The Basics of Building an Effective Lead Generation Funnel
We know you want to grow your business and increase your sales. You could just take whatever sales happen to come your way, or you could work to cultivate them. By developing high-converting leads, you can increase your sales profits by leaps and bounds. So how do you generate more leads? That is where lead generation funnels come into play.
The Importance of Lead Generation Funnels
We’ve touched on the fact that lead generation funnels can lead to increased sales and business growth. But what makes them so important is that they serve to drive high-qualified leads to enter your sales funnel. These warm leads are more likely to make a purchase, helping you win half of the battle.
Many business owners downplay the idea and effectiveness of sales funnels, seeing them as too salesy or only for scammy online marketers. But this stems from a misunderstanding of what a sales or lead generation funnel actually is.
The reality is that a sales funnel is simply each touchpoint and interaction you have with prospective customers, from brand awareness to conversion. Understanding this entire experience and optimizing it is what allows you to scale up. Remember, you can’t scale up traffic that simply isn’t there! Plus, your competitors can’t take away the power of your lead generation funnels, helping you build a protective moat around your company.
The 3 Phases of an Effective Lead Generation Funnel
Let’s break down the process of building an effective lead generation funnel from start to finish.
Phase 1: Attract Traffic + Generate Leads
The first phase is the attraction phase. Here you are purely focused on converting cold website visitors into leads. This includes all of the interactions someone has had with you up until the moment they become a lead, including lead magnets to capture emails, high-converting landing pages, and paid ads that target buyers with keywords.
The Goal: To get people to opt-in.
Phase 2: Conversion to Customer
Once visitors become leads, you now enter the nurture phase that takes potential customers down the path to making a purchase. This is where you coordinate follow-ups, demos, pricing discussions, etc., all leading to a strong close. This process is different for each individual business and industry, but you want to focus on creating a relationship with your leads.
The Goal: To create a strong relationship with leads that nurtures them to convert.
Phase 3: Building Loyal Customers
Once you have a customer, you can’t just drop the ball here. It’s time to turn these first-time customers into loyal ones! Why? Constantly generating new customers to replace drop off customers is consuming and never grows your customer base. This stage is where you can secure referrals and facilitate upsells and cross-sells, guiding to repeat purchases and fueling word-of-mouth and reviews.
The Goal: To turn first-time customers into loyal ones to grow and build your customer base.
Overall, you want to focus on how to create the best experience for your clients. How can you get referrals? How can you provide value to clients? Remember, most businesses focus on phases one and two while neglecting the third phase. But high-value, paying customers who are repeat customers are hard won–and that requires maximizing each phase!
The 3 Offers of a Lead Generation Funnel
A lead generation funnel brings together the core touch points you have with a potential customer. However, you also need three core offers you can make to motivate a lead to take action. These offers help persuade people to take the next step. Remember, you shouldn’t make the big ask of a sale right away. You want to build up to it by creating a series of “micro yesses” that build off one another.
The first offer is your “authority beacon,” or your lead magnet. It is what attracts colder traffic earlier in the buyer journey. In other words, this is the offer that brings people into your universe.
The second offer is what converts visitors into leads. Not everyone is ready to make a purchase right away or to even talk right away, so this offer should match where the lead is in the buyer journey. This is often the most personalized part of marketing and sales funnels.
The third offer packages it all up and presents what you sell to leads who are sales-ready. At this point, a lead should be hot–not just warm!
Final Thoughts
We’ll dive into more specifics on how you can optimize your lead generation funnels in the future. But the first step is to understand the basics of this very important marketing tool. Start by making a list of your goals and a rough outline of your ideas. What will your phases look like? What will your three core offers be? Once you have an idea, you can start to dive into the specifics of developing your lead generation funnel.
Want help from the experts? Tintero Creative would love to help you turn cold leads into paying customers! Schedule your free consultation today to learn more.