Before you launch your business, you should ensure you’ve chosen the right audience for your products. If you’ve already launched your business, this is a great time to reevaluate your target market and ensure your strategy is effective.

You should be targeting people who:

• Are eager to solve a problem they’re dealing with
• Can pay for your products
• Are part of a growing market
• Can be reached by your marketing and traffic strategy

The market you choose will obviously depend on the products or services you offer, but it’s still essential to market to an audience that fulfills these requirements. After all, if you try to market to an audience that doesn’t need or want your products or can’t afford them, your conversion rates will suffer.

A great way to choose your market is to imagine your dream customer. Who would you prefer to buy your products? What is their age demographic? What are their likes and dislikes? What problems do they struggle with? How do your products solve those problems? These marketing books can help.

Building out your dream 100 customer’s profile in as much detail as possible will allow you to refine your marketing plan. Determining whom you market to will determine how you market to them. It will affect how you voice your content marketing efforts, the social media channels you utilize and the content you post there, the keywords you choose in your SEO campaigns, and much more.

Once you’ve settled on your target market, it’s time to research your customers. This is important because you’ll want to know as much as you can about them—their problems, desires, financial situations, and more—in order to effectively market to them and increase conversions and sales.

One of the most effective ways to find out everything you can about your target audience is to follow where they hang out online. Seek out hashtags, Facebook groups, Reddit threads, online forums, and anywhere else they might congregate.

Researching your customers will help you learn more about their problems and desires, as well as how to connect with them in your marketing. Both of these will increase sales.

By this point, you should have selected your ideal market and done enough research on your customers to feel like you know them intimately. Now, you’re ready to start developing your brand and building awareness.

Developing your brand includes things like crafting a mission statement, designing your logo and website, establishing your voice, and building your online presence, potentially with the help of hiring a business coach. Each of these is vital to the success of your business.

Your branding will be your business’s identity and the way you build trust and rapport with your customers. It’s estimated that nearly 60% of consumers prefer buying new products from familiar brands rather than trying a new one. Brand awareness and familiarity are how you’ll get your customers to like you, trust you, and continually purchase from you.

Let’s look at some ways you can learn how to build brand awareness.

Get Close to Your Products

Once you’ve built up your selection of products or services, you’ll want to take a closer look at them to identify what makes them different. What do you offer that other companies don’t? How do your products uniquely help lead consumers away from pain and toward pleasure?

Usually, identifying this distinctive factor comes before you’ve even finished crafting your products or services. If not, though, you shouldn’t skip this step. Being able to tell your customers why your products are different and superior is vital in building brand awareness and boosting sales.

Create Your Brand Message

Creating your brand message is the next step in building brand awareness. Your brand message is comparable to an elevator pitch. You should be able to describe your company, its products and services, and how they differ from your competitors in three sentences or less. The entire message should be compelling enough to draw in crowds from your target market.

You should include your brand message in all your sales funnels. Obviously, you shouldn’t use the exact same wording every time, but consistency is key. Your customers want to know you’re a brand they can rely on.

Establish your brand message and send your audience the same message every time: that your products are unique in the way they solve problems.

Craft a Mission Statement

Your mission statement is a vital component of your branding. It differs from your brand message in this way: your brand message communicates the what—the products you sell and the problems they solve. Your mission statement communicates the why—the reason behind why you started your business in the first place.

Your mission statement should be concise yet eloquent. You should craft it in the hopes that it will resonate with your target market. It should humanize you and your business and help convince your audience to trust you with their purchasing power.

Form Your Voice

Forming your brand’s voice is one of the most essential strategies for sales and marketing. Your voice will determine the way you phrase absolutely everything: your product or service descriptions, your social media posts, your blog posts, your sales funnels, and the list goes on.

You can choose whether you want your voice to be serious, funny, casual, formal, authoritative, or any mix of those. Just make sure of two things:

1. Your voice should align with the products or services you offer.
2. Your voice should remain consistent across all platforms.

For example, if you’re in the business of life coaching, your voice should be encouraging and down-to-earth. If you own a law firm, your brand’s voice should be knowledgeable and formal. If you’ve started a hair salon business, your voice should be conversational and upbeat.

The bottom line: You can play around with how you want your voice to come across, but make sure it resonates with your audience. Most people will be turned off by a law firm posting puns or a hair salon using a stuffy, formal voice. Make sure your voice works in your niche in everything you put online.

Establish Your Visual Voice

Your brand’s voice extends to its visual aesthetic, too. Keep this in mind when designing your logo, website, product images, videos, sales funnel cover photos, and social media posts.

You have a lot of freedom with your visual voice, but again, make sure it aligns with your business’s products and will strike a chord with your audience. You want your brand to stand out while helping your target market to like and trust you.

Build Your Online Presence

Once you’ve established your brand’s unique factors, message, mission statement, and voice, you can start scaling your business through coaching and by building your online presence. This step consists of using targeted traffic channels and platforms to grow your business’s digital footprint (and therefore, support goals of increasing sales online).

One of the most effective ways to do this is to get your business on social media. There’s a strategic way to do this, though: the social media platforms you choose must be relevant to your target market.

