In marketing automation, Ryan Deiss, co-founder of Digital Marketer, often describes the sales funnel as a multi-step, multi-modality process that moves prospective browsers into buyers. It's multi-stepped because lots must occur between the time that a prospect is aware enough to enter your funnel, to the time when they take action and successfully complete a purchase. 

The last step in the sales funnel is to keep your momentum going. Follow up with all the new customers you have acquired and ensure they are happy with their product or service. A great way to accomplish this is to offer a membership-based rewards program. This will allow you to remain in contact with customers, giving you the perfect means for telling them about new deals and services.

Data insights are again the key to funnel optimization. Three other data-driven technologies follow analytics and sales reporting as the most popular sales tools: account and contact management (65%), sales forecasting tools (56%), and customer relationship management (CRM) systems (58%). The latter is a particularly crucial tool for optimization, enabling your business to organize all customer-related data in a central location.

If these three letters send shivers to your spine, you’re not alone. SEO is a huge topic. You need to know a minimum amount about SEO to make sure your content development efforts are not wasted. There’s just no point in writing a hundred blog posts if your website and blog are not optimized for Google (and Yahoo, Bing, etc.) search traffic that you want to drive into the top of your funnel.
^{Blog posts: This tactic employs the principles of content marketing by offering educational articles of interest to your target audience. They’re designed to give advice or helpful insights on topics related to your business or industry, and consequently, draw consumers to your site who are interested in this information. These educational, informative posts also showcase your company’s knowledge and expertise, building your brand with the target audience.}

In our Teachinguide survey, online instructors ranked marketing courses as one of the top challenges they face.  In previous articles we’ve begun addressing this issue by providing some tips on various marketing tactics.  That said, apart from creating great course content, the # 1 marketing activity that you should spend your time on is creating your online course sales funnel.  Course coupons and/or a blog alone won’t drive people to enroll in your course in droves. 

Finally, hospitals will need to think about their relationship with consumers in a new way. In the internet economy, the traditional paternalistic viewpoint of healthcare providers toward patients will only attract people in times of specific need. To make an organization the destination of choice requires a relationship of mutual respect. It requires a deep understanding of consumers’ experiences within and beyond healthcare. It requires a fierce dedication to the highest level of service. And it requires creativity to design the kind of interactions that will delight and even surprise consumers.
You need to understand your audience like you do your very own yourself. You are aware of your dislikes and likes, you know what problems you face and you know the sort of people you will let help with those problems. If you learn to know your audience in the same manner, the chances of you establishing a genuine connection increase vastly. You will also be able to guide more people through your sales funnel and get those coveted ‘closed-wons’.
_{According to one recent study published by Pardot, 70% of buyers turn to Google at least 2-3 times during their search to find out more about their requirements, potential solutions, companies offering those solutions, etc. Many people also turn to public forums and social media platforms for recommendations. At this point, they aren’t looking for promotional content; they’re only looking to learn more about potential solutions.}
On the contrary, if your new customers are welcomed by a thoughtful onboarding process, personal attention and are educated about all the resources they are going to be needing to use your product successfully, they’re more likely to confirm to themselves that they made the right choice. And when they’re confident, they’re more likely to pass on their satisfaction to others in the form of product endorsements and recommendations. This further leads to increased brand advocacy.
^{One of the core concepts in the digital marketing industry is the sales funnel. While odd sounding at first, this single core concept can take a business from virtually non-existent and unknown to multi-million-dollar marketing machine with mass saturation, seemingly overnight. In fact, there are skilled practitioners who have built a career around implementing this single concept in business.}