Building a funnel isn’t a walk in the park, especially if you do not know where to start. Sure, you can just Google away and follow the best practices shared out there, but if you really want to connect to your market, you have to have a thorough understanding of your customers.
If you’re struggling to start creating your own funnel, my best advice would be to plan and map out your funnel which is personalised to your customers. Personalising your funnel according to data acquired from studying and analysing your customers is a great way to ensure your funnel’s success.
Why?
Because you’re addressing what your customers need and want. You are addressing what appeals to them.
If you haven’t started on your funnel, now’s a good time to start studying and analysing your customers and create a data-driven funnel optimised and personalised based on data acquired from your customers.
Below are strategies you can adopt before creating your funnels or if you are looking to optimise your existing funnels:
Create a Robust Buyers Persona
What is a Buyer Persona?
It is a generalised representation of your ideal customer. In essence, it is a fictional representation of your customer. It may represent the largest segment of your market or it may represent a group you want your funnel to target in particular.
How do I Create a Marketing Persona?
- Study your current market by analysing individual profiles in your database
- Conduct interviews or surveys
What Data do I Need?
Among the data you need to create a good buyer persona, the data below are the most basic:
- Personal Background – This includes general family information such as the number of people in the family, social status, etc.
- Job Background – This includes the position, responsibilities, job tenure, industry, etc.
- Goals – This may include primary goals pertaining to your responsibilities.
- Demographics – This includes their age, gender, location, etc.
- Challenges – This includes the challenges they need to overcome to attain their goals.
- Communication medium – This information pertains to how you can connect to your consumer to be able to market your solution.
- Language – The language you use in your marketing.
Most buyer personas would also require you to research the following:
- Psychographics
- Influencers followed
- Media followed
- Quotes
Take note that you are not limited to just 1 buyer persona. You can segment your ideal buyers into different personas you can use for future marketing purposes.
ClickFunnels’ CRM, Actionetics, isn’t only for automating your email marketing. Simply head on over to your ClickFunnels account, go to Actionetics > Contact Profiles > Click to view each profile and you’ll find that the data you need is already available to you.
Build Data by Surveying
Part of building a good and accurate buyer persona is to acquire and build data by conducting surveys.
Tips for creating a successful consumer survey
- Yes or no questions are far easier to understand. For a more comprehensive answer, you can include a space where they can expound their answers.
- Offer incentives for answering your customer surveys.
Survey Tools
- Google Consumer Survey is a great tool for creating consumer surveys and generate custom insights on your market.
- SurveyMonkey is also a great tool for creating surveys plus it lets you automate follow-ups.
- AYTM or Ask Your Target Market. This cleverly named tools lets you create customer surveys you can send to your own list or to AYTM’s own panel of marketing list.
- Instantly Survey Builder is another survey builder tool that lets you create your own custom market surveys and send them to your own list.
- The ClickFunnels Editor lets you create your own custom surveys. Simply head on over to your funnel, create a new step or add your survey in an existing page. Just drag and drop the Survey element and you’re done. It’s very easy!
Rent Out 3rd Party Email Lists or Social Profiles to Send a Survey if You Don’t Have Your Own Audience
If your business is fairly new or if you haven’t built a sizeable email list, yet then you can either rent out or buy existing email list or social profiles that resemble your target market.
From there, you can send these contacts surveys and questionnaires to fill up with valuable data you can use in building a successful funnel.
Another great idea to acquire your own list is to partner up with influencers or people with a following that mirrors your own target market.
Map Out the Customer Journey and Their Touch Points
Understanding the stages that lead up to the end goal of a customer journey is another process that should be considered before creating a funnel. In essence, you will be mapping out how a visitor arrives at each step of your funnel and how each step compels the visitor into moving on into the next stage and finally onto the end goal of your funnel.
- Awareness – Where the consumer learns about you, your brand or your solution to their problem
- Consideration – This is where you catch the visitor’s interest and begins researching more about your offers.
- Action – This stage is where the visitor fulfil the goal of the funnel. It could be a purchase, a registration or a sign-up.
Once you have a thorough understanding of your buyer journey and their touch points (funnel stages, landing page, website, etc.), you can build your funnel in such a way that it mirrors your buyer journey.
What Next?
Now, remember that all the strategies suggested above are only ways to acquire data about your target customers. Your next task is to sift through that mountain of information and analyse the data to build solid insights. From those insights, you can start to map out your funnel and create content.
The key word here is personalisation. By personalising your funnel and the content according to your buyers, you get the chance to connect to them on a personal level. Remember that good marketing does not feel like marketing at all.
How do you start creating your own funnel?
Do you also start by studying your market? What strategies do you apply?
Comment down and tell us!