For example, B2B businesses will see the most success on LinkedIn. Businesses geared toward younger audiences should join TikTok and Instagram. For those companies aimed at millennials, Gen X, or Boomers, Facebook could be your best bet.

You should have a variety of social channels where you post frequent, relevant, and engaging content. Doing this builds your brand in several ways: you can connect with potential customers, join the conversations happening in your market, bolster your brand’s reputation, and ultimately expand your reach for sales funnel placement.

Speaking of sales funnels, they’re often among the most consistent ways to generate online sales, helping generate traffic that supports converting leads into paying customers, and customers into repeat consumers. Its streamlined, laser-focused process allows you to do all this using proven methods for funnel building.

The great thing about sales funnels is that there are different kinds of funnels to serve different purposes, and you can replicate funnels that have already proven successful for businesses in your same industry.

The specific funnels you choose to create will depend on your goals. Different funnels will have varying degrees of success based on your industry, goals, offers, hook, and more. You analyze each funnel to gain insights into increasing sales for your business.

Here are a few examples of sales funnels and how they help different businesses:

Lead Magnet

A lead magnet is one of the first steps in attempting to increase your sales. However, you won’t actually receive any sales directly through this funnel, as its purpose is to generate leads or contacts, usually email addresses.

Once you add these email addresses to your email marketing list, you can tailor your marketing efforts to their individual profiles and alert them of sales, new products, and exclusive offers. This is called list building, and it’s incredibly valuable, especially since you’ll find yourself relying less on paid ads and more on nurturing relationships through email marketing.

Even though you aren’t designing your lead magnet to generate sales directly, you’ll may dramatically increase the effectiveness of the leads you acquire. This is how to create a lead magnet funnel:

1. Hook your audience with something that catches their attention
2. Offer them something of high value for low-cost or free
3. Ask for their email address in exchange for your high-value item

Your valuable item is usually something like a free guide in PDF format. It’s a way to share your expertise, and this does two things:

• It provides the reader with valuable information.
• It convinces the reader to trust your brand because it shows you know what you’re talking about.

Regardless of your business’s industry, you should have knowledge and creative ideas you can use to create this guide. For example, let’s say you own a landscaping and design company. You could create a guide on styling front yards for curb appeal or maybe a guide on the best plants to use according to season, climate, and appearance.

The point is to share valuable expert knowledge with your audience. You can market to these leads through emails, but a nice bonus is that your guide can also help convince readers to use your products or services.

Lead Magnets for B2B Companies

Lead magnets are also a great way to pursue ways to increase B2B sales, especially since being able to nurture leads is crucial for B2B companies.

If you own a B2B company, it’s vital that your lead magnet is incredibly valuable and that you are extremely knowledgeable about your guide’s content. After all, you won’t be trying to attract the average consumer—your lead magnet needs to convert the decision-makers for businesses. Make sure it’s sophisticated and really shows that you know what you’re talking about.

Value Ladder

In Russell Brunson’s view, the value ladder sales funnel is the most effective he’s boosted sales. It consists of four parts:

1. Hook, Story, Offer: This is where you offer your audience your lead magnet—a free guide in exchange for their email address.
2. Frontend: This is where you offer your least expensive product, something of starter value to help your lead.
3. Middle: Here, you’ll offer a more expensive and valuable product than your frontend offer.
4. Backend: You’ll finish off your funnel by offering a higher end product with your maximum value.

This funnel is Russell’s favorite, successful sales strategy for a few reasons. You begin your funnel by offering value to your customers, then continue to provide more value with simple upsells that excite your audience.

One important thing to note about the value ladder sales funnel: your offers should build upon each other. That means that each successive offer should be related to your previous offer. These can be things like BOGO pricing and add-ons or upgrades to products. They can also be separate but complementary products or services.

Whatever you offer, make sure your target audience is interested in each successive tier of your value ladder sales funnel.

Webinar Funnel

Another type of funnel that may generate sales and supports sharing your expertise is a webinar funnel.

In this funnel, you’ll create a sales webinar (typically 45 to 60 minutes) that people can register for on your funnel’s landing page. At the end of your webinar, you’ll spend a short time pitching your frontend offer (something low-priced, though the value can vary depending on your choice).

Webinar funnels are effective in two main ways:

1. You now have all registrants’ email addresses, so you can continue your list building and use email to tailor your marketing efforts.
2. By sharing your knowledge, you’ve provided attendees with valuable information and helped them to trust your brand, even if they didn’t take you up on your frontend offer.

At the end of your webinar, if you made sales or generated leads, at the least you got your brand into the minds of everyone who attended. That way, even if they didn’t make a purchase, your brand may be the first to mind when they do need products or services in your niche.

Make sure that your webinar provides genuine value. Your audience should come away feeling enlightened and that their time was well spent. If you’re not careful, your webinar could turn into nothing more than an extended sales pitch—not exactly a great way to build trust or boost sales.

In all your marketing efforts—building your brand’s voice, online presence, and various sales funnels—you should strive to position yourself as an expert.

Establishing with your audience that you’re an expert in your field is a great way to build belief in your product to support sales. They’ll be more likely to trust your brand and purchase from you if they believe you can solve their problem or offer them the best value for their money.

This will often require research, and you might need to hire someone to help you with your marketing efforts. It is important that your customers continue to trust you as you build a rapport with them.