The funnel in…

There are three stages to someone becoming a customer.  The first is the top of the funnel we’ve just mentioned, and this is ‘awareness’.  These are the people who you have made aware of your business, through advertising, vegan fairs, social media posting and all the other activity you have been diligently doing.  You want as many people as possible to be aware of your company but there’s no point in these people being aware if that’s as far as they go.  You get no money for a Facebook like!  If you keep spending energy and money on making people aware but few become a customer then you will soon run out of both of those resources.  You need to have a strategy for all these lovely new people who now know about you to take them to the next stage, which is ‘evaluation’.

When someone is at the evaluation stage it means they are not just aware of you, but they are actually thinking about buying from you.  This doesn’t mean that they will – I mean, how many things do you consider buying every year but don’t?  But knowing the process they go through means that you can create content and marketing aimed just at them.  This will be different from marketing aimed at just getting someone to know about you.  Some people will evaluate you in real detail, they might have a problem that your product solves but are currently evaluating you against a competitor.  Or they might be evaluating you in a more passive way, thinking that it would be quite cool to have what you sell and they could be convinced to buy.  The people who are evaluating you are the people you really need to focus on.  Being able to answer whatever question they have, presenting them with the right offer at the right time, or just giving them a healthy push will be the difference between them becoming a customer or drifting off.  And if you have a leaky bucket, ie you are not turning the people who are already aware of you into customers, then there’s no point keeping putting more water into the top of it.