(This BrandPro article is the first in a series of five articles that discuss the process of “Turning Prospects into Lifetime Customers.”)
(This BrandPro article is the first in a series of five articles that discuss the process of “Turning Prospects into Lifetime Customers.”)If you’re in marketing or business, you might have heard of the popular AIDA Formula. AIDA is an acronym for Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. It’s the process that we marketers often use to create a customer and build customer relationships. Now it’s more common to see what we call the Marketing Funnel, or Sales Funnel. The Marketing Funnel takes a new twist on the old AIDA Formula. It presents a visual diagram that helps us understand how to turn a prospect into a lead, a lead into a customer, and a customer into a lifetime, repeat customer. When using the Marketing Funnel, our main goal is to develop lifetime customers—because it’s much easier to sell to existing customers than constantly trying to attract and sell to new ones.
The Marketing Funnel
The Marketing Funnel isn’t “one size fits all.” There are many versions of it out there because it needs to be adopted and customized to best fit your business’s needs and sales process. For the next few weeks, this BrandPro Blog series will focus on each part of the following Marketing Funnel, as it pertains to digital marketing.
A Quick Overview
Each phase of the Marketing Funnel has its own unique goal and includes various tactics that can be used to achieve its goal. Here’s a brief introduction to each phase, in which we will go into more depth in the weeks to come.
Attract
During the Attract phase, your main goal is to draw attention to your business, products and/or services. If done well, you will reach the broadest set of targeted, potential customers. In this phase, you will most likely increase brand awareness.
Engage
Once you have attracted the attention of your target customers, you want to begin to engage with them as a brand. In this phase, target customers become prospects. They are not only aware of you, but they’re interested in you. Your goal is to engage with them and instill a desire to do business with you—a desire to buy your products or services.
Convert
As you filter out your prospects, your next step is to convert them into leads. During this phase, prospects act on their need, want or desire for your product or services and ask for more information. At this point, depending on where the lead is in the sales cycle, he or she may quickly decide to purchase and become a customer, or it may take a little nurturing before the lead decides to do business with you.
Nurture
There are two parts to the Nurture phase. On one end, you are nurturing your leads and continuing to build your relationship with them in order to turn them into customers. On the other hand, you need to nurture your current customers and instill a loyalty so that they will become lifetime, repeat customers. Remember, the main goal of utilizing the Marketing Funnel is to get targeted prospects to this end of the Funnel and become lifetime customers. The Nurture phase is critical because it’s much more efficient to sell to current customers who will potentially spend more with you on an annual basis than it is to constantly acquire new customers.
In the next article of our “Turning Prospects into Lifetime Customers” series, we will dive deep into the Attract phase of the Marketing Funnel and give you actionable tactics that will help attract attention to your business, product or service.