If you are wondering why you’re not getting enough views on your ads or how to make your ads more effective, you should start digging deeper into the marketing funnel. A marketing funnel is the visual description of your customer’s journey, from being someone who doesn’t have an idea, a stranger, if you will, of your company to a loyal customer. You can think of marketing funnel as a salesman that will convince a user to buy your products. Through this article, you can go step by step and learn some strategies to convert users into customers.

1. Awareness

This is the first stage of the marketing funnel. Your potential customers will be attracted to this stage through marketing campaigns. This is the first time your potential customers notice your brand so this stage is all about making sure that the right people are getting your message.

Be different and have a presence in social media

Having a presence in social media is a must, your potential customers might already be out there, you just need to reach them. To build awareness of your brand, it is important for you to find what makes you distinct from your competitors. You need to stand out from the crowd and make people notice you. Make sure to have high-end photos on your site. Remember, it’s important to have good quality photos since they are the only comparison point your customers have. Add your logo and an attractive headline.

Each social media platform differs from each other the same way target audiences differ, so if you are advertising on Twitter but all your personas are on Facebook, you won’t attract any customers.

Engage with your audience and take advantage of SEO

Engagement is all about creating meaningful interactions with your audience and it could be done through paid ads or organic reaches. Organic reach is more meaningful and lasts longer, that’s why it is crucial that every post or for the replies be personalized if you are sharing news about your business or blog contents. Customers need to feel that behind the social media account, is a real person just like them.

The more comments, shares, likes your post has, the higher the SEO will be. That’s why the content should be meaningful and eye-catching enough for both your customers and potential customers to want to share. Create a voice, hashtags to differentiate from others so it would be easier for your customers to find.

Invest some Ads budget on social media

You want everyone to notice you and to do so, you need to start investing in advertising. Post engagement will allow you to reach more people with a relatively lower budget. During this phase they need to know that you exist rather than throwing all your products in social media. Create reach content that will attract their attention to you, photos, videos, polls. Think as if you were in their shoes.

Start Retargeting Ads

Did you know that people need to watch the same information 7 times to remember it? Suppose you’ve already spent some money on getting traffic to your website, so make sure you’re fully prepared to convert those visitors into customers. Here is where retargeting comes into place and during the awareness campaign is a great moment to start using it. In other words, retargeting reaches the audiences who have interacted with your page and drive more traffic to your website. Ako Retargeting offers the three kinds of retargeting campaigns and for this step of the funnel you should consider using: engager retargeting ad since it reaches the audiences who have interacted with your page and drive more traffic to your website.

2. Evaluation

In this stage, it is important for you to create a deeper relationship with your customers and introduce them to your products and services. You will now need to work on your credibility.  Your target audience will determine whether or not they want to go with you. In this stage, sales and marketing work together to convince the customer to buy the product and why is perfect for them. Here are some suggestions:

Create contents that matters

You want to give your current or potential customers content that catches their attention since they are willing to learn more about your company at this point.

You might be wondering, what kind of content should you send to the people that are subscribed? Let’s look at this example, you are selling baking tools on your website. The content you could include in your emails and post could include:

• Recipes using the products you sell.
• Iconic people or influencers using your products and what they think about them.
• Cooking workshops or webinars

These are some examples of how to create contents that your target audience might be interested in.

Rating apps

Think of the last time you purchased a product without reading reviews or asking a friend for their opinion. How did the uncertainty make you feel?

Be sure to add a review button to your site so customers can leave their comments. Shopify has great integrations with various apps such as Judge.me. This social proof will increase your conversion rate, organic traffic, buyer engagement, and of course, your credibility.

Invest in more ads and retarget them

Now that you are in the next phase of your funnel, you can start to observe the behavior of the people that are visiting your site. Once you have the information you can start investing in different kinds of advertising. There are another two ways that you can reach your customer through retargeting:

1. Reach the audiences who have visited your website/product pages or have abandoned their carts.
2. Convert your visitors who have visited your product pages or abandoned their carts through dynamic product ads.

This strategy lets you choose who you want to retarget regardless of the current status in the marketing funnel.

With this tool, you can convert your visitors into customers at any time.

3. Purchase

Your potential customer has decided to purchase your product!  

Upsell

Once your customer has agreed to make a purchase, it’s a great strategy to upsell your products. Upselling is a technique that works 60-70% of the time, once customers agree to pay a certain price, it is easier to convince them to pay more. Everyone likes to receive more for less. Candy Rack helps you to set up your upselling campaign to your customers by offering extra services, free gifts and/or related product bundles.

Free gifts or Gift cards

Everyone loves free gifts, and whenever you are offering free gifts to your customers they will tend to buy more in order to get the prize. Gift Box can help you to implement this experience into online shopping. This strategy will keep your customers motivated to buy more products on your website. With this app you can customize the experience you want your customer to have, from “Spend only $10 more to get free shipping, gift wrap, gift card or free product”, offer products and services for free even set the number of gift cards they can access too.

Guest Post by Akohub

Pammela Murphy, Content Marketing & Partnerships, Akohub

Akohub helps merchants turn website visitors into customers with Full-Funnel Retargeting Campaigns. The Ako Retargeting app also recovers your abandoned carts and increases sales conversion rates. Feel free to try their 14 days of the free trial from Shopify App Store.