Digital Marketing Strategy: Profitable Sales Funnel Fundamentals

1. Welcome!: Hey there, my name is Maggie Stara, and I'm a Canadian digital marketer living here in Australia. I've been working in digital marketing since 2016 and during those years, one of my biggest passions has been being able to look at a business as a whole and then really zero in on those unique individual elements that then allow me to create a really tailored strategy that's unique to that business and to their audience. The reason that I'm so passionate about this is because I do think it takes quite a bit of skill and effort to be able to see how all of the different pieces of the digital marketing puzzle all fit together. I've seen a lot of business owners who are maybe spending their days running Google ads when they should really be focusing their efforts on running Facebook ads. Or maybe they're spending a lot of time creating these amazing videos for YouTube, when really their business is a lot more catered towards building an awesome and nurtured email marketing list and this is the reason that over the years, I've worked with businesses of all sizes to really help them to identify which parts of a digital marketing strategy they should really focus on to be able to amplify their profitability and which areas maybe they don't need to focus on as much and that's exactly what this class is about. Whether you're a business owner, entrepreneur, or a freelancer, or someone in between, this class is perfect for anyone who is just looking to find new ways to build profitable sales funnels and build profitable digital marketing strategies for their business or for their clients if you're a freelancer. Inside this class, you're going to learn how to identify who your ideal customers are, and how to use sales and marketing funnels to really grow your business online. Then we're going to also look at what metrics you want to be measuring at each stage of your funnel in order to ensure that everything is profitable and running smoothly. Then I'm also going to talk you through some problem areas that you might want to look out for at each stage of your funnel as well. I'm going to be taking you through lots and lots of different examples of how really big businesses like Amazon and Apple, and McDonald's, and others have used the exact strategies that you're going to learn inside this class to grow their multibillion dollar businesses. Then by the end of the class, you're going to have the skills and the plan to execute on the class project where you're going to actually put all of your knowledge into action and map out your perfect profitable sales funnel for your business and your own unique audience. Now throughout the class, I'm going to be sharing with you some of my own missteps and mishaps and mistakes that I've made with executing digital marketing strategies for my own business that haven't worked so well and why they didn't work so well, and how you can prevent those mistakes in your own business. Then I'm also going to share with you some of my successes and how you can replicate those and implement those for growing your own business. I'm honestly over the top nerdy level of passionate about this stuff. I'm really excited to get going and hopefully you are as well. If you are someone who's ready to take the next steps in learning how to build a profitable digital marketing strategy to grow your business or grow your client's businesses if you're a freelancer then I am so excited to get going and I'll see you in the next lesson. 2. Strategy vs Implementation: The real reason that marketing and sales funnels are such a hot skill to have for business owners and marketers, is because of the actual complexity that goes on behind the scenes of developing a really successful digital marketing strategy. The digital marketing world neatly divides itself into strategy and implementation, and there are some people who will never really go outside of the implementation phase. For example, a content writer may never actually be involved in the strategy that it took to get them to a piece of content. They might just be assigned to write a piece of content on a particular topic, and then they go and research that piece of content and they write it, and that's their implementation or execution side done. But there might've been someone who was that planning element of that content execution where they spent hours, maybe even days researching and planning, and looking at past pieces of content, and future pieces of content, and future product launches, and competitor pieces of content and other marketing activities that are going on in the business as a whole that then delivered them to selecting a particular topic for this content writer to write at just the right time that it aligns with all the other marketing activities. That might seem quite complex, but that's the marketing magic that it takes to really get a perfect piece of content in front of your ideal customer at just the right time so that they take the action that you want them to take. That's exactly what I'm going to be teaching you. We're going to be going through how to develop a perfect digital marketing strategy for your own unique business in a way that creates more customers, more revenue per customer, and more lifetime customers that are really happy with your product and service that they're ready to tell anyone and everyone they know about how amazing you are and refer your business so that it can continue to grow more organically as well. But because of how complex this process can be, I have provided you with a guide which you can find under the projects and resources section of this class on your desktop. Inside of that guide, you're going to find lots of useful resources that will assist in your learning journey throughout the class. You will also find access to a Google Doc that you can then copy to your own Google Drive so you can fill it out as you go through the lessons. I'm going to be prompting you to write down certain things as we go along, which will really help you to essentially have a fully formed strategy by the time you actually get to the class project. The class project is designed in a way that's not set out just