If you want to drive sales, it’s very simple. You need a sales funnel. More specifically, you need to use the bulletproof sales funnel we’re about to share in this blog.
We’ve driven over $304 MILLION dollars in revenue for our clients with our social media advertising services and more, and you don’t do that by just “guessing” what marketing campaigns are going to work.
You do that by having a sales funnel that you know is going to work time and time again.
So, make sure you read to the very end because I’m sharing the exact same sales funnel we use for our clients to drive revenue.
What Is A Sales Funnel?
A sales funnel is the series of steps you take to move a person from not knowing about your brand at all to being a loyal customer.
People call it a funnel because when you build one out visually, it looks like a funnel.
The most common sales funnel has 4 main stages: awareness, consideration, conversion & advocacy.
We say “most common” because sometimes when you start Googling marketing funnel, sales funnel or advertising funnel the results can get really complicated and bogged down with extra stuff that not every business needs.
We’re sharing the same simple but effective sales funnel that works for our clients.
Awareness Stage
When you’re looking at the funnel, the widest part at the top is your awareness stage, also sometimes referred to as top-of-funnel.
This is considered to be the beginning of your buyer’s journey, and this is where people are entering your sales funnel.
People who are top-of-funnel are becoming familiar with your brand for the first time, because prior to this, they’ve never heard of it. These people are what’s called a “cold audience.”
They are in the awareness stage because you are making these people aware of your brand, products and services for the first time.
You’ll also notice that this stage is the widest part of the funnel for a reason; you want to cast a wide net and then weed out people as we go along.
Consideration Stage
Next, we have the middle of the funnel, otherwise known as the consideration stage or the engagement stage.
People who are in the middle of your funnel means that they’ve just come from the awareness stage.
They are not new to your brand, they’re familiar with it now either from seeing it on social media or Google Ads or what have you.
Therefore, people in the middle of your funnel are what’s called a “warm audience.”
The key here is that before you let people get to the next stage, which is the conversion stage, you need to start weeding out people so that you’re only keeping prospects who are both aware and interested.
We’ll talk more about how to do that in a minute, but you don’t want people who are not going to convert taking up space in your funnel.
Conversion Stage
Then, we have the conversion stage, sometimes referred to as your bottom-of-funnel audience.
Again, it’s the narrowest part because not everybody who entered in at the top should make it to the bottom.
Only qualified people who are likely-to purchase should make it to this point in your funnel, and they are considered a “hot audience” because they’re familiar with your brand, they’ve shown interest and they’ve taken a high-intent action.
This could mean that they’ve shared their contact information with you or they’ve been adding your products to cart for example, but they just haven’t made the move to purchase yet.
Your bottom-of-funnel marketing materials should be made ready to close these people because by this point all they need is that extra push to convert into a customer.
Now, a lot of people stop with these three sections. So make sure you pay attention and include this 4th section in your sales funnel.
Advocacy Stage
The Advocacy stage is a stage in your funnel made for people who have already purchased.
If you’re a B2C or ecommerce company, repeat purchases may be something you aim for. The advocacy stage is where you can nurture your existing customers to become repeat buyers.
If you’re B2B or a service-based company, like us, this stage could be used to nurture existing clients to remain long-term clients, and even to send a few referrals your way.
In either cases B2C or B2B, you might have an add-on product or service that you want to upsell customers on, and this is where you can nurture your existing customers into purchasing that.
Either way, the Advocacy stage helps you work smarter not harder by maximizing the value of your current customers.
How To Create A Sales Funnel
This is how to create a sales funnel for free in 9 steps.
- Define Your Goal: What do you hope to obtain from this sales funnel, direct sales? Leads? At what cost? Specify your goals.
- Make A List Of Customer Problems: Jot down all of the pain points, problems and/or goals your customers have that your product or service helps with. What solution does your business provide them?
- Provide Free Value: Give free, valuable content to customers in the Awareness stage to build trust in your brand and industry authority. If you don’t know what would qualify as valuable to them, refer to your list from step 2.
- Provide Gated Value: Now, offer more in-depth value for free in exchange for their contact information. This value is often referred to as a lead magnet. Examples of lead magnets include a free ebook, quiz, calculator, discount code, and so on.
- Qualify Leads: Qualify (and disqualify) leads to ensure they are a good fit for your business and are likely to purchase at the bottom of the sales funnel.
- Nurture Qualified Leads: Nurture qualified leads by continuing to give them free value, answering any questions they have, and tackling any objections to purchase.
- Ask For The Sale: Give them the CTA (call-to-action) to purchase the product or service.
