What is aSales Funnel?
Let’s start at the beginning…
A sales funnel is a marketing strategy process designed to guide potential clients through a series of steps, with the ultimate goal of converting them into paying customers.
It’s a visual representation of the customer journey. Starting from the initial point of contact and leading them through various stages until they make a purchase or commit to your coaching services.
A typical sales funnel features the following stages:
So why do we need Sales Funnels?
They are a plan, a blueprint, and a strategy to follow. Fail to plan, plan to fail… or something like that 👀
For fitness coaches and personal trainers, sales funnels are essential to streamline the lead generation and client acquisition process.
A sales funnel allows coaches to nurture relationships with potential clients, providing valuable content, and building trust over time.
We’ve covered how important it is to build trust in our blog: 9 Strategies to Build Brand Trust >
By understanding your audience and guiding prospects through each stage of the funnel, coaches can increase generate more leads, increase conversion rates, and ultimately grow your business more effectively.
Stages of a sales funnel and what to do
Let’s look at the AIDA structure in a bit more detail.
Awareness: Attract potential clients through social media, content marketing (blogs, SEO etc.), and paid advertising. Offer free resources (lead magnets) such as e-books or workout guides to capture their interest.
Interest: Engage potential clients with informative content, so with client success stories, and testimonials. Showcase your expertise, skills and unique coaching approach to differentiate yourself from competitors.
Decision: This is getting close to the finish line now. Start presenting different coaching packages, and pricing options, and highlight the benefits of your services. Offer a free trial or consultation to encourage commitment.
Action: The business end. By now your prospective client is pretty red hot and ready for converting. Convert those red-hot leads into paying clients by providing a seamless signup or purchase process. Offer incentives such as limited-time discounts or bonuses to motivate immediate action.
How to create a sales funnel
Let’s dive into the key elements to make a successful sales funnel.
- Define Your Target Audience: Understand your ideal client’s needs, preferences, and pain points to tailor your funnel accordingly. Make sure you’re crystal clear on who you’re targeting. We’ve got some tips on how to do that on our lead generation blog >
- Craft Content like an Utter Legend: Create valuable and engaging content that resonates with your target audience at each stage of the funnel. So we’re talking about actionable content like lead magnets or webinars through to softer content like ‘get to know you’ reels and other posts that put some personality to your brand.
- Build Solid Landing Pages: Design dedicated landing pages for each funnel stage with clear calls-to-action. This is imperative to pushing leads from lukewarm to red hot. If they follow your beautifully curated content and land on a page that is pure turd, then they’re only going to do one thing – leave. The landing page needs to be a clear continuation of the content they’re seeing elsewhere.
Key: Don’t just point to a random page on your website, make it a dedicated one. - Implement a Slick Email Automation: Let’s say your funnel is offering a free lead magnet to your prospects. Once they’ve got their hands on the goods, set up an automated email sequence to nurture them and guide them through the funnel.
- Track and Analyse the Heck Out of it: Monitor the performance of your funnel, identify any bottlenecks, sort them out and continually optimise for better results.
Steal our sales funnel
Need a head start? Here’s a simple sales funnel template that we’ve used, all you need to do is adapt it to your own lead magnet.
Sales Funnel Type: Free Lead Magnet Offer
Step 1: Spread the word about your lead magnet, and tell people why they’ll benefit from having it in their lives. Do this through organic social media posts and even paid media channels too.
Tip: Your lead magnet could be a free upper/lower split training guide or perhaps a free recipe book.
Step 2: Direct your prospective leads to a kick-ass landing page that is simple and clear. Include a clear CTA and make sure it’s a simple process for them to access to your free download.
Need some inspo? Here’s our landing page >
Step 3: Your prospective lead has downloaded your lead magnet. So what are you doing with their details…? Answer: EMAILING THEM!
Follow up with a series of valuable emails, sharing success stories and testimonials from happy clients. The aim here is to provide value but to also try and engage.
We don’t want to just spam leads with a load of marketing material so again, go back to your target audience profile and provide solutions to some of their pain points in your emails.
Top tip: Ask them for their feedback on lead magnet too – bit of market research for you there!
Step 4: Now that your lead is securely in your email sequence, they know who you are, and what you do. They’re consuming your content across all your marketing channels so now it’s time to give them an unmissable reason to take the plunge with you as their coach.
Present them with a time-sensitive offer for your coaching services, providing an unmissable reason to take action. As an example… ‘For the next 48hrs, your first month of coaching is FREE’
Step 5: The close. Your lead is now a client, great right? But the nurturing doesn’t stop there.
Your onboarding sequence needs to complete the funnel in the most seamless way. Provide a warm welcome to your new client with a slick process that’s packed full of information and gets them ready and raring to go!
And that’s it. Happy funnel building!
Key takeaways
- A sales funnel can be adapted to suit whatever type of sales process you’re looking to implement in your fitness business.
- It’s all about nurturing your prospective lead all the way through to a respected and loved client!
- The top of the funnel can be where a lot of the hard work happens for very little reward or return, don’t despair or lose interest, keep on driving your content and things will fall into place over time.
what's next?
You’ve got a couple of options.
- If you haven’t already, have a read of our 7 Tips to Create a Fitness Brand >
- Get a FREE slide deck template and level-up your next client presentation or use it as an effective lead magnet
keep up to date
Thanks for reading our blog, we hope it’s offered some help in your own fitness website build. If you’ve got any comments or questions, please feel free to leave them on here or drop us an email on [email protected] and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.
We’ve got more blogs for you here > Make sure you check back regularly to keep up to date with all things fitness branding.
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