The sales funnel is the process of converting a visitor into a paying customer which must be a priority for every company in its sales process in order to make it as efficient as possible.

According to Hubspot’s 2018 survey, only 69% of marketers believe their top priority should be to convert prospects into customers.

You as a marketer, your job is to move your customers at different points in their journeys along the sales funnel to making a purchase.

 It’s important that you know how your audience thinks, what path they intend to take to find a solution and the answers they seek. To do this, you need to create a content strategy that associates your content with the different stages of the buyer’s journey.

In this article, we will look at the different stages of a sales funnel, how it works and the type of content you need to create for your customers at each stage.

What Are the Sales Funnel Stages?

The sales funnel is called a “funnel” by analogy with the conical shape in which a large number of consumers may start at the top of the sales process, but only a portion of them pass through it and end up making a purchase.

Throughout the sales funnel and the customer’s journey, prospects are reduced to fewer opportunities, and after the decision phase, sales end with a closed deal.

Your funnel may look different depending on your business model, industry, product, audience, and pricing. But regardless of your business model, the goal of your entire sale funnel is to solve your customer’s problem.

When you know the problem of your audiences you should build content to attract them then offer them a product or service to solve their problem.

When you are aware of their likes and dislikes and know what difficulties they face you can help them with those problems and establish a genuine connection with them.

So the sales funnel allows you to adjust your goals and calculate the value of future sales.

The sales funnel allows you to establish data and figures on the number of transactions needed to reach your goals and define a method to move customers from a sales process to closing orders.

Before going deep into the different stages of the funnel, you must first have traffic on your site. To do this you can increase lead generation and traffic in three different ways:

Free traffic

 Free traffic includes direct traffic from people visiting your website through improved SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and through other social media. You can also get referral traffic from other websites that connect you.

Read More: 

Top 10 Strategies to Increase Organic Traffic to Your Site

SEO for Beginners: How to Optimize Your Blog Posts for SEO

Paid traffic

Another way to attract traffic to your site is paid traffic. You pay for an advertisement and as soon as someone clicks on it, you have a customer on your site.  You can also use Facebook, Google AdWords, Twitter, and LinkedIn ads to increase traffic.

Cold outreach

There are two main initiatives for winning potential customers: inbound marketing and outbound marketing. Outbound marketing is rather considered a traditional form of marketing such as door-to-door and cold calling.

Cold email outreach, is the new form of outbound marketing, which consists of sending cold emails to potential customers that might need your products or services.

Now let’s look at the three stages of the sales funnel:

In most cases, a sales funnel consists of three stages, generally known as the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel, although these stages may vary depending on the company’s sales model.

Top of the Funnel (TOFU):  Awareness

The top of the funnel is the first step in the funnel in which your prospect becomes aware of you. At the top of that funnel, lots of visitors arrive but not all who enter the sales funnel will reemerge out from the other end.

 Because most prospects won’t buy from your website at first glance, especially if they’re only just becoming aware of you today.

According to Marketo Company: “Approximately 96% of visitors that come to your website are not ready to buy — but they may be willing to provide contact information in exchange for valuable content.”

Your visitors can arrive organically or through a paid ad to your website. But the way visitors arrive at your website has an impact on the success of your funnel.

According to Adweek, 81% of shoppers conduct online research before buying.

If visitors find you organically through a Google search, it means you have some element of authority. They may see your funnel differently and are more likely to enter it because they know that if they have found you in a relevant way, what you provide must be of great value.

You need to know that your prospects and customers have different motivations, different buying decisions to buy your product and use your products differently.

To guide more people through your sales funnel and get those customers, it’s best to create a different buyer persona for all types of customers and create different sales funnels to match their experience. So you can’t have the same sales funnel for everyone.

Of course, no matter how they get into your funnel, your goal as a marketer is to get them through the multiple steps that prevent the prospect from coming out of the sales funnel without buying.

To do this, you need to build a relationship with the customer by being reliable, honest, and transparent in your email sequence and with an interesting offer (lead magnet) to give you their email address.

At top of the Funnel, the potential customer is trying to solve problems, looking for answers, education, resources, opinions, research data, and insight, or getting an answer via blog posts, ebooks, infographics, and social content.

But getting them through the funnel they must feel there’s an immense amount of value to be had there. The top of the funnel should therefore be designed to educate your client to show them that your solutions are best suited to their needs.

At this stage, their value as prospects is low because there is no guarantee that they will buy from you, but if they find your content interesting and useful, they may find themselves in the middle of the funnel.

Middle of the Funnel (MOFU): evaluation

 The Middle of the Funnel is where you can establish trust and engagement between your audience and your brand. In this stage, your prospects aren’t looking for promotional content.  They’re looking rather learn more about potential solutions for their need.  

When the customers move into the middle of your funnel, that is means, you’ve captured their attention and they are doing heavy research on whether to buy your products or service to find the best solution for their needs.

Now you must engage your prospects, educate them on specific topics that interest them, so they will be prepared to make a buying decision.  The simplest and most effective way to engage your prospects is to turn them into email subscribers.

You can also engage them and promote your lead magnets on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. to generate leads or include a link from your website to the landing page.

They might request free trials of the different products or services, online demonstrations or training videos, or resources like pricing guides.

The evaluation stage is perhaps the most critical point in the consumer’s journey, as it is at this stage that potential customers begin to eliminate solutions that are not suitable for them.

In the middle of the funnel, you can create content that will grab the attention of your customers and create the personal engagement that will help your company qualify prospects and nurture relationships.

