Hey everyone.
Jason here, digital marketing consultant.
And in this sales funnel strategy guide, you're going to learn the five simple steps to creating
your own strategic sales funnel plan, timestamp table of contents in the description, along
with some other helpful videos to build your funnel.
Here we're going to go through those five decisions you need to make and how to put
together an actionable strategy for you and your business so that your sales funnels actually
successful.
So let's go ahead and jump in.
The very first thing is of course, making sure your sales funnel is focused.
One of the huge traps new funnel builders fall into is they create this beautiful funnel
and then they try and drive tons of traffic to it, without really realizing that there
needs to be a one to one ratio pretty much across your entire funnel.
If that doesn't make sense, you'll see how this one to one ratio plays out as we go through
our funnel.
And when you stick around to the end, I'll actually be sure sharing with you the key
funnel metrics, the five metrics you should be looking at throughout your entire sales
funnel.
And this is the funnel that you're going to be building.
So there are going to be different parts of your funnel.
You are probably heard of webinar funnels and launch funnels, and then VSL funnels.
Really all a funnel is, is a simple process of taking someone who isn't your customer
and hopefully turning them into someone who is a happy customer.
And that's it.
It doesn't matter if we have a webinar, we have a 45-minute video.
We have a tech sales letter.
We send 12 emails.
We send one email.
The whole point is about building rapport in relationships.
So keep that in mind as we go through it.
It doesn't really matter what label you give the funnel.
And I'll talk about where the launch and webinar and VSL style stuff comes in, or if you're
going to be doing a free plus shipping offer, the very first step here is deciding who your
ideal customer is, irrespective of what type of funnel you decide to put together.
And the best way to do that is to create an ideal customer profile.
So out of all the prospects of the world, prospects are just people who could potentially
do business with you.
Who's that one ideal person that you want as a customer.
Now, there are a couple of simple questions you can ask to figure out who your ideal customer
is, I'll link up in the description to a much deeper dive video.
We're going to go through this part relatively quickly so we can get on with the strategy.
So the very first thing is just who are they?
Basic age demographics and location information.
You can actually use Google analytics and Facebook audience insights tool for a quick
and easy analysis.
So you don't have to pull this out of thin air.
Again, link in the description to a video that walks you through exactly how to use
those two tools to answer this question.
The next one you want to answer is just figure out who your competitors are and where your
ideal customer's attention is.
That's going to be very helpful when you put together your traffic plan, which is going
to be the next step.
And finally, the two questions that we're going to focus on here with your strategy
is going to be what are the roadblocks and results that they are specifically after.
So I'm actually going to go through a quick example here before we move on to the second
step.
So with these two questions, I'll go through an example of someone who's trying to start
a YouTube channel.
Well, someone who wants to start a channel, they probably want to be spending more of
their time in their business.
So they probably want to be much closer to full time.
Okay, awesome.
What do they think is getting in the way of that?
Well, probably, they think they need more views.
They need more subscribers.
Maybe they think they need to rank their videos, their video quality isn't as great.
Now you're going to want to take 20 to 30 minutes to do this for your own ideal customer
profile.
And this is going to lay the foundation for your sales funnel strategy.
You need to do these two questions before you build anything else in your funnel.
You're really going to see how this ties in when we put together our lead magnet.
So just keep that in the back of your mind.
The next thing we want to do is decide how we're going to get in front of our ideal customers.
And when it comes to traffic, there are two types of traffic.
Both types are going to work for the funnel that you're putting together here.
So we're on step two of our funnel diagram.
The first one is going to be advertising or paid.
And the second one is going to be organic or free.
Now here's the key to your funnel.
You can do multiple of these, but when you're building your first funnel or when you're
building your second or third funnel, you need to choose one.
You need to make one funnel for one traffic source, for one ideal customer, starting to
see the one to one ratio.
So we have one customer, one traffic source, one funnel.
