What| Is| A |Digital | Funnel |

Digital  Funnel

A sales funnel built using multiple channels produces ready-to-sell leads or direct trade. The most important thing in building a sales funnel is the collaboration of all channels.

The sales funnel can be divided into four stages:

Reach, you reach a potential customer and catch their interest

Action, you can get the customer to perform recognizable actions on your site, such as reading blogs and links and visiting service pages

Conversion, the buyer makes the desired conversion, which turns him into either a lead or a customer

Engagement, you attract customers to your company because profitable growth comes from long-term customer relationships

 The first letters of these words make up the MRACE model. When you add additional measurements to the model, the MRACE model is created, which we use. RACE is not just a model built to describe a sales funnel, but it can (and should) be used to build the marketing of an entire company. In this case, your company's marketing plays together and the actual sales funnels are not even needed, because your marketing already works as a sales funnel itself.

Reach, 

Act, Convert and Engage all work in marketing with the same math as regular sales. The more relevant meetings in the Reach phase, the more you can solve customer problems and help them during the Act phase. The more you help your customers, the more they create transactions at the Convert stage. The better you take care of your customers after the sale, the better you will be able to make further sales during the Engage phase.

The MRACE infrastructure is a model built to run a marketing organization, but it can also be used to build sales funnels.

A sales funnel is often described as a simple process in which a customer simply enters the funnel and makes a purchase with a smile. However, this is not the case and visitors who made a conversion can be roughly divided into two groups: the minority who made it right away, and the majority who made an average of 5-6 visits to your site before making a purchase.

Because of this latter majority, all marketing channels need to come into play together.

How to build a sales funnel?

In this blog, I'm talking about building a comprehensive sales funnel suitable for B2B and selling B2C products and services (like renovations). Many B2B decisions and B2C products require a lot of information to be searched and thought through before a buying decision is made. As a result, the sales funnel also requires more content and different channels.

Your funnel won't work without the right content.

I wrote earlier about why content marketing is a critical element of digital marketing. That's what it is about a sales funnel. While we can search Facebook and Google for the most buy-ready audiences and target ads to them, no one will buy your product unless you sell it to them along with your content.

Your product or service is certainly the answer to the customer's problem, but if you don't answer the customer's questions with your content, there will be no connection between your product and your customer's needs.

"Your product is the answer, but what is the customer's question?"

Therefore, before you start driving traffic to your site, your site must be both in content and technically appropriate. With the help of content, you need to build shopping paths on the site, which we call lead mills. When we create content right, they turn a prospect from the top of the funnel into a sales-ready lead. It is also important to take into account conversion optimization in the sales funnel functionality so that the customer's journey through the funnel is as smooth as possible.

Let's start building the funnel.

1) Reach - make yourself visible and spark the interest of your audience

Reach is at the very top of the sales funnel. The goal is to reach target groups according to your customers. At this stage, we can roughly divide our customers within each customer personality into three different segments:

1) People actively looking for your product

2) People looking for a product similar to yours

3) People who are not looking for your product

1)Advertising

I deliberately excluded people who are looking for your company's product directly, because then the role of the sales funnel is not so great. If you imagine selling oat milk, the people in segment 1 will say, "I'm looking for oat milk." People in segment 2 say, "I'm looking for milk." Buyers in segment 3 are not saying anything.

To reach these segments, you will need several different digital marketing channels, the most important of which are Facebook / Instagram (in some cases LinkedIn), Google "SEO"  search engine optimization.

Next, I'll take a look at what channels you can use to get the most relevant customer flow from these three segments to get to your website.

People who are actively looking for your product

There are two ways to find people looking for your product on your site: Google Ads or organic search results, thanks to search engine optimization.

You can read about the role of Google Ads here and the role of search engine optimization in new customer acquisition here.

People looking for a product similar to yours

These people are not looking for your product, but rather looking for another product that solves the same problem as your product. In this case, we can target people who have visited/searched for your competitors' sites.

People who are not looking for your product

For these people, the most successful advertising is through Google Display and social media channels (usually Facebook is best). For awareness raising, Youtube is a good option. I recommend reading our blog on how you can use Google Display to build your sales funnel every step of the way.

Facebook allows you to communicate with your audience about the problems or needs they are facing. Once your audience recognizes themselves from the message “I have this problem,” you can start by using the right content to create a connection between your proposed product and the solution to your customer's problem. Thus, the need for the target group begins to spread to your product.

