What Is A Sales Funnel?
A sales funnel is a representation of each step that a customer follows in their journey to purchasing a product or service from your business. It is the different stages that a customer or prospect has to undergo to reach the final stage of patronising your business.
The Importance Of Sales Funnel
It helps you understand the customer journey and how to communicate appropriately
One of the issues that many marketing campaigns have is that they send generalised marketing campaigns to various customers and hope that they convert. With a sales funnel you can actively track which stage of the journey your customers are, and with the power of automation, send them customised messages that speaks directly to the stage of the customer journey that they are; thereby helping them convert more easily.
It helps you gain credibility
The quickest way to lose credibility with a prospect is by sending generic messages that are not important to them. With a sales funnel, you can understand the stage that each prospective customer is, then tailor messages that answer their questions; thereby gaining more credibility.
It can help you make more sales
Ultimately, most businesses want to make more sales and that is what a sales funnel does for you. With a proper sales funnel and a better understanding of your customers, you can craft better messages and create better offers that will ultimately lead to more sales.
AIDA: The Four Stages Of The Sales Funnel
Every customer that ends up patronising your business has to go through four stages before they buy from you. These four stages include the awareness stage where they become aware of your brand, the interest stage where something stimulates their interest in your product, the desire stage where communication or other factors influence their desire to patronise your brand and the action where they actually take the action to patronise your brand. These four steps are the core components that make up the AIDA model.
How To Use The AIDA Marketing Framework To Increase Your Sales
The AIDA marketing framework is one that millions of marketers and business owners have used for over a hundred years to scale their marketing efforts and ultimately make more sales. It is a simple marketing framework that allows you to check all the boxes before sending out a marketing message. Before discussing how to use the AIDA framework, let’s answer the question; what exactly is the AIDA framework of marketing?
What Is The AIDA Framework Of Marketing?
AIDA is a marketing framework that a lot of marketers have used over the years to improve their marketing results. There are a couple of other marketing frameworks like the 7Ps model, STP model, Porter’s five models and the SOSTAC model but the AIDA model is one of the easiest and simplest to deploy. AIDA itself is an abbreviation that stands for attention, interest, desire, and action. Now that we have established what the AIDA framework is, let’s break down how you can use it to increase your sales.
The 5 Steps Of AIDA And How To Use Them
Attention
The first step towards convincing a person to buy or patronise your business is by capturing their attention in the first place. The first “A” in the AIDA model stands for attention. The framework advocates that for a marketing campaign to be effective, it needs to be able to capture the attention of the target audience. When creating a marketing message, endeavour to create messages that will capture the target audience’s attention, then proceed to the next step.
Interest
Now that you have the customer’s attention, the next logical step is to try and stimulate their interest in your product or your service as the case might be. One of the best ways to stimulate a prospective customer’s interest is by predicting their pain points and crafting a message that caters specifically to their pain points. For example, let’s take the example of a detergent company that primarily targets working professionals. Let’s imagine that one of the pain points that they identified in their customers is that they cannot find a detergent with which to wash their coloured shirts without it fading. Crafting a message that specifically talks about the problem and the fix that your detergent provides will quickly stimulate their desires.
Desire
After stimulating a prospective customer’s interest, you make them desire your product in order to move to the next stage of the funnel. Just being interested in your product will not automatically make people patronise you, so stimulating their desire is a core aspect of converting them. To be successful at this stage, it is integral that you highlight the unique selling proposition of your products and services to help you stand out.
Action
The last component of the sales funnel is the action part. This is where the prospective customer carries out the action that you want them to take. The truth is that sharing a marketing message does not on its own mean that a prospect will go ahead and take the action you want. A rule of thumb is to include a call-to-action or CTA as it is called in some quarters. A CTA will spur the prospective customer to take the action you want them to.IMAGE SOURCE: Pixabay
