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October 05, 2010 at 08:00 PM
This is the first of a five-part series on the components of the online marketing funnel.
Good news: Selling online isn’t that different than traditional selling. As in traditional sales, the successful Web agent sees their online marketing as a funnel. Breaking your online marketing down into components of the funnel will help you track and manage your online sales efforts. This also gives you the tools you need to identify and remove bottlenecks, resulting in a more efficient and profitable sales process. Over my next five articles, I’m going explain the five components of the online marketing funnel.
Components of online marketing funnel:
1. Attract
2. Engage
3. Convert
4. Retain
5. Refer
Component 1: Attract
Online marketing begins by getting visitors to your Web site. Whether they are people actively shopping for life insurance or casual Web browsers, you can’t begin to sell to prospects until you’ve got their attention. This means, very simply, that at the top of the funnel, you must get your prospects to your Web site.
Attracting visitors to your site
Several of the most effective ways to attract prospects through online marketing include:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Optimize your site to show up in search engines for phrases that your prospects are searching for. SEO is a long-term strategy that requires continuous effort but once in place, can be a tremendously valuable source of visitors.
- Pay-per-click Advertising (PPC) – Purchase ads where you pay every time someone clicks through to your site. Because anyone can purchase ads on a PPC network, this is an effective strategy for agents looking for quick traffic. Search engines such as Bing and Google, as well as social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn operate PPC ad networks.
- Link Building - Get other Web sites to link back to yours. The Web is by definition, connected. A great way to attract visitors is to proactively get other sites to link to yours. This could be as simple as commenting in message boards and blogs where you can link back to your site or as complex as contacting other site owners and requesting relevant links back to you.
- Off-line Marketing – Connect your offline marketing with your online marketing. Make sure your Web site is on everything you send out from business cards to brochures to letterhead. When someone ends up with a piece of off-line marketing from you, they’ll go to your Web site to learn more about you before they pick up the phone to call.
Measuring attraction
