According to new research by Content Marketing Institute, both B2B and B2C marketers are successfully using content to engage with customers throughout all stages of the buyer’s journey. In a sales funnel, you will need content to aid in consumer awareness, evaluation, and purchase of your products and services. In this post, I’ll share everything you need to create a profitable sales funnel, from a custom funnel design to the content you need to get consumers from one step to the next.
Part I: Funnel Design
According to a survey of over 3,500 marketers worldwide, CoSchedule found that marketers who documented their strategy reported the highest rates of success in achieving their marketing objectives. To create a successful sales funnel, the first step is to document your funnel design.
Don’t get stuck on how to design your funnel. You can choose flowcharts, mindmaps, whiteboards, napkins, or text-based outlines. The sales funnel should cover as many possible steps in the buyer’s journey throughout the customer’s lifecycle, from the moment they discover your products and services until they make their final purchase.
The steps in your sales funnel should answer the following questions.
- How will potential customers become aware of your business?
- How will potential customers learn about your products and services?
- How will you sell your products and services to your customers?
- What will you do when your customers buy your products and services?
- What will you do when your customers don’t buy your products and services?
- How will you attempt to increase the customer lifetime value?
- How will you attempt to increase customer satisfaction?
Here are a few examples to get you started.
Sales Funnel Design for One Product
Let’s start with a simple sales funnel for a business that sells one product – a rice cooker. This business would need to create a sales funnel with the following steps.
- Step 1: Targeted blog posts about how to cook amazing rice attracts potential customers to the website from search.
- Step 2: Traffic sources (like social media sites) where blog posts could be shared, increasing traffic from potential customers.
- Step 3: A lead magnet with rice dishes is included with opt-ins on blog posts to entice potential customers to subscribe to an email list.
- Step 4: A conversion-optimized landing/sales page is created to sell the rice cooker.
- Step 5: An email series is created to sell the rice cooker to people who received the lead magnet.
- Step 6: An ad campaign is created to sell the rice cooker to people who visit the landing page, but do not buy the rice cooker.
- Step 7: Support content is created to help people who buy the rice cooker troubleshoot common setup, usage, and cleaning issues.
- Step 8: An email list is created to place people who do not buy the rice cooker so they continue to receive new blog posts with new recipes and sales offers about the rice cooker.
- Step 9: An email list is created to place people who do buy the rice cooker so they continue to receive tips on how to use their new rice cooker.
As you can see, even for one product, even a simple sales funnel contains a sizeable amount of content. Now, let’s look at what happens when you add in an upsell.
Sales Funnel Design for a Product and an Upsell
One additional product in a business’s lineup can add a lot of additional content to a business’s sales funnel. In this case, the additional product is an upsell – a cookbook.
- Step 1: Targeted blog posts about how to cook amazing rice attracts potential customers to the website from search.
- Step 2: Traffic sources (like social media sites) where blog posts could be shared, increasing traffic from potential customers.
- Step 3: A lead magnet with rice dishes is included with opt-ins on blog posts to entice potential customers to subscribe to an email list.
- Step 4: A conversion-optimized landing/sales page is created to sell the rice cooker.
- Step 5: A conversion-optimized landing/sales page is created to upsell the cookbook in one-click
- Step 6: An email series is created to sell the rice cooker to people who received the lead magnet.
- Step 7: An ad campaign is created to sell the rice cooker to people who visit the landing page, but do not buy the rice cooker.
- Step 8: An ad campaign is created to sell the cookbook to people who visit the landing page, but do not buy the cookbook after buying the rice cooker.
- Step 9: Support content is created to help people who buy the rice cooker troubleshoot common setup, usage, and cleaning issues.
- Step 10: An email list is created to place people who do not buy the rice cooker so they continue to receive new blog posts with new recipes and sales offers about the rice cooker.
- Step 11: An email list is created to place people who do buy the rice cooker but don’t buy the cookbook so they continue to receive tips on how to use their new rice cooker and sales offers about the cookbook.
- Step 12: An email list is created to place people who do buy the rice cooker and cookbook so they continue to receive tips on how to use their new rice cooker.
As you can see, by comparison, the more products and upsells you add into the mix, the more content you will need to attract customers and sell your products. Now, let’s dive into each of these specific funnel elements in the order that you would create them.
