Digital Sales Funnel is an invaluable tool in your digital marketing strategy. What is more, most marketing managers use this approach. This means that your fans are already used to this.
For once, if many marketing managers use Digital Sales Funnel, it means it works! Also, you don’t need to spend extra cash.
In other words, a Digital Sales Funnel is a way to structure your fans sales journey. The word funnel targets the way you lead the fan into more and more direct purchase opportunities.
The idea is to use the Digital Sales Funnel and convert a person into a super-fan! This is crazy, the concept of fan communities ties directly into the Digital Sales Funnel.
If you don’t know about fan communities already, you can learn more here: Understanding Fan Communities
Before you start working on your Digital Sales Funnel, you need to be very clear about its goal. What does the Sales Funnel need to do for you?
Perhaps you want to sell more live stream tickets. Also, maybe you want to incubate more Patreons?
You can use the Digital Sales Funnel in order to work on those goals!
How does a Digital Sales Funnel look like?
There are many diagrams on Google that explain the Digital Sales Funnel. I found this one here and think it works great for the music business.
Here, you can clearly see the funnel aspect of this concept. You start with the largest and widest part, here in green. This is the starting point of your Digital Sales Funnel.
Important to realise, you need to be absolutely clear about your target audience. Otherwise, you will not know who to aim your Digital Sales Funnel at in the first place!
Ok, let’s say you know your target audience by heart. Now in this first part, you will aim at targeting them. Hence the name: target audience.
You can do this with various paths. For once, you can use good old search engine optimisation in order to attract people onto your website.
On the other side, you could also use a so-called freebie where you offer a free EP in return for a newsletter sign-up. Of course, you can also run advertising over social media in order to attract people towards your Digital Sales Funnel.
Important to realise, in order to stand out and to be catchy, you need super strong branding. Professional branding will help you get the most out of this first target step.
Most people will stay in the engage phase
The engage phase is the one most people might already know about. Those are your Instagram followers, your YouTube subscribers or even your Spotify followers.
However, beyond this, they don’t really ‘do’ something. They don’t really write comments or like your posts.
By all means, they might watch your YouTube videos endlessly but they don’t really take action. It’s likely that they won’t even tell their friends about your music.
In order to get this group into the next higher phase, you really need to get your work in. Especially your engagement over social media. Make sure to post regularly and interact with anyone who will leave a comment or a like.
Show your fans that you are approachable in case they change their minds and actually would like to do something. Also, make it as clear as possible what you want your fans to do. A straightforward Call-To-Action is sometimes all those engaged fans need in order to get to the next level.
What is more, make them feel special by offering them exclusive content. Building up a sense of community and group spirit could convince those engaged people into becoming super-fans!
After all, you are competing with so many musicians and bands out there. You really need to give your fans a reason why they should spend their limited time with your content and music instead of somebody else’s.
The convert stage is the holy-grail of the Digital Sales Funnel
Last but not least you reached the convert stage within the Digital Sales Funnel. Here, you can really aim at selling your music.
You can either use Remarketing Lists in order to target fans that already engaged with your content. Alternatively, you can use Direct-To-Fans methods like Facebook messaging bots or superphone.io.
What is more, you can utilise that sweet newsletter of yours in order to sell live stream tickets or merchandise.
It gets better: beyond the mere monetary value of people in this phase of the Sales Funnel, you’ve got the actual chance to convert them into super-fans!
Again, the idea is to offer the fan something extra and make them feel as unique as possible. Perhaps you could offer them special content on Patreon. Likewise, you could let them be part of your next digital release strategy.
Why don’t you put some cover art and photos of you together with your logo into a Dropbox or Google Drive. Now, you could ask your super-fans to become the creative directors of your new campaign!
This way you can make sure they feel special and at the same time you can link everyone in your Instagram posts and do regular shout-outs via Twitter, for example.
To put it in another way, your super-fans need to stay super-fans for you to make a living off of music. Of course, using the Funnel in order to acquire new super-fans is important. However, keeping your super-fans where they are is vital.
With this dual approach, you will not only generate sales but you are simultaneously working on your fan community!
You may have different Digital Sales Funnel running at the same time!
Here’s the thing: there is no such thing as a single Digital Sales Funnel. The fun part about this whole endeavour is that you can have different Digital Sales Funnel for different purposes running at the same time!
Of course, make sure to not oversell to one particular target audience. This is crazy, in this modern digital and very much connected world we live in, you might have totally different target audiences at the same time.
For example, you may have your established fan base in your home town. But now you’ve synced a track to a car advertisement in Mexico. Bam! All of a sudden you have this target audience in Mexico as well.
Having a Digital Sales Funnel for every target audience will get you to a place where you are flexible in your digital strategy as well as resourceful!