It may seem simple to conduct social media marketing, especially if you only want to engage with the audience. But when you want lead generation online in Singapore, there is much more to it because you must consider the sales funnel for your digital marketing.

Marketing and Sales Funnel

Consumers are moving from in-store to online purchasing. But it does not mean that selling your products or services online is simpler. Usually, the sales funnel does not remain in its boundaries. Even though the stages of digital marketing are similar to those of sales funnel, digital marketing has to attract customers without having the real item in front of them. You must surpass all your rivals and avoid all social media distractions to achieve this.

How can you attract users to click on your content and stay on your website long enough to buy your brand? The process is not complete even after the customers making a purchase. How do you handle all the mess on the internet to make the clients come back to your website again and again?

Steps Taken To Attract An Online Buyer

1. Awareness

Implementing the stages of a digital marketing funnel is a slow process although social media is fast-moving in nature. You need time to develop a following, a reputation, and a fan base. It involves more than offering free items and discounts. It is about developing relationships with the current, past, and future clients.

You can use the following tips to increase your brand awareness to the target audience:

• Giveaways

Using social media giveaways is one of the most popular ways of lead generation in Singapore. It is a simple strategy to attract attention to your products and profiles while making your clients feel appreciated and excited.

A research done in Singapore showed that 80% of users tend to purchase after getting a recommendation from family and friends. Social media increases the rate at which word of mouth travels and how far it can go. So, take advantage.

Giveaways normally direct users to share a post, like a page, or tag a friend to enter into the draw. The reason for doing all these is to enhance the awareness of your brand. With this, you are increasing your online followers, and your posts are being shared to people outside your circle of followers, and this keeps individuals engaged.

The aim of giveaways is not to increase purchases, but to enhance brand awareness, product interest, and user engagement. All these aspects are crucial to pass people through your sales funnel for lead generation.

• Page Likes

Advertising and social media features have developed to a point where nobody has to like your page on Facebook to view its content, especially when you want to boost your posts. Regardless of the advancement in technology, digital marketing sales funnel remains a game of numbers that depends on attracting masses of people and converting a small portion. So, social media is a contest for popularity. And this is the reason why businesses, even the leading ones in the industry, regularly run ads to attract page likes.

Increasing the number of followers on social media platforms does not increase your sales directly, but it is very beneficial. Since these individuals are going for your content, the ones who like your page are likely to engage and respond to your promotions and posts.

Your ability to maintain close relationships with the consumers with or without a deal is what develops consumers to become loyal brand customers. Page likes drive users to your business, and hence into your sales funnel.

• Content

Now that you have a large audience, you have to determine how to retain them. One of the benefits of social media is spreading information quickly and attracting more individuals into your digital marketing sales funnel without requiring to make a purchase.

Research shows that 78% of social media users in Singapore do not make their purchasing decisions based on the posts of the companies they follow. Making your followers to buy your brand using social media is not as easy as it seems. Taking your clients through the sales funnel works slowly, but it is very beneficial in the long run. Pushing consumers to buy your brand does not work out in your favour.

Ensure that your posts on social media add value to the consumers without getting out of topic. You need to ensure that your interested consumers travel down through your sales funnel. The use of quality content is to develop a desire for your brand by giving information that is relevant and valuable to the audience.

Sharing customer testimonials and blog posts can assist you to supplement your brand. They will make it relevant to the needs of your audience. It is good to include a call to action on your posts, but customers are likely to buy more if you assist them to conclude that on their own.

2. Interest

As mentioned above, digital marketing involves more than attaining purchases. Social media ads offer various metrics that can assist you to track how your ads are doing and the reaction of your audience is reacting. They include the following:

• Click Through Rates (CTRs)

You can calculate the rate of click-through by dividing the total number of individuals who embark to your website by the total reactions generated. A high proportion of click-through shows that your ads are booming. It shows the amount of interest generated by your ad, but it does not warrant conversions.

It is one of the key metrics to focus on if you wish to optimise your ads. A CTR less than 2% indicates that you need to adjust to match the interests of your targeted users.

• Landing Page Views

Regardless of your business goals, you want to guide people to your website. Your website is the arena where customers will learn about your brand, your business, and your reputation. Before executing your ads, you need to ensure that your Facebook Pixel is correctly installed so that you can track the individuals visiting website. Landing page views enlighten you of the individuals who are sincere among those who are interested in your ads.

