Most business owners and marketers that sell products or services directly to consumers will know the importance of optimising a sales funnel and how critical it is to the success of a company particularly one that has a niche in the market.
If you are targeting a slightly more niche market, the concept of optimising a sales funnel to guide potential leads into converting customers may seem like an avenue not worth pursuing. However, despite your target demographic and unique selling point (USP), you’ll still likely need to establish a defined sales funnel and a targeted communication strategy to attract more paying customers.
Looking at Niche Sales Funnels
A sales funnel is used to describe the proverbial customer journey and having one with a CRM that is optimised, safe and fully automated is great for business. Analysing a customer journey is important for businesses to understand what makes their customers interested in their products and how they can be more easily encouraged to make a sale.
Regardless of a company’s size - sales teams play a pivotal role and are always on the lookout to find quality, viable leads. Usually, their performance is indicative of how well an organisation does throughout the forthcoming quarters and years.
If a steady stream of cold and warm leads is not naturally and organically flowing, it may be worth revisiting your company’s strategy. The four main stages of a general sales funnel comprise:
- Awareness: The part where customers become aware of your product, service and brand; it’s the first impression that a customer has about your company.
- Interest: The prospect learns whether your product or service is capable of fulfilling their needs, and questions how they can benefit from becoming a paying customer.
- Desire: This stage involves the prospective customer examining the pricing of your product or service and any other options that are available to them.
- Purchase: When the customer takes action and makes a purchase.
Whatever industry or sector you work in, your funnel should be personalised to your business, its requirements and the needs and touchpoints of your target audience. Whether you sell online, offline, B2B or B2C, an optimised customer journey can help you:
- Strengthen your content marketing strategy
- Increase your conversion rates
- Build customer loyalty
- Improve customer retention
- Identify successes and failures in your sales processes
- Influence buying decisions
- Map specific interactions across your customer lifecycle
- Understand important customer insights
- Pinpoint any bottlenecks, points of contention or friction
How to Optimise Your Customer Journey
So how can you get to the point where prospective buyers can easily become aware of your brand and ultimately become loyal, paying customers? In other words, how can you optimise your sales funnel to attract more of the right types of buyers?
These key steps can be taken to optimize your customer journey in line with your business strategy.
1. Define Your Target Audience
The first step to optimise your sales funnel is to clearly define your ideal customer. Who are they, what do they need, and how can you best serve them? You won’t get very far without establishing a buyer persona - something that Shopify defines as a research-driven hypothetical representation of your ideal customer.
Creating a persona gives you valuable data about your customer’s motivations and pain points, which you can then tailor messaging and sales approaches to address these aspects at various stages of the sales funnel.
2. Create Authoritative Content
Once you know who your ideal customer is, the next step is to create compelling content that speaks directly to them and targets their specific pain points. This can include blog posts, social media content, videos, landing pages, case studies, whitepapers, podcasts, infographics, and many more. Niche sectors can also enhance their marketing efforts and online visibility to attract more organic search traffic with optimised ranking website content, such as more relevant terms, phrases and tailored questions.
Your content should be informative, engaging, and focused on providing value to your potential customers. Consider what type of content would work best at each specific stage of your sales funnel.
3. Nurture Your Leads Effectively
Once you have a list of leads, it's important to nurture them with regular communication. You’ll need to increase customer interest in your products and foster strong feelings of authority and familiarity. Personalising content is vital for building trust with prospective clients visiting your site. Without trust, it can be almost impossible to grow your market reach and your business.
One of the most effective ways to do this is with direct email marketing, where you can distribute email newsletters, updates, and other types of content that keep your brand at the forefront of people’s minds.
4. Optimise Your Landing Pages and CTAs
Your landing pages are the most important place to educate your prospects about your brand, products or services. It should evocatively communicate your brand values and how you as a company can make a difference to the customer, having addressed the underlying salient pain points. Make sure that the tone of voice and messaging is consistent across all channels.
Furthermore, each page and content piece should have a clear purpose and a call to action (CTA), which encourages the prospect to move further along to the next stage of the funnel. Regardless of what that action involves - whether it’s signing up for a free trial, subscribing to a mailing list, downloading a PDF, booking a phone call, or filling in a form - your CTAs should be strategically placed and attention-grabbing for customers in various journey stages.
5. Use a High-Quality Lead Magnet
A lead magnet is an offer or incentive that entices potential customers to provide their contact information and for you to open a new dialogue with them. This can include things like a free consultation, a downloadable guide, or a discount code. Either way, by sharing their information, they’re expressing an interest in your product or service.
By offering something of value in exchange for their contact information, you can start building a relationship with your potential customers and move them further down your sales funnel. Without something valuable in return, it’s unlikely you’ll be granted their information.
6. Make the Conversion Stages Hassle-Free
Establish sufficient trust signals and social proof, such as product reviews, testimonials, case studies and ratings, to reduce potential friction.
The final step in optimising your sales funnel is to close the sale in as frictionless a way as possible. If you create too many obstacles, your prospects could abandon their purchase. This could be due to long delivery times or unexpected shipping costs or taxes, or it could even be the result of being forced to sign up before making the purchase.
To reduce friction, make your conversion process easy and hassle-free. As an idea, offer guest checkout options, and set clear expectations from the outset of potential fees or delivery times.
7. Create Tangible Goals and Track Key Metrics
Once a customer converts, that is not the end of it. You need to continue optimising and monitoring each aspect of your funnel to identify areas that need improvement. This will be crucial to have to hand when planning your business’s strategy to scale up.
In conclusion, optimising your sales funnel is critical to the success of your niche business. Sales funnels won’t necessarily convert leads into customers from the off, but they can, if optimised, help more people naturally progress into becoming loyal buyers.