- Upsell: After they’ve made a purchase, upsell them on future purchases and/or maintain client longevity in the Advocacy stage.
- Track Everything: Continuously track how many people are entering your funnel vs how many people are coming out customers at the bottom, and pivot your strategies anywhere needed to ensure there are no holes in your funnel and that the right people are making it through at a profitable cost.
That’s the basic outline of our bulletproof sales funnel, now we’re going to show you how to put it into action.
Which Marketing Strategies To Run At Each Stage Of The Sales Funnel
We’re going to cover organic and paid campaigns alike that you can run to fuel or nurture each part of the sales funnel.
Awareness Stage
The biggest thing here to remember is that this is a cold audience of people who’ve never heard of your brand before.
A lot of business owners spend like $300 a month on ads for the first few months and they’re targeting their ideal customer, but the ads are like BUY NOW, DISCOUNT, LIMITED TIME!”
And when they don’t get any revenue from that, they’re like, “What the heck?! I spent $300 and didn’t get any sales?! Facebook ads suck!”
The problem is you’re running conversion-stage ads to an awareness-stage audience.
The people seeing those ads for the first time are AT BEST like “Eh, I don’t recognize this brand,” and they scroll on.
Even if you’re implementing best practices you’ve seen from our other blogs- you’re addressing your audience by their needs, their goals, their pain points you haven’t built the trust and rapport that’s statically needed to ask for a purchase yet. We say all of this to set up your expectations appropriately.
In the awareness stage, we are not looking for sales, we are looking for positive responses like likes, comments, views and follows, and MAYBE some website traffic to lay that first foundation of trust.
Therefore, any marketing efforts in this stage should reflect those goals.
Marketing Strategies To Fuel The Awareness Stage
Posting On Social Media
A strong organic posting strategy on the platform your specific audience spends the most time on, optimized with hashtags, location tags, and keywords people search on those platforms, is a great way to gain awareness.
If you’re posting on Facebook and Instagram, you can then boost that content with the engagement campaign on Facebook, which optimizes for post engagement, video views, and direct messages.
Influencer Marketing
You could also really give your social profiles a boost by employing an influencer marketing strategy so that influencers with mass, targeted followers are seeing their trusted influencer that they follow post about your product or service in a positive light.
Sales Campaign
The only businesses who can maybe get away with a Sales Campaign in the awareness stage are businesses with the lowest-priced items or lowest barrier-to-purchase.
If your product or service is cheap and tends to be an impulse buy, you can try running a sales campaign to a cold audience and see if you get any results from that. Otherwise, you’ll want to run ads to introduce your brand a little more first and, more importantly, provide value first.
Promoting A Blog
Providing value to a cold audience could look like sending traffic to your blog site or a landing page that is content-oriented (not sales-oriented), where the point is to provide value in the form of teaching your audience how to solve a problem or pain point they have or how to accomplish a goal they have.
You can send traffic to your landing page or blog with the traffic campaign and then just change the conversion location on the ad set level under conversion to be to the website and change the performance goal to maximize the number of landing page views.
This way, it shows the ad to people who are likely to actually wait for your landing page to load and view it as opposed to people who are just likely to click the ad and nothing else.
So, again, you’re sending people to something like a blog, and while yes, you can have a pop-up or sidebar widget on the blog promoting a lead magnet in exchange for their contact info just in case they’re confident about you and ready to take the next step, that shouldn’t be the focus of the page.
This isn’t a squeeze page.
Remember, the point at this stage is solely to provide value to them, and in return, it will hopefully give them higher brand recall and build a little foundation of trust in your brand.
If you don’t have the budget to run ads, a free but time-consuming way to promote your blog or educational content is via SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization.
You can optimize your blog for keywords so that it appears at the top of the search results when someone searches that keyword.
For instance, if you own a plumbing company, you can post a blog around the keywords “how to fix a kitchen sink leak” so that when someone searches that on Google, your website appears first, answering the question.
You’ll know this person needs your services, you’re building trust by providing free value they actually need, and in the event they don’t fix it themselves, or when they need a plumber again in the future, they will likely call you over competitors.
You’ll just need to go to Google’s free keyword planner to find relevant keywords with high search volumes to make sure you’re writing blogs around keywords your audience actually searches.
SEO is time-consuming. It can take months and months, sometimes over a year to rank a newer website, and keyword optimization isn’t the only thing Google takes into account when determining which pages to rank at the top of the search results.
Consideration Stage
The goal of this stage is to get people to take a deeper, more high-intent action and simultaneously rule out people who are not going to convert later.
