What is a Marketing Sales Funnel? It’s a question that entrepreneurs ask every day. And for good reason! A Marketing Sales Funnel can be one of the most important tools in your business arsenal, turning around businesses that are struggling and helping them to make more money. In this article, we’re going to discuss what a Marketing Sales Funnel is, how to build one, and why it’s so important. Stay tuned!
I’m Adrian Boysel and welcome back to Adrian Agency, or if this is your first time, thank you for being here. I have something to say that I feel is quite vital that other people aren’t talking about. One of the most crucial components in running a business is acquiring clients; otherwise, you have no business. I’d want to teach you a technique that I’ve been using in my business for years.
Using a Marketing Sales Funnel to Generate Revenue
That’s what I’m going to talk to you guys about today – using digital marketing and specifically funnels to generate more revenue and attract more clients, with the goal of building your database and increasing your income. This is a strategy you can use in your business to really level up to the next place and reach the next income bracket. So let’s jump right in! The strategy that I want to talk to you guys about today is a marketing sales funnel.
What Is a Marketing Sales Funnel?
What is it? A funnel, well, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard of a funnel or a sales funnel. It’s a buzz-worthy word these days; it’s trending. You can just go look up Clickfunnels to know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s a process and a system for converting a prospect into a raving fan that starts with them not knowing you and ends with them begging for your autograph.
What a lot of the visual graphics of this look like is an actual funnel like you would use in your car. You’re using this in your business to attract top-of-mind awareness and get them to know, like, and trust you, and then to nurture them through the process into buying from you in multiple different places to increase the lifetime value. But in the beginning, you need to be a giver. If somebody doesn’t know you, you need to go out and do things like I’m doing and add value to the marketplace.
Step 1: Be the Expert
The first step for you is to find something that you are an expert on, if you’re not an expert on something yet then you need to get your skills up. You need to grow your talent, grow your soft skills and your heart skills to the point where you can start creating these things. I create content like this because this is knowledge and information and mentorship and courses that I’ve learned and I’ve taken over the years from sales and marketing and business leadership. I’ve taken a lot of that and I’m turning them into lead magnets. To bring this down even closer for you is understanding that usually, at the top of the funnel, the very top is what they call the lead magnet.
What Is a Lead Magnet?
That lead magnet can be anything. It could be a video, it could be a training video, it could be a webinar, it can be an e-book, or it could be a traditional book. However, there are lots of lead magnets that marketers are using these days to attract people to them. Your lead magnets can be free or low-ticket offers, but I’ve even seen lead magnets that have been high-ticket. However, most often people are wanting to build that reputation with a new audience that doesn’t know them. You want to ask for a very small commitment upfront.
Funnels are a marketing tool that involves formulating and distributing offers. Typically, funnels will have a seven-dollar opt-in or a free opt-in to an e-book or logo guide as an example of this is that we do a lot of internet marketing especially local marketing as an agency, and in our agency, we do what is called Google My Business Ranking. We help customers go through their Google My Businesses and improve them so they can start generating more traffic to the Google My Businesses. As a result, we created a how-to for doing it yourself.
Make It Irresistible
A lot of people are going to read that guide and see how much work it takes, and they’re going to say “Oh man, I would just rather have these guys – the experts who know how to do it better than me and have the time for this – handle this themselves.” There’s going to be a certain percentage of people that take it and use it for themselves, and there’s going to be a certain percentage of people that want just you to do it for them. So this is a way to build an email list. So you put this as a pop-up on your website, or on your link tree, or all the different places you can list your lead magnet.
You put that up there, and people put their information in an email or phone number, maybe an email and phone number and their name. You get this basic information, and now they’re in your funnel. This is where you want to create sequences that follow up from that to nurture the relationship. So let’s just use that example again – they opted in and they’re looking for the Google My Business service. Well, as part of that service, they need to geotag images. So we can offer a special and put automation processes in place where we say “Hey here’s how to geotag your images.” You can either do it yourself with this tool or again add value, we can do it for you for this price a month. That’s the draw of an effective marketing sales funnel.
Making an Irresistible Offer
If you’re smart, you’ll make an irresistible offer to get them to make their first purchase, so that maybe your free guide for Google My Business is free the next step in the funnel as you’re starting to come down to the real big sale that you want or the higher ticket sale or to the total lifetime value that you’re trying to get. Maybe you make that $10, $20, or $50 for geotagging.
One of the next steps is going to be getting citations for your Google My Business. So that’s going to be a cost they’re going to have to pay. They can try to figure out where to get citations themselves, or you can provide it to them; that’s another offer that you can put in the funnel. They can do it themselves, or you can do it for them. So these lead magnets and these funnels are going to bring them through a journey now, once they’ve optimized their Google My Business and got their geotagged images.
Final Steps
They’ve got their citations. They’re probably going to need to get reviews, so they’re going to need a great review system. This is an opportunity to introduce what a good review system looks like. I’m taking you through a journey, and everything is vertically integrated as we want to call it. So you want to take them through this funnel, to eventually have them just go, “Man, this is so much work. I just want you guys to manage this.”
Next thing you know, you’re selling a thousand-dollar a month Google SEO plan for a thousand bucks a month. It costs you three or four hundred bucks a month, so you have a nice margin in that, and you start to get this recurring income coming in. As a creative, such as a designer or web designer, motion designer, etc., this can be very beneficial. That recurring revenue is super valuable for you because it’s now consistent and reliable income, and you can scale and delegate these different things so creating that magnet is what draws them in, and then you take them through that cycle and through that journey to where now that client was initially worth zero dollars to me.