Links clicks might give an inaccurate value of the number of individuals who visited your web pages since the pixel intended to record the actions after each click. It could involve those who clicked accidentally or those who could not delay until your site can load.

For landing page views, the information is accurate since it counts the number of individuals who have visited your website and viewed the content in it. The purpose of your site is to drive people to your website. Your website then either entices them to make a purchase or drives them away.

Google learned that individuals take 0.05 seconds to decide whether they will stay on your site or not. For this reason, it is crucial to evaluate the appearance of your website and enhance its speed.

The first feelings count. A research done in Singapore in 2016 showed that a better user experience boosts the rates of conversion by 400%. The storefront of your online business is your website. Therefore, its appearance plays a crucial part in the size of your business and user experience.

• Link/Traffic Links

Avoid focusing only on reaching customers when you want to track the performance of your ads. Reach involves the number of individuals who have observed your ad, but this is not as important as the number of individuals who have acted upon the ad.

Link clicks are the number of individuals who have clicked on your ad to your site. It is a useful indicator of the portion of your audience that is getting into your online marketing sales funnel.

Facebook allows you to create groups of individuals who engage with your ads. Thus, even if you will not generate many purchases from your link clicks, you will be able to sell to those people again in future.

3. Decision

Retargeting

Most methods of traditional marketing do not offer this step, and this is one of the significant differences between an ordinary sales funnel and a digital marketing funnel. It is intended to summon up the people who have left your sales funnel before making a purchase and bringing them back.

Retargeting has demonstrated to be very useful in attaining the best results time and again. However, your ads require time to run and build up data to get a quality audience that you can retarget.

You can track specific actions on your website using Facebook’s Pixel to remarket your brand to particular visitors. You should give them a reason to return to your website. Most clients do not make purchases on their initial visit to your site. Mostly, it is because they need to conduct extra research about your business, or they were unprepared. No matter the reason, if the users agree to sail through your ad to your site and buy, they have an interest in your brand. You only need to push them a little more.

It is important to remind your customers of the beneficial items that you still deal with even after they have made a purchase. But ensure that you utilise fresh graphics to remarket. Using the same ad for a prolonged period will make it look like spam or too pushy.

4. Conversions

This is the last stage in the online marketing sales funnel. Studies show that 65% of individuals disconnects with a brand over only one terrible experience. Hence it is very critical to develop an outstanding user experience. It is expected that user experience will surpass even the services or products offered by 2020.

Creating a good consumer experience will not only increase your income but also assist you to keep your visitors and convert them to your loyal customers. After all the efforts of earning your customers, the most effective method of ensuring increase profits and business growth is retaining these clients.

Here are some ways to increase your rate of conversion:

• Refreshing Ads

It is not confident that you will get conversions even at this final stage of the sales funnel. You should not abandon your ads regardless of the prosperity they offer to your business. Customers are likely to get bored by your brand if they continue seeing the same ads.

There is no specific time when you need to add a few new ads to your digital campaign. Various aspects determine the rate at which people get used to your ad. They include the delivery platform, budget and target market.

Lucky enough, some metrics show alerts after your ads have existed for three months. Imagine seeing the same ad popping up on your feed for more than three times. Most likely, you will not click the ad because it seems too pushy. So, you should optimise your ads by adding new graphics when the average times the audience has observed your ad gets close to three.

• Email marketing

The transaction may have ended, but your sales funnel has not stopped there. Creating an email list gives you an added value because the subscribers have already interacted with your brand before. They have already shown their interest in your products, so they are a superior target market.

Studies show that consumers who buy through emails in Singapore use 138% more than the individuals who do not receive emails. However, mastering email marketing is more difficult than social media. Individuals hate receiving spam emails. So, ensure that your emails remain relevant to the users.

Email marketing is one of the simplest ways of ensuring that you remain relevant to your previous and current customers, and ensuring they stay in your sales funnel. However, avoid overdoing it since people don’t like a lot of promotional messages in their emails. Sending a lot of emails might get your email marked as spam.

7 Costly Lead Generation Mistakes you should avoid completely

It is every Singapore business owner goal to get high value client and create campaigns that deliver a consistent flow of qualified leads. So far, we have focussed on the various lead generation strategies that you can use to achieve this goal.