for you to test out the skills that you've learned throughout the class, but also for you to get some really valuable feedback from myself and other students. Because sometimes it can be the smallest of tweaks that's going to result in thousands of dollars worth of extra revenue that you wouldn't have otherwise had, and it might just come from a suggestion of someone saying, hey, improve this little thing or why don't you try this out and it might make all the difference in the world. I really encourage you to be a little bit vulnerable. I know it can feel really intimidating to ask for feedback when you're new to this stuff, but I really encourage you to put yourself out there and put your project out there so that you can get that feedback and a little bit more guidance and support as you're building your first or 10th or 100th funnel really. I'm going to be there to really guide you and provide some feedback on how you can improve or some slight tweaks that you can make to your funnel to make it as profitable as it can be. I do promise that this stuff does get easier so once you have one awesome profitable funnel, it's going to be a lot easier to build your second and third and 10th, and 100th funnel because the strategies are quite similar and you'll have the skills to be able to identify what to look for in each funnel and each business as well. Now, if you're ready, let's get going with the next lesson where you're going to learn how to identify your one ultimate goal that you want to achieve with your sales and marketing funnel. 3. Establish Your Goals: You might have various goals for what you're hoping to get out of the material you learn here. You might be a freelancer looking to build a profitable marketing strategy for your clients or you might have your own digital product or physical product or service. You might have a mix of all these different scenarios going on. Maybe you don't really have a business in mind yet and you're hoping that this course will give you a little bit of clarity and the skills to create your own profitable product or service and know how to sell it. I get it because that sums up my own multi-passionate experience as well. In order for you to succeed, I really want you to focus on one area of your business or future business and one ultimate goal for what you're hoping to achieve. We will be looking at how to identify micro goals to then achieve your big macro plans. When you're just getting into this world, it can be so easy to get distracted and think of 20 different ideas for creating a profitable funnel. You end up dividing up your energy a little bit too thin and achieving nothing concrete in the end. I want you to pick one avenue to direct all of your focus on, then go make that profitable. Then once that's confidently working for you and everything is working as it should, you can use the exact same skills and strategies to launch another profitable business growth strategy if you wish. The reason that I'm so passionate about this one goal, one plan of execution at a time is because I personally wasted thousands of $ being directionless. I'm a big fan of trial and error and back in 2018, I listened to a digital marketer podcast episode where a woman named Molly Pittman generated 157,000 and 362 leads in just eight weeks for about $1.08 per lead. Then I thought, "Oh yeah, a $ a lead? Yes, please. I want to do that." I went ahead and went on a mission to replicate her results. As you can see from this screenshot of my Facebook ads account on the right, I actually ended up doing a little bit better by getting about $0.86 per lead for 924 leads. Granted, I didn't have to generate a 150,000 leads. I definitely replicated her success on a much smaller scale but overall it was a successful campaign. Was it a good idea? Well, not really because I didn't actually have anything major to sell to these leads at the time or any plan of what to do with them. The tactics that I learned in this experiment really helped me generate a lot of leads and sales for my clients so I'm grateful for the experience. But in terms of my own business, and having no clear idea of what the overall goal was, meant that I paid quite a bit of money to get people onto my email list with no real idea of why I wanted them there or what I was going to do with them once they got there. I spent about $800 with no plan on how to actually get a return on my investment so I want you to be very clear as to what your goal is. Are you looking to build your email list or are you looking to just generate revenue? If you are looking to build your email list, do you know what the ultimate product or service will be that you can sell back to your audience? Don't get me wrong. Building an email list is a great strategy, even if you don't have a product to sell your audience yet but you have to be on your way to having something to sell them and have clear deadlines as to when you'll be able to sell them and offer them something. One thing I want you to keep in mind is that no matter what your smaller goals are, whether you're looking to build your audience on social media, get traffic to your website, get more views on YouTube videos, or build your email list, you should always be thinking about how that is going to generate leads for your business that are going to turn into sales. Because it's very easy to spend a lot of time tinkering with the right times to post on Instagram and the right hashtags to use and the right accounts to engage with, but if all of that time is not going to help you grow your business and generate sales, then it might be time to reassess where your time is better spent. Hopefully that's exactly why you are here. To learn where to invest your time and resources in growing your business. That's exactly what we're going to be going over the following few lessons. For the time being, I just want you to go into your course guide and write down your ultimate goal that you're going to be looking to achieve with your marketing strategy. At this stage, it doesn't have to be extremely specific yet, like saying you want to increase your sales by 400 percent. Your goals at this stage could be something along the lines of what's listed on this slide here. Maybe