Sales Funnels and User Journeys

And why need-states matter.

Full, non-edited transcript by descript.com

Sales funnels, user journeys, and why need States matter.

It’s reiterate the digital marketing podcast.

Hi, it’s Clinton. Welcome back. To reiterate, I’ve been slow on this podcast for the last two months. I’ve been looking at finding time, and the truth is you don’t find time. You make time. So here we are.

Thanks for tuning in. Um, I’ve had some great feedback since the last show, and especially around sales funnels, it seems to be a need and a want to understand more about how they work. So today I’m going to dive into them a little bit more. Sales funnels work in three ways when there’s three paws to a sales funnel.

Um, and this applies to anything that you do. When you’re looking for a product or purchasing something. So if you use yourself as the center of this and say, what would I do? You’ll probably figure this out quite quickly and you’ll be able to use it in your campaigns going forward to think about things that you do daily.

So the first thing you would do is you are aware that a product exists and you need something. I need a new Kittle, I need a new toaster, a fridge, a car. What do you do? You go and you start searching for it. Normally Google or whichever other search engine you’re looking for, and a whole bunch of answers come up.

These products, these price, these brand, there’s the shops where it’s available. You may click on a few of those. You get into websites, um, from the, you might look at some reviews. You may or may not purchase it at that point. And that’s what, and that’s when you were aware of something that exists. Um, number two is your way that you need something, but you don’t necessarily know that there is a product for you out there.

For example, why fight in my house doesn’t work very well. I wonder what I can do about that. Usage for my wifi doesn’t work very well. And then you find that the arrange extenders and these mission, it works and a whole bunch of things that you didn’t know about. And now there are products that you become aware of.

That you didn’t know existed. Wow. I didn’t know that I could plug it in and extended into my electricity circuit and extend my wifi range out to the pool or whatever it might be. So that’s number two. You’re aware of the category or a need, but you don’t necessarily know that there is a product available for you.

The third one is you have no idea that there is a category. You have no idea that these things exist at all and you have no idea that you might possibly in quite quickly, absolutely depend on one of these things. So how that works is because you’re not aware of it, there’s no intent for you to look for it or search for it.

So we can’t find you and, and targets you by that. What we can do is talk to you by your interests and things that you are in to. Or your marital state, your age? Um, other demographics or lacks or topics that might be similar to the kind of things that we selling. And then we deliver you content that is bene or video based.

So those would be display ads. On various sites that you visit, so it’s a building site or a home craft site or mom and child site where there is information related to something you’re interested in. And then we can tell you, Oh by the way, mom, did you know that there is a pram that lets you do X, Y, and Z?

Oh, you didn’t, you didn’t even know the frames existed. That is the other way. It can work in video on YouTube. I’d work successfully on the social channels, whichever one you might be on, whether it’s Instagram or tech talk or Facebook or other. So you’ve got getting to you from you looking for something.

That you know exists. You’ve got getting’s you for looking for a category or a solution that you need where you don’t know a product exists and you’ve got getting to you via some other visual reference usually, or video where you don’t know that the things exist and you become aware of them. So the first stage in all of those as a witness.

So make sure that they’re in as awareness of the product and if he isn’t one, use visuals of video on social or target sites to make your customer aware that your product exists. Once you’ve done that, great, then they will search again. So they go back to option AOB. Um, then they visit websites, hopefully yours or partner websites.

Um, if you think about your own experience, you probably visited five or six websites looking for a product. You click on name, you look at, you read, you seen, maybe that’s the right one, maybe that’s not the right one. And you sit along two or three from there. You take those two or three, and you look at it in terms of, let’s see, reviews.

Let’s see what other people say that. See what experts say. So here you can. Pay for experts. You can write blogs, you can have independent third parties speak about it. You can hope that there is enough people out there that love your product so much that they review it. I think last time I looked at Seth Goden latest podcast, they were four reviews, probably one of the most influential and well known people in the world with four reviews on his podcast in its entirety.

So don’t rely on the good nature of people to do reviews. You may need to prompt them, Austin, full stop, five star services or ratings, or give them an incentive to share it. Those are the kinds of ways that you do reviews or you pay people to do things like unboxing or whatever it might be. Okay, so now they’ve reviewed it.

There’s an awareness stage, there’s a search stage, there’s narrowing down the things that you looking for. Then you do reviews and the reviews make you sit on one or two products. And then you may or may not purchase. If you purchase fantastic than to go to your site, they’re going to put in the details and again, to buy the product.

If they don’t, what do you do?

Well, they’ve already been through the search phase, so it’s pointless targeted, and it was searching in necessarily in terms of paid. And if you do, it’s a different kind of search. It’s based on absolute brand name, absolute product. The other way, of course, is things that happen to you everyday when she sits for something, you get remarketing material put to you.

So the banners or videos that come up that talk about the products or services that you’ve seen before and that you’ve looked for. If you’re a bit more sophisticated and you’ve signed up for a newsletter, you will probably get an email. Now those emails can say, can be generic and show you products or services that exist in general.

Or if your email service is more refined and put together in a bit of a better way with your eCommerce site, you may get served a, an email that’s tailored to you that says, Hey, I saw on the last day that you visited this product but you didn’t purchase it. Why didn’t you come back and buy it? And he has 10% off.

If you do. A few days later, you get another incentive and a few days off to bet you get another one. That kind of service is available through some of the email platforms and not all of them. So make sure you look around and see ones that allow that kind of level of sophistication and automation decision trees and things like that.

So once you’ve done that, you’ve got the awareness, you’ve got them searching, you’ve got them going to your website, you’ve got them looking at reviews. You’ve got them signing up for an email, maybe you’re doing remarketing to them, you sending them emails with discounts and special offers as to why they should do it, and then at some point they will make a decision to come back and purchase and once they come back to purchase, the next tape off to that is to try and upsell them to another product that is similar or better or an accompaniment to you might want to cross sell them as well.

And all you might want to ask them to leave reviews on the product so that other people can benefit from their knowledge of it. And the way you do that is make them feel special and make them feel as if they are part of your team rather than a customer

inside the phase where there is a decision happening or a potential decision, you need to look at. The life cycle of decision making. So whether it’s buying a toaster or a car or a house, how long does it take someone to go from ESM? Kind of interested to, I am going to purchase it today. If you know that number, then what you can do is you can put in remarketing and emails within their time period to persuade them to come and buy your product or brand or service.

So it might be five days, it might be five hours, it might be 25 days. Look at the industry that you’re in, so look at the product that you’re servicing and make sure that you hit them with at least two or three pieces of remarketing material if they haven’t purchased, don’t hit them with too many because there’s nothing worse than being bombarded with stuff that turns people off and they’ll never come back and don’t hit them with too few because they won’t remember you.

So to recap, awareness, make them aware that the product exists, let them search for it, and consider it through a whole bunch of different avenues, whether it’s websites or reviews or other, and then let them purchase it through your site and your reviews on it themselves so that other people can do it.

Among. Along those stages, there is a lot of content you can present to them. Bias, social bias, search via video by email, by SMS, via WhatsApp, by any channel that you choose or you where you think your customer might be. And then use that to get them to come back and hook them into buying your product.

That’s it for this week. Thanks so much for tuning in and I hope to hear from you soon in the show notes, there will be visuals that explain the sales funnel and little diagrams that explain what you should be doing in each phase. And the KPIs that possibly you might want to use and the metrics that you might want to use to ensure that your campaigns work.

Have an amazing week and we’ll chat again soon.