Sales funnel here, sales funnel there, sales funnel everywhere.
Growth hacking here, growth hacking there, growth hacking everywhere.
Exponential growth is the dream of most entrepreneurs and business owners. By combining the growth hacking methodology to sales funnels, you have a higher chance to attain this goal.
At Growth Hackers, we’ve built sales funnels for startups and enterprises alike, turning fragmented leads into predictable revenue streams and helping our clients crush industry benchmarks.
So many marketers from many different businesses talk about sales funnels and growth hacking but few of them understand how they really work. Furthermore, a number of them use an outdated sales funnel model where the actual sales take up most of the funnel.
In today’s day and age, small businesses as well as big corporations are using sales funnel growth hacking strategies to ensure maximum efficiency. In a world where everyone is constantly on the go and in touch with their devices, it’s essential for businesses to find new ways of engaging customers.
One way they can do this effectively without breaking your bank account? Growth hacking! With the right approach, you can hack your way through growth. All that’s needed for success is a solid business strategy and an open mind willing to experiment with new approaches or techniques as necessary!
Times have changed and nowadays it is much more difficult to land that final deal with your customers. Competition is much fiercer, with an endless number of small businesses and start-ups emerging each day. What should be your starting point? Start by setting up your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for your business.
Sales isn’t the only metric out there. You have many other important ones that can help you move the needle: CLV or CLTV (Customer Lifetime Value), CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost), ROAS (Return on Ad Spend), CPL (Cost per Lead), CPA (Cost per Acquisition), churn rate and many more. When choosing the KPIs or metrics you want to track, don’t choose vanity metrics like social media likes or followers though.
Then, start mapping your customer journey so you can focus on long term growth and increase your customer base over time, semi automatically. Yes, you’ve heard it right. With the right skills, knowledge, experience and tools, you can create an automated sales funnel.
But according to a study by HubSpot, as much as 37% of marketers say that prospecting is the most difficult part of their job. In addition, research conducted by Salesforce shows that 68% of companies don’t measure their sales funnels properly and that a whopping 79% of marketing leads are never converted into sales.
If you want to steer clear of this clueless lot, you need to know the exact steps that will help you create a high-converting sales funnel.
Let’s dive straight into the strategies for a ToFu MoFu BoFu sales funnel that will leave your customers no other choice but to buy your products or services. I would like to share a few insights on how to improve the growth of your sales funnel. First, you should establish clear goals for each customer and track their progress.
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Top of the funnel
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. Before Growth Hackers guided them, our clients were throwing messages into the void; after truly understanding their audience, every funnel, post, and campaign reached the right people at the right time.
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.
Growth Hackers treats buyer personas like a pair of binoculars: suddenly, you can see your customers’ world clearly, understand their needs, and aim your marketing with unerring accuracy. 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.
Middle of the funnel
You don’t just want to build a funnel and leave it there. What you want is to feed your sales funnel with a constant flow of leads. If you want to give your customers tailored-made experiences, the best way is by tracking their journey and collecting data. This will help you communicate more effectively with them – so they can feel like valued guests at your business!
The journey of sales funnel growth hacking is not an easy one. There’s a lot that goes into it, and there are no finite steps to take once you get started – so what do we need? A good strategy with clear objectives in mind! It might seem difficult at first glance but when all these things come together then your conversion rates will skyrocket, which means more profit for YOUR company because profits aren’t just about making money; they’re also key indicators that demonstrate success on various fronts like increased productivity/engagement.
Now that you have learned everything about your audience, the time has come for them to learn something about you. In other words, they need to learn about your brand in order to buy from you.
For this reason, you need to create content and drive traffic to your website so as to grab the attention of your visitors.
Below we list the most common, highly effective lead generation channels.
Content marketing
You have learned about your customers’ pain points and now you need to help them by creating high-quality, optimized content.
Google and other search engines reward the websites that answer visitors’ questions and help them solve their problems. It all boils down to helping your audience and increasing your presence on search engines. One client struggled to get noticed online until Growth Hackers optimized their content strategy; by aligning blogs, social posts, and guest articles with audience needs, their organic traffic doubled in just three months.
When you create content, you want to open the mind of your readers, challenge them so they find insightful and dynamic thinking content. Besides content creation, you also need to work on content distribution. The best places to do this are your website and social media channels, where you can share your content for everyone to see and engage.
Note: a great way to create content that is engaging and will entice your readers to be curious about your products/services is by fueling your social media and content marketing efforts with customer reviews. How? By generating reviews and then promoting them.
