Marketing Funnels
Peter Brissette • July 27, 2018
Hey guys, Peter Brissette here with our monthly marketing message, and this month we are talking about marketing funnels. Just real quick, what is a marketing funnel? Basically a marketing funnel is a simple way to walk a prospect through bit of a process that, ideally, is a fairly automated process or it could be some human interaction as well. But, how do you move someone along a process that’s fairly automated or fully automated so that you can move them from interest all the way to capturing this out? That’s the basic idea behind a marketing funnel.
Couple things in background, you can kinda see here our basic layout of the marketing funnel, which uses a simple formula that we can ACES Marketing, thank you to my mentor Go Go for giving me that, which is attract, capture, engage, and sell. One thing as a reminder before we dig too far into this … let me go back here to ACES Marketing. Again, just a reminder, you always gotta start with strategy. What’s your unique selling proposition? What makes you different? Why should people listen to you? That’s really critical in setting up your funnel for success.
Then look back in my blog past, past blog posts, for the 4P Framework of people, which is your demographic. What’s the problem that you solve for them? How do you uniquely solve that? What’s your process to do that? And then, the final P is: What’s the passion, the personality? What’s the epic story that pulls all that together? Once you know that, then you can do ACES Marketing. So, attract, capture, engage, and sell. What we see often times is people jump on social media or they jump on email campaigns, and it’s sell, sell, sell, sell right from the very beginning. Then they wonder why they’re not having very much success. Often, the reason is because they don’t take the time to nurture somebody to let someone get to know you and have a chance to trust you enough to move to the next step. That’s really part of what a marketing funnel does. A marketing funnel is about helping build trust so that people will move along through the process.
Let’s talk about these real quick here: attract, capture, engage, and sell. How can you attract the attention of your ideal prospect? What is it that your ideal prospect needs where you can answer a question for them, solve a problem that helps them go, “Okay, you solved this immediate problem, but I need more. That’s not enough, yet. I need more of this problem solved.” That’s some type of offer. What’s your offer to attract attention? Commonly you see eBooks. What I like to do or things that I call marketing widgets, what’s something that you can give away? A tool, a checklist, something that is something that’s useful and beneficial to your ideal prospect that may even get them to use it more than once. Maybe it’s some type of calculator where they gotta fill out some information. Maybe it’s what I prefer, is a decision making tool. How do I know I should do business with you? Answer these four questions and depending on your answers, here’s what you should do next. Those types of things are things that we can use to attract the attention of our ideal prospect.
Then you’ve gotta capture. It’s a little bit of a militaristic term, “Let’s capture them.” How do you capture them? Well, usually there’s a landing page. This is a page that has the information that you’re offering to them. A landing page basically is a page with limited navigation. So, there’s not a lot of things that they can do on this page. It’s very focused on, “Here’s the offer. Here’s the message. Put in your name and email address.” They’re giving you their information. That’s basically what a landing page, or a capture page, you could call it a capture page as well.
Then engage. So, how are you then going to take that information and nurture this person to develop and build that trust? This could be, in what we call an Auto Responder Series, where you have a set of emails already pre-programmed to go out and be sent to that person who’s giving you their email address for that. That could be three emails, that could be five emails, it could be an email every week for a year. You can pre-program that anyway that you want to.
Then, of course, we wanna sell them. What we like to see in terms of messages that are informational and helpful and useful, and then the actual asking for the sell, closing the sell, is that there’s a five to one ratio. Five informational messages to one, “I’m asking for the sale,” message. At some point, that’s our goal. All this stuff that we do doesn’t matter unless something happens. This could be just a phone call for a sales conversation that you use a marketing funnel for, but it could be an actual, “I’m buying something. I’m buying this service. I’m buying your offer.” Maybe it’s all online, but this works the same for any kind of sales process. Maybe you offer a service, so that selling part is actually a phone call or a face to face meeting where you go over the final details. You’ve answered all their questions already through your engagement campaign, they know who you are, they understand who you are, they trust you, now it’s just finalizing the details so that we can actually deliver the service and solve your problems.
A couple of tools, just to mention, that we like to use for these types of campaigns. One is called Active Campaign. It’s a great email marketing tool and CRM System, where you can track both email marketing campaigns and sales activities as well. Then click funnels is kind of one of the biggest ones out there. There’s a lot of different tools out there where you can easily and quickly build marketing funnels that have landing pages and things like down sells and up sells and all these different things that you can add to that and be able to do that. It could be membership systems, things of that sort.
That’s the basic ideas behind a marketing funnel. How to attract, capture, engage, and sell. You use ACES Marketing to build your funnels. It gives you a nice little plan of the basic steps that you need to do that. I am going to do a much more detailed training on marketing funnels and some of the tools we use on creating marketing funnels that you’ll be able to find inside our full marketing blueprint. If you go to the home page of DMD.com, you can opt in to the marketing blueprints and you can get full access to our training that covers not just marketing funnels, but these eight key areas of marketing for your business.
