How to Use a Customer-Focused Approach to Build a High-Converting Funnel for Your Small Business

The success of your business depends on consumers making the transition from potential customer to paying customer. Funnels exist purely to help facilitate this process. Funnels can have varying layers of complexity, with some focusing on categories like brand awareness, imagery and even favorability. No matter what categories you’re using, your funnel needs to guide consumers through the four building blocks of a conversion:

Attention
Interest
Decision
Action

Let’s be frank: conversions matter. This is about more than just following a business plan. It’s about proving to investors that your business is making money and that there’s market demand for your product.

So, it only makes sense that businesses would choose to focus on the sales component of their business. While that’s certainly important, there’s something strange that happens when businesses put their profit margins above their customers.

Especially with the modern consumer, there’s a tendency to do business with the company that they like the most. Even if the option they like the most costs significantly more. So when a company responds to consumers with generic messages and no real sense of humanity in their social media accounts, it’s bound to leave a bad taste in the consumer’s mouth.

Your approach needs to be customer-focused because there’s no other successful way to run a small business in 2017. Customers have more options than ever before and these days, meaningful engagement with your community seems to be one of the easiest ways to show you put your customers first. If you want to ensure that you get repeat customers, you’re going to need to build that high-converting funnel with your customers in mind.

Start with a Crystal Clear Value Proposition

Before you start trying to build out a conversion funnel, you need to be establish a clear value proposition with your audience. Aside from making the process of grabbing a consumer’s attention (the first step in any high-quality funnel) that much easier, it jumpstarts the process of gaining a consumer’s interest. Two birds, one stone.

Why do some small business owners have issues with establishing clear value propositions? Well, some of them are worried their product/service won’t gain any traction in the market. After all, it’s difficult to be proud of calling yourself an entrepreneur if your business falls apart.

While some small business owners seem to think that the answer is to hide in the shadows and slowly hope that eventually their product gets traction...the best approach is to force that traction by showing people why they should choose your product/service over the competition’s. Don’t end up being one of those companies that preaches originality and then does exactly what their competitors are doing. Isolate your unique value proposition and use social media to promote it.

For example, let’s say you already have a sizable Instagram following. Instead of posting generic, corporate pictures promoting your own products like most of your competitors, break the mold. Take advantage of the naturally authentic presentation of Instagram Live videos and let consumers look behind the curtain and see how things are made onsite, to prove why your product is the best.

But it doesn’t end with Instagram. Host an impromptu Q&A through Twitter. Live stream an interview with an industry authority figure on Facebook Live. There’s plenty you can do to not only inject humanity into your brand, but showcase exactly what makes your business worth choosing.

Develop your Offer, Follow up with Testing and Set up Tracking

Once that value proposition has been established, it’s time to focus on developing your offer. Your audience is clearly interested, so now it’s time to help them make their decision. As the cornerstone of your funnel, you’re going to need to create an offer that tangibly, regularly converts! To be clear: the best funnel in the world won’t be able to support an offer that people simply don’t want.

It doesn’t really matter what kind of offer it is. It could be a product/service/software. What matters is that you should have offers that the market actually wants.

For example, you can having one really fantastic offer for a slightly lower price than you’d usually sell it for. That one purchase can end up being the catalyst for a list of purchases to come. But only if that offer is absolutely irresistible.

Absolutely none of this matters in the long-term without testing. Things like A/B testing, where businesses can test anything from different types of Facebook Ads to different emails sent out to potential customers, remove the guesswork and confusion from building a high-converting funnel.

Testing is something all of the best marketers and small business owners of the world do automatically, for the simple reason that metrics and data are the best tools a small business owner can use to make their decision.

If you’re worried that you haven’t had a funnel long enough to have a test, you’re not thinking about this the right way. With each test your business conducts, you’ll gain more data about what’s driving sales. The truth is -- you should’ve started tracking what drives sales the moment you created that business. When it comes to building a funnel, trying to develop it over time without using any data is like stumbling through the dark.

Start with small, easy to track funnels that will lend themselves to small tests and work your way up from there. You’d be amazed at what you could learn about the digital media marketplace just by tracking funnels.

On top of that, testing will help you increase your chances of converting. For example, let’s assume you had an email list and a Twitter follower count of the same length. Which do you invest more time into? The one that converts the most often, of course.

All this talk about testing leads us to one of the major sticking points of building this funnel: setting up tracking. Forget about your preconceived notions about your own product. Instead, turn all that attention towards your consumer and watch your business grow as a result.

What gets measured, gets managed. And what gets managed can be improved. By establishing an accurate tracking setup, you’ll no longer need to guess whether or not something worked. The beauty of implementing tracking into your funnel strategy is the cyclical nature of it. In a sort of upward spiral, your funnel can continue to determine what’s driving conversions and improve the effectiveness of your funnel over time. With the right data, your journey to creating the perfect high-converting funnel just got a lot simpler.

Drive Traffic, Draw Conclusions and Expand your Funnel

There are a variety of methods/practices that you could use to get people from the decision stage to the action stage, but for the sake of brevity, we’re going to focus on landing pages. There are actually a ton of ways to drive traffic to your landing page, so no need to worry.

Feel free to use anything from your blog and email ads to pay-per-click (PPC). What’s important here is to have a clear goal in mind when creating your landing page. Keep in mind that not all landing pages are designed to convert instantly. As long as your value proposition is still aligned with the customer’s interests, they’ll stick around. Eventually, you’ll want to create buyer personas and test on a smaller scale to see exactly which method works best for your small business.

Remember when you spent all that time on Instagram Live and Twitter, connecting with your audience on social media? It’s time to see just how much that authenticity helped your funnel. First, clearly determine how much you spent on Traffic Costs. Traffic Costs includes things like:

Google Adwords
Facebook Ads
Instagram Ads
Snapchat Geofilters
Youtube Ads

Then figure out Total Revenue by determining income, identifying sales and sales returns, and then subtracting sales returns from your sales. To calculate your ROI, subtract Traffic Costs from Total Revenue, then divide that by costs as a percentage.

From there, once you’ve armed yourself with all the information a small business owner could ask for, it’s time to supercharge your funnel. Make your unique value proposition as clear as possible, to ensure you gain the modern consumer’s attention and interest. Guide potential buyers down the path of conversions by developing your offer and helping them make a decision. Once you’ve done that, all that’s left is encouraging consumers to take action. To ensure your funnel converts more and more, you’ll be tracking the data and gradually building a stronger funnel over time.

Granted, there a dozen ways you could fundamentally change your business on the road to building a high-converting funnel for your small business. You might decide to create follow-up emails for buyers and non-buyers, a low cost front end offer that leads to your core offer or retargeting ads for different steps in your funnel.

The what isn’t nearly as important as the why. The only why that matters is “why does my customer want/not want this”. It might sound cliche, but who cares about ‘being cliche’ when your small business is converting?