Create Your Marketing Funnel in 5 Minutes..

Building a solid marketing funnel helps small businesses support a marketing strategy with more than a solid brand or message or offering. It allows small business owners to use what makes digital marketing so great: DATA.

A marketing funnel is essentially answering one really really important question for your business. That question is...

I said "potential customers" for a reason. Potential customers should be your target market.

It takes building a solid marketing funnel to answer this question. You can do it in 5 minutes. Ready....go.

Your Small Business Marketing Funnel:

Step 1) The last step on your funnel is someone buys your product/service. We'll call this "Step 0." What is the step right before that (step 1)? (Ex: proposal presented, talks to a salesperson, fills out a long form, etc)

Step 2) What is the step a potential customer takes right before step 1? (Ex: fills out short form, calls location, in-store visit)

Step 3) What is the step right before step 2? (Ex: clicks on an ad, follows on social media, opens email)

Step 4) What is the step right before step 3? (Ex: sees an ad, gets an email, receives phone call, is reached in some way.)

You may have 4 steps or you may have 10. Figure out what steps a potential customer might take and list them in order.

Conversion Rates

Now, start with Step 4 (or your last step). This is the very first introduction someone has to your offering. What percentage of these people go from Step 4 to Step 3? These are your conversion rates.

Let's say this number from step 4 to 3 is 40%.

What percentage go from Step 3 to Step 2? Let's say 20%.

What percentage go from Step 2 to Step 1? Let's say 70%.

What percentage go from Step 1 to Step 0? Let's say 10%.

Now, we do the math.......

Step 0: We're looking at 1 person to buy. 10% of folks at step 1 purchase. So 1 divided by 10% = 10. This is the bottom of your funnel. It's all the marketing that needed to happen to get the sale. 

If you extract these numbers across the rest of your conversion rates, You get this:

And you have the answer to that really really important question that should be key number in your marketing strategy: 175.

175 people from your target market need to hear about you to make 1 sale. Sounds pretty good. What's your number? How do you make these percentages better? What happens when we extrapolate these numbers based on the number of sales you need this year?

The answers to all of these questions should get you thinking about a cohesive strategy that not only feels good, but has strong data behind it.