Managing Your Small Business Marketing Funnel

With the over whelming success of the Digital Marketing Age, you may think that the concept of a marketing funnel is now defunct. And, yes, what used to be a fairly direct route from drawing in leads to converting them into clients has now exploded into a multitude of micro processes.

However, the concept of a Marketing Funnel is still a good way to create a marketing plan that needs multiple levels of engagement to convert leads into clients. Today, in this era of social media and smart phones, we are definitely in a (sometimes) brave new world of marketing plans.  Even when we’re ready to run screaming from our computers after trying to make sense of all the rapid changes that have evolved.

If you use a marketing funnel plan for your small business, there are probably some adjustments that could be made to your process that will help you see even better results in lead generation and subsequently converting those leads into paying customers. Here are a few procedures to improve your marketing funnel and provide even more successful results quickly.

Carefully Research and Develop the Stages of Your Buying Process

How To link Your Small Business Email Marketing to a Marketing Funnel

What is a Marketing Funnel?

The idea of a funnel is used to illustrate the process a potential client goes through as they become familiar with your products or services.

Visually, clients enter the funnel at the widest part, the top, then proceed to descend, stage by stage, leaving at the level they lose interest.  What you end up with at the bottom are the final few who have purchased and love your product or service.  These are the clients that will keep coming back

Your goal is to raise the number of potential clients that enter the top and lower the number that loses interest at each stage.

To accomplish this, you will need to have a conversion tactic for each stage.

There are a few different Funnel maps out there that vary in their vocabulary but each basically means the same thing, for the sake of this article, we’ll go with the following terms:

• Awareness
• Engagement / Interest
• Discovery
• Purchase / Conversion
• Loyalty / Retention
• Advocacy

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Using Email Marketing to Get a Client All the Way to the Bottom

Top Tools for Optimising All Your Sales Funnels

Ready to start building out your sales funnels? I find that a lot of people are just lost when it comes to building out their funnels. There are a few things you need before you can get started. Here are some of the most popular options when it comes to putting together both free and paid funnels:

Leadpages - when it comes to building opt-in pages, LeadPages.net is one of the most powerful tools you have at your disposal. They've tracked and tested a variety of page styles to determine which ones convert best, and they make it easy for you to build similar pages for your marketing funnel. The reason people like Leadpages is because it has a drag and drop feature that makes building your opt-in pages a breeze. It does come with a fee of $25/month if you pay annually. So before investing, you'll want to be sure you can recoup your investment.