Because remember, you don’t want to waste labor, time or money on leads or prospects who aren’t going to return a profit later.
Marketing Strategies To Fuel The Consideration Stage
Lead Generation: Facebook Ads & Google Ads
If the nature of your business is one where you need to communicate with leads one on one before they can become a customer or client, then lead generation is probably a good next step for you.
If that’s the case, there are several Facebook ad campaigns you can perform:
If you have a squeeze page or landing page specifically designed for collecting leads and contact information, you can send people there with the Sales campaign and track how many people from Facebook completed your landing page lead form.
If you don’t have a landing page specifically built for capturing leads (or if you’re finding people aren’t really responding well to that campaign), you can use Facebook’s Lead campaign.
In this campaign, people can fill out your lead form all right there within Facebook, without ever leaving the platform.
The leads’ contact info is stored in your Facebook ads manager for you to download manually or for you to automate into your CRM.
Alternatively, you can also run a Google Ads campaign to send traffic to your landing page.
The biggest difference here is that with Facebook ads, you’re targeting people by interests, behavior, or demographics, and you’re paying per impression.
With a Google Ad, also sometimes called a PPC ad which stands for pay per click, you’re targeting people by what they’re searching on Google and paying per click.
Ideally, when you run these ads, you advertise a free lead magnet that is super valuable to your audience that they can get in exchange for giving you their contact information.
App Install Campaign
Depending on the nature of your business, you could use the app install campaign if you have an app that allows users to make an account for free, because again we’re not asking for a sale just yet. The middle of the funnel is all about getting them plugged into your brand a little deeper.
ManyChat Automations
You can set up a free ManyChat account, to set up automated messages to reply to comments or messages you get on social media to further engage and build trust with your audience.
If your business does not require having a meeting or phone call with a lead prior to the purchase, you can still use some of these same campaigns but for a different purpose.
For example, you can still use all of these lead generation campaigns to get their contact information in exchange for a different kind of lead magnet, such as a coupon code, or to have early access to a new product launch, or an ebook that’s related to your product or service.
Meanwhile the contact information you receive from them can be funneled into your email marketing campaign, as well as retargeted on Facebook, which we’ll get into in a second.
Qualifying Leads
Either way, whichever method you use, if you’re capturing leads in this stage, please make sure you’re qualifying and disqualifying leads as much as possible so that only qualified leads are making it to the bottom of your funnel. Qualifying means you’re giving the lead reasonable expectations, telling them exactly what they’re going to get from working with you.
You’re not overpromising and under delivering. Disqualifying means you’re also ruling out if a lead is not fit to be your customer or client.
Disqualification is just as important as qualification but it’s usually the thing growing businesses don’t want to do because sometimes it means turning away leads that are showing interest.
We know that’s hard to do because you want to accept any and all customers right now but here’s why it’s important.
Usually the things that disqualify a lead are lack of budget, geographical location, or wanting something different or outside of what you offer.
If you’re nurturing a lead that doesn’t have the money to pay you, isn’t in the area you service, or is ultimately going to be dissatisfied with your service because it’s not what they wanted to begin with, you’re just wasting time and resources now on a lead that was never going to be a good, sustainable or profitable fit for your business.
So, how do you qualify and disqualify leads? In every piece of content you put out and especially in your lead form.
Ask the right questions and if they don’t give the answers you want, boot them from your sales funnel.
Offer a relevant lead magnet that ensures people are going to be interested in what you offer later down the road.
For instance, if you offer home repairs, and you’re targeting homeowners, a question on your lead form could be do you own your own home and if their answer is, “No, I live in an apartment,” the relationship can end there.
If your lead magnet was a free homeowner’s spring maintenance check, you shouldn’t be getting apartment-renters clicking on your form to begin with.
So qualify, and disqualify.
With the middle of the funnel, you want to be able to say, “Okay, now that they have completed XYZ or taken this action, NOW it makes sense for me to ask them for the sale.”
In some of our other blogs, we compare the sales funnel to a relationship in the sense that you wouldn’t ask someone to marry you on your first date.
But after dating for a while and getting to know each other really well and falling in love, then you move on to marriage.
The middle of the funnel is the dating portion. It’s the connecting bridge between addressing a stranger, and building so much brand trust that they now want to buy from you.
Conversion Stage & The Advocacy Stage
These stages consist of a hot audience because at this point, they’ve already taken a high-intent action with your brand, so this is where you start closing and/or upselling them with ads.
Marketing Strategies To Fuel The Conversion & Advocacy Stages
In most cases, we use the Sales campaign from Facebook for this or a Search or Display campaign on Google.
