You’ve got your website up and running, and now you want to know what to do next to progress your business. Read on as we look at how to craft sales funnels for your business.

No matter what service you provide, setting up sales funnels can make all the difference for both you as a business owner and your clients and website visitors.

You’ve probably already heard of the words ‘sales funnels’ but may not know what the definition of the word is in practice.

A sales funnel can be described as an enchantment experience as part of which you’re offering value to your prospects in a sequential manner. The goal is to carry them through the stages of buying. This is from an ‘Unaware’ stage to an activation stage, to a conversion stage before making them an irresistible offer and converting them into loyal customers.

The initial goal is to enchant them by giving them a lot of value upfront, before any consideration of sales, they can then develop trust in you and the value you can provide.

So know you know what a sales funnel is, you are probably asking how do you go about crafting sales funnels for your service business. In this post, we are going to examine what the process is so that you can see how easy it is for you to start monetizing your service business website. You can then apply this new knowledge to your own business and begin reaping the rewards.

Here’s an outline of the process of crafting sales funnels for your service business:

1. Market research
2. Develop a complementary lead magnet
3. Push traffic to your content
4. Give value and pleasantly surprise your prospects
5. Your funnel will close the sale for you
6. Make the sale

Let’s dive right in and discover what you need to do next.

#1 Market research

Your first task will be to do some homework on your target market. You may have even already explored who you are looking to attract to your website. If this is the case then you’ll already have a good understanding of what content you’ll need to create. Here are some questions that will help you to gain clarity on the content of your website:

• What will your visitors need to know?
• What problems do they need to solve?
• How can they solve those problems?

You’ll need to start with creating the first pieces of content, keeping in mind that the content will need to contain answers so that it’s valuable to your audience.

#2 Develop a Complementary Lead Magnet

The lead magnet is there to identify people who are in urgent need of a quick win relative to the problem you’re solving. That allows you to isolate them and get them into the funnel so they can go through that enchantment experience. You can then lead them to a sale after having established the trust that comes from providing upfront value.

When it comes to enticing people to sign up to your subscriber list, you can create new content or repurpose content that you already have. You can create materials for your prospects by either expanding on the content of the original article or go into depth on an aspect of the material. For example, you could create any of these pieces:

• A video
• A checklist
• Swipe files
• Infographics
• Cheatsheet
• A report on how to do something

The main thing to remember is to keep it simple. You should be able to create it within a day.

#3 Push Traffic to Your Content

Now that you’ve created your content, you’ll need to add it to your website. You might choose to add it to the end of one of your blog posts or articles on your site. Alternatively, some people want to create an individual landing page for it. Wherever you put it, the way that you’ll be sending traffic to it is by posting it onto social media and adding a link, using paid advertising or linking to it from other websites such as Medium.

#4 Give Value and Pleasantly Surprise Your Prospects

Once you have started to capture people on your list, they will be expecting you to communicate with them and provide them with some solutions. This is an opportunity to surprise them by delivering some value-packed content in the form of webinars, masterclass training, case studies and anything that they can learn from for FREE. It’s a chance to tell them about you and why you are uniquely qualified to give them the best help on this topic. For example, you have ten years of experience in the business coaching industry.

#5 Your Funnel Will Close the Sale for You

Now that you’ve established trust with your prospects, your funnel should guide your visitors into the sales page of your offers. Your audience has signed up to you with the hope that you can help them and in many cases, they will be ready to spend to access those solutions, no matter which form you provide answers in – ie video, audio, ebook etc.

#6 Make the Sale

Now that you’ve made a sale; it’s not “game over”. It is now time to start upping the ante. The best preparation you can make for this is to create a series of 7 to 10 emails that can let them get to know more about you and helps them with their problems. It’s also a time to gradually move the prospect from not knowing much about the topic and your relevant solutions to something they can buy.

Overall

As you consider what you need to add to this series, review the content that your prospects read to find your lead magnet. Now it is your task to expand it, go deeper into it and inspire them to think and learn about it.

The good thing is, is that once you have set your funnels, you can forget them except for sometimes checking that all the information contained is current. There are several autoresponder systems that you can use with landing page options. For example, convertkit.com, leadpages.net is good for landing pages or you could use drip.com for emails.

Your sales funnel system all needs to be designed to flow seamlessly. The topic needs to be suited to your list members, and they need to find it easy to make use of your offers and respond to your calls to action. Think about what the next step would be for your readers and what tool or product they need from you to be able to do it.

By putting yourself into their shoes and considering what they need, you will help you to be successful with sales funnels in your service business.

In summary, you now know how to craft a sales funnel for a service business, and it’s time to get going on giving your target market all the answers they are seeking. If you get the balance right, you’ll soon be making your first service business sales.