So it needs to be one throughout, because sales copy that tries to speak to everyone,
winds up connecting with no one.
And so this one to one ratio, make sure that you're very focused in your sales funnel process
so that you are speaking to your ideal customer better than all of your other competitors.
And you're not just being bland and generic.
So you do want to choose one, an easy way to choose it, is based upon your budget.
If you're on a shoestring budget, then contents the way to go.
If you have some money to spend, or you really do want to get good at paid advertising, then
go ahead and go with the paid route and whichever you choose.
Remember this is just your first funnel.
Once the spiral is profitable, you can come back to this step and go through this process
again for your second, third, fourth, fifth funnel or whatever.
But when you first starting, just choose one.
Now this next one comes to platforms.
So once you've decided whether you're going to do organic or you're going to do paid,
now you have to choose a platform.
So we need to go down to one again.
And of course there are tons of different platforms.
There's tons of different traffic sources, but when it comes to choosing which one, if
you're going to go with organic, it's going to be either WordPress or YouTube.
If you're going to go paid, well, you have a ton of options, it's Facebook, Twitter,
LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest.
And of course Google ads.
I could have even put Bing ads on here, but it seems like no one uses Bing anymore, but
Hey, maybe Bing ads might work for you, but either way, you're either going to choose
one platform to really master with paid advertising, or you're going to choose one platform WordPress,
meaning a blog or YouTube, meaning a YouTube channel, kind of like this one for your content.
The reason you need to choose one is because a Jack of all trades is a master of none.
So you really need to make sure that you choose one that you're going to focus on and be the
best at, because all these platforms are hyper competitive.
You might see larger competitors in your niche, advertising on Facebook, remarketing on YouTube,
and then they have this crazy long blog posts.
That's great.
You can get there eventually, because they have teams of people, literal teams of people
who just focused on those individual platforms.
But if you're doing this yourself, you need to choose the one platform that you're really
going to focus on.
So now we know who our ideal customer is, and we have a good idea of where we're going
to grab their attention.
Once we have that attention, we're going to send them to something called a landing page
where we want to collect their contact information.
Now, obviously random strangers or prospects aren’t just going to hand over their name
and email for no good reason.
So we need something to entice them, to provide that contact information.
So we can go through the sales process or make our offer, which is going to be your
last step or decision.
And so if we go back to our diagram here, you'll see that we have our ideal customer.
We have our traffic source and this next part, the lead magnet and landing page are where
we offer to solve a problem for them in exchange for their contact information.
So we'll go through an actual example, but when it comes to a lead magnet, it can be
anything from a PDF to a video, to a diagram.
And this is typically where you start to hear about different types of sales funnels.
So when someone says, Oh, I have a webinar sales funnel, or I have a launch sales funnel,
or I have a free plus shipping sales funnel.
Typically, all those extra words in front of or behind sales funnel is just referring
to the type of lead magnet or the type of sales message.
So for example, with a webinar funnel, it's pretty much just a video.
And all you're doing is combining your sales message and your lead magnet or the value
you provide in exchange for that contact information into one thing.
Or if you're just offering a PDF guide, then later on in your funnel, you'll actually make
your sales pitch via a video or a text sales letter.
I'll get to more on that in a little bit.
So let's go ahead and go through a couple of examples of what a lead magnet could actually
look like.
So if you're doing a PDF, which is what I recommend starting with, you can offer an
audit, a case study or a report.
An audit is simply a checklist that shows your ideal customer, all the mistakes they're
making, a case study shows them an example of someone in their similar situation who
is actually successful.
And a report does a bunch of analysis and research for them.
And of course there are a bunch of different types of lead magnet.
So let's go back to our example of someone who's trying to be successful on YouTube.
We'll look at that list of roadblocks and then choose one that we want to try and solve
for our ideal customer.
And this is really powerful, because now we're making sure that we're making a lead magnet
or we start our webinar or launch sequence process with the ideal customer in mind and
where they are right now.
And so here are a couple of examples of what we could do.