This is this month’s marketing message. Hope you enjoyed it. Let us know what you thought in the comments and please like, comment, and share if you come across this video, wherever that might be.
Thank you and have a great month.
Learn the many benefits of a strong learning system on the backend of a speaking, coaching, consulting business.
Read our latest blog post on Mastering the Marketing A’s: Understanding Your Audience for Better Results.
The last question that should we follow our competitors on social media? Sure, why not. You know, you want to see what they're doing and see what's happening there. You know if you're going to be active and you're really trying to use social to build your business then having a good idea what's what your competition is up to is probably important. And you know sometimes what I find with so called competitors is that we you know often times find people that we can collaborate with. It doesn't necessarily mean they are competitors so we work with a number of other marketing agencies and provides some services for them for their clients that they don't necessarily do, but they hire us to do it for them. So like I work with other marketing agencies, so they're not necessarily, you know, your competitor and everything. So but yeah, see what's going on you know, investigate, read up on them, see what they're doing, check out their websites, see what they're ranking for. You know, the more you understand the competitive landscape, the more you know what you should be doing and what you need to do.
And the last question that we have is, can you say more about running a test on TikTok yeah, I so I'm not on TikTok I'm not using tiktok. I wind up watching a lot of TikTok videos on Facebook and the Facebook reels. I think it's fascinating. I find it very interesting. But it's not a platform that I've taken the time to jump on at this point. Again, based on where I'm at with strategy and so forth, it's not a fit for me. But anytime you're using any platform, if you're going to do something, you want to come up with some means of measurement. How am I going to measure success? What does success look like? Is it I, you know, posted a video and I got a thousand views. Is that success you know or is it actually driving traffic and are you tracking how much traffic and then are you tracking what happened to that traffic? Did they fill out a form, did they make a phone call? Like what's the, where do you want that to go? So we really need to step back and think about that whole process. Of creating content, I'm pushing this through to, you know, to my website. And this is what I want to have happen. This is what I wanted the results to be. And then how am I going to track it? How am I going to measure it and do that so anytime you're spending, anytime you're doing something new in particular. Or you're spending any money you need to track it all the way through. All the way through.
The next question that we have is if you have a GoDaddy web page already and are having some issues, are you able to switch over somehow? You can build your website on any other platform and then just you just change the domain where the domain points. So yeah, you can do that anytime. Thank you, Peter.
Next question is how powerful are paid plans to things like Google Adwords or whatever it is called now regarding driving traffic, how can you possibly compete when you don't have the cash to put towards such programs? Yeah, so that's where you gotta get creative. So again we're small businesses and we don't have you know, unlimited funds to you know, just throw a bunch of ads up and you know compete with some other big companies so. Again, this goes back to what are the things I can really do better, because chances are your website is getting some traffic and it could be getting good traffic, but if your messaging isn't clear on your website, you're not getting them to take the next step. They're not making a phone call or filling out a form. So where I can put energy and effort is in that messaging and that and being very clear about who I'm working with, the problem I solve, how I solve it. So that whoever does come across my radar, I have a much higher chance of converting that person then someone else. So you know it's not the best product that always wins, it's who's the best communicator. And so that's why I talk about what you own and what you can't can control and making sure that is dialed in. And doing what it's supposed to do so that if you do go I, if I'm dialed in and I know everything is working well with my website and it's communicating clearly now, I can spend a small amount on ads and drive a small amount of traffic knowing that I'm probably going to get a decent amount of conversions because my messaging's on point and so I don't have to spend as much as the big guy. But I can be more effective because I've spent time working on the stuff that really matters. Thanks, Peter.
The next question is, we have a couple more here. What is your choice for a website hosting platform? So if you're going to host WordPress, my number one choice would be sitegroundsiteground.com That would be my top choice for WordPress hosting that, great support and all that. And again, you can have your. Domain on GoDaddy and it can point to wherever. It can point to Squarespace. It can point to site ground wherever it needs to go. But yeah, for WordPress site ground would be my top choice.
The next question is, can other businesses similar to mine attach to my website and then their ads show up on their Facebook page? No, I don't see how that can happen. Thank you.
The next question that we have is I used to utilize local provider gizmo to be able to personally update my website due to its ease of use. If you knew word you could do gizmo. Do you know of a website editing platform that would be as simple. I don't need an online store so our website just needs to be simple clean design that I can update content. So any of those platforms we talked about we believe with Squarespace can do that. Our platform that I mentioned can do that as well. So that's something that I know someone that was asking about that, I'll just give you my contact info. You guys you know can provide my contact info. If you're interested in looking at that, we can we can talk about that one-on-one Thanks, Peter.
Will there be an alternative to Twitter?