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Why Your Business Needs A Sales Funnel

How do customers go from hearing about a product or service to ultimately purchasing it? Chances are, they have entered a business’s sales funnel and came out the other side as a paying customer.

What is a Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel is an automated journey a prospect goes through to become a customer. It usually consists of three to four steps that convince interested prospects to take a certain action. As customers continue to be interested, they work their way down the funnel.

Elias St. Elmo Lewis devised the sales funnel process back in 1989. He outlined four steps:

• Attention: When a customer is first made aware of your business or the products or services you sell.
• Interest: The customer is curious about your business, how it solves a problem or gives them something they want.
• Desire: The customer begins to like the product and develops a fondness for it.
• Action: The customer does more research, samples the product, and eventually purchases it.

It’s called a funnel because of the way it looks on paper. The top is wide as awareness reaches a lot of people and eventually narrows as the pool of interested individuals becomes smaller and more targeted.

Why Your Business Need A Sales Funnel

A sales funnel is the backbone of every online business. Here’s why your business needs one:

It builds a relationship

Most customers don’t make major purchases right away. They do their homework, study their options, and buy from brands they trust. A sales funnel allows that relationship to blossom.

You focus on the right leads

Uninterested customers will leave your funnel on their own, leaving you to devote your time and resources to those who are most interested.

It sets the stage for ongoing sales

When customers enter your sales funnel, they are at varying stages of the buying process. Those that are further along will become paying customers. The others are on a journey that will result in an eventual sale. Keeping interested customers engaged in sales funnel means a steady stream of customers in the future.

Accountability for your sales

Every activity in your sales funnel is tracked, so you will know your most effective content, your best selling products, the social media platform that has the most responses, and the geography of your most paying customers. Having a sales funnel helps you understand the sales process and adjust to what is working the best.

You can monitor your metrics

Sales funnel software can give you more information than the page views your website typically gives. It measures traffic, returns traffic, sales qualified leads, conversion rates, cost per lead, sales velocity, and much more.

If you’d like to learn more about sales funnels and how they can help your business, contact Web Strategy Plus. We create engaging sales copy that expands the number of visitors who enter your funnel and enticing landing pages that persuade visitors to take action. We can build a sales funnel for your business that is both effective and affordable. Contact us today for a free consultation. For more tips to grow your business, check us out on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram and SlideShare.

The Best SEO Techniques for 2017

One of the reasons that search engine optimization is so challenging is it's a field that's always changing. In many cases, techniques that worked well just a year ago are no longer effective. There are two reasons this may happen. The first is when people rely on techniques that fall into either a gray or black area with Google's guidelines. If enough people start using this type of technique, Google will take action against them. Since that action can mean losing all search engine traffic, Web Strategy Plus always recommends sticking to SEO techniques that fall within Google's guidelines.

The other reason a technique that used to work well may no longer be effective is it gets used by too many sites. Even if the technique isn't breaking any guidelines, search engine optimization strategies that become very common aren't going to be enough to move the needle for a website in a meaningful way. So if you're considering enlisting professional search engine optimization services, it's important to choose a digital marketing agency that understands Google's guidelines but is also always looking for which technique within that area will provide a meaningful edge.

To help highlight some of the types of practices that can get your website to the top of Google for keyword phrases that your potential customers are using, we want to highlight four of the best SEO techniques for the upcoming year:

1. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

As more people use mobile devices to get online, Google has continued to increase the amount of emphasis it places on speed. One way to increase how fast your website loads on mobile is to integrate Google's AMP technology into your website. By utilizing AMP, you can optimize your site to load faster, which in turn will appeal to Google's ranking algorithm.

2. Local SEO

Part of Google's focus on delivering the most relevant results possible is providing local options whenever it makes sense. Ensuring your website is fully optimized for local search results can open up new possibilities that you may not have even realized were available. That's why the right local SEO services can be so valuable.

3. Featured Snippets

Featured snippets are a special block that Google often displays when users type in a question. Because this is the very first thing that Google displays for relevant queries, creating a strategy for featured snippets and then implementing this strategy into all your content creation efforts can yield significant results.

4. Video SEO

While video was huge during 2016 and only stands to become an even bigger driver of online activity in 2017, very few businesses are utilizing this medium as part of their SEO efforts. By not only creating interesting videos on a regular basis, but also optimizing them for search prior to publishing, you can get your business in front of viewers who are eager to consume online video.

If you want to ensure that you're taking advantage of all the right SEO techniques for your business this year, be sure to contact Web Strategy Plus for a free consultation.