The Next Phase of Your Marketing Funnel: Consideration
Let’s continue to plan out your marketing funnel. We have had several lessons on the funnel itself, the awareness and interest phase – which is all about lead magnets. And now that you have a Lead Magnet and people are signing up, you are now in the consideration phase of the funnel. People will start to consider you, your product or service as their solution.
They obviously had a problem or a question and downloaded your lead magnet as a step to try to solve that problem. Now, you need to begin nurturing these folks to take them one step further… and consider you as the solution.
Keeping the interest of audience members who have given you permission to market to them is a very important part of the sales funnel. If you plan your content and information correctly you can move them faster to the purchase phase.
Known as the Consideration Phase in your sales and marketing funnel, this is the step in which you communicate to leads and prospects what you have to offer beyond your initial connection with them.
Your leads (prospects) at this point may know they need the product or service by now, but they need more information to determine that it’s the right solution for them. This involves a lot more information (like the interest phase), but information that’s more in-depth, focused and personalized.
You want to focus more on identifying the pain points of your customers and showing them how your programs, services or products will specifically help them get the solution they have been searching for.
Here are 6 ways to get your leads to take more time to consider you as a solution.
- Consultation Calls, Webinars & Teleseminars – All of these offer a way to ‘speak to’ your prospects directly. Depending upon the nature of your product or service these can be in person or via group webinar/ teleseminar, recorded or live on-air where you can answer questions directly. It can be a 15-minute free consult. (I was once against offering these to a mass audience other than as a one-to-one consult offer, but I am coming around because there is value in taking 20 minutes to talk one-on-one to people.)
- Content Upgrades – Send your email list recipients and leads who signed up for a lead magnet, additional content. A Content Upgrade. This can be an additional eBook, checklist, short report, long report, a full ebook – anything that showcases more of what you have to offer. You can even point them to a book you published on Kindle when you’re having a free or low-cost promotion. The trick is to continue to nurture them after they downloaded your lead magnet, not only to keep their interest but to show them the value you offer to them via your services and products.
- Private Groups – Invite your audience to join you on your private Facebook group or other avenue online where you can have a private group where they feel like they have more personal access to you in order to build trust. Six years ago everyone was dumping Facebook groups for Pages, but now many are getting back into them. They offer a very easy way to build the Know, Like, Trust Factor and the solution ultimately is a paid program or service you offer.
- Demonstrations – Show people visually how your products or services help people. You can record and post the demo as a video blog or article, or even make it into an eBook sample, or conduct live demos via Facebook Live Videos or Webinars.
- Testimonials – Ask others to tell about what your product or service did for them. Encourage this activity by having a contest. You can showcase these as blog posts or even in emails. Some people are having great success with image or video testimonials they share on social media.
- FAQs – Using questions people have asked in the past, or questions you feel that your audience may have to develop a FAQ. Create an email series addressing each issue in your FAQ to help overcome objections. Create your FAQ based on potential objections.
Getting personal with your audience at this point will help pull them toward trusting you more and buying from you. First, you need to convince them that your product or service is better because of you. You can demonstrate this via the content you put out on social media, emails, on your blog, and in other channels.
Learn to do more with your marketing by understanding the Foundations of Content Marketing with this free guide.
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