you're looking to get more students into your high ticket offer program, or get qualified leads for a real estate business, or get more medium-sized clients which are at least 300,000 a month plus consultations for an agency, or get more sales of an affiliate product or get more appointments, whatever your overall goal is, write that down. Eventually of course, you will be looking to make this as specific as possible but for now I want you to just identify one goal you will be using as your inspiration for your marketing strategy throughout these lessons. Remember that it's perfectly fine if you have multiple areas of your business, you want to see growth in. At the agency, we helped a wedding photographer book more wedding clients. Before then, also looking at her maternity and newborn photoshoots and assisting in getting more bookings in those different areas as well. Like I said, one thing at a time. Choose one overarching goal in one path and keep that in mind as you're going through the following lessons, and we will be looking at how to make it as specific as possible a little later on because quite honestly, building marketing funnels is complicated and enough with just one goal, let alone four or five. Once you nail it with one, it's so much easier to then replicate and expand into other areas of your business. If you don't have an existing business yet and you don't know what your one goal should be, that's perfectly fine. Stay tuned and I'll help you get some clarity on this as well. 4. Identify Your Ideal Customer Avatars: Much like your end goal, it's important to establish who you will be looking to speak to at the beginning of your marketing funnel and throughout. As we'll be going through what funnels are and how to implement them in growing your business, I want you to really think about who your target audience is with anything and everything that you do online. There's honestly been so many times we have written something and thought this is brilliant, and then I thought about my target audience, who isn't me, and then realized it's not actually an ideal piece of content for them, so I needed to re-frame it in a way that was more tailored to their pain points, and their problems, and their needs and not my own. It might sound easy, but it's actually a little bit unnatural for people to keep adjusting the way they speak, the way they write, and the way they create to a particular tone of voice, and style, and format to suit someone other than themselves. But it definitely gets easier with practice. For this exercise that's also inside of your course guide, I want you to create three fictitious people that will represent your target customers. These are called buyer personas, customer personas, ideal customer avatars, brand personas, there are honestly so many names, I get a little bit lost. But no matter what people call them, their purpose is exactly the same; to help you make better marketing decisions. Allow me to explain. I want you to just go through and create the following within your course guide or you can just do this in a Google Doc or on a piece of paper for now. I want you to write down who your ideal customer avatar is. Starting just with your very first ideal customer avatar, who are they? What is their name? Give them a name, give them an age, give them a gender, a marital status. Are they married, are they not? Are they a parent, are they not? Are they in a particular location? That can be just one country. Being as specific with this as possible, but if you want to include just a region, as in English-speaking countries or North America for example, instead of going specifically, they live in Toronto in Canada, then you can do that for now. In terms of the industry that they work in and the job title, again, this can seem really intimidating when you're making this stuff up. But I want you to just think about your product and your service, or your various products and services, and think about who's problems they solve. Who are they catered to? Then group those people into just three categories, and then this is going to be almost a representative of that category. What industry does that representative work in? Are they maybe in HR, or in marketing, or is it completely unrelated? Are they in the travel industry, hospitality industry? It's so crucial for you to think about your business and your audience in this. Then think about what job title they are in, and that can also include a seniority level. Think about what a job title says about how long the person has been within that company, and maybe what level of skill and experience they have within their industry. Then what is their rough annual income and education level? The reason you're writing all of this down, and the reason that you want to be as specific with this as possible is because these are all the different things that you can actually target, especially through your advertising. Maybe not so much through organic methods. If you're writing a blog post, or you're just posting on social media, you might not be able to target people based on their parental status, for example, or based on their annual income, but when you are actually advertising, you can have all of these different categories in mind and use it to really hyper select your audience that's going to be seeing your ad. The more specific you can be with creating these three target buyer personas, the better off you'll be in terms of where you're going to be putting your money behind on your advertising. Then moving on to the left-hand side of this, which is your goals and values or their goals and values. Think about what drives them. What do they want to accomplish in the short term and the long term? Again, this is really, really going to come into play with your funnel because you're going to be able to give them short-term solutions that are a little bit cheaper and long-term solutions that are a little bit more pricey, but it's going to allow you to get more value out of these people. Then think about what's important to them in terms of the way that they conduct themselves personally and professionally. This is just the kind of emotional triggers that you can leverage in terms of, is there any causes