The Difference Between Marketing Funnel and Sales Funnel and Why They're Important for Language Schools
Marketing and sales are complementary – one doesn’t work without the other. And any business, your language school included, needs both to get customers! The process between becoming aware that a company exists and becoming its customer is much longer than you think. This is why you need a marketing and sales funnel to make sure you guide as many people as possible from being complete strangers to becoming your recurrent students!
Interested in what marketing and sales funnels do and why it is so important to consider them for your language school? Keep reading!
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What Are Sales and Marketing Funnels?
Sales and marketing funnels get their name from a strong analogy to a physical funnel. They’re supposed to be a guide that leads from a broad audience and vague interest to a narrow group of potential customers that decide to buy a product.
The purpose of using a funnel is to maximize the number of people that go through each stage of getting familiar with your company and products and finally decide to purchase. The aim is to be effective and limit the dropout at each stage - meaning the number of people that at a certain point become disinterested in becoming a client.
What is a Marketing Funnel?
A marketing funnel is a guided multistep process of getting people from not being aware of the brand to becoming loyal customers. It is complementary to a sales funnel, but it should always come first. It’s difficult to sell and customize offers for people that don’t even know you exist! 😉
The marketing funnel can be divided into 3 steps:
1. Creating awareness about your brand
This step includes methods such as advertising, viral campaigns, content marketing, and inbound marketing - creating interesting and helpful content that your future students may search for and stumble upon your website.
This is also where your landing pages can help you get people’s email addresses. Taking care of your website’s usability can play a huge role in helping visitors to learn about your school’s offer and willingly agreeing to hear from you on regular basis.
2. Nurturing a lead and maintaining interest
When you get people’s attention and you have a group of potential students, who are familiar with who you are and what you’re offering, you can focus on maintaining that interest so that people come back and decide to sign up for your courses.
This step includes methods like presenting tailor-made content to introduce them further to your courses and school, and build even more interest around the offer. It can rely on sending emails, newsletters, e-books, etc.
3. Customer evaluation
The last step is making sure you have loyal customers is making sure to keep in touch with them after the sale and delivery. Not only is it important to remind yourself to your students when it comes to signing up for the next year, but it’s also good to ask about their feedback.
It will show care and it will also be a valuable source of information for you.
What is a Sales Funnel?
The sales funnel starts when you’ve gained a group of potential students interested in your offer. This is where you have to make it easy for them to make the decision and encourage them to take action such as signing up for classes.
The main point is to present yourself as better than your competition. Present your offer in a clear and exciting way and make sure the process guides to a call-to-action button with little distractions along the way. The transition through different stages should be as seamless as possible.
A sales funnel can be as simple as a landing page starting from a short, interesting headline, going through offer description to a big call-to-action button. You can use additional methods such as pop-ups on your website, advertising a free trial lesson, or a discount that has a link to a short page describing the offer and containing a sign-up form.
The sales funnel works the best when it’s customized to your company and potential clients. Although it may sound like an exotic idea, you’ve probably gone through such sales funnels many times. If you’re looking for an example, think of how easy it is to sign up for Netflix!
Don’t forget that you can also advertise your offer to people after they’ve already become a client and signed up for your courses.
Recurring and loyal customers are very important, and you don’t want to forget about them in your marketing strategy!
Get access to our library of free marketing guides, trackers, and templates for expat language schools:
What is the Difference Between a Marketing and Sales Funnel?
The terms ‘marketing’ and ‘sales’ funnels are sometimes used interchangeably. That’s because there’s a smooth transition between one and the other and they should always be complementary to work effectively.
Generally speaking, a marketing funnel can be viewed as an introduction to a sales funnel. It is aimed to familiarize people with your language school and get them interested in your courses and engaged with your brand. The end result should be generating a group of people that will probably consider becoming a client and, if possible, getting their contact info, so you can keep up their interest or start your sales funnel via email.
A sales funnel focuses on guiding already interested potential customers to consider your offer and to purchase your product. It is the final stage of the whole process, but it’s never actually finished, as you can always go back to your recurring customers to persuade them to purchase again.
The two funnels are very much alike in that they aim to eventually boost sales and the number of customers. They also often use similar solutions like landing pages optimized for high conversion rates.
Ideally, each component should be customized for the company’s needs and the elements of the two types of funnels can easily blend with each other if needed.
Conclusion: How to Use Marketing and Sales Funnels for Your School Successfully
Marketing and sales funnels are important to boost sales and optimize the process of getting new customers. This is also true for language schools and tutoring businesses.
Deciding on starting a language course can be a long process and it is crucial to guide a person until they make the decision to become your student.
Your aim with a marketing funnel is to present your school and yourself to new people, especially those who will probably be interested in language courses.
Depending on your client avatar you may choose to use ads, social media content, or inbound marketing. You can, for example, provide free e-books or quizzes related to learning languages or post articles about exploring the city as a foreigner if your clients are expats.
Landing pages are a great way to exchange free materials for someone’s contact data, so you can contact them later by email. Remember to make sure your website has intuitive navigation and allows your potential students to easily learn about the offer and prices of your courses as well as about the advantages of your school. User experience on your website is a crucial element of your marketing and sales funnels.
By spending some time upfront on creating a proper marketing and sales funnel for your school you’re making sure your school has high enrollment each year and the process of finding new students is highly optimized!
