Creating Sales Funnels That Work
These days, it seems like everybody out there has marketing advice. And what happens is their advice conflicts, which often leaves people wondering, what the hell am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to take my product and get this thing to sell online? The key is in a sales funnel. These days, sales funnels equal survival. And I’m going to walk you through exactly what is in a sales funnel and how we build sales funnels for our clients that 10 X, their ROI, my name’s Ryan Toth. I’m the CEO of ClearBrand. Let’s jump in.
What is a Sales Funnel?
All right. So first, what is a sales funnel? Picture a funnel right now. The goal of a sales funnel is to get people, lots of people up top, get them down into your funnel. And this is where they buy right at that bottom point is what we’re trying to do is take lots of people, get them into your funnel, get them to know your business, and then to buy your product. Now, there are multiple ways to go about creating your funnel and there are five parts of a good sales funnel, a sales funnel that gets you results.
Parts of a Sales Funnel
The first part of the sales funnel is actually the walls of this thing, right? The funnel itself, this is your clear brand message. Without that nobody’s going to be falling anywhere in this funnel, because you don’t know who you are or how to talk about it. They’re going to be confused. They’re going to leave before they’re even in it.
Now up at the top, we have traffic and you don’t have traffic. None of this is going to work. Then we have a lead magnet. Then we have an email sequence and finally a landing page. Those are the five parts of your sales funnel. Let’s walk through those one at a time, but, we’re not going to go through them in order. We’re going to go through them in the order that you need to create them, which is actually backwards, right?
Know Who You Are
We start with the clear message, and then we go to the bottom of this funnel and we work our way up. Let’s do it. So the first thing you got to do is you’ve got to know who you are and how to talk about yourself. One of the best ways to do that is with the StoryBrand messaging framework. There’s a link below this video to go to Business Made Simple University, you get 10 courses, they’re adding more all the time.
The StoryBrand messaging framework is one of those courses. As you go through that framework, you’ll be confronted with the parts of your identity that aren’t all the way clear parts of your marketing message that aren’t all the way clear. Then you clarify them. You walk out of that course. You’ve got a clear message.
Landing Pages
Next, once you have a clear message, we move on to the landing pages. This is where we’re going to convince people to buy. Why do we start here? Because it’s all about that purchase. It’s all about taking action and we’re going to reverse engineer our way back up to the top. But if you start up at the top here and you’re like, oh, I just need to get traffic.
Which is what a lot of SEO companies do out there. They’re not actually driving people who might purchase. They’re not actually driving you a tour to purchase. They’re just trying to get your traffic. This is why typically when our clients have been paying an SEO company and instead they switched over to ClearBrand, they actually make more money is because we have the entire process in mind from start to finish.
So we’re going to start here at this landing page. We’re going to talk about first, what is the action that we want people to take? Is it going to be buying? Maybe it’s going to be scheduling a call if you’ve got a service-based business, but we want to start with that action. Then we’re going to build the page to drive people towards that action.
We have a course that teaches you exactly how to do this. There’s a link below this video. It is called the Winning Website Master Plan. And I walk you through section by section, how to create a website that gets you results.
Now, after you have this landing page, we got to get people there. How do we do that? With an email sequence.
Email Sequence
In the world of business, people buy in direct relation to how much they trust you. Now. Sometimes they trust you right off the bat, but it doesn’t happen most of the time. Instead people need kind of some lead time, just like in dating. You’re not going to marry somebody when you meet them. Instead, you got to get to know them a little bit. You got to take them on dates. How do we do that? In the business world, that’s with your emails.
Now there’s two parts to your email sequence. The first first you got to add value to your customers’ lives. Typically that’s with some free stuff that’s with maybe blog articles, it’s information, it’s videos, things like that. Then what we’re going to do is sell them. What are we selling them on? Your landing page. The same thing that we’re going to be selling on that landing page we’re going to tell them about in the sales part of this email sequence now to increase conversions.
One of the things that you can do is add a sense of urgency to do that. You can add a discount or bonus or something else to the purchase. If they purchase within a certain number of days using a tool like deadline funnel, you can actually have the landing page with a countdown timer that is specific to each individual in your email sequence. And that countdown timer will look different depending on what day they joined your email sequence. So go check out deadlinefunnel for that.
Okay? We have your email sequence. You’re selling people on your product, we’re sending them to that landing page that we built. Great. Now, how do we get people into that email sequence? With your lead magnet.
Lead Magnet
Now, your lead magnet tasks to solve the same problem that your product solves. Let me say that again, your lead magnet has to solve the same problem that your product solves. Why? Because if your lead magnet doesn’t solve the same problem, these people aren’t interested in the product that you’re about to sell them. So figure out the problem that your product solves, then what you’re going to do is you’re gonna create a lead magnet that solves that problem, but it does it in a free way and it doesn’t do it as well as your product.
Here’s an example. Our best lead magnet is a free website wire frame PDF. You download this thing and it’s like madlibs. It’s a, it’s a PDF that tells you exactly what to put in, where to put it on your website, but it doesn’t build your website for you, which is why we also offer a prebuilt website that follows that same format.