In this stage, you can also help people if they are not determined enough. Indeed, during the sales funnel evaluation stage, your prospects are looking for content that shows them that you are the experts in your industry.

 So is the best time to position yourself as the helpful industry expert with content that helps them. Content such as webinars, expert guides, and white papers that compare your advantages and features with those of your competitors is the best choice in the evaluation phase.

Case studies of past customer successes can also be extremely helpful in terms of moving customers from the evaluation stage to the purchase stage.

Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU): Purchase

At the bottom of the funnel, your potential client has determined that he has a problem, studied his options, decided which one is best for him and is now thinking about what it would take to become a client.

They’re ready to take the last choice and buy services or products, but that still doesn’t mean that they’re going to buy from you. At the buying stage, you need to make your final offer.

In most cases, your leads need that final push and that convincing call-to-action to get them to make a purchase decision.

At bottom of the funnel (BOFU), you must create content that helps your potential customers feel confident in their decision to purchase your product or service. Case study content, showcasing the success of a previous or current customer, is very effective.

The most effective types of content at the buying stage can be trial offers, case studies, demonstrations, and product literature.

How Does Sales Funnel Work?

If you don’t define the steps of the funnel, you won’t be able to focus your efforts on getting consumers to the buying stage.

 According to Salesforce 68% of companies have not identified or attempted to measure a sales funnel.

How and why these people get down the sales funnel depends on how you get them through the different stages and your ability to sell and convert.

For example, if 100 people click on your offer and 20 people enter your sales funnel but only 5 of the people buy, then you have a 5% conversion rate.

To better understand the concept of a sales funnel and just how you can implement it in your own business, let’s look at the following image. The acronym AIDA helps you better remember the steps of the sales funnel.

The sales funnel narrows as visitors or viewers move through it. This is because you’ll have more prospects at the top of the funnel than consumers at the bottom and because your method of interaction needs to become increasingly targeted.

When someone visits your website via a search engine or social link, at this stage, your visitor is a prospect. Your visitor can browse your product lists or view your blog posts and has the opportunity to subscribe to your mailing list.

If the visitor fills out your form, he becomes a lead and you can now market the customer outside of your website by email, text, etc.

This customer or lead tends to come back to your site when you offer him/her information about new blog posts, special offers, or other interesting offers such as a discount code or some kind of gift.

The sales funnel from the customer’s perspective consists of four steps: awareness, interest, decision, and action. Each stage requires a different approach, the right message at the right time.

Let’s look at these four stages of the sales funnel in more detail.

Awareness

Awareness is the time at which you first catch a customer’s attention and your prospect becomes aware of your brand.

They can hear about you through your advertising, social media, click on one of your ads, read your blog, find your website through a Google search or hear a colleague talk about your product or service.

At this point, your prospect has already completed the research and entered your sales funnel with an attractive offer from you, such as e-newsletter subscriptions, eBook downloads, online quizzes, and much more.

At the awareness stage, your potential customers are looking for answers and information about an issue that relates to a product or service need.

The best way to capture the attention of your potential customers is through relevant content like blog posts, eBooks, courses, video content, and other forms of educational content, free templates, or free trial.

Often, the awareness stage is more of a commitment. You try to encourage the prospect to come back to your site and become more engaged with your products or services.

Interest

At the interest stage, your prospects research and consider their options and make comparisons based on their interest level.

Your main goal here is to educate them with your relevant content or in any way possible so that they can make an informed decision.

Decision

In the decision stage, your prospect will explore your pricing and packaging options in greater depth to make a purchase. Getting prospects to make a decision isn’t easy.

It’s a good time to make an interesting offer that your prospect can’t wait to take advantage of, such as a discount code, free shipping, video testimonials or reviews by other customers, or a bonus product.

A limited offer or the time remaining before the expiration of a discount or slots available for an online course is the most effective way to motivate people to take action.

Action

The final stage of the sales funnel is the action that you’re intending your leads to perform. At this stage, the customer reaches the bottom of the funnel and is ready to take action to purchase your products or services.

For closing your sales funnel and converting customers into leads, you can use some strategies such as sales emails and sales calls, webinars, products, and sales pages.

This way, you explain to them who you are and make a clear and precise offer that targets your customers’ needs, thus closing the deal.

You may also invite your customer to give you feedback, express your satisfaction with the purchase, and make yourself available for technical support. In other words, focus on building customer loyalty.

Tracking Your Sales Funnel Metrics

Often, sales funnels can also include post-purchase follow-up, which increases retention as well as cross-selling and up-selling.

When you create your sales funnel it is important to analyze and measure your results once everything is in place.

If you want to get better results first choose your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and then set up a measurement program.

To find leaks in your sales funnel and improve it, you need to see where your weaknesses and strengths lie.

Is it to create awareness or to close leads that you should focus more on?

For example, if you have a good audience flow from the top to the funnel but you can’t close a sale, you need to work more on content creation.

Conclusion

Understanding your target audience is key to developing your sales funnel. Your audiences can vary widely based on intent and industry. Therefore, persona research is very important. 

Every stage of the sales funnel represents a different step in the customer’s journey based on their overall awareness of your product, service, or solution.

by understanding the process of your prospects for awareness and evaluation you will be able to create an effective content marketing strategy to involve in every stage of their journey through the funnel.

In your sales funnel process, you can take advantage of email sequences, tutorials, personalized value-driven stories, and product suggestions that occur through several stages to solve your customer’s problems. 

 This strategy should be packed with unique and custom content that best supports the customer’s journey toward making a purchase.