that are really aligned with their values? All of these things can be really key so write down as much as you can think of. Then move on to their pain points. What are they struggling with? What do they want help with? Have they maybe being burned in the past by someone who has tried to help solve their pain points? This is an interesting one because you have to be a little bit prepared for the fact that maybe someone in the past has offered them a similar product or service to what you're offering, and maybe it wasn't such a positive experience for them. Maybe that's the reason that they're not super likely to purchase your own product and service, because they're a little bit fearful of that happening to them again. Maybe that actually is something to think about. What do they fear? What do they wish that they could maybe eliminate from their life? Then in terms of interests, this is more just for you to get a sense of maybe some famous authors or famous media personalities that you can target off of by leveraging their audience. If you figure out what books they read or what blogs they read, or what movies they watch, then you can say, "All right, show my advertising to people who have an interest in Deadpool." First maybe movie I could think of, I don't know why my audience would be watching Deadpool. Actually, they would be, it's a great movie. You get the point. Just writing down as much stuff about this person as you can, as if they were your best friend. Think about if this was your main and you were writing a profile for them over their fears, their pain points, their likes, their dislikes, all of this stuff, what would you write down? But, of course, it has to be catered to your audience of your business. Then also really critical thinking about who do they follow on social media? Because that is really, really going to assist you in targeting off what their audience is, because they might be reading all these books and maybe watching all these movies. But unless those people are on social media, it's not really going to assist you as much with your advertising. As many social media accounts that you can write down that you think your target audience is following, the better off you'll be. Then in terms of who inspires them, what events do they attend, what other things they're buying, so that could also include your competitors. Maybe they're currently buying from your competitors, and your goal is to not steal their audience, but get their audience to come and see the value in your product and service versus theirs. Then how do they spend their spare time? Maybe they like to hike, maybe they like to go for walks, maybe they are really keen rock climbers. Those are all things that you can write down in terms of the interest. Then the objections, you will get a better sense of the objections once you actually have real life customers who are going to be sending you some e-mails and messages about reasons they're not really ready to buy your product or reasons that they're not sure about buying your product. But if you can come up with objections that you think people would have to buying your product based on your research, then write those down as well. Now, remember that you are making all of this up, so there is no right or wrong answer here. But ideally, these personas would be based on your existing customer data. If you do have your existing customer data, you might be able to leverage that to actually create your personas. But if you don't, then you're making it up based on what you think your audience will be divided into these three chunks of these fictitious characters that you're using to represent those three chunks of your audience. But there is no right or wrong answer. Just write down as much information as you currently have or you currently think of. Now, it might seem a little bit unfamiliar if you've never done this before, so I want to give you an example of one of my personas Ellie here. Starting with the middle section again, Ellie is a 27-year-old single girl with no kids living here in Australia. She currently works in HR, but she dreams of being able to travel full time. She makes about $65,000 a year and has a masters degree. Maybe I'd be a little bit more specific about what her masters degree is in as well, but at this point the education section is quite key in just determining the level of education. Whether she's finished high school, has her bachelors, or has a masters, or a PhD degree because that's the level of detail we're looking for there. She's also driven by her love of travel and by creating her own freedom. Now, her short-term goals are just to be able to learn about the different ways that she can make money while traveling, and then pick one that really suits her best and learn the skills necessary to begin that career. Now, her long-term goal is to be able to get one freelance client. For him, she can just do a little bit of work in the evenings and on the weekend so she can really practice and get her confidence up, and then eventually get enough work to replace her current income so she can travel full-time while working from her laptop. Now, she is struggling with finding the right path for her because it seems like there's so many different options out there and it's hard to know what's right for her. She's a little bit fearful in taking a big leap to a new career path and failing as she is currently in a pretty stable career and she doesn't want to disappoint her friends and her family, as well as letting herself down. Now she's a fan of Simon Sinek and Tony Robbins, and she's really big into inspirational speakers like Simons and again, Tony Robbins and others. She loves travel shows and follows a lot of social media accounts dedicated to people traveling full-time. This is also where I would mention those specific accounts. Obviously, I didn't go into that much detail, but this is where I would list those accounts as well. Ellie loves being outdoors, loves going hiking, and surfing in the summers, and snowboarding in the winters. She is prone to being a little bit skeptic when offer seem too good to be true, and she likes to do her own research before making any purchases. This is an example of how I might