2) Take Action - 

Convince site visitors with your experience and convert them into leads with good content.

Action is the most important step in the entire sales funnel. It determines if a site visitor turns into a potential customer

In the outreach phase, you got them interested and made yourself visible. This is an easy job compared to the action step. At this stage, you need to get the visitor to waste their precious time on your site and consume so much content that they will contact you or, for example, download a manual, and thus leave you their contact information.

The goal of the Action Phase is to get shoppers to follow the buying path as directed by the guide controlling their buying decision to achieve the desired action (such as downloading a guide). The more strategically your site builds the lead mill generated by your content, the better it will drive visitors deeper into your site.

Driver example: When buying marketing, one person wants to develop a brand while another wants leads. The buying paths of these two customers must be distinguished, and the content of each buying path must be completely focused on the factor that most determines the buying decision of the customer's personality, that is, the driver.

What makes the action phase challenging is that you need to be more interesting than the rest of the client's life at that moment.

During the action phase, interactions between channels should work seamlessly because customer buying processes are not straightforward (buying versus searching for information by interest). This is completely related to two things: 1) It's okay to think about a purchase decision several times and over a long period. 2) things constantly happen in life that will distract the attention of your customers from the purchase.

A solidly built lead mill and a complete blog post don't impact your buyer's decision when a baby starts crying, when a friend calls, or when a spouse asks for help with food preparation. Or just Netflix, watching which the client can feel more comfortable at this very moment, even if he is reading the blog.

Whatever the reason, the buying process stops

Hence, you need to drive customers to your site so that they can continue the shopping process with remarketing. Remarketing to such a warm audience is very accessible and productive when done right. In the best-case scenario, you can advertise a blog to a customer where the buying process was interrupted.

Social media in the action phase

In addition to remarketing, social media plays another important role in the action phase. This allows you to deliver action stage content to people who are already interested in your product and direct them to your site. The purchase process for this group may have been unfinished a long time ago, but with a properly formatted message, you can continue.

In addition to this, your message will also reach many other people. Based on micro-conversions like watching a video or going to a website, you can identify entirely new customer segments that are interested in your services. Facebook's AI recognizes whether certain types of people are responding to your ads, clicking on your pages and becoming leads. You can now target Facebook to find more similar people on Facebook and show them ads.

What content do you need for your website during the action phase?

Content at the high end of the sales funnel plays a critical role in how well the sales funnel gets started. If you are talking about your product, you are only reaching out to the audience that already wants your product. This mass is usually quite small.

Content at the top of the funnel should be purely reader-focused. Content should address the concerns, needs, goals, and day-to-day challenges of your customer's personality. The more accurately you can describe the problems and desires of your customer's personality, the more likely you are to find a solution.

At the top of the sales funnel, customers search a lot using keywords based on needs, concerns, and motivation. “How to generate leads,” “The car makes a strange noise when it starts,” etc. If the content is processed only by your product, then you will not be shown in search results with these keywords.

It's important to do keyword research because they also serve as the basis for your content. When content focuses on the keywords your customers are looking for, SEO starts to deliver far-reaching results.

The content of the action phase should also create clear driver-based buying paths to support information retrieval for customers.

Let me give you an example. The person googles "How to improve the percentage of salesperson clustering." He ends with "How to improve salesperson clustering with marketing." Now we're starting to teach them that low clustering rates are not necessarily vendor-related, but low-quality leads. The person is interested and continues to read.

Once the interest is captured, we start directing the person to other content: Generating High-Quality Leads for B2B Companies, Generating Facebook Leads in B2B Companies, Downloading the Modern Sales Director's Toolkit: 37 Tools to Optimize the Sales Process and improve the quality of the trigger. "

This allowed us to connect with an unknown person with a sample blog post “How to Cluster Your Salespeople Using Marketing” and redirect them to blog posts based on their interests. Finally, he has uploaded the guide and we are starting to warm it up as a lead using marketing automation or we will contact him directly.

Note that this was an example of just one downscaled buying path for one person.

3) Conversion,

 The conversion stage includes the time when the customer is in the lead but hasn't paid you yet. The nature and duration of this step vary greatly from product to product. In some products, the reflection period is long, and in some, the purchase decision is made quickly. In some products, the salesperson is most responsible, while in others the marketing is the most. For example, it is difficult to buy marketing services without a salesperson, while many SaaS services can be purchased without a single contact with the salesperson.