So once you have that free PDF, now you actually might want this pre-built website. It’s priced incredibly well. The whole thing’s already mobile friendly. It’s already optimized. All you’ve got to do is take what you wrote on that PDF and copy and paste the content into this pre-built website. And now you have a website it’s that easy, right? So this lead magnet, we know that the people who download this PDF are also the people who would buy a website template and your lead magnet could be a video series.
It could be a series of articles that are not on your blog. It could be a PDF. It could be a couple PDFs, a series of PDFs. However you want to do that. This is actually the first piece of that value series in your email sequence. The PDF is the first value. If your lead magnet is a video series, those other emails will just be the rest of the video series. And in your email sequence, those three value emails would actually be the same as the lead magnet. Now for us, because we’re using this PDF as our lead magnet, we actually have a couple more emails that add value in the emails sequence so you got options here, however you do it.
What you want to do is make sure that your lead magnet is valuable. It’s worth at least $15, but you’re giving it away for free in exchange for an email address. Then people get this email sequence, but it’s automated. So you don’t have to do anything, right? You’re hooking this up to your email platform. They download the lead magnet and then they are immediately added into this email sequence.
For the first couple emails, provide value and nurture the relationship. And then we transitioned to some sales emails. Now that we have that, let’s go back up to the top of the funnel, which is traffic.
Traffic – Ads
None of this works. If you don’t have traffic, now there’s a couple ways to get traffic. One, ads, you’re buying traffic. If you do that, you need to make sure that you’ve got high conversions all the way through this sales funnel, because paying money is not why you’re in business. You’re in business to make the world better and in order to do that, you need to make money. And so if you’re paying for ads, you better make sure that you’re making money at the end of that sales funnel and that you’re making more money than you’re paying on those ads.
Traffic – Content Marketing
Now, another way to do this is with content marketing. What I mean by that is writing valuable blog articles on a regular basis that people are searching for. Do not write blog articles that make you feel good. That is not the point. The goal is traffic. Whenever you’re writing a blog article, the goal is traffic. If you want to be looking up, what are people searching for? A couple of tools for that Google Keyword is inside of Google ads. They have a keyword tool. You can see the traffic for different searches. Another tool that I love is called Ubersuggest U B E R suggests, Google that, you’ll bring up the website and you type in different keywords.
Blogs
You could type in, eh, let’s say you sell running shoes type in running shoes. And you see what are those top searches associated with that? Then you’re going to write blog articles about that stuff. If you see blog articles that are ranking highly one easy tactic is to write another version of that blog article, but do it better. So if somebody has seven best running shoes, do 10 best running shoes and then do a better analysis of each of those running shoes. Now, of course, if you sell running shoes, your running shoes are going to be the number one suggestion there. That’s how you do that. Or you could say you could do an article on form, you know, how do you run with form? You know, what is the proper form when running it? That gets a lot of searches.
But again, you’re not writing about what makes you feel good. You’re writing about things that people are searching for because blogs are built to get you traffic, that’s the whole point. Now you have your sales funnel, so you’ve built it backwards, but the way people walk through it is they’re going to see your ads, or they’re going to do a Google search for something that you wrote a blog article about.
They’re going to come to that page. If you’re running ads, run ads to your lead magnet, more people will download your lead magnet than they will buy your product. The exception to that is remarketing. If they’ve already been to your website, run ads straight to your product. If they haven’t been to your website, ads to lead magnets tend to work really well. The blog articles that you’ve written, because that’s the top of the funnel, make sure that you have calls to action.
Typically, you’re going to be offering your lead magnet somewhere on those blog articles, maybe down at the bottom, maybe in the middle somewhere. But remember the goal is to get them into the funnel. It doesn’t matter how much traffic you have. If nobody’s buying at the same time, it doesn’t matter how good your sales funnel is. If you don’t have traffic, you need both.
This is not an either or scenario. This is a both. And so your blog articles need to be getting people into your email sequence and they do that by offering your lead magnet on them. So if somebody comes, they find out about you either through your content or through your ads, then they download your lead magnet. Then they are now in your email sequence, which is automated. It goes out without you having to do anything, then that email sequence sells them on your product, sends them to the landing page where they buy.
All of that is supported, with the walls of the sales funnel which are your clear message. One of my favorite phrases from a man named Donald Miller is that “marketing is an exercise in memorization”. You are simply repeating the same message over and over and over and over. Okay? So throughout this funnel, you’re talking about the same problems. You’re talking about the same solutions, right? You’re getting people to move through this by being consistent in your message. If you are not consistent, they will not remember you. So that is why the walls of the sales funnel are your clear message they, it supports the entire thing. I’ve mentioned a lot of tools.
I think the most important tool out there is the ClearBrand website template. This is a pre built websites, already mobile friendly. It’s already optimized. It’s got five pages in there and we’ve got a bunch of designs for you to choose from to fit your brand or personal design preferences. Best all you’ve got to do is fill it in with your content. Literally it asks you, what do you sell? And you just write in that spot. This is what I sell, right? It says, why should I trust you? And you right in that spot, this is why you can trust me.
It is that easy. It’s like madlibs. You just go through this thing, fill it in. And you’ve got a website that sells, click the link below this video to learn more and buy today. When you implement what you, what you learned in this video, you’re going to see an uptick in your sales, comment below with how much your revenue increased. I want to hear about it. So go out, grow your business and I’ll see in the next video.