Let us now look at the seven common mistakes that you should avoid when doing lead generation in Singapore. Pay attention to each mistake to avoid losing money on online marketing strategies that do not resonate with your brand.

1# Lack of Background Information about the Audience

If you do not have background information about the target audience you intend to sell the products or offer the services to in Singapore, all your lead generation strategies will fail. This is based on the fact that it will be difficult to come up with the right message and offer.

The wrong message and offer means that you will not succeed in grabbing their attention and holding it throughout the sales funnel. You will also not be able to compel them to take the next step.

Take the time to carry out extensive research about your audience. Get to know their interests, needs, demographics, pain points, curiosities, and pleasures. All this information will help you come up with digital marketing campaigns that will promote your lead generation efforts.

2# Being to General/Generic

In the current fast-paced and competitive Singapore digital market, you cannot afford to be just basic, general or generic in your quest to generate quality leads. One thing that you need to understand is that the target customers are not looking for a brand that will solve general problems, but specific problems that they have been struggling to resolve.

Take a deeper look at your Singapore business model and if it is too general, look at the areas you can specialise or focus on fully. More customers will look up to your brand when you focus on one thing and you will also get recommendations. Remember word of mouth is still a powerful marketing method. In addition, you will also be able to negotiate better prices or rates as a specialist.

3# Poor Positioning

Along with having a clear understanding of the target customers, you need to know your brand and yourself. What you stand for, the values, and emotions that you want to elicit should be expressed through your message.

Otherwise, your brand will eventually lose its true essence and you will fall in the “Me Too Business” category.  Use your message to inform your audience not only what you stand for but also the things that you stand against. Give them a snippet view of the:

• Personality behind your brand
• What you have
• How it is different
• Benefits it offers.

4# No Value Proposition

This point basically means that you want something for nothing. That is, if you want a potential customer to give you their phone number, address, or email address, you have no option but to offer something that is of value to them in return. If you do not do that, then do not expect much result.

Look at what you can offer to prospects that are already at a certain stage in the sales funnel at no cost. The offer should be worthy and relevant to them. Otherwise, they will not feel motivated to take the desired action. The offer does not have to be expensive or a physical product; it can be a whitepaper or a webinar that explains how your product works.

The information should demonstrate that you are an expert in your niche to gain their trust and confidence. In fact, this is one of the lead magnets that most of the professional Singapore digital marketers use to encourage new clients to place an order.

5# Lack of a Robust Referral System

As a business owner, you should strive to get a consistent flow of referrals from past clients who are satisfied with what your brand offers. However, you should not expect that you happen if you have not put in place a robust referral system.

The online shoppers trust recommendations from other customers and peers than company reviews and product descriptions. Organise a meeting with your in-house marketing team and come up with a referral system that is custom to your business. Note that referrals are warm qualified leads that do not cost anything up front and as we mentioned earlier on this article, word of mouth is still one of the most powerful marketing strategies today.

6# Trying to be Everywhere

One of the downsides of internet marketing is that we have thousands of dishonest marketers who fail to deliver on their promises. As a professional digital marketer in Singapore who is determined to get your business to the next level of success, avoid following the hype.

For example, if your target audience spend most of their time on Facebook, don’t waste time and resources marketing through LinkedIn. It is not too late to take a step back and look at the research results to identify the platform you should focus your attention on. Remember to test, measure, and adjust the marketing strategies you implement on the platform to get maximum ROI.

7# Not Using CTAs

One of the unique aspects of digital marketing especially inbound marketing is that if you do not ask, you do not get. Surprisingly, most of the websites have poor CTAs or lack one and this hinders them from convert regular site visitors into buying customers.

Make the call to action easily accessible and visible by using color contrast and buttons. Ideally, if your brand is giving the customers a product that is worth the money, don’t shy away from requesting for their details in return whether it is by phone or web form.

Conclusion

The digital marketing funnel resembles a circle. It requires time to move your potential clients through the stages to be able to determine the ones who are most likely to become real customers. Growing your business is like planting a garden. It needs more money, work, and patience because digital marketing is a competitive industry. After gaining purchases, you also need to keep your clients for more investment in future.

Get a digital marketing team in Singapore that will work with you until the set goals are achieved and beyond. Contact us today to book a free and no obligation consultation session.