Remarketing keeps your business in the minds of potential customers

During the conversion phase, one of the most effective ways that marketing can support sales is by giving feedback on ad ideas through remarketing. This way, your business will remain in the lead's memory, but at the same time, it will convince them of your competence. If they sent out several invitations to participate in the tender to different companies, then the corresponding feedback can play a significant role in closing the deal.

Marketing Automation will notify when a sales team needs to contact a customer

Without exception, all marketing automation tools provide a feature that allows you to see what each visitor was doing on your website. This feature does not exist so that marketers can keep track of which blog someone is reading late at night. Its purpose, among other things, is to tell sellers when to contact a lead.

Let's say two different visitors download a guide from a site and join the marketing automation chain. One of the participants fills out the form, but for the first week does not even open the manual. Another opens it immediately and visits your service page and various help pages on the same day. Marketing Automation allows your sales manager to receive automatic email notifications of their actions, allowing them to spend their time on the most ready-to-buy leads.

This automation becomes especially important when there are a lot of potential customers.

What content do you need on your website during the conversion stage?

At this point, the lead is interested in your product. Therefore, the most important thing is to teach him to make the right choice. Reference stories, case studies, buying guides, interactive product selectors, comparisons and expert content are what the buyer needs at this stage.

The content of the conversion stage should provide connectivity and remove barriers to purchase. Plus, they need to be built in such a way that leads feel like they no longer want to stay in their current state but want the future that your product will bring. We often feel overly comfortable, which means that a “good” current state is perceived as a better option than painful information searches and the buying process, even if things get even better afterwards. Therefore, the content should also clearly communicate what will happen if the potential buyer does not change their current state.

4) Engagement

 involve customers in your business to grow it.

The bucket will not stay full if it has holes in it. A business won't grow if a lot of customers leave. Therefore, you should pay the same attention to customer interactions to attract new customers.

In the engagement phase, marketing is about building customer loyalty to your company. This means very different things depending on the business. For example, in SaaS companies, the engagement phase begins right after the free trial is launched because there is a lot to learn from the customer through content marketing. This way they will learn how to use the tool and will not switch to an older version or stop learning.

The renovation company should send out a segmented newsletter to those who have done kitchen renovations, such as kitchen decor. Gradually, the angle of the entrance can also be changed to renovate the rest of the house, which will attract the client's interest in the next renovation.

Simply put, engagement marketing teaches your customer to use the product they buy more often and better. This is done through social media and Google remarketing and email marketing. However, the focus is on search engine optimized content that you direct your customer to through the channels mentioned above. If search engine optimization is in order, visitors will continually flow from day to day, even if there is no more investment in marketing.

What content do you need on your website during the interaction phase?

I mentioned earlier that engagement scene content teaches your customer how to use your product better and more often. Software is used more when you teach your customers how to use it in the most versatile way. The frying pan is more used when you write a recipe for your customers. The idea is thus very simple, but the content of this stage often helps in attracting new customers.

The content of the engagement phase is also useful for attracting new customers. If a lead reads engaging content about what they can do with a product and sees how easy it is, then of course he or she is more likely to buy the product.

5) Measurement -

 when marketing is measured, 

At the same time, however, it is also one of the biggest risks. The volume of data drowns easily and incorrect numbers can be distracting. In addition, the quality of the data is often poor, in which case their interpretation may even lead to inaccurate conclusions.

If you want to take a deeper look at dimensions, read the Marketing Dashboard here to track your sales funnel metrics in real-time and visually.

Summary

The MRACE model is a marketing framework by which digital marketing channels work together rather than be isolated from each other. As a result, your marketing will appear consistent and fluid to your customers, increasing both marketing results and brand influence.

Eventually:

Conversion Optimized Websites Are Net Profit

Websites are filled with customer-specific content that constitutes lead mills or purchase paths

Lead mills drive traffic across multiple channels, and a well-formed lead mill collects organic traffic from search engines, so marketing always stays on

When a customer's buying process is interrupted, it will be restored with remarketing exactly where it left off

Everything is structured to guide the customer to the desired action, such as submitting a request for quotation, contacting us, or downloading a buyer's guide

Let's see how your digital channels currently work together?