Lead Generation Funnels – How They Work & Why You Need Them

Running a business and being successful at it will require you to think about multiple different things and use various strategies aimed at gaining customers and generally growing. In simple words, you’ll need to have a development strategy and establishing how your business will generate leads is a significant part of that strategy. This might help you understand what a lead is in the first place.

Having a website but not using the right techniques and tools to make it work for you is just like not having a website at all. I suppose you understand this already and I am quite sure that you have already thought about using at least a few different digital marketing methods that can make that site work for you. As you probably know, generating leads is a huge part of the whole process, meaning that your techniques will have to be aimed towards that.

Since we are on that topic, let me ask you one question right away. Have you heard of lead generation funnels yet and do you even know how those work? If not, then I say it’s time to change that. These funnels are extremely important when it comes to the process of generating leads and chances are that you won’t be successful at that endeavor if you don’t use the funnels to your advantage. Since you might not be sure what these are, how they work and why you actually need them, I’ve decided to try and answer those questions for you below.

What Are Lead Generation Funnels?

Unsurprisingly, we are going to start with the most basic stuff here. To put it simply, a lead generation funnel is actually the process of “funneling” prospects through a series of significant steps that they need to take in order to turn into leads that are highly likely to eventually convert into paying customers. Getting paying customers is the ultimate goal and I’m sure you understand the importance of taking the right steps towards that goal.

A lot of prospects will enter your lead funnels in the very beginning and, as they proceed to each stage, people will eventually drop out. This might worry you, but it is actually a good thing, since it means that you will filter out and eliminate all those prospects that aren’t quite a good fit for your particular services or products. Thus, when you reach the end of the funnel, the people that are left will actually be the perfect contacts that have the highest chances of converting into customers. In few words, this process filters out people that aren’t a good fit and leaves you with those individuals that are most likely ready to pay for your products and services.

How Do They Work?

If you want to understand how this whole process works, picturing a real life, physical, funnel will actually be quite helpful. Basically, you take a large amount of prospects and take them down this funnel until you are left with converting leads. There are various different stages that the prospects have to go through during the whole process and those stages serve both to eliminate the not-so-great prospects, as well as to attract the perfect ones.

The first stage is aimed at raising people’s awareness about something you have to offer and about your whole business in general. In this phase, you work towards driving traffic and building up a large audience. You should never try and sell something in this initial stage, as chances are that you will simply scare of any future leads and paying customers. You need to take it slowly.

After raising awareness, your next step should be to gather the data that you have collected during those efforts of getting people familiar with your whole brand. The data usually include names and e-mail addresses. By gathering those, you will get to create a database of potential customers, which is undoubtedly extremely important.

Once you have created the database, it’s time to start engaging your prospects. You will need to take steps towards encouraging your potential leads to engage with you and the content that you are sharing. For example, you might want to have them sign up for your newsletter, attend your online events or take any similar actions. The people who don’t engage in this stage are highly unlikely to reach the end of the funnel and become your paying customers.

Here are some reasons why these funnels are rather important for you: https://www.b2bleadblog.com/funnels/

Managers and marketing specialists will do their research on all the contacts that pass through the engagement stage, since those are the ones that have the highest potential of turning into paying customers. Most likely, the people that have reached the end of the funnel will be quite interested in what you have to offer. That further means that they are extremely likely to become your customers.

Why Do You Need Them?

If you aren’t quite sure why you need a lead generation funnel, then you probably haven’t been paying attention to what I’ve been talking about above. We have gone through the whole process and explained how these work, meaning that you must have realized their importance as well. In any case, some things are worth repeating and this is undeniably one of those, so I won’t mind telling you in short once again why you need these funnels.

In simple words, this technique helps you not only generate high quality leads, but also eliminate those poor quality ones right at the very beginning. This means that you won’t waste your time on poor leads and that you won’t end up scaring off some great ones by going too quickly with the process of turning those visitors into customers. A lead generation funnel helps you take all the right steps towards actually turning those prospects into leads and then later into customers, which is a rather significant technique that every single business can benefit from.