How to Create an Inbound Marketing Funnel

Trevin Shirey

10 Oct 2016

When you’re starting an inbound marketing campaign, your marketing funnel is essential to your success.

By considering all the different parts of a customer’s journey to conversion, you can create a sales funnel that helps your business succeed.

Here’s what you need to consider to create an effective sales funnel for your business.

First stage: lead generation

The first step to creating conversions is attracting potential customers making them aware of your company.

You can use many different strategies at the top of the funnel includes to attract potential customers.

Social media marketing

Marketing on social media is one of the best ways to get potential customers to enter your conversion funnel. Not only can social media posts spread like wildfire, but they also start conversations between you and your customers.

You can market on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn, just to name a few. By posting on these platforms, you can draw interested users into your conversion funnel to turn them into customers.

You can also use social media to advertise for your company.

Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram ads are extremely effective at drawing potential customers. By placing ads on these platforms, you show your brand and content to users that are interested in what you have to offer.

Thanks to the ultra-specific targeting options from social networks, you can tailor every ad you make to appeal to your customers only. That way, you don’t waste your budget advertising to people who aren’t interested in your business or aren’t qualified to buy.

Blogging

Starting a blog is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your website.

Blogs promote your brand, show how knowledgeable you are in your field, and provide information that your potential customers want to know.

To attract potential customers with a blog, think about the questions you get from your current customers most often. If you can pinpoint one thing your customers frequently want to know, start by writing a blog about it. Answer the question, provide additional information, and conclude by telling your reader to contact you for more information.

Once you do that, search engines like Google will notice your blog and start to show it in search results related to your topic.

Though your blog won’t show up on page one the day you post it, it still creates an opportunity for potential customers to click into your website.

Free trials

At this stage of the marketing funnel, you want your customers to get a sense of what you have to offer.

Consider offering a free trial of one of your services or products to get customers interested. You could offer a sample of one of your most popular products to show off the quality of your product.

Studies have shown that if a customer is satisfied, they are likely to spend more. This means that if you can wow a customer with your sample, they are 93% more likely to buy your product. That’s a huge probability!

Webinars

Webinars are live videos where potential customers can watch and listen to you talk about a specific topic. Webinars let attendees interact with your company instead of sitting in a sales pitch. They’re perfect ways to show the tone and personality of your business.

Webinars are also great ways to determine valuable traffic and analyze which users you should target in the next level of your conversion funnel.

You can track who watches the whole time, who downloads the written version, or who wants to learn more when they provide their contact information with GoToWebinar.

Case studies

Case studies are the perfect way to look in-depth, at a single companies’ experience with your product or service.

Not only do case studies look at statistics from customer experiences, but it looks at how different strategies worked for them, how long each process took, different data from each sale and more.

Posting case studies are a great way for other potential customers to see how you work for your customers before they decide to work with you.

Second stage: lead nurturing

After you’ve converted some of your traffic into leads, you have to nurture those leads to turn them into paying customers.

This stage includes methods like targeted email campaigns and targeted content, which allows you to further move your leads through the conversion process.

Targeted emails

Targeted emails are messages you create specifically for a certain set of behavior.

For example, say someone signed up for your newsletter and then your blog updates. They’re really interested in your company and industry news, so you can tailor your emails to reflect that.

You may also have personal demographic or business firmographic data on a visitor so you can see their industry as well. That’ll help you speak directly to their pain points, highlight your major selling points, and close a deal quickly.

When you start a targeted email campaign, you should set a schedule for when your emails go out. It strengthens your trust and credibility when you send at the same time, whether that’s weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly.

Targeted content

Targeted content is based on specific buyer personas to get an ideal response from a single group of people.

This kind of content is mean to target one industry and is super detailed in order to appeal to that industry. This kind of content uses industry lingo and is likely only viewed by users that understand what they’re reading.

This also means that targeted content appeals to very few people since it is niche-based.

Stage three: Converting leads into customers

The final stage of the marketing funnel is convincing your leads to buy.

There are a number of ways to do so.

If you’re an ecommerce business, your customer has an item in their cart. If you’re a physical service, they’ve contacted you and they’re ready to spend.

In either situation, this is your chance to convince the buyer that you are the right fit for their needs. That could mean sending email reminders, scheduling appointments, or signing a contract.

With that final step, you’ve earned your newest customer!

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