Your marketing should begin with a strategy to get more customers and keep them by offering a great product or service and backing this up with the customer service to make sure they get the full benefit from their purchase.

By observing what successful marketers do to plan out their marketing agenda, you too can create a plan that ensures success. A part of that plan is to find a way to get repeat sales from your existing customers. Ideally, as their confidence in you increases, they would increase the size of their purchases over time.

You accomplish this by offering more advanced (and, thus, more expensive) products as time goes on. This is the concept of a marketing funnel. Your funnel starts by attracting new people who aren’t familiar with your business and draws then, step by step, into ultimately becoming a customer for life.

Entrepreneur VIP contributor Susan Gunelius has published an article showing marketers how to develop a marketing funnel that helps them increase sales and profits.

In her article, Gunelius says, “It takes time to convince people to make a purchase. One of the best ways to move people through the buyer journey is to create a conversion funnel, which provides consumers with small actions that lead to a purchase.

What types of content and messages can be used to successfully move consumers through the marketing funnel? There isn’t a single recipe for success, but there are some proven strategies that can work for you.

Top of the funnel (TOFU)

At the top of the funnel are consumers who aren’t yet aware of your product or service. This is the stage where you need to raise brand awareness, not to try to sell your products or services. You wouldn’t walk up to a stranger on the street and immediately try to sell your product or service to them, and you shouldn’t do that in your content, either. Much of your content marketing success comes from indirect marketing, so don’t go for the hard sell yet”.

How to Create a Marketing Funnel That Will Increase Sales and Profits

Entrepreneur

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