Let’s admit it: creating funnels is hard work because it’s often not enough just to “set up a funnel”. A typical sales funnel setup calls for the right strategy, design, copy, and integrating different marketing automation apps.
It also demands that you make the right offer, create multiple variations for each of the elements of your funnel for split testing, and tracking the performance of each element of the funnel.
Typically, creating effective funnels is so much work that most businesses don’t bother. Because they don’t, they lose out on opportunity every day.
The simple guide to funnels
If that’s you, then:
- You might not be leveraging sources of traffic to generate relevant, high-interested, potential buyers.
- You could be generating qualified leads from your website’s organic traffic, but you are not.
- You could be making appealing offers to grow your email list fast, but you’re missing out on growth.
- You would be converting some of your leads into customers, but without a funnel you can’t.
- Every single day that goes by without you having a funnel (or some kind of lead acquisition and conversion strategy in place) is money going down the drain.
Fortunately, thanks to Facebook Ads and Google Adwords, even lazy business owners can do just as well as hyperactive entrepreneurs, when it comes to generating quality leads to feed their funnels.
With the help of tools, experts, and information on the web about lead generation and building sales funnels, there are really no excuses.
Content marketing, SEO, blogging, social media — all of these take way too much time, money and other resources. That route of using multiple marketing channels to grow your business might not be for you if you can’t commit to such demanding work.
If this is the case, then your best option is paid advertising campaigns and funnels. Here’s how you can make paid traffic and funnels work for your business:
Make an offer
Depending on your business, think of a strong offer you can make with your ads.
Consider how most ads are like:
“Check us out”
“Buy now”
“Sign up”
If your ads are like that, it won’t work.
Consumers today have a lot to choose from so you’ll have to make an offer that can stand out, tease, entertain, amuse, or you give away something so appealing that your prospective customers would have been thrilled to pay you for it.
Learn to master the art of making irresistible offers. Prepare to give away some to get some. There’s no point in launching a campaign or building a funnel until you are sure you have something of value to give away.
Setup your funnel
For the offer you’ll make above, you’ll need a sales funnel. After clicking on an ad, they’ll go straight to a landing page where you continue with more information and supporting graphics to make your offer that much more compelling.
Be sure to carry the same message on your landing page that you also communicate with your ad. When you build a landing page that helps support your ad, it’s called a message-matching landing page. Message matching landing pages help keep your potential customers hooked, enable trust, and boost your conversions.
If your ad says “30% off”, your landing page should also say “30% off” and some more.
If your ad promises something for free, your landing page should compel your visitors to download (or get) that little freebie.
While you are at it, create a set of dedicated landing pages for the sole purpose of retargeting
Trigger automated email sequences (or SMS?)
As a business, you won’t be online all the time (even if you have a 100% online business). You’d also not be able to manually send in emails or SMS messages every time someone signs up for your offer (above).
That’s when marketing automation comes to the rescue. By triggering automated email responders each time someone signs up for your offer, you bail yourself out of endless firefighting scenarios and mind-numbing administrative work.
Plus, you can rest assured that every person who signs up for your offer on your landing page (or at the top of your funnel) is nurtured diligently by your reliable email autoresponder.
Analytics and tracking
You wouldn’t know where you are going, how you are doing, and just how effective your funnels are without proper analytics, tracking, and attribution.
Before you read anything else, know what you are going to track and the KPIs that really matter. Don’t chase vanity metrics of any kind that don’t add to your bottom line).
Depending on the traffic source you’ll use to bring in traffic (see ‘launch campaigns’ below), you’ll have some more work to do. At the minimum, here’s what you’ll have to do:
- Use Statly, our new software for real-time tracking on visitors through your sales funnel and website which helps you improve conversions and optimize the sales experience dramatically, and help you discover where your opportunities and bottlenecks are in your website.
- Add specific conversion snippets and Javascript codes for respective traffic sources to every landing page (including variants). Even if you were to opt-out of a traffic source, it still makes sense to add these codes to build your audiences (for launching campaigns later). For instance, you’ll have to setup the Facebook Pixel for Facebook Advertising and Google’s Adwords remarketing code and Google Adwords Conversion Code for each landing page and variants.
- Use UTM variables appended to your URLs to help you track and attribute traffic sources with conversions, leads, and sales. (The Statly Plugin automatically adds them to all of your blog links for easy tracking!)
Launch campaigns
By the time you get to this point, each of the above steps should be tested. Make sure that all systems are go.
Finally, choose your traffic source.
Are you going to use Google Adwords? Facebook ads maybe? How about Instagram advertising? Regardless of the traffic source you pick, all of the steps above are going to remain the same.
Launch your campaigns.
After your campaigns run for a while, wait for data to populate and then set about doing A/B tests to know exactly what works and what doesn’t. You can then take a call on making changes to your ads, landing pages, or even entire funnels based on the data you get.
Need help with your funnels?
Does that sound too much even for a lazy marketer or business owner? We get it.
Here’s some help:
Get access to our Funnel Factor Report, Sales funnel webinar, or our Funnel Blueprint Video Series.
Need specific help with funnels or marketing for your business? Get on a scheduled call with us.