8. Understanding the Online Sales Funnel — 30 Days Of Medium
Welcome back to 30 Days Of Medium
In this article I’m going to be talking about the Online Sales Funnel and how understanding it is crucial to succeeding online.
You can catch up on the first 7days of my Medium challenge below if you missed them:
0. 30 Days Of Medium
1. What do you need to build your own website? — 30 Days Of Medium
2. How to find a business you love — 30 Days Of Medium
3. How to build your own website — 30 Days Of Medium
4. How to measure your website’s performance — 30 Days Of Medium
5. How to get more customers by answering their questions -30 Days Of Medium
6. The successful business website cheat sheet — 30 Days Of Medium
7. How to measure success — 30 Days Of Medium
8. Understanding the Online Sales Funnel — 30 Days Of Medium
9. What is traffic and why is it important? — 30 Days Of Medium
10. What is Google URL Builder and why should you use it? — 30 Days Of Medium
11. Double your traffic by automating your social media schedule — 30 Days Of Medium
12. How to tell what sells — 30 Days Of Medium
13. How I grew my Medium following 6,500% — 30 Days Of Medium
14. How you look at things matters — 30 Days Of Medium
15. How to SELL services to small businesses — 30 Days Of Medium
16. How to win more deals with effective proposals — 30 Days Of Medium
17. How to setup an online store in 10 minutes — 30 Days Of Medium
18. How to work from anywhere — 30 Days Of Medium
19. Why your website is sabotaging your sales — 30 Days Of Medium
20. Where does your traffic come from? — 30 Days Of Medium
21. How to actually recognise burnout — 30 Days Of Medium
22. How to hack your schedule and get twice as much done — 30 Days Of Medium
23. Don’t copy your competitors — 30 Days Of Medium
24. How to SEO optimise a blog post — 30 Days Of Medium
25. Be unique or be forgotten — 30 Days Of Medium
26. Going with your gut — 30 Days Of Medium
27. People don’t pay for average — 30 Days Of Medium
28. How to do keyword research — 30 Days Of Medium
29. Why The Pareto Principle is the world’s biggest hack — 30 Days Of Medium
30. Your content is more profitable than your telephone — 30 Days Of Medium
What is the Online Sales Funnel?
The Online Sales Funnel is a simple representation of how online marketing works.
Why is it important to understand how the Online Sales Funnel works?
The reason why so many people get demotivated with online marketing and give up at trying to grow online, is that they take a scatter-gun approach.
The Scatter-Gun Approach
The scatter-gun approach goes a little something like this.
“Hey Jim, we need a website!”
“Oh really, why?”
“Well because we do! Even Forbes are saying so! We can’t be missing out on this huge opportunity. And we need to be on social media too. We should hire someone to tweet for us and update our Facebook!
“Um o.k I guess so. I mean are we sure?”
“No but we need to do something!”
How do you think this is going to pan out?
The Online Sales Funnel Approach
This involves using common sense and a bit of independent thought.
It looks a little like this.
- What is our objective?
- How are we going to achieve this?
- Which channels will best help us do this?
- How are we going to measure this and connect the dots as far as our bottom line goes?
- Our research has led us to believe that we should do X, Y and Z
Anatomy Of An Online Sales Funnel
This is the simplest image I could find.
It works like this:
- Drive traffic
- Generate leads
- Generate customers
Simple, right?
The expression — “It’s a numbers game” is as old as time and will never change.
You need eyeballs on your business to generate potential buyers who then become actual buyers.
The Online Sales Funnel demonstrates simply how online marketing works.
Plugging Knowledge Gaps
The reason small businesses pay me to help them grow online is I help plug their knowledge gaps.
A lot of small businesses already know this stuff, they just don’t know what to do with it.
In the same way you pay your accountant to file your taxes and maximise your profits, you already know that’s the name of the game, you just don’t know how to do it. If you did, they would’t make such a good living and spend so many years studying their trade.
The best thing you can do to grow online is plug your knowledge gaps.
Get Inbound Certified for free through Hubspot.
Seriously, the free courses Hubspot offer are absolutely incredible and can take you from zero to hero in a matter of weeks. Regardless of whether or not their software is a ripoff for small businesses (there’s many cheaper options).
It doesn’t matter what label you put on it, or whatever business is hot right now, whether it’s ClickFunnels, Hubspot, LeadPages, Shopify or Drip.
The fundamentals remain the same. These tools just help you do what you need to do.
The reason you aren’t growing online is because you have knowledge gaps, don’t know your metrics and don’t stick to them focusing on incremental growth improving the areas that need improving.
If you don’t have the time to learn online marketing and growing online outsource it to someone who will do it for you. But make sure you understand it well enough to correctly measure your return on investment.
Hopefully you found something of value in this article, look out for the next one in my 30 Days of Medium challenge!
Any questions on this topic? Let me know in the comments.
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