In this article, I am going to walk you through an effective strategy marketing plan example. We are going to talk about the sales funnel and its importance in your customer acquisition strategy to increase your business conversion rate and sales in the short term.
Many times, you don’t need a large investment or to spend much time deciding what action to take to increase your sales.
It’s indeed simply necessary to know which part of the funnel is failing to improve it, increasing that ratio instantly.
But first…
What is a Marketing Plan Example?
A colloquial definition of Sales Funnel would be “The way a company plans to attract a customer.”
It is basically the entire process from when the client interacts with your company until the moment you close the sale and get income.
This sales funnel is especially important as it will help you understand which part of the sales process is failing or needs to be improved in order to optimise it and raise your conversion rate.
“An analysis and monitoring of the sales funnel can help you improve the profitability of your business exponentially”
The sales funnel is used especially in e-commerce customer acquisition processes, since here, having a well-defined sales funnel may be the difference between billing $1,000 or billing $10,000.
Normally, although it depends on the company, the marketing department will be in charge of the design and monitoring of the sales funnel since it is necessary to use sales analysis and prospecting techniques that are not usually found in other departments of the company.
To understand this strategy marketing plan example, we first have to understand the definition of a lead.
Do you know exactly what a Lead is?
A lead in an Anglicism that refers to records with the data of those people who have shown interest in the offer of your brand, either through a request for additional information or by going to customer service points.
Phases or stages of the Sales Funnel
If you are wondering how to do a sales funnel correctly to improve the conversion of your website or business, here are the phases or stages and important points to take into account to improve the return of your marketing actions.
Lead, Data, or Contact – 1st Stage
This is the first stage of contact with your clients. At this stage, the client will find you and your funnel will begin to fill with leads or contacts. In this article, we explain step by step how to capture or generate leads, so read until the end.
“Remember: The content we use to capture leads in the TOFU (Top of the Funnel) stage should never be sales-oriented.”
Prospectus – 2nd Stage
At this stage, you have to identify and classify the leads generated first. It is very important because if you filter the potential clients correctly it will save you later commercial efforts.
In conclusion, a good prospect stage helps you not to invest time and money in those leads generated that are not really potential customers of your product or service.
Opportunity – 3rd Stage
This stage of your sales funnel begins when the potential customer became concerned about some content or an offer. By doing so, they convey to you that they need knowledge that they do not have and therefore, it is possible that they may need some of your services.
This stage would also include the case in which the contact is made by the company towards the client and the client responds by paying interest.
QUALIFIED OPPORTUNITY STAGE
Once we detect a sales opportunity, it is mandatory to qualify it.
How to qualify a sales opportunity?
Offline Media: Each seller must have a list of Smart Questions whose answers do not reach the end of the funnel and allow them to know what arguments they can use to close or abandon the opportunity.
Online Media: In online media, you will not be able to ask questions, so you must carry out a Lead Nurturing so that they advance faster through the funnel and Lead Scoring to score each lead based on the actions they take.
“Being able to detect what need, problem, or topic is of interest to the visitor will be necessary to develop a strategy based on providing solutions”.
Qualification – 4th Stage
At this commercial-stage, you will be able to determine what needs your lead has in order to offer them a product or service in line.
Offline Media: In many offline consumer goods, it is the case that the closing of the sale occurs at the same time as the classification or commercial visit.
Online Media: If your product is online, you should only have made the database correctly identifying all the interactions made by each Lead in order to offer exactly the product or service you need.
“The qualification stage or BOFU (Bottom of the Funnel) is the key to closing our sales cycle.”
Closing – 5th Stage
The closing is the last stage of the Sales Funnel. This stage will begin when you have closed the negotiation and the client accepts the order, purchase, or service.
Strategy Marketing Plan Example
– Example of marketing strategy plan in online marketing:
1) You can capture visits through articles on your blog offering information of interest.
2) At the end of each article, you offer different attractive content to get their data. For example, a free e-book on how to increase visits to their blog.
3) To download it, they will have to fill out a form with name, surname, email, and age. (Stage 1 – Lead, data, or contact).
4) You then filter the Leads that are older than 25 because you consider that they will be those blog owners willing to invest in online marketing (Stage 2 – Prospect).
5) You try to see what business opportunity you can find in the Lead according to the actions taken. You can try to determine these opportunities by offering them other attractive things that make them trust your brand and take an interest in the product. (Stage 3 – Opportunity).
6) In case they only downloaded the free e-book, you would rate it one way. If, in addition to the e-book, they signed up for a webinar on SEO tools, you would give them a higher score. Depending on all the content they download or the actions they take, you will consider it for the sale of one type of service, or another, or you will discard it. (Stage 4 – Qualification)
In this case, you can sell your audience for example:
-A course on SEO positioning for blogs.
-An article positioning service for their blog.
-A positioning tool from one of your affiliates.
7) If you have done well in the previous steps and you have detected exactly what the potential client needs, it is very likely that we will end up turning that Lead into a sale. (Stage 5 – Closing).
– Marketing strategy action plan example in offline marketing:
1) You distribute some flyers with your product or service.
2) The client finds your flyer and decides to call you to find out about web pages. (Stage 1 lead, data, or contact).
3) You filter those customers who seem to be more interested in the conversation. (Stage 2 leaflet).
4) You will detect what the client wants by asking them to say exactly what they need since there are many types of different web pages. (Stage 3 – Opportunity).
5) You offer them a product in line with their needs. The client wanted a page to be visible on the internet and to be able to write their news and articles. (Stage 4 – Qualification)
6) If the product fits what they need and the price is right, you will surely close the sale. (Stage 5 – Closing).
– Who should design the Sales Funnel?
The sales funnel belongs to the commercial department of the company, so it is recommended that the highest position in that department, or someone with experience, sufficient data, decision-making power, and a good analytical capacity make it.
The people who are usually in charge of designing the sales funnel are:
-Commercial Director.
-Marketing managers.
-Other senior managers.
-External digital marketing agency specialised in sales funnel creation.
“It is very important that the person in charge of the design of the sales funnel is the right one since a large part of the sales results will depend on this design.”
– Sales Funnel Maintenance and Optimization
If you have reached this point, it is because you are really interested in the sales funnel and its optimization, so I am going to tell you how you should correct your funnel and improve its optimization and achieve a higher conversion rate of your Leads.
How to optimize a strategic marketing plan template
-Follow-up or tracking: You must keep track of all your actions for further analysis.
-Data analysis from your sales funnel: Analyse the data obtained in the follow-up to control the effectiveness of each phase and the action taken.
-Actions measurement of the effectiveness: The conversion rate is an indicator of your funnel efficiency (Visitors / Sales). With it, you will know which actions work better and the ones which work worse to later make the appropriate changes.
-Optimise your actions: you must perform A / B tests for the actions which perform the worse. The use of the A / B test will allow you to discard the actions with the worst results for others that work better and thus achieve greater efficiency in your funnel.