put something like this together. You will notice that I didn't actually answer every single question that was on the previous slide because I might not have all of that information. That's the maximum level of information that you're looking for from each persona, but you might not have all of it for every single persona. It's quite a lot of detail to go into, but you wanted to cover at least a couple of points in each of these five sections. I would then maybe have another persona that would be totally different, and for me, this would likely be a stay-at-home parent. My third persona would then be a university student who's just about to finish, and he's really unsure about what to do next and needs little bit of guidance. That's how I would maybe categorize my three personas for living to Rome for my courses. Now, what this will do for you long-term is allow you to deliver incredibly targeted messages to each of your three segments even if you're actually selling just one product or service. But each of those segments will then feel like the messaging is talking directly to them and their pinpoints. Here's an example of how Cat Howell, who's an awesome marketer, has done something like this. This is the exact same video, same offer, but two completely different messages. One of them is speaking directly to marketers who run Facebook ads for coaches, and then the second one is speaking to coaches who want to learn how to run their own Facebook ads. It's selling the exact same service to two completely different target markets, which is why she separated them out and she would be delivering one to the marketers and one to the coaches. Just imagine how much better this ad would convert when it's speaking directly to that specific audience instead of just a super general message of, do you want to learn how to run Facebook ads and then sending that out to everyone. I really want you to go ahead and create these three customer avatars for your own business using the questions we just ran through that are inside of your course guide as well. Because I promise you that having these in mind when you're thinking about the rest of your sales funnel will really help to increase the return on your marketing investment when you're at the stage of putting everything together, and also when you're thinking about how to actually plan everything out. It will also just really help you to come up with the messages to put into your marketing materials when you're building everything out, because sometimes, that's the part that people get stuck in. They've planned out this beautiful funnel, everything looks great, and it's time to actually build everything out, and you just have no idea what to put in a Facebook ad or in a YouTube video. This is what's going to really help you because you're going to know who you're actually talking to, and that's going to help to frame those messages. As you can imagine, people are so much more likely to buy something if they feel like the seller is talking directly to them as a single mom living in Chicago versus all women in English-speaking countries. It's such a different effect when you are looking at an ad, whether it's for a shoe or for a $4,000 coaching program, it doesn't matter what the price point is or what the product is, people still want to feel like the person selling them that product or service gets them and gets their pinpoints and he's talking directly to them. Finally, please bear in mind that these personas do and should change as your business grows and evolves because ultimately, they should be based on the actual people that are going through your sales funnels and they are purchasing your products and services. The personas that I created for living to Rome a couple of years ago before I really knew who my customers were, look totally different than the ones I have now based on my actual student data. Don't feel like you can't change these up later because you absolutely can, and in fact, I really encourage you to do so. 5. Why Funnels Are the Key to Success: Now that you have an overarching goal in mind, and an idea of who you're looking to target, let's go ahead and talk about why we're all here today. What the heck are sales funnels, why are they so integral to growing your business on autopilot, and where do most people completely mess up when trying to get sales of their products or services? It might seem counter-intuitive, but let's start with the last point first. Where most people go wrong in selling their product or service, is that they ask for the sale right upfront, and the online world is really not that different from a physical store front, for example. Just imagine that you're out on the street and you're doing a bit of window shopping and this pair of shoes just really caught your eye, so you decide to go in and check it out, and a pushy salesperson walks up to you straightaway, and asks if you would like to follow them to the register and pay for these shoes. You'd likely be leaving that door, even if maybe, you had the intention of trying the shoes on, and purchasing them if they looked good on you. Now, not only did they not get the sale, but they left a terrible impression on you, making it pretty unlikely that you would ever return to that store, and likewise, imagine if you're meeting someone at a party for the first time, and they asked you out, and then you go on your first date, and then they ask you to marry them before you've even finished your appetizers. Is not a great experience, is it? People are asking you to commit to something that you haven't really had a chance to think about or try, or develop that kind of trust factor for. You need to focus on building these kinds of relationships with your audience online as well, and you need to be focused on adding value to their lives, before asking them to open their wallet. The sales process is basically a courtship. Your ideal customers need to get to know, like, and trust you. Just remember that anytime you're thinking about constructing a salespersons for your business, and don't worry we'll be talking lots and lots about this throughout the course as well. Now let's talk about why understanding sales funnels and executing them correctly is so