The Challenge

People hate being sold – but they love to buy.

If your solution is a significant investment in terms of money, time, or required information that your prospect requires, then you need an approach that builds a relationship, helps educate and inform them, while guiding them towards a purchase decision when the time is right.

The typical approach that most businesses use is to build an expensive website, then spend a lot of money on paid ads like Facebook and Google to send people to that website.

More often than not, they’re disappointed with the outcome.

The reason that this approach isn’t particularly effective is because:

1. Only a tiny % of your visitors are actually ready to buy – most are trying to educate themselves on a purchasing decision and will only enter a sales conversation on their own terms once they feel they are properly informed.
2. Websites need to satisfy multiple audiences – current customers, potential customers, information seekers, investors, potential employees. Pulling your audience’s attention in multiple directions will hurt your conversions. They need a single minded offer of a next step.
3. Ads ain’t cheap – Costs for paid ads on all platforms have been significantly increasing over the last decade. Your entire paid traffic budget gets eaten up sending people to a “buy now” page before they’re ready. In this scenario the only winners are the big ad platforms, and I don’t think Mark Zuckerberg needs more of your hard earned profits.

Where Traditional Marketing Falls Down

Traditionally, marketing involves spending time and effort implementing ad hoc campaigns – writing a blog today, a social post about something else tomorrow, and now let’s try a few Facebook ads and see what happens.

There is usually nothing wrong with each individual piece of marketing, but they aren’t put together as a system in an exact sequence to help move your audience in the right direction.

Marketers can sometimes focus in an uneven manner towards branding, education, or conversion. All 3 elements are important, but they need to be done in the right sequence and with the right balance to help your marketing efforts succeed.

Being too focused on your brand can result in spending a lot of time and money recreating websites, watching Simon Sinek videos, and updating logos – without ever using marketing to enter actual meaningful conversations with your business.

An over-reliance on education can see your business being in the “friend zone” – a constant source of information in blogs, videos, whitepapers, webinars, and podcasts – but never actually entering into a buying relationship with your prospect.

Finally, an over-reliance on conversion marketing can turn you into the “sleazy salesperson”, a business that is constantly pushing the hard sell but has never taken the time to understand their audiences needs, help them through the buying process, and build a meaningful relationship rather than just a transaction.

Your path to success is a funnel that is deliberately designed to help someone move through their education phases, while moving towards a buying decision, that builds your brand through positive interactions along the way.

A Funnel Is The Solution

A funnel creates a pathway for people to progress from seeking education into being ready to buy.

How it typically works is by driving an audience to a particular offer to get some more information in exchange for someone’s contact details, then engaging that person with a series of education, information, testimonials, and offers, to help move them towards a sales conversation when that person is ready.

By educating them first, you are nurturing the buying decision, and by using a lead magnet or offer of value to gain their contact details, you can engage them over multiple touch points rather than just one.

To really nail a funnel that you can then scale into driving customer acquisition, there are 5 key elements:

A Desirable Offer

We know our audience wants to make an education decision on how to solve their challenge, so that is exactly what you should give them. Typically this will be a piece of information in exchange for their name or email address.

Typical lead magnets include:

• Downloadable whitepapers, checklists, how to guides
• Interactive lead magnets such as calculators, quizzes, and online assessments
• Webinars – live or pre-recorded
• Invitations to live events
• Offers of time – a consultation, a strategy session, an audit, etc.

The rule for good lead magnets is that they should quickly answer a question or solve a problem for your customer that relates to your core offer / solution.

Conversion Optimised Landing Page

Your website tends to have multiple choices for the user to make which can divide their attention. A strong landing page is like a mini-website with the single minded goal of asking the person to take you up on your offer.

Your landing page should have a clear promise of a desired outcome for your audience, supported by lots of social proof and evidence of how your business can help them.

Don’t forget your thank you page – these are often overlooked assets which give you the opportunity to develop your relationship with your audience and progress the conversation.

Comprehensive Nurture Sequence

Given that most people aren’t necessarily ready to enter a sales conversation, the goal of a great funnel is to help educate and nurture them, with appropriately placed offers of a sales conversation throughout the nurture sequence.

A nurture sequence is usually a combination of email marketing automation combined with an advertising traffic strategy called retargeting.

Once someone has downloaded your lead magnet, you know their contact details and that they have a certain level of interest. An excellent nurture sequence will be a series of emails including further education on the outcome they are seeking, along with case studies of real world results of people just like them that have achieved the outcome that you or your business delivered.

These ads can then be supported with retargeting ads to your audience to help them keep seeing your brand and engaging with your business. Retargeting can be a combination of educational articles and calls to action to your core offer.

Consistent & Scalable Traffic

Now that you have a great offer, a compelling landing page, and a strong nurture sequence, it’s time to start filling your funnel with potential buyers. When it comes to traffic there are a ton of different sources that you can potentially leverage:

• Email marketing and marketing automation
• Paid traffic such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and YouTube Ads
• Your existing website traffic and visitors
• Organic traffic strategies such as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
• Social media strategies to build your audience and then promote your offers in front of them
• Partnerships, collaborations and sponsorships with other people & brands that might already have your audience, such as guest podcast appearances and brand collaborations

While emailing your existing database and sharing across your social platforms are fast and free, they tend to be a one-off event and don’t allow for ongoing scale and optimisation. They should absolutely be used, but should not be relied upon.

Furthermore, organic traffic driven by SEO can take a long time to build and isn’t guaranteed.

Paid traffic is similar to turning on a tap of potential customers. Google and LinkedIn Ads are particularly effective at this stage of the funnel as they are fast and scalable.

As a longer term strategy, once paid traffic is performing well and your funnel is profitable, I’d then reinvest some of those profits into a longer term organic SEO strategy where you will need more patience to see the longer term organic results.

Testing

Most marketing is built on hope and assumptions, neither of which are a reliable long term strategy. We live in a digital world where everything can now be split tested and optimised with real data on which elements help drive more traffic.

A funnel is rarely a huge success when it first launches. Once it’s live, a systematic approach to testing new traffic sources and new advertising approaches, testing improvements in landing page design, and testing changes in your email nurture sequences is how you turn it into a winner.

Making small and consistent gains at every touch point of your funnel is how you can really unlock the massive potential gains in growth and customer acquisition.

“Success is iterative. It’s a process rather than an event.”

There you have it!

A funnel is a specific marketing strategy aimed to help educate and nurture your ideal prospect while moving them down a specific path towards a sales conversation.

It combines various marketing tactics and tools into a cohesive plan to help you acquire new, relevant, educated, ready to engage prospects with your business.

A great funnel combines a desirable offer, scalable traffic sources, a dedicated landing page, and a nurture sequence to help educate your prospect over a period of time rather than as a single event. The magic of funnels is that continual testing and optimisation unlocks big gains for your business.

Want More From Your Digital Marketing?

Click here to sign up for our free training on how you can Predictably Get New Customers Using This Step-By-Step Approach To Digital Marketing.   In the training you will learn:

• The consistently overlooked marketing tactic you can start using today in your business to reliably generate new customers.
• How one simple change to your approach can result in qualified customers actively booking time in your sales team’s calendars.
• The sales psychology framework (that I guarantee you haven’t used before) that will explore you marketing performance.