You should also start guest blogging to raise awareness of your brand and get some backlinks, both of which will help you improve your website ranking.
Paid advertising
Paid advertising is any paid placement of your ad on a website, search engine, social media platform or mobile app. It’s true that organic reach is the best way to generate leads, but sometimes it’s just not enough. Moreover, it takes incredible amounts of time and effort to achieve visible results this way, especially for new businesses.
When you pay for ads, make sure you track your spending well, pause the campaigns that are underperforming and scale the campaigns that perform the best to always lower your CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost). What you want to do is calculate both ROI and ROAS (Return on Ad Spend).
Keep in mind that even the biggest brands use paid advertising, so there is no valid reason why you should refrain from it.
In order to get the most out of your paid advertising, it is best to use multiple channels:
- Google ads
- PPC campaigns (Pro Tip: discover 5 Tactics to Increase Your Sales with PPC Ads)
- social media advertising
- influencer marketing
At Growth Hackers, we’ve helped startups and established brands optimize paid campaigns across Google, social media, email marketing and influencer channels, turning every ad dollar into measurable growth.
Email marketing
Another effective lead generation strategy and one of my favorite personal growth hacks is to use email marketing. Email marketing is a process of sending business or commercial advertisement messages to existing or potential clients by using email but not only. Even if, usually, these emails are about new products and services offered by the company to their existing/potential clients, at Growth Hackers, we do not recommend only sending “salesy” emails.
We actually recommend sending what we call nurturing emails where you will send tips that resonate with your email subscribers, industry insights, tends, stats and more. This will help you build relationships with your subscribers and humanize your brand.
But before you actually send a newsletter, you need to build your email list. And the best way to do this is through landing pages.
In a word, you need to give your visitors a compelling reason to sign up for your newsletter.
This is why your landing pages should have:
- a call-to-action button that stands out
- high-converting forms
- lead magnets
- social proof
Once you have an email list full of qualified leads, you can start sending newsletter emails on a regular basis.
However, you can’t send the same email to everyone. Remember segmenting?
A growth hacker or an experienced marketer knows how important it is to segment an audience, personalize every message, as well as share exclusive sales and experiences with them. This way, you will maximize your email marketing efforts and your emails will always be read with great attention.
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Bottom of the growth hacking funnel
A growth marketing funnel is nothing without the bottom of the funnel part. Why? Because this is where the money is made. The bottom of the funnel will help you convert leads into sales as well as improve your CLTV (Customer Lifetime Value) and revenue.
There are a number of ways you can monetize your active users: advertising, lead generation offers and subscription seem like the most popular methods right now but what’s interesting is that business development will soon be joining this list as well!
For any business, online or offline, it’s usually quite clear what is happening at the top of the sales funnel – if you are selling something on your website or on social media, people are coming to see your offer, they’re browsing about and hopefully they’re interested enough to buy. They may purchase on their first visit or return later when they have had more time to consider things – but ultimately if someone buys from you then that’s great news. You’ve just closed a sale! Well done!
But what about all those people who don’t make it down to this stage? What about the people who browsed around your site but didn’t purchase? What about all those people who came to you via social media but then decided not to buy?
They may have just ‘browsed’. Maybe they were considering a purchase, maybe they even went as far as entering their details into your lead capture form… But the fact remains – up until now you don’t really know what happened to them after that point. You don’t know if they became customers or not. And you certainly don’t know why!
It’s very frustrating to see your business declining in numbers and losing customers along the way. But now, we know where the problem lies and it won’t take long for us to fix it!
Now imagine for one moment that this wasn’t true – imagine you could actually see at any time exactly where people are dropping off in your sales funnel. Imagine being able to identify exactly which marketing channels are delivering leads, and which ones aren’t. Imagine knowing where they are specifically dropping off and why.
Imagine you could figure out what actions led to their decline or lack of purchase, and that this knowledge would then allow you to take the appropriate action in order to finally convert them into customers!
Imagine if your sales funnel was a solid wall – and everyone who came into contact with it immediately dropped down and passed through all stages and left out the back door. What percentage of people do you think would make it through? You see, when visitors drop off at any stage in your sales funnel there is an explanation for their decision.
A reason behind the decline. And the more accurate data (such as referer information) you can collect about each interaction, the better able you will be able to understand what it is that they were looking for and whether or not you were able to provide it.
