How important is building a marketing funnel to make your business a success? Learn all about filling your funnel here!
How to Fill Your Marketing Funnel and Prospect Effectively
Understanding the Marketing Funnel
If you want your business to grow, you need to consistently and effectively bring in new prospects and bring them into the marketing funnel. And your sales team members, your business partners, need to know how to do it as well. Help arm them with the information and materials they need to sell to customers. This way, you don’t do everything alone, and you’re expanding your funnel at the same time.
With one piece of data, I can get an idea of the pace of your business. How many people have you converted into customers in the last 30, 60, or 90 days? When you can’t convert leads into customers, it’s difficult to tap into the wealth that comes from developing a robust and ever-expanding business.
Your willingness to reach out and talk to new people on a consistent basis is the most effective way to continually fill your marketing funnel. If this concept is new to you, let me briefly explain the traditional marketing funnel model.
Defining the Marketing Funnel
A marketing funnel refers to a visual presentation of the stages from prospecting to buying. To give you a better idea, picture this:
Imagine a funnel, like the one in your kitchen. It’s wide at the top and then morphs into a shallow neck at the bottom. Visualize the prospects are dropping into the narrow part of the funnel as you reach out and talk to new people.
When it comes to your marketing funnel, you want to have a consistent and steady flow. In the later stages, these prospects will drop out of your funnel with varying degrees of interest. Some will purchase a product, eventually becoming customers. A customer may even want to do the business and join your team perhaps as a franchisee, retailer, or distributor. Potential customers will offer referrals, which can increase your sales and conversion. A lead will have no interest at all.
Take These Steps to Convert Prospects to Customers
While they’re in your marketing funnel, you want to bring them deeper into the customer journey by educating them via a series of “What’s Next?” action steps. It can be the following:
- Three-way call
- Local event
- Face-to-face appointments
One of the effective strategies you can implement is digital marketing. It is a process of using web-related tools to increase the awareness of your prospects and capture them as leads.
Marketing surveys reveal that almost 90% of respondents used the Internet to find information about a local business or product. The also rely on
The survey further highlighted how the respondents were more likely to rate the information from search engines as more accurate or reliable than the ones coming from their friends.
Your digital marketing program can include the following:
- Website Content
- Social Media
- Email Marketing
- Pay-Per-Click Advertising
- Search Engine Optimization
- Blogging
- Analytics
How to Work Your Marketing Funnel
There are two primary strategies to work on your prospecting funnel:
1. Fill Up Your Funnel
Fill it up and keep it full with as many prospective customers as possible who are considering your business and/or your products. You can launch different types of marketing campaigns to connect to your prospects and convert them into leads and, later, into customers. The main process of bringing them deeper into the marketing funnel should not stop.
Keep in mind you cannot convert all your prospects into customers no matter how “foolproof” or “well designed” your techniques may be. It’s possible you can attract 5,000 leads in a campaign and convert only a percent of them or 50 people. That’s why it’s important you are consistent with filling up your funnel.
2. Don’t Wait
Don’t be the like the others who are obsessed with converting every person they reach out to into customers. Shorten or condense the time between the first introduction and the ultimate decision of “yes,” “no,” “referral,” or “not now.”
Otherwise, here is what can happen if you are not paying close attention to the process: You can unconsciously slow down your prospecting pace to match the decision-making process speed of the prospects in your funnel.
Avoid having your personal prospecting pace decrease to keep up with the time it takes the people in your funnel to make their decision. In other words, you need to keep up the pace regardless of your prospects’ timeline.
Take some time today to evaluate your prospecting pace. I certainly want you to follow through with the existing prospects in your marketing funnel. Where are they now? Is the speed of converting them into customers slower than you expect it to be? I want you to keep up your pace for reaching out and talking to new people at the same time. The two activities are not mutually exclusive but support each other.
Take charge of your prospecting or marketing funnel! The consultants who consistently sponsor become the leaders who reach the top of the pay plan. I want you to join them, and the sooner the better. This will be an exciting journey for you and your business!
Editor’s Note: This article was published on June 27, 2017, and has been updated for quality and relevancy.