What Is Lead Generation Funnel & How To Create One In [2023]

What Is Lead Generation Funnel & How To Create One

You need quality leads if you want your online business to thrive and make sales.

Lead generation is a big challenge for many small businesses.

And if you don’t know about lead generation and how to use a funnel to generate leads for your business, your business may suffer a setback.

So, how can you set up a lead generation funnel to get more customers and increase your sales?

That is what we are going to discourse in this article. We will cover the following:

What is lead generation sales funnel?
How to build a lead generation funnel?
What are the best lead-generation tools to help you automate your work?
Some of the best lead-generation tools

Before we jump into the lead generation funnel, let’s discuss the sales funnels first.

Understanding the sale funnels and how it works will give you a better understanding of the lead generation funnel.

What Is A Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel is a journey that customers take, from seeing or hearing about your products to purchasing.

A sales funnels contain three parts, top, middle and bottom.

Let’s take a look at each part.

Top of the sales funnel: It targets your audience
Middle of the funnel: customers
Bottom of the sales funnel: Existing customers

The main goal of the sales funnel is to convert visitors into new customers (leads) and then into existing customers by building solid relationships.

Russell Brunson of Clickfunnels explained the sales funnels template called Value Ladder,

Value Ladder has FOUR main funnels:

Bait
Frontend
Middle
Backend

1. Bait

To create awareness about your products and services, you need to create bait, also known as a Lead Magnet.

The lead magnet is what you will offer your visitors in exchange for their email addresses to get them into your funnel.

2. Frontend offer

After downloading your lead magnet, you present them with the front-end offer. The front-end offer is an inexpensive product that people can afford. It may be $7 products.

3. Middle Offer

Before you present your middle offer, you must provide more value to your customers.

Help them in any areas they need help with and build a strong relationship with them.

The middle offers must be more valuable and expensive compared to the front-end offer.

Offer quality products that solve a problem and serve as a solution to the problem of your customers.

4. Present them with a backend offer.

It will be the most valuable and expensive product.

The value ladder template works well and helps you serve your customers while presenting your offer to them.

What Is the Lead Generation funnel?

You have understood the sales funnel; let’s dive into the lead generation funnel.

A lead generation funnel is the top of your sales funnels, where you present a lead magnet to your visitors.

You catch the attention of your audience through your lead magnet.

Offer them a valuable lead magnet that is difficult to resist.

Write a high-converting headline to attract the audience to subscribe to the lead magnet and give your their contact information.

After subscribing to your lead magnet, they become leads, and your main job is to get them through the rest of your sales funnel and build a strong relationship with them.

How To Build Lead Generation Funnel For Your Business

Below are the simple processes you can follow to build your lead generation funnels for your business.

Step 1: Define your Target Audience

The first step is to know who your target audience is. This will help you to present your offer or lead magnet in front of only people in your niche or who will be interested in your products and services.

You don’t want to target a general audience; you need to be specific about your audience.

You can look at the data of any business in your niche that is buying its products and services.

Once you learn about the existing customers in your niche, you can think about attracting people like them and growing your business.

Step 2: Identify a Problem and Provide a Solution

It is time to do customer research. You have known your ideal customers and then find out where they hang out online.

What you want to do is to know the problem your ideal customers are facing. You can join some of the Facebook groups in your niche.

Join a forum in your niche or related to your offers.

Find YouTube videos and check the people’s comments.

The idea is to find some of the challenges your idea customers are struggling with and let your front offers provide a solution.

Your lead magnet or bait must also provide a solution and relate to the problem people are facing within your niche.

Step 3: Create a Lead Magnet That Provides a Solution

After identifying a problem, create a lead magnet that provides a solution.

There are different ways to create a lead magnet; it may be downloadable products that your ideas customers will like and access online immediately after they subscribe to it.

Examples of lead magnets are

An eBook
An email course
Simple video course
Cheat sheet
Printable material
An audio file
Etc

It will help if you put yourself in your customer’s shoes. What would you expect when you subscribe to an email newsletter?

Choosing a format that can convey your message and make them understand your intention is crucial.

You need to provide value to create a lead magnet and follow the same approach you use to create and design your paid product.

If your lead magnet fails to convey your message, it will affect both the frontend and backend.

Step 4: Create a Funnel Page For Your Lead Magnet

Once your lead magnet is ready, you must design your sales funnel.

Your funnel is not selling anything. You offer valuable free products in exchange for your ideal customer’s email address.