Since I sold all these other things in the journey and then eventually I got that thousand dollars, now that client is worth twelve thousand dollars. Now I want you to understand this. This is really important to having a functional marketing sales funnel. The more time that you invest into your lead magnet, the more heart, more energy, the more knowledge, the more wisdom you add to it, the more valuable it becomes – and the greater the returns you’ll see.
I did a Google My Business lead magnet on my website and saw great results – we got a bunch of subscribers and people on our email list. Recently, I launched another funnel under Instagraphics which is our community and software building for the creative industry.
How We Created Our Marketing Sales Funnel
I launched a funnel and let me just kind of walk you through some of the steps that it took to build this funnel. We had to build a landing page with multiple landing pages within the landing page. So there was the initial landing page where they put their information in, it gave them a little bit of a background, then there was the actual training page that we put together for our Instagraphics Quantum Prospecting training.
Then from there, it took them to the purchase page and also introduced them to the pro group, to make sure that they got the opportunity to do the group that we have. Then, from there, it gives them a confirmation and shows them the next steps. Right there, there’s a whole sequence of multiple pages that we had to build out. I couldn’t do that on my own, and if I did it would take me a long time to build, because I have an amazing team behind me. I was able to create that thing pretty quickly, in under a week. This is something that we provide as a service to our clients.
I also did the Google presentation deck, the Google slides deck that took me seven hours to produce from scratch. I had no idea what I was going to talk about, to a finished, completed project that was seven hours alone, just for the Google slides deck. Then I had to create all the ads – the video ads, the confirmation page ad, all the different things we had to create. I had to create a bunch of videos for the specific ads that we’re going to be running on YouTube and Facebook and all the places, so that was a whole other load of time.
Then, from there, I had my offer. I had to come up with what the offer was that I was putting out there: a $1,800 offer per year to join our community and be part of our network, to get group coaching, to get the swag, and to get all the things we needed to create an irresistible offer – which obviously is insanely irresistible. For $1,800 a year, you can come into our community group coaching program with me every single week. I mean, I put a lot of time into that offer, and so you want to have a well-thought-out offer on top of that. I had to do all the mock-ups for the entire digital product that I was offering.
Offers
I was offering a training video on how to help people learn how to prospect effectively and turn outbound prospecting into inbound prospects. So that was something I had to do. I needed to come up with a story, in the way that I told my story, in my slides deck, and as well as in my presentation in front of a camera. So I had to have camera equipment, like all the costs that come into doing that. I also had to develop the intro video at the beginning of my training, as well as the music that I put in my training. I had to create copy, and write all the copy for that page that was on all those web pages it was on the lead magnet.
There’s a lot of work that goes into creating that lead magnet, but I’m making an eighteen hundred dollar offer, so I better offer a lot of value inside of this training. Tens of thousands of dollars worth of value, especially if I want them to commit to the next step, which is joining our community. So this lead magnet, I probably put three months of work into it between producing an event, getting high-level speakers, me crafting my pitch, and really dialing everything in. There was a lot of investment that went into that.
ROI
The return that is going to come back from that is going to be way bigger than just the Google guide. This is something that is way more thought out, way more planned out. And the more time you invest, the greater the returns are. So this is something I want you to consider when it comes to building a magnet: the more time you’re willing to put in, the more knowledge you have around that, the better the outcome is going to be.
Step 2: Know Your Goal
The last piece to your magnet is you need to know what the goal outcome is. A lot of people don’t start with the end in mind and this is something that you need to be thinking about before you build the magnet if you’re going to do a GMB, Google My Business magnet or a prospecting magnet or some any kind of lead magnet, whether it’s super simple and easy little four-page e-book, or a guide to branding, or a guide to logo design, or how to create a great sports logo, or some sort of article, or whatever piece of educational content you’re coming up with.
You need to understand what the end goal is and what the objective is. This is where a lot of people fail inside of their lead magnets; they don’t have a solid objective or offer, and no next steps. Every lead magnet needs to have the next steps, and what is the next step along their journey? If you don’t lead them, they’ll wander off and take your lead magnet with them. They’ll never hear from you again, and it’ll be a wasted effort. So you want to make sure you put in a strong call to action, and you put in a strong objective of what it is you’re trying to accomplish with the magnet.
What I want to do with my group is get 5000 members. This one lead magnet is going to be responsible for bringing in probably a thousand – maybe more. I’m just now launching it. You’re going to have to drive traffic to that in order to use the existing traffic you have from your website. You can do things like put them on other websites, like blogs, and publish things.
Step 3: Drive Traffic
So there are lots of ways to drive traffic, and that’s another video for another day. But once you’ve got that magnet created, you need to drive traffic to it. And that is the last piece you can do organically – you can do it through paid methods, or with your Facebook groups. There are lots of ways to drive that traffic, but it’s really important that you utilize this tool and this strategy to grow your business. Because you have expertise and knowledge in your head that can help other people. And by educating the market, by giving instead of just expecting to receive, you are pulling people to you. That’s why we call it a magnet. Once you get them into your funnel, it’s all about nurturing that relationship.
Final Thoughts on Marketing Sales Funnels
So hopefully this video was super impactful for you. It’s just a big part of why I’m building this community – I really want you to know that I’m here to serve you at the highest level possible. If you have any criticism or feedback, I’m not afraid of that either. So go ahead and drop that down below. Thank you so much for watching, if you haven’t already, make sure you check out the Instagram Pro Network, the free group on Facebook. Just fill out all the questions and if you do, we’ll let you in and welcome you into our family. I look forward to seeing you there! I’m Adrian Boysel, thanks for watching, and as always, keep looking up.