We could do a webinar or video of how to get more views to your video, a recording of a
fellow YouTuber who grew their channel from nothing and insights they gained.
That would be an audio version of a case study.
We could have a diagram of how to structure a channel page or format videos for longer
watch times.
And of course we get, have a PDF checklist or an audit or a spreadsheet to help them
track their video rankings.
So all of these are relatively simple, but each one of these is directly tied to a roadblock
that we thought about in step one, which was our ideal customer.
So this makes sure that you don't just make a lead magnet that sounds cool, but nobody
actually wants.
So we always want to meet the ideal customer where they are and then pull them through
our funnel.
And so this is how we get that initial contact information, it so important.
So once we have that contact information, we're ready to actually make our offer.
So something that's really important with any type of sales funnel that you do, no selling
has happened at this point, we've our ideal customer.
We've either made some content or some ads and we've offered them something for free.
And hopefully in our webinar launch sequence or the free PDF, we gave them, we demonstrated
our worth.
We demonstrated our value.
We've built rapport.
We've showed them that we're not just some random person on the internet.
We can actually be helpful to them.
And now that we have their email information, we can start our pitch.
We can start making our offer.
And so you'll send emails that will drive them either back to your webinar.
If you decided to do a webinar, drive them through your launch sequence, if that's what
you're doing, or if you did the fast method, which was creating some sort of PDF, then
inside your emails and your PDF, you drive them to either a video or written sales letter
that actually makes a pitch for your product or service.
Of course, this pitch only works if you've actually given value and solve some problems
in your lead magnet.
So that's how it works.
You have to solve a problem, build rapport, demonstrate your value, and then, and only
then start the actual sales pitch.
So now let's go ahead and go through some metrics that you need to keep track of as
you go through this entire process.
So that does it for the five steps that you need to go through when deciding what your
sales funnel strategy is going to be.
So the first thing you want to look at with your traffic and your content is your click
through rate.
How many people saw the piece of content, how many people saw the ad and how many people
clicked?
You want to get that rate as high as possible.
You want more people clicking so that you have more people hitting your landing page,
with your landing page.
Metric number two is looking at how many people visited the landing page, how many people
opted in.
So you want to try and get that as high as possible.
You'll do that by trying different headlines.
You can even try different lead magnets.
I'll link up in the description to a conversion optimization rate guide, and a link to a full
blown video on how to write your landing page copy, because this part of the process is
really important.
Then once they're on your email list, you'll just want to keep track of how many people
are actually opening and clicking your emails.
Now, typically you're going to look at open rate just because click through rate inside
of emails is really… you need a couple thousand for it to actually mean something.
So you're just going to focus on your open rate, and you're going to try out different
headlines and different emails to see what gets people to open and click so that they
actually hit your sales page.
So if your sales page is either text or video, in both instances, you're looking at how many
people out of everyone who read the sales letter or watch the webinar or watch the sales
video.
How many of them actually clicked the link to check out in the shopping cart and completed
the process?
So that's what you're looking at there.
And then finally, one that is super easy to forget, but maybe the most important one out
of everything is what's your refund rate.
How many people are getting your product or unhappy with your service?
Because those are going to be the people that are going to be the best future customers.
The best customers come from people who are already customers.
So once you keep your customers happy, this is a very long drawn out and hard process.
Despite how easy some other people say it is, this is a lot of work.
So once you've gotten someone to be a customer, it's going to be a lot easier to grow and
scale your business, if you can keep these people happy and then keep giving them products
and services, that's going to make their lives easier and better.
But if they're not happy after all of this, well, guess what, you're going to have to
go all the way back to square one and then keep pushing people through a funnel to a
product that ultimately isn't that great.
So go ahead and make sure you check out the timestamp table of contents in the description.
Drop a question below.
If you have any questions on putting together your own sales funnel strategy, I read and
reply to every single one.
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like this one.
And until the next, keep building the business you love.