Part II: Targeted Blog Content
Before you get too stressed about blog content, not every business has to create blog content on a daily or weekly basis to sell their products and services. All you need is blog content that will attract your target audience – the people most likely to buy your products and services. This is what we call targeted blog content.
- For a business selling rice cookers, targeted blog content would focus on people ready to be convinced there is a better way to cook rice than on a stovetop.
- For a business selling chiropractic treatment, targeted blog content would focus on people ready to be convinced that most health issues can be resolved with alternative medicine.
- For a business selling historical tours in Europe, targeted blog content would focus on history lovers and travelers ready to see that visiting historical sites offers a rich educational experience. For example, a blog post could highlight the Utah Beach Museum, a hotspot site included in their tour.
- For a business selling tax software, targeted blog content would focus on people ready to be convinced that there is an easier way to file their taxes each year.
It doesn’t matter what business you are in – there is a demographic of people that are ready to be convinced that there is a better way to do something. And if you can be the one to convince them that your product or service is the better way to do it, then you will likely win the sale in the end.
But first, you have to get your potential customers to your website. One way to do that is to rank well in search results. In addition to optimizing your website’s homepage and product page(s) for search, you can use blog posts to target additional keyword phrases that your potential customers are searching for.
To rank well in search results for the keyword phrases that would ultimately attract your potential customers and get them thinking about the benefits of your products and services, you will likely have to write exceptionally high-quality content. While the topic of your content may not be 100% unique, the way you cover it must be.
Take the business selling a rice cooker that wants to write blog content about cooking rice to attract customers. When you research how to cook rice using free keyword research tool Ubersuggest, you find that the top results on Google are popular cooking sites with strong domain authority, links, and social shares.
Longer keyword phrases with smaller search volume have stronger competition in search results.
To rank well in search for keyword phrases relating to cooking rice, businesses would have to create outstanding content that generates links and social shares. The content would have to be better than what is already ranking on the first page of search results, offering something new with better details, images, videos, or results.
The best way to achieve this is to look at the top five to ten posts ranking well in search results for the keyword phrase you plan to focus on in your blog post. Analyze each blog post to see what main points are covered, how often they use the main and related keyword phrase, how they use images and video, how long the post is, and if they use any schema markup on the page.
Once you have completed your analysis, you know the bare minimum of what your blog post needs to cover. Then do some additional research for points that others have not included to add to your content for a unique and fresh perspective.
After you have written your content, you will optimize it for search engines by including your target keyword phrase (and semantic keyword phrases) in your blog post’s SEO title, meta description, image ALT text, heading text, and body text.
Part III: Lead Magnets, Opt-Ins & Email Lists
In a perfect world, you would create a sales page, optimize it for search, convert visitors into customers, and generate tons of revenue. In an ideal world, you would create a blog post, optimize it for search, convert readers into customers, and generate tons of revenue. But we don’t live in either a perfect or ideal world.
Here is what you don’t want to happen. You don’t want to create amazing blog posts, optimize them for search, generate tons of traffic to them, and watch the visitors bounce off your website.
This is why we create email lists. To capture website visitors’ email addresses as leads to sell to later.
Not every visitor is going to opt-in to your email list for just another weekly newsletter or a coupon code for a product or service they don’t even know they want. To ensure you get the most visitors’ email addresses, you have to offer a free incentive. Something that only your potential customers want.
Lead magnets are incentives offered to website visitors in exchange for their email address. While some businesses do use newsletters and discount codes as lead magnets, the most effective lead magnets are pieces of content.
In the example funnel design, our fictitious rice cooker company used a lead magnet about specific recipes for rice dishes as an incentive to get website visitors to opt-in to their email list when visiting blog posts about how to cook rice. Other businesses use case studies, checklists, ebooks, email series, free tools, games, guides, kits, mini-courses, quizzes, and white papers as lead magnets to grow their email lists and generate leads.
As website visitors are reading your blog content, capture their attention with visually appealing opt-in forms. Combine your email marketing service’s opt-in forms with a cover graphic that represents your lead magnet. Canva has thousands of free templates you can use to create a professional design for your lead magnet that people will notice.