Whichever campaign you use, you’ll want to track how many people saw your ads, clicked to your site or came to your store and converted, aka completed a purchase.
Now, you may be wondering, how are you going to find those people again on the internet again if they didn’t complete your lead form?
Every action your audience has taken up to this point can be retargeted.
On Facebook and Instagram, your likes, followers, video views, post engagement, website traffic, customers, leads can all be gathered in a custom audience inside of Facebook Ads Manager to be retargeted so long as you set up your Meta Pixel on your website at the start.
For Google, you’ll want to make sure their separate tracking tool called a tag is installed.
If some of the people in your retargeting audience already converted a little earlier in the funnel and are currently a client with your company, then you can create a separate audience of those existing clients or recent purchasers to exclude them from your retargeting audience so that you don’t waste money delivering ads to people who have already completed the action.
On the flip side of that, you can deliver new ads exclusively to that audience to upsell them in the Advocacy stage.
Overall, your bottom of the funnel ads need to be direct.
You’ve educated, provided value, instilled brand trust, now it’s time to ask for the sale or the upsell if they’re in the Advocacy stage.
This is how you build a bulletproof sales funnel.
You’re drawing in the right people from the start, and positioning your product or service as the industry-leader with valuable content so that when they make a purchase, they purchase from you.
Sales Funnel FAQs
How do you create a sales funnel step by step?
- Define Your Goal: What do you hope to obtain from this sales funnel, direct sales? Leads? At what cost? Specify your goals.
- Make A List Of Customer Problems: Jot down all of the pain points, problems and/or goals your customers have that your product or service helps with. What solution does your business provide them?
- Provide Free Value: Give free, valuable content to customers in the Awareness stage to build trust in your brand and industry authority. If you don’t know what would qualify as valuable to them, refer to your list from step 2.
- Provide Gated Value: Now, offer more in-depth value for free in exchange for their contact information. This value is often referred to as a lead magnet. Examples of lead magnets include a free ebook, quiz, calculator, discount code and so on.
- Qualify Leads: Qualify (and disqualify) leads to ensure they are a good fit for your business and are likely to purchase at the bottom of the sales funnel.
- Nurture Qualified Leads: Nurture qualified leads by continuing to give them free value, answering any questions they have, and tackling any objections to purchase.
- Ask For The Sale: Give them the CTA (call-to-action) to purchase the product or service.
- Upsell: After they’ve made a purchase, upsell them on future purchases and/or maintain client longevity in the Advocacy stage.
- Track Everything: Continuously track how many people are entering your funnel vs how many people are coming out customers at the bottom, and pivot your strategies anywhere needed to ensure there are no holes in your funnel and that the right people are making it through at a profitable cost.
What are the 5 stages of the sales funnel?
The 5 stages of the sales funnel are Awareness, Consideration, Preference, Conversion & Advocacy, though we usually don’t include preference in our sales funnel as we are able to generate profitable sales without it.
What is a sales funnel example?
A sales funnel example is somebody seeing your business’s reel on Instagram, clicking to your page and following you because of the valuable, free content you post there, then seeing a Facebook ad a week later and signing up for the lead magnet you’re advertising, then converting into a client after seeing how your services are the solution to their problem.
How do I create a free sales funnel?
You create a free sales funnel by following these 9 steps:
- Define Your Goal: What do you hope to obtain from this sales funnel, direct sales? Leads? At what cost? Specify your goals.
- Make A List Of Customer Problems: Jot down all of the pain points, problems and/or goals your customers have that your product or service helps with. What solution does your business provide them?
- Provide Free Value: Give free, valuable content to customers in the Awareness stage to build trust in your brand and industry authority. If you don’t know what would qualify as valuable to them, refer to your list from step 2.
- Provide Gated Value: Now, offer more in-depth value for free in exchange for their contact information. This value is often referred to as a lead magnet. Examples of lead magnets include a free ebook, quiz, calculator, discount code, and so on.
- Qualify Leads: Qualify (and disqualify) leads to ensure they are a good fit for your business and are likely to purchase at the bottom of the sales funnel.
- Nurture Qualified Leads: Nurture qualified leads by continuing to give them free value, answering any questions they have, and tackling any objections to purchase.
- Ask For The Sale: Give them the CTA (call-to-action) to purchase the product or service.
- Upsell: After they’ve made a purchase, upsell them on future purchases and/or maintain client longevity in the Advocacy stage.
- Track Everything: Continuously track how many people are entering your funnel vs how many people are coming out customers at the bottom, and pivot your strategies anywhere needed to ensure there are no holes in your funnel and that the right people are making it through at a profitable cost.
