How to Plan Your Lead Generation Funnel

What is a Lead Funnel?

A lead funnel is a metaphorical funnel that depicts the path a lead takes to learn about your product or convert to a paying customer.

A lead must pass through several steps of a lead funnel in order to reach the other end. The lead initially learns about your product at the beginning of the journey, and by the time it reaches its destination, it has become a paying customer.

Similar to this, lead generation is essentially a method for piquing the interest of future clients or customers. Companies nurture the lead's unique demands as it moves through the sales funnel until the customer is prepared to make a purchase.

We discuss these stages in detail in the corresponding sections.

What is a Lead?

A person, company, or organisation that expresses interest in your product is referred to as a lead. These are your prospective clients, also referred to as prospects. Finding these leads and making sure they convert to paying customers are the objectives of any business.

Moving these potential consumers or "leads" up the lead funnel is the aim of the lead creation process.

Stages of a Lead Generation Funnel

The lead generating funnel has a very organised design. Therefore, it comes with many symbolic stages organically.

Each step is created such that the lead advances to the following one in the funnel's journey. By personalising the experience and paying close attention to the requirements of your customers, you may achieve this.

Generally speaking, a lead funnel has three portions.

Top of the funnel, or TOFU

Middle of the funnel, or MOFU

Bottom of the funnel, or BOFU

These paragraphs essentially explain which stage of the funnel your lead is in.

A normal lead funnel, however, is divided into distinct sections. These phases are listed below.

1. Awareness - TOFU

The initial stage of your lead funnel is this. This stage's main goal is to spread knowledge about your product. So, this stage includes any endeavours that draw attention to your brand.

You'll need to develop extensive indirect marketing initiatives for this, including paid advertising, social media marketing, content marketing, and search engine optimization.

Utilizing these inbound marketing strategies is a straightforward concept. Companies determine the individual needs of their customers via product development and market research. You must now approach your customers with content and resources that specifically address their needs thanks to inbound marketing techniques. The goal is to produce pertinent material that would encourage interest in your brand among potential customers.

2. Creating a Database

The next stage is to establish a detailed database with all the pertinent data about the consumer now that you have a pool of potential customers that are interested in your offering.

This is a crucial stage in developing a lead funnel that works. You can design the corresponding segments of the voyage with the aid of all the facts.

You ask your potential consumer to complete a form with all the necessary information based on your unique demands. These could include things like Name, Email, etc. Furthermore, the fact that actual users are prepared to provide this private information to you supports your product in a way.

Returning to the data, you'll simply need to build a database including all pertinent details about your product. This will enable you to tailor the next actions for them.

By adding a CTA to your landing page and tying it to your ads, blog posts, social media postings, etc., you can gather this data.

3. Targets and Prospects - BOFU

You can determine where your leads have come from and what stage of your lead generating funnel they are in using your database. For instance, although some leads could be ready to purchase your product right away, others might still be on the fence.

At this point, your objective is to turn these prospective leads into prospects who are prepared to purchase your goods. Engaging your leads and explaining how your product will benefit them is the best method to accomplish this.

Making sure your resources are focused on leads who can genuinely demonstrate that they are potential customers is equally vital. Basically, you need to make sure that your processes are optimised so that you can achieve greater results with fewer efforts and resources.

4. Marketing Qualified Lead and Sales Qualified Lead - MOFU

Your leads may be sales leads or marketing leads. Marketing initiatives like social media marketing, content marketing, advertising, etc. produce marketing leads. A sales lead, however, might have arrived via a landing page or sign-up form.

This is the marketer's ultimate responsibility during the lead creation process. The team's next move is to close the deal after making an effort to turn these leads into prospects. If a lead chooses to sign up for a free trial or buys the demo, they are then considered marketing qualified leads. The sales staff can now suggest an appropriate model to the lead.

5. Recycled

Not all leads will immediately want to buy your product the first instance you interact with them. Many prospects are probably just passively engaging with you without any intention of purchasing your product. But that doesn’t mean they won’t be interested in the future either.

So cultivating these leads becomes important. You can do this by continuing to engage with them further - helping them with any information they need.

7. Customers

Finally, this is a stage when the prospect turns into a customer - that is the lead decides to buy your product. This is usually the last stage of any lead funnel.

However, the journey doesn’t end here. Cultivating and engaging with your customers is important to retain them. So the goal after the final stage is to ensure the customer is happy and provide great customer service.

There you go! These are the stages of a lead generation funnel.

6. Opportunity

Now with the set of sales qualified leads, the real goal of the sales team is to make sure the lead makes a purchase. For this the team tries to utilize any opportunity they get to sell the product. Teams end up offering discounts, coupon codes, or other incentives so the prospects are prompted to buy.

How to Optimize your Lead Funnel

Creating a functional lead funnel can be a difficult task. But here are a few ways you can optimize your lead funnel.

1. Create automation

Not all parts of the lead funnel can be monitored manually and as the system scales, it gets increasingly difficult to do that. So it’s a good idea to use automation anywhere possible. For example, you can have a chatbot that takes care of customer queries. Or you can automate email replies and any other processes.

2. Cultivate good relationships with your customers

Retaining existing customers is very much easier and cheaper than acquiring new leads and turning them into paying customers. So customer retention initiatives are definitely important. You will have to focus on increasing customer loyalty through incentives or customer loyalty programs. This will help retain your existing customers and make sure they spread the word about your product or service.

3. Create personalized messaging

Your customer, lead or prospect doesn’t want to hear about your product features that are not directly relevant to them. Here’s where your database about your customer comes in. You’ll have to make sure all your messages are personalized at all stages of your lead funnel.

4. Track metrics

It’s important to understand how your current lead funnel is working out. If a sizeable amount of leads are bouncing off at a certain stage of your lead funnel you’ll have to figure out the reason behind it and how you can fix it. But first, you’ll have to identify such cases. For this purpose, tracking your retention numbers and?bounce rates?becomes important.

5. Upsell and cross-sell

Finally, you can increase your sales by upselling and cross-selling. Upselling basically helps you sell increasing expensive versions of your product to your customer. Whereas, cross-selling refers to a strategy where you sell additional products to accompany the original purchase.

For more visit: www.exellius.com