How to Create a High-converting Sales Funnel – Funnel Growth Hacking Explained

This is the beginning of your customer journey. The first goal of your sales funnel growth hacking efforts isn't to drive sales but rather work on your brand awareness, visibility, exposure, trust and reputation. And you know what they say: ‘The beginning is always the hardest’.

At this stage, no one knows you, so the first step of your lead generation journey and eventually, sales process, should be to research the market and learn as much as you can about your potential customers. Your business should rapidly run experiments and tests to understand who your target audience is and what's your customer journey.

Get to know your audience

Knowing your target audience is key if you want to build an effective customer acquisition funnel. When it comes to marketing, success of our efforts is largely dependent on whether we can get the attention of our target audience. The key to getting people's attention lies in understanding how they think, what they like and where their interests lie.

In order to make an effective growth hacking funnel, you have to understand your audience. But to do this, you need to pin down the specific questions you need the answers to.

There is so much information out there that you simply have to be selective and search for the information which is truly relevant to your business.

Here are some questions that you should ask yourself:

- Who is my audience?

In other words, you want to know their demographics like age, gender, location, education, etc.
Another set of information you can use to get to know your customers better and finally convert them is called psychographics. This is a study of consumers’ attitudes, aspirations, and other psychological criteria.

You won’t send the same marketing message to a millennial and a baby boomer, right? That is why you need to know everything about your audience and be able to talk to them as to your best friend.

- Where are they on social media?

Again, people of different ages will use different social media platforms. Your job is to discover your audience’s favorite place to hang out online and then use this channel to reach out to them.

- What bothers them?

This is another crucial question. The sooner you realize it is not about you but about your audience, the better chances you have to create a more effective sales funnel.

Remember, your potential customers are humans and your mission is to help them solve their problems. This is highly relevant to your content marketing strategy.

When you know your audience well enough, you will be able to:

- position your brand uniquely
- find your audience more easily
- address their pain points more effectively

Ask yourself as many questions as you can think of and when you determine all details, use them to create buyer personas.

Create Buyer Personas

Whether you want to build a B2B sales funnel or a B2C one, you will need to know your target market well. A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. This is an essential element of any growth marketing funnel. It describes the demographics and psychographics of a typical member within this group. By creating customer personas you can gain an insight into their world and user journey which will help you better serve them with relevant content, marketing pitches, and products.

Creating buyer personas allows you to:
- Understand commonalities between your customers
- Identify new opportunities within existing markets
- Develop effective messaging for specific target groups
- Define appropriate messaging channels for each group

How do I create good quality buyer personas? Here are some steps that we use to create solid and reusable personas:

1. Do your research

The more you know about your audience the better. This is an ongoing process that should be continually refined throughout your company's future growth.

2. Focus on behaviors

Focus less on what people say and more on their actions, for example how they use your product, where they see value in your product, or when are they most likely to use it? What are their pain points? What motivates them to act in certain ways? When do they need certain information?

3. Talk to them

Do not only record data but also listen to feedback from users through user testing sessions (remote or in-house). Ask open questions that will help you understand why buyers make the choices that they do. Ask about their purchase process, where they look for information, how long it takes them to make a decision, etc.

4. Create individual personas

Your buyers are not just numbers on a spreadsheet; at this point you should have created several different buyer personas with unique personalities, goals and challenges that can be mapped back to your key audiences.

5. Narrow down your personas

Now that you have completed all of the above steps you can begin to narrow down each persona into smaller groups based around commonalities between the people within them i.e., similarities in age range or common interests related to business needs (yes even hobbies should be considered).

6. Test your buyer personas against existing customers

Use your existing customers to see if they fit within the personas that you have created. If there are any discrepancies, go back to step one and do some more research!

7. Name your buyer personas & create a profile

Give them names, job titles or some other identifying feature so they become real people in your head rather than nameless representations of your audience. Keep it simple but descriptive- avoid using made up words unless you are creating an entirely new persona based on a different business need e.g., gamer kids male/female age 6-10 years old).

8. Define their demographics & psychographics

In some cases you may not have sufficient information available on your target audience so it might be useful to focus only on demographics and psychographics at this point in order to save time and resources. We recommend doing this only if you have a limited number of personas (six or less) and find it difficult to narrow down further details.

9. Use your buyer personas for messaging & marketing campaigns

Once you create your personas, make sure to use them as the foundation for all messaging and marketing campaigns moving forward! Start by mapping your existing audience against your new persona groups; identify which group(s) they fit into and how closely they match based on what has been mapped out above.

There are many more aspects to consider when developing your new persona groups (industry, educational background, salary range etc) but we recommend narrowing down these aspects further only after you have gained enough experience with creating authentic profiles.

Knowing your audience by creating user/buyer personas is essential when you want to create a powerful marketing funnel. If you research your prospects thoroughly, you will see that not all of them are the same. In fact, you will have to divide them into categories, or segment them, which is a more popular term.

You need to create different buyer personas based on the information you came across while doing your research.

Here, you need to ask yourself more questions:

- Why do they want to buy your product or service?
- How are they going to use it?
- What motivates them to buy your product/service?

Answering these questions will help you personalize your approach and improve each customer’s individual experience by categorizing them as a specific buyer persona.