We’ll discuss the types of email content you will need, from introductory emails to sales emails. But let’s continue with additional ways to capture leads and sales on your website.
Part IV: Landing Pages
Landing pages are pages on your website with one specific goal. Typically, landing pages are created with the goal of capturing leads or making sales.
Unlike other pages on your website, you will remove any distractions from your landing pages to ensure that your website visitors will complete the landing page’s intended goal. This includes your website’s main navigation bar, sidebar, and footer, although some businesses will include a home link on their landing page’s footer for good user experience purposes.
Crafting effective landing pages requires a keen understanding of user behavior and preferences. Incorporating tools for user research enables businesses to optimize their landing pages by identifying key pain points, preferences, and behaviors of their target audience, ultimately improving conversion rates and achieving their desired goals.
Your business will need a landing page for each lead magnet, product, service, upsell, downsell, and cross-sell opportunity you want to include in your sales funnel. This will allow you to create links to each opportunity in your email, ad, and promotional content so you can direct traffic throughout your sales funnel accordingly.
Each landing page should have a main heading, sub-heading, hero image or video, USP (unique selling proposition), key benefits, additional details, social proof and testimonials, and call to action. The call to action should encourage the visitor to enter their email address to receive a lead magnet, add a product to their cart, or make a one-click upsell purchase.
And since sales funnels oftentimes need to created and deployed fast, you should use a tool like Unbounce to quickly and easily create landing pages for your funnels.
Part V: Email Content
Email plays an important role in your sales funnel. Your email content has to lead your audience back to your website at crucial points. The first series of emails are triggered is after you capture a first-time visitors’ email address with a lead magnet. The goal of this series is to lead them back to your website – preferably to your product sales landing page.
Ideally, you will be able to do this by convincing your subscriber why they need your product or service to get the benefits that you have been building up in your content. For the company selling rice cookers, it’s a series of emails that tell the subscriber how their rice cookers make cooking perfect rice dishes a faster, easier process.
The second series is triggered when a subscriber clicks through to your sales page but doesn’t convert. Many email marketing services have a remarketing option that allows you to target email campaigns to people who have added products to their shopping cart, but not made a purchase. In this case, you could be sending abandoned shopping cart reminders or extra discount codes to get visitors back to finish the sale.
The third series is triggered when your customer make the main product purchase but doesn’t purchase the cross-sell or the upsell. For the company selling rice cookers and a cookbook, the email followup content could include a discount code for the cookbook or continued teasers for recipes they could be trying with your new rice cooker.
The fourth series is triggered when the customer makes the main product purchase and the upsell. This series of emails is a customer satisfaction series and includes content that helps the customer get the most out of their product or service.
Businesses with more products, upsells, cross-sells, and downsells will find themselves managing many email lists, email series, and email automations. While they may be tricky to set up at first, the result will be a profitable sales funnel that ultimately can manage itself as a passive income stream, based on the type of products and services you offer.
Part VI Traffic Channels
Once you have completed your sales funnel, you will need to get potential customers into it. Most businesses depend on a mix of organic and paid search and social media marketing along with PR outreach to build brand awareness, authority, and traffic.
As you add high-quality blog content to your website, your organic search traffic will begin to naturally increase. In the meantime, you can promote your blog posts on social media by posting links to your company’s profiles and pages. You can also post links to your latest content in some social media groups, Q&A networks, and forums, based on each network’s rules and admins.
In terms of paid advertising, you can use Google advertising to send potential customers directly to your product sales landing pages. Social media advertising on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter can be used to direct traffic to blog posts, lead magnet landing pages, and product sales landing pages. You may implement a social media analytics report to track the performance of the posts to see how they are working and how you can enhance them to drive traffic.
To reach larger audiences with your content, you can also try advertising platforms like Taboola or Outbrain. These services will put your content on major media networks like CNN, Time, Mashable, Bloomberg, and similar.
Paid advertising can also be used for remarketing to people who have visited your sales landing pages but not converted into customers. This would allow you to remind people who almost bought your product or service about it again on their favorite search engine, social network, or website.
In Conclusion
Setting up a profitable sales funnel from the start can seem like a challenging task. But once you have funnel designed, your content published, your automation in order, and your traffic on its way, it’s only a matter of time until your website starts generating revenue 24/7 for your business.
