How would you respond if someone knocked on your door, told you what they sold, and then asked you to buy something from them immediately?
You’ve probably had this happen to you before. In an instant, you have to make a snap decision whether to agree to switch dry cleaning services, buy Girl Scout Cookies or let someone inspect your home for termites.
And, your reaction is probably fairly different depending on whether the person is your neighbor’s kid selling Thin Mints (in which case, the answer should always be yes) or whether it’s an adult salesperson asking you to spend $1,000 on something.
When that high ticket seller comes to the door, I’m more likely to tell the “No thanks” and never give them a second thought. Even if I really did need their services, I still am not likely to make a spur of the moment purchase based on my initial awareness of their existence.
Instead, I’d want to make sure they were legit and could deliver on their promises.
I’d want to poke around their website and check references, or visit social review sites and find some testimonials – both negative and positive ones.
I’d want to make sure they were trustworthy, which would require more than that first knock-on-the-front-door conversation.
The knock of the door is the awareness phase of marketing. It’s saying “Hey, I’m here. This is what I do.”
Just like in my analogy, to make the sale, you have to build rapport and match your prospect’s needs to the solution you’re providing. You need a process for moving them from awareness to that moment when they seal the deal and you make the sale.
You need a marketing funnel. We’re outlining the key steps in the marketing funnel and how you can build processes that keep your prospects moving.
Marketing Funnel Phase 1: Awareness
Awareness can occur from everyday actions, like seeing an ad in the newspaper (old school!) or seeing a post on social media.
The best awareness occurs when people know they have a problem and need to find a solution. Focus your awareness messaging on how you offer solutions and the benefits you provide, not simply on the features of your product.
Strategies for engaging consumers at this stage of the funnel include:
- Organic social media posts (YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest and more, depending on your audience)
- Paid social media advertising
- Billboards
- Events
- Search engine marketing
- Influencer marketing
- Website content
How To Do It Better:
- Focus on the right audiences. With awareness, you’re often trying to cast a wide net, and those efforts can be expensive. Invest in developing buyer personas and identifying your target audience, so you can advertise where they are.
- Collect email addresses. Find a way to create value and convince people to give you their email address in exchange. Having the opportunity to engage through email opens a world of personalization and marketing automation to you.
Marketing Funnel Phase 2: Interest
In my experience, many businesses are open to investing resources in the awareness stage of the process. In their minds, they’ve made people aware of their product, and when sales come through, they automatically believe them to be directly attributable to that Times Square billboard or that event/trade show booth.
The truth is, though, most buyers aren’t going to progress straight from awareness – that knock on the door – to a purchase.
That’s where the interest phase comes into play. This is one of the most underrated portions of the sales process, and the one where you have the most potential to create a difference, nurture better leads and get higher quality, higher value sales.
Many people start to realize they have an interest problem when they put out CTAs for a purchase and get crickets. Now that can either be that your product or service doesn’t have value – for that audience – or, more often, it can be that you just haven’t properly primed the pump yet.
You can’t expect someone to buy from you if they don’t know you and trust you yet. Just knowing who you are (the awareness stage) isn’t enough.
People have to trust you. They have to have confidence that you have a solution that will work for them. And, they have to be able to afford your solution – these are the things that happen in the interest phase.
In the interest phase, you work to share the solutions you offer and match them with the problems your prospects have. You identify their needs and can use marketing automation processes to serve them the personalized content that fits their situation.
Focusing on this phase will cause some people to self-select out of your process quicker, but that may be because you’re not the right fit for them. Your pricing might be out of their range, or your solution might not be the right fit for their needs.
You can be okay with that happening, because then you’re not investing further time in a deal that wouldn’t be likely to come to fruition anyway. And, the deals that you do secure will be more valuable. Nurturing your prospects’ interest can lead to 20 percent more sales opportunities and almost 50% higher spend from the nurtured leads who choose to go with you.
How to do it better:
- Create more content – B2B buyers in particular want to review a lot of content before making decisions – an average of about 13 pieces!
- Use marketing automation to get the right content to the right people – track prospects’ engagement with your content and provide them additional resources that match.
Marketing Funnel Phase 3: Consideration/Decision
You’ve attracted them. You’ve held their interest. What’s next?
In the consideration/decision phase, you may have more targeted interaction with the client as you help them decide definitely if you’re the right fit.
For B2B sales/marketing, you’ll show demos, answer questions, handle objections, set prices, connect prospects with satisfied customers for conversations, and more.
For B2C sales/marketing, this is where you might see a lot of emotional appeals, messages that encourage people not to miss out or to make a decision right away. Look for ways to make the process of purchasing seamless, so that when they’re ready to buy, there’s no need to hesitate and no time to change their minds.
How to do it better:
- Do it faster. Get the right decision makers in the room at the right time. The number of people involved in a decision continues to grow as processes become more integrated – compliance, IT and other business units all need to weigh in. Most organization include more than five people in their decision making process, according to the Harvard Business Review.
- Use video. If you’re trying to get through this phase efficiently, consider producing some videos that you can have available on demand – things like testimonials from satisfied clients. Incorporate these into your email marketing automation, so your sale isn’t being held up by waiting for an existing client and future client to have a conversation, or because it’s too hard to get all the decision makers in the room for a demo.
Marketing Funnel Phase 4: Action
You did it! You got them all the way to the bottom of the funnel. Now, what needs to happen so you can close the sale and get paid?
Basically, don’t let the process stall out – according to Salesforce, almost 60 percent of sales do somewhere in the pipeline.
Recap pain points and offer specific solutions customized for them, not just out-of-the-box options that could work for any client. Use an automated email or email series to push them toward a decision – a well-timed coupon or discount code might help to seal the deal if necessary.
How to do it better:
- Personalize the process. Don’t make it easy for them to feel like they can walk away from the relationship you’ve created. Include appreciation and gratitude in your communications – even the ones that you’re adding through marketing automation.
Once you make it through the funnel, your work’s not over. Start creating long-term loyalty immediately with onboarding sequences that get them using the product and seeing a return on investment as quickly as possible.
Does this sound like a lot of work? It is. That’s why we use marketing automation to streamline processes and help our clients earn better results.
Want to learn more about marketing processes and how marketing automation can play a key role in nurturing leads and making more sales? Our resource center has the information you need to start building your marketing automation system and generating better leads and sales.