integral to the growth of your business. This effectively comes down to the difference between the best, and the best marketed. As in, the bestselling books on Amazon aren't necessarily the best written. Even the best selling courses on platforms like this one aren't necessarily the best in their industry or taught by the best instructors, what they are is the best marketed. They're packaged, presented, and sold in a way, that makes them discoverable and shareable, and a no brainer for customers to purchase, which then gives them the illusion of being the best, and on the other side, there are likely many incredibly well-written books, and life changing products, and innovative tech, that will remain completely unknown because of a lack of marketing. Just as an example, J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books were turned down by 12 publishers, before they found their fame, while even the youngest members of western society seemed to know who the Kardashians are. So yes, a great sales and marketing strategy is the key to success of your business. The most important takeaways from the rise of both Harry Potter and the Kardashians, is that an effective sales funnel, doesn't really end with the sale. Actually, it never ends. According to this infographic by Statista, the Harry Potter franchise has hold over 25 billion in revenues since 1997, 8.5 of that was at the Box Office, 7.7 in books, and 7.3 just from toys. Just imagine that J. K. Rowling just sold her books and then went yeah, that's done, and then just missed out, on an additional $18 billion in revenue from movies and merchandise. But it's not just about that, it's about the exposure to the brand everywhere you go, that gets you to buy the next book and see the next movie, or play, or buy that new product, and the best brands in the world definitely know this. They know that they can't just assume you're going to buy everything they released from here until eternity, just because you engage with them once. They know that they need to put in the work, and keep you engaged with their brand by showing up on your TV, and in your emojis, and on Facebook, and podcasts, and YouTube, and everywhere you go they go. They also leverage the power of user-generated content, to further boost their brand's credibility, which is all the amazing content that their users and their audience submits and puts out there, because people pay a lot more attention to other people who are just like them, who are using, are loving a brand's product or service, than they ever would to the actual brand themselves. People just trust regular people more than they would a formal business, and we'll be looking at how you can create these sales and marketing magic for your own brand, using effective sales funnels. Maybe not Harry Potter or Kardashian level of effectiveness, but still very effective. What actually is a sales or marketing funnel, and how does it look in its most basic form? Put simply, a marketing funnel is a framework businesses use to turn strangers into customers. Now the term funnel itself is a little bit deceptive because it refers more to the methodology behind funnels rather than the actual shape of the framework, because in reality, in their most complex forms they're more like spider webs than they are in funnel form. The final framework is essentially based on the idea that the number of people you attract to the initial meeting point of your business, whether that's a website or social media profile, is much larger than the fraction of those people who will still show interest in your business too far enough down the funnel to become leads and eventually customers. At the top of the funnel, naturally, you will have the largest audience of strangers who are just discovering your business for the first time through blog posts, and social media posts, and videos that are out there, while through the middle of the funnel, your goal is to capture those visitors and turn them into email subscribers, so that you can eventually get them to the bottom of the funnel where they turn into targeted customers. Where your audience is much, much smaller, which is where the shape of the funnel comes in. I do want to be clear about the fact that you will find lots of different pieces of information out there about funnels, and their structure, and everyone will be saying something that's slightly different, just because there is no [inaudible] framework for what a funnel needs to look like, because it's super targeted to each individual business and their unique audience. Always keep that in mind, if you're leveraging other people's information and content. Now, when we talk about what you should actually create for your audience at each stage, and what you should be measuring to actually determine the success of each stage, we'll be talking about that in a bit more depth by focusing on each stage in the following few lessons, and we will primarily at this stage be focusing on organic content, which is things like blog posts, and email marketing, and social media posts, because once you begin advertising, you will essentially be amplifying your organic efforts by putting some money behind the exact strategies, we'll be talking about with our organic efforts. But we will talk more about paid advertising a little later on. I'm just trying to introduce you to the concepts of building out a funnel, by talking about topics that you're probably already a little bit more familiar with, such as just posting on social media and writing blog posts. Let's now get started with talking about what to look for at the top of your funnel. 