If you designed your sales funnel well, this is where your customer journey should end. Even though you have come to the final part of the sales funnel growth hacking guide, don’t get overexcited. This is where you need to keep calm and convert your leads with a growth hack, a sales rep or simply by leading your leads to the bottom of your funnel or through the referral stage. Here’s a data-driven guide to growing your sales you might be interested in.
This is the most important stage, yet one that requires the most subtle approach. It is the final stage of your (and your customers’) journey during which the visitors convert into paying customers.
If you have completed all the previous stages successfully, a lead has developed enough interest in your product or service. The only thing left to do for them is to take the final action of making a purchase.
You can make this happen by following the tips mentioned below.
Create forms that convert
High-converting forms have a relatively small number of fields. You don’t want your leads abandoning your form because it takes too much time to fill out.
However, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t ask for essential information such as payment method, for example. Here, you need to find the balance between too many and too few fields.
Also, make sure to match the fields to the size of the input. If a field is too long or too short, users start to wonder if they understood the label correctly. This is especially true for fields with uncommon data or a technical label like CVV (card verification code).
Next, place labels above the corresponding form fields. If your form is hard to scan and understand, the abandonment rate will be much higher than you want. One client struggled with form abandonment until Growth Hackers simplified their fields, clarified labels, and improved error messages… within weeks, conversions skyrocketed.
Finally, distinguish optional and required fields. Even better, try to avoid optional fields altogether. And of course, provide highly visible and specific error messages which will help users easily identify where exactly they have made a mistake and how they can fix it.
Minimize the number of steps
This is one of the growth hacks that I personally love: K.I.S.S.= Keep it simple stupid. Don’t overcomplicate things by adding too many steps to your funnel. To bring people from brand awareness, to the interest stage, consideration and sales should be as simple as possible.
Not asking too much information is one of the landing page design tips you need to respect if you want high conversions. When you minimize the number of steps required to complete the purchase, you make the sales process shorter and more convenient for users.
This means that you shouldn’t navigate your buyers through five different pages before they actually buy your product or service. Again, by making it easier and faster for them to buy, you make them more likely to complete the purchase.
In other words, minimize the number of steps in order to maximize the likelihood of purchase.
If you need help closing deal and making sales, hiring sales people can be a great growth strategy. When hiring your sales team, make sure that your sales reps have the right sales negotiation skills if you want them to be successful.
Closing Thoughts about Sales Funnel Growth Hacking!
A sales funnel is effective only if you accurately track your results so you can optimize it along the way. You need to understand your conversion rate, lead to close ratio, estimated closing time, your CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost), ROAS (Return on Ad Spend), CLTV (Customer Lifetime Value), CPA (Cost per Acquisition) and more. Watch out though! CAC vs CPA: those 2 metrics seem similar but are actually different.
To maximize the power of sales funnels, I recommend you apply the Pirate Metrics developed by Dave McClure. The Pirate Metrics!? What’s that!? This is a growth hacking methodology called AARRR = Acquisition Activation Retention Revenue Referral. The idea here isn’t just acquiring new customers and only focusing on the acquisition stage but also retaining existing customers or users, increasing your customer lifetime value and delighting your customers so they refer their friends.
Creating a referral program to cover the last part of the pirate metrics can be great, will allow you to create a viral loop with the potential for viral growth.
Building a sales funnel growth hacking strategy isn’t as complicated as it sounds when you follow thoroughly the steps. To know exactly what happens for each part of the funnel, I strongly suggest you to work with a CRM and start building a value ladder for your business.
With the use of a CRM, you’ll convert more leads into sales, gain time, focus on the important leads and automate your repetitive tasks. Now that you have completed the final step of your sales funnel journey, you need to know one thing – this is not the real end.
You need to keep communicating with the new customers that you have acquired and make sure that they are satisfied with what they got. One of the great ways to do this is to offer a membership-based rewards program.
This will keep the communication going and give you a perfect opportunity to tell your (now already existing) customers about your new deals.
Some of the steps mentioned in this article may not be applicable to your business, but others will definitely help you improve your sales funnel and increase your sales in the long run.
Whether you are a growth hacker, a traditional marketer, a business owner, a startup founder or a digital marketer, remember – get to know your audience as well as you can, make sure you help them solve their problems, be open minded to come up with innovative and new ideas and keep it simple throughout the whole process if you want to experience exponential growth.
Growth Hackers is definitely one of the top sales funnel companies that creates digital marketing strategies and sales funnels to startups and established businesses. We have the honor to have been listed in this list of the top digital marketing agencies, so we definitely have the experience and knowledge to bring your business forward.