Most of the sales funnel designed to offer lead magnets is also known as a squeeze page.

It does not require many stories.

For example, your lead magnet landing page should have the following:

Headline
Social proof
Sales copy
Sales video
Call-to-action

Below are examples of squeeze pages that offer a lead magnet. If you want an easy tool to build your landing page, you may check Clickfunnels 2.0

Russell Brunson, the CEO of Clickfunnels, uses the squeeze page for his funnel cookbook. And it converts like crazy.

There is no opt-in page on the squeeze page, but when you click the call-to-action, there will be a pop-up where visitors can input their email address and subscribe to the funnel cookbook.

Bran Dean From Backlinko

Brian Dean from Backlinko used the squeeze page to grow his list by offering his visitors an eBook on how he got 25,000 unique visitors per month.

Another excellent example of a lead magnet is Russell Brunson’s free webinar training, where he shared the secrets funnel strategy many top marketers and companies have used to generate millions of dollars in revenue.

Your lead magnet and squeeze page need to appeal to people to at least 5x the downloading of your lead magnet.

The more people subscribe to your lead magnet, the more leads and more people you can sell your product and services to.

This is the best way to increase sales and generate more profits.

So, your lead magnet and the landing page are essential to your business if you want to generate more leads and grow your business faster.

Step 5: Lead Nurturing And Email Sequences

You can build a relationship with your leads and turn them into customers without email sequence to nature them.

You need to create autoresponse email series that will automatically send to people who download your lead magnet.

Your email sequences should:

Contain welcome message
Provide information and value to the customers
Tell your potential customers about your products and services
Introduce your front-end offer

You must provide value before introducing your offers to improve your email sequences and produce results.

So make sure to maintain balance, and don’t turn your potential customers into ATMs.

Step 6: Drive Traffic to your landing page

Once everything is set up,it is time to drive traffic to your funnel and allow people to download your lead magnet.

I recommend paid ads to drive traffic to your lead magnet to avoid wasting your time.

You can set up Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Google ads depending on your experience in any of these platforms.

And if you don’t have the money to invest, you can focus on SEO to drive traffic. The only disadvantage is that it may take more time before you start seeing results.

Step 7: Access the Data and Improve Your Ads

If you rely on a paid ad, then this is very crucial to avoid wasting money and increase your ROI.

Ensure to check the following:

Ad conversion rate
Landing page conversion rate
Lead conversion rate

After running ads for a few days, you need to check the data and determine whether your ad is converting.

From there, you can improve your ads, create new ones or adjust the targeting audience.

Remember that traffic quality matters.

Understand the System

You need to understand how the lead funnel works, and each stage of the lead funnel is connected to the other.

Every lead funnels stages need to work together to get maximum results.

In addition, understand that the lead generation funnel exists within your sales funnel; it is like a system within a system.

Conclusion

Generating sales is the best way to make your business stay on the line.

And you can make sales without building quality leads for your business.

But when you have a lead-generating funnel, you are on track to build a successful business.

Although in most cases, it may take time to get it right. And once you’re getting results, you can generate more leads on autopilot and continue scaling up your business.

Now that you understand lead generating funnel and how it works.

Let’s look at some of the tools to help you generate leads for your business.

Lead Generation Funnel Software

Clickfunnels

Clickfunnels is a well-known all-in-one automation tool to generate leads and sales.

You can start a 14-day free trial to get started with Clickfunnels 2.0. You can read my complete review of Clickfunnels 2.0

HubSpot

You can go wrong when it comes to CRM tools on the market. If you are serious about generating leads and tracking all the data and analytics about your lead, check Hubspot.

Getresponse

Getresponse is one of the best email marketing software with more automation tools that you can use to generate leads and nature them.

Systeme.io

Systeme.io works like Clickfunnels; you can design a fantastic funnel to generate leads for your business.

One thing I like about Systeme.io is that it is not expensive like other tools.

GoHighLevel CRM Tool

If you have an agency or are into the lead generation business, you might have heard about the high-level tool. It builds specifically to generate leads for small businesses and companies.

You can check the GoHighLevel tool and see if it fits your business.

Optimiser

This is one of the best WordPress plugins to design a landing page and generate leads.

If you’re a blogger, then I recommend this plugin. You can use it on all your blogs and generate thousands of leads without a problem.

There are more landing page builders you can check if you want to learn more about the list of sales funnel software in the market.