Marketing to Conversion: How to Hit All Areas of the Sales Funnel

There’s much more to marketing than just ensuring a sale. Correctly implementing all areas of the sales funnel helps you reach more potential customers and turns customers into advocates for your company, acting as free marketing you can use to drive customers toward your business further. 

Here, we discuss the different stages of the sales funnel, how they tie into your marketing, and how you can leverage customer interaction at each stage to attract new customers to your business better. From the initial brand awareness stage to the brand loyalty and advocacy phase, we cover everything you need to know to hit all areas of the sales funnel with your marketing strategies.

Sales Funnel Stages

Depending on which marketing expert you talk to, their sales funnel stages may go by different names. But, in general, five to seven steps make up the typical sales funnel. So we’ve narrowed ours down to the six prominent points every marketing campaign should focus on for the best customer retention and outreach. 

These points include:

• Awareness: This stage includes brand awareness, or how recognizable your company is to your clients. Awareness can be as simple as knowing your products exist or as complex as understanding your brand identity. A potential client or customer does not need to know every aspect of your company to be aware you exist; they need to have you on their radar. Of course, it can take several interactions for a customer to truly recognize your brand, making awareness a broad part of the funnel. 
• Interest: Once customers know your brand exists, curiosity drives them to learn more about your products and company. Without something to drive their interest, potential customers may continue without ever learning more about your company. 
• Decision: Every time customers see one of your social media posts, they consciously or unconsciously choose to keep following you. This choice keeps your company at the front of their mind, making them more likely to purchase products down the road. 
• Action: Your customers decide to make a purchase or use your services immediately or in the future. 
• Purchase: What some marketing experts consider the “goal” of the sales funnel when your customer or client finally makes a purchase or hires you for a service. 
• Loyalty/Brand Advocacy: An essential part of the sales funnel, which turns happy customers into loyal clients and independent brand advocates for your company and products. 

Each of these stages earmarks crucial points for customer interaction and a chance to convert potential customers into loyal brand advocates. Making sure you interact with customers at each step of the sales funnel can help ensure their repeat patronage and help you craft an effective marketing strategy that helps prevent customers from slipping through the cracks.

Marketing Touch Points

Now that you know the sales funnel’s main stages, you can identify some critical marketing touch points necessary to convert future customers. By interacting with customers at each stage of the funnel, you can help shepherd them toward the end goal of brand loyalty. Of course, forcing the issue at any of these stages can drive customers aware, so finding a good balance between a strong marketing strategy and the natural progression is crucial to crafting a good marketing plan.  

Awareness

This is one of the most straightforward touchpoints on the list. Awareness comes through advertising, whether in the form of influencer posts, social posts, or anything that shows up organically on user feeds. Making sure your social media posts show up on your customers’ timelines or “for you” pages is vital to promoting brand awareness and a cornerstone of customer engagement. If you don’t interact with customers at this stage, you miss getting them into the sales funnel, which hurts potential awareness-to-sales conversion down the road. 

Interest

You need to post something valuable for your customers to maintain their interest and check out your brand. While many viral posts get high engagement numbers, people are unlikely to want to learn more just because they saw a cute cat video. Sure, cute videos can be a cornerstone of your brand identity. Still, to get potential customers to follow you, you need to provide valuable content, such as informational posts or niche interests. 

Decision

This ties into the “interest” portion of customer outreach: your customers need to decide to hear more from you. This decision comes from continual interaction, requiring you to constantly post new and engaging content. There are many ways to generate content, including influencer posts and guest blogs, but in general, your goal is to keep your customers interested and engaged in your posts. Once they decide to interact further with your brand, you are a step closer to gaining a customer and securing a purchase. 

Action

Once your customers arrive at the “action” portion of the funnel, you want to ensure everything goes smoothly. From optimizing your website for commerce to making customer service easy to access and intuitive, you want to make sure nothing slows down a customer looking to buy from your business. For example, suppose you’ve ever made an impulse purchase. In that case, you know the simplest thing can throw off your resolve, so ensuring your website and purchase system are as smooth as possible can ensure you don’t lose a potential customer at the last second. 

Purchase

Just because a customer makes a purchase doesn’t mean their journey with you is over. Post-purchase confirmation emails and marketing strategies help move the customer through the post-purchase stages. Not only do tracking emails, follow-up review requests, and deal notifications assure your customer that your business is legitimate, but they can also help instill trust and make them more likely to purchase from you again. By including post-purchase email marketing strategies in your marketing plan, you can help turn one-time customers into loyal followers in no time.  

Loyalty/Brand Advocacy

The final stage of the marketing funnel is loyalty and brand advocacy. To convert a one-time customer to a long-standing lover of your brand, you need to balance post-purchase outreach and future user-generated content carefully (UGC) marketing strategies to create a sense of shared experience. You should reach out to customers for reviews, encourage them to share their experiences on social media, and respond to comments and messages as part of your standard marketing strategy. Not only does this help create a personal connection with your brand, instill brand loyalty, and encourage customers to recommend your business or brand to their friends, family, and followers. 

As you can see, carefully monitoring and leveraging each stage of the sales funnel is crucial to growing your business. Suppose you’re looking for a team of experienced professionals to manage each aspect of your social media marketing, website development, and customer service interactions. In that case, Planted Marketing is the right fit for you. We use our combined expertise to grow your small- to mid-sized business, carefully nurturing each stage in customer interactions to bring your business to new heights. To find out more, contact us today. 

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Planted Marketing is a full-service digital marketing agency that specializes in content marketing and organic solutions for woman-owned brands. Our wide variety of services allows for customized plans that work best for your brand and each stage of growth. Want to learn more? Send us a message at info@planedmarketing.com. Talk soon!