A marketing funnel is a journey from how people find your business to becoming customers. Creating a marketing funnel is, in essence, about answering a series of questions. Get this right, and a marketing funnel will become one of the most important tools for any small business in San Diego.

Step 1 – Analyse your current marketing funnel

Creating a marketing funnel doesn’t have to be overly complex but it is important to have an understanding of the process. When you identify the current process, you identify gaps. And this is important because where there are gaps, you are losing customers.

Answer the questions how do your customers find you, what do they do next and how do they buy?

Step 2 – Decide what on the end goal of your marketing funnel

Surprisingly, you may think, it is isn’t a natural assumption that the end goal of your San Diego marketing funnel will be ‘making sales’. It could be that you want email addresses for your direct email marketing campaign or book a call to discuss your services and so on.

Without an end goal, your marketing funnel will not taper to an action meaning that potential customers and leads simply swirl around the wide rim of the funnel and then drift away.

Step 3 – Plan your marketing funnel

For many small businesses in San Diego, this is the difficult step because unless you have a finite understanding and knowledge of the funnel process, actually knowing how to put a funnel into practice can be difficult.

You start by looking at a specific starting point, such as your website. You want to ask questions such as how do people find your website? When they arrive on your website, how will you determine what they are looking for and so on?

With an end goal in place, you have something to aim for and thus, you can create a funnel accordingly. For example, if the marketing funnel end goal is to swell your email database contacts, you would create a sign-up pop up for people to join your mailing list.

You might also want to create another pop up for later on in their browsing to remind them to sign up. You may want to offer an incentive and so on.

When it comes to designing and implementing a successful marketing funnel, you want to answer three key questions;

1. Does the method of attracting customers accomplish what it was designed to do?
2. Is there something putting customers off?
3. If someone shows an interest, where does the marketing funnel lead them?

Step 4 – Prioritising the marketing funnel

Marketing funnels only work if they hit the spot and not just once, but time and time again. From converting people into customers to getting more traffic to your website, there are many different goals and paths that a marketing funnel can lead people through.

But for any funnel journey to be a success, there are key components that must be prioritised;

• Is your website up to scratch? – if your website is lacking in content, strong call to actions and has a flow that is stilted and not logical, then you will be losing people before they have even entered the funnel. Prioritise getting the basics right.
• Do you follow up? – so someone hops along to your website and signs up to your e-newsletter… now what? Do you send a welcoming email? In other words, follow up is an important part of the marketing funnel, a chance to showcase your small business brand to a potential customer. 
• Adding fuel to the process – just because a customer is in the marketing funnel doesn’t mean that they will automatically buy or follow you. You still need to add fuel to the marketing ‘fire’ and that means making sure that people don’t forget who you are. This doesn’t mean bombarding people but linking and using other marketing processes such as social media ads, pay per click advertising and so on.

Step 5 – Tracking results

Keeping track of the numbers can hound your every moment or provide you with information that is either valuable or nonsensical. We can become hung up on numbers, becoming obsessed with watching the hit counter or the like button counter increasing.

On one hand, you need to treat the numbers with caution but on the other, you need to understand the information they are giving you. A marketing funnel should come with its own data.

It should tell you how many people are filtering through each stage of the funnel. What they may not tell you is why customers are stalling at a certain stage and not making through to the final end goal, whatever you have set hat to be.

It is highlighting there is a problem and one that needs to be fixed. It could be a simple case of what the customer needs to do next is not clear or the call to action is not strong enough.

From monitoring increased hits on the website to understanding bounce rate, to watching your email database grow to making more sales – your end goal will determine which statistic means the most – understanding the broader picture of marketing metrics will see you avoid costly mistakes.

Step 6 – Book Above The Fold for a FREE consultation

Frankly, marketing offline and online in an increasingly competitive marketing place is daunting. For a San Diego business like yours, you know that not marketing your San Diego business is not an option but you also have one eye on the marketing budget. You need to spend your marketing budget in the right place at the right time and aim ads and the like at the right people.

There are a lot of variables to get right which is we offer a free consultation. We look at your current marketing strategy and plans, how well your marketing funnel is functioning and give you an idea of how we can make more from all your marketing efforts, as well as introduce a few new ones. Now nothing is holding you back – give the team a call today (or send us an email!).