6 Ways to Widen the Sales Funnel and Increase Conversions
These days, growing your business is all about how much exposure your brand gets. Whether it’s through social media marketing, connecting with influencers or even traditional advertising campaigns, there are plenty of different ways to get noticed on the internet and draw more attention to the products that you’re offering. Unfortunately, far too many people focus solely on exposure and don’t consider the other components of your sales funnel.
In most cases, the sales funnel starts with awareness. This is where people notice your brand and then they carry over to the consideration stage. Once they’ve considered you as a viable brand to purchase a product from, they’ll look at their personal preferences and see what you offer. If they find something they like then it’s likely that they’ll make a purchase, but the sales funnel doesn’t need to stop there. Past the sale, the customer could develop not just brand loyalty for repeat business, but also advocate for your products but recommending it to others.
So in order to take advantage of these different stages of the sales funnel, it’s vital that you invest in different strategies to grow your business and widen the funnel so that you have increased sales conversions and more success.
#1: Use Multiple Platforms to Advertise Your Services and Products
It’s important to use multiple platforms to advertise your services and products in order to create more brand awareness. Simply using social media alone isn’t going to do the trick and you need to mix and match all kinds of advertising options in order to reach a wider audience.
Start with social media platforms and make sure you have a presence on all of the major ones such as Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. After that, try to engage with your audience on community message boards and forums by answering questions and responding to feedback and criticism.
Lastly, you can also use public events and appearances in order to attract media attention. The more details and information you give content creators and the media to talk about, the more likely your brand will be discovered by other people.
#2: Establish a Good Reputation to Be Considered a Trustworthy Business
The goal is to create a business reputation that doesn’t make people second guess themselves. You want people to instantly associate your brand with a positive message or reliability that exceeds other brands so that during the consideration phase, they don’t even have to think twice before looking at your products.
This means establishing a good reputation through positive reviews, plenty of media and community interaction to show that you care about feedback and criticism, and also by offering quality products to existing customers so that your new customers know that you’re trustworthy.
Establishing a good reputation is the key to widening this crucial part of the sales funnel. It’s something worth investing capital into and it’s one of the main reasons why you need to be a transparent, humble and friendly business that cares about its audience.
#3: Focus on Doing One Product Really Well or Offer a Diverse Selection
If you’re a small business then one of the biggest hurdles to overcome at the beginning is deciding whether you want to specialize in a single product or offer a diverse selection. Both of these choices are viable but you don’t want to create a situation where you’re in between a specialist and a retailer that offers a lot of choices.
Decide early on if you want to create a small range of high-quality products that have been through several iterations, or if you want to offer customers a lot of choices in products and services. This will also be influenced by the type of business you are, so it’s important to make this choice early on to align your business goals with your resources.
#4: Make Purchasing Easy for Your Customers
Purchasing has to be made easy if you want the purchase stage of your sales funnel to be simple and efficient. That a look at this website to learn more about the different payment methods that you can add to your business to give your customers more ways to pay for your products and services.
You could also invest in unique payment methods, such as selling products directly from social media or offering more tech-savvy options such as paying through cryptocurrencies. The more ways your customers have to pay and the easier they are, the more likely you’re going to convert those qualified leads into sales.
#5: Reward Loyalty and Personalize Your Follow-Up Contacts
One of the best ways to bring back customers is to reward loyalty. Whether it’s sending discount codes or customizing emails and messages to them, there are plenty of ways to show that you appreciate their business. One common strategy is to send an email with a discount code on a customer’s birthday to both remind them of your business and also to send a positive message.
#6: Encouraging Users to Advocate Your Brand
One of the best ways to widen the entire sales funnel is to turn your users into advocates of your brand. Here are a couple of ways to do just that:
- Offer incentives for advocating your products and services such as affiliate programs.
- Be a trustworthy business that your customers have loyalty towards.
- Deliver an outstanding level of service to all of your customers.
- Continue to engage with your community and build relationships with advocates.
- If there are people creating content around your brand, promote it and appreciate it.
By establishing a good relationship with your brand advocates, you’re essentially creating incredibly loyal customers that are more than happy to recommend your products. However, do keep in mind that if you’re not being transparent and honest in your business practices, it can be difficult for your advocates to promote your brand and if you make too many mistakes, they’ll start to lose their faith in you.
Hopefully, this article has shown you a couple of excellent ways to increase conversions and stretch out the sales funnel so that you have a greater chance of business success.