No matter how talented you are, making a living as a creator goes beyond the quality of your work. It’s all about keeping your pipeline full of qualified clients or customers so that you have consistent income coming in.
Unfortunately, a lot of marketing advice fails when it comes to driving consistent leads to your inbox:
- Endlessly produce content and put it out there, just hoping that people see your value and buy from you
- Cold-pitch your target audience, spending lots of time on prospects who won’t convert
- Create ads for your products and services without a strategy, spending empty dollars for no return
But what if we told you you could develop a proven method for taking strangers from “no idea who you are” to excited paying customers?
You can. It’s called a sales funnel. And in this article, we’re sharing how you can create one for your online business.
What is a sales funnel?
The phrase “sales funnel” sounds complicated, but it’s not. Simply put, a sales funnel is the process that people must go through to become your customer or client, from the time they first “notice” your business to the instant they become a paying customer.
For online creators, the bulk of the sales funnel often takes place through email. But your sales funnel can also take place on a website or sales page, through a webinar, or through some combination of each of these.
Why is a sales funnel important for creators?
A sales funnel may seem like a fancy marketing tool for big corporations. But as you’ll see, in practice, creating a sales funnel is incredibly easy and effective for small businesses, too.
Here’s why sales funnels are the best-kept secret of successful creators:
Puts you in the driver’s seat of your marketing
You may think of your customers as the people who are buying from you already or who are about to buy from you. That is, customers who are already aware of their problem and are actively looking for the very solution you offer.
But there is a whole other world of potential customers out there who will eventually be ready to buy from you…. Just not yet.
These customers need to be nurtured. In other words, they have the potential to become awesome paying customers but something has to happen first: They need to be helped to understand why they need your product or service and get prepared to pay the cost.
This is the job a sales funnel does. With a sales funnel, you’re no longer waiting passively to be found by the few people who are already aware of their problem and looking for a solution. Instead, you’re actively turning a wide swath of ordinary people into amazing customers.
This active approach to marketing and sales is what leads to that holy grail of a full pipeline of qualified customers. These customers started off not knowing why they needed your product or service, and now they’re ready and willing to buy from you.
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Ensures you don’t waste time with bad-fit customers
A sales funnel does the work of educating your customers for you. Done well, your sales funnel will help the right customers self-select for your service or products.
This means that by the time you have to engage personally with potential customers, such as on a sales call, they’re far more likely to be a good fit for what you offer. No more wasting time on sales calls, emails, and messages with bad-fit customers! – Read more
