trust. Sure, some impulsive purchases can happen, but even those are now governed by trust, because people have access to all the information they need thanks to technology. In any case, your goal is to build a relationship between you and your customers and that relationship needs to be built on trust, especially if you are looking to make those consumers loyal to your particular brand and my guess is that every brand wants to do just that.
If you want to go anywhere near becoming your prospects’ trusted source of services and products, you will have to always have the sales funnel model in the back of your mind when approaching any new consumers or offering your products to the existing ones. Remember, people buy things from companies they trust, but they also buy things they need or they *think* they need in order to solve an issue they might be having, and your job is to make sure that your services or goods solve some of their problems. Nothing can be more helpful in doing that than the sales funnel.
#4 It Helps Attract Returning Customers
As I have said above, impulsive purchases can still happen. But, let us face the facts here. Nobody is actually trying to make people buy their goods and services impulsively. This is just something that happens and even though it’s nice, companies aren’t really that happy about scoring a one-time customer. What they are happy about is scoring a returning, or a life-long customer.
That’s the way you succeed in today’s market. In fact, that has always been the way you succeed and not focusing on getting returning customers will definitely lead to failure at one point or another. You might have some short-term success from one-time buyers, but that never plays out well in the long run. Everybody knows that and it should be your number one concern when you start a business.
Sales funnels are designed precisely for making this happen, i.e. for turning people into returning customers. As you can see at https://www.feedster.com/business/importance-of-sales-funnel-marketing/, this model doesn’t focus precisely on making a sale no matter what. Making a sale is, in fact, the ultimate goal at the end of the funnel, but the truth is that the whole model actually revolves around helping you gain as much returning customers as possible instead of simply making a one-time sale.
#5 It Helps You Gain Competitive Advantage
There’s no doubt in my mind that one of your goals is to gain competitive advantage over all those companies that are in the same line of business as you are. Of course, you cannot do that without letting people know you exist, making sales and gaining loyal customers. If you have been paying attention, then you clearly understand how a sales funnel strategy helps you achieve all of those things.