6. Your Top of the Funnel Strategy: Tofu isn't just a great protein substitute for non-meat-eaters like myself. It can also be used as an acronym that's often used to just refer to the very first stage of your funnel, which is the top of funnel stage. You might hear it being referred to as the TOF or the TOFU. I prefer the TOFU, so that's what we're going to be using throughout the following few lessons. The top of your marketing funnel is really just all about increasing the visibility of your business and making it really targeted audience aware of the fact that your company exists. Now, this is your opportunity to really showcase your authority in your topic or industry. People at this stage of the funnel are really not ready to buy anything from you, they're just getting to know you and your business. In practice, the top of the funnel might look like someone maybe reading a blog post that you wrote or viewing one of your YouTube videos or just engaging on social media. Your goal at this stage is really just to attract as many targeted visitors as possible with a really relevant content. This part is really, really, really key. You don't just want to be attracting anyone and everyone to your website or social profile. You want to be attracting the right kind of audience. Honestly any brand who has gone viral for the wrong reasons will attest to this, let's say you are a sustainable makeup brand, and you've just been in the news because of a factory mishap, then you might still get hundreds of thousands of visitors to your website, but they're likely there for the wrong reasons and are probably not there to purchase your products, so not all visitors are created equal. After your goal, let's focus on the metrics that you want to be measuring at this stage of the funnel. If you don't have a website yet and your online presence is just on social media for now, then you could just measure things like engagement on your posts and the number of video views or new followers at this stage. But ideally, you will have a website for your business at some point. In which case, these are the metrics that you want to be measuring at this stage. You want to be measuring the overall web traffic to your site,and then you want to really narrow in on the number or the percentage of new sessions. Not just the people who are continuously returning to your website and reading more and more blog posts, but you want to see what new people are finding you for the very first time through you website. Then you want to be focusing and looking at the bounce rate, which is the metric that's going to tell you the percentage of the traffic or the sessions that ended with that user not taking any further action on your site and then your traffic per channel. This is a metric that's going to tell you what is actually bringing people to your website. Are they getting there through a link that they've clicked on via e-mail or have they found you organically through Google, or have they been sent there through social media? This will really allow you to cater your strategy through the channel that is sending people to your website and getting them to read that content. You can track all of this really easily through Google Analytics for free, just under Acquisition-All Traffic and then Channels like I have in this screenshot here. If you're not sure how to set up Google Analytics for your website, or maybe someone's already set it up for you and you're not sure how to access it. Then check your course guide for some resources on everything to do with Google Analytics because it can be a really handy free tool for accessing all of the data that's so key at the top of your funnel. In terms of the numbers that you actually want to be aiming for on all of these metric, well, they highly depend on things like your industry and the type of website you actually have. For example, blogs and news related websites like Living to Roam, will generally have a higher bounce rate between 65 and 90 percent sometimes, whereas e-commerce websites will have an average bounce rate of between 20 and 40 percent, which makes sense if you think about the fact that bounce rate is all about people taking further action on your website and when you're on an e-commerce website, you're probably looking at a few different products, you might be adding stuff to cart, you might be checking out whereas on a news related website or a blog, you might have just come there for that one blog post and then you're done and you're not really taking any other actions on that website. The type of website you're running and then also your particular industry can really affect the numbers that you should be aiming for. It's really best to do some research on this in terms of your industry averages and also the type of website you're running, but ultimately, honestly, as long as you are getting the results that you're happy with, the numbers are more just to guide. There's no concrete number you want to be aiming for. You might have a higher than average bounce rate, but what if you also have a higher than average conversion rate over your visitors into paying customers, in which case, it doesn't really matter what your bounce rate is because you're getting the results that you want, just take it as almost like a measure but with a grain of salt with these numbers in terms of what you want to be aiming for. But the key is just to really keep an eye on it and try and improve as you go. What kind of content should you be creating at this top of funnel stage? Well, in an organic approach at this stage, you would be looking to create entertaining or educational content for your visitors. This can include the form of blog posts or videos or social media posts, infographics, podcasts, doesn't necessarily just have to be through your website. Basically, anything that's free and provides value to your audience would be great at this stage of your funnel. Then when we talk about the actual particular strategies, think about the shape of that funnel. This is where you're going to be attracting the largest number of people. The number of strategies is going to be a lot bigger at this stage of the funnel, than it will be in the middle of the funnel and the bottom of the funnel. There are quite a few strategies for you to keep in mind at this stage, but definitely pick and choose according to your own business and according to what you enjoy creating as well. The first strategy is content marketing. Ideally, this content should be very closely related to your ultimate paid product or service. The reason for this is because just like not always those are created equal, not all content that provides value to your visitors will also provide value for you and your blog. I'm going to give you an example of Living to Roam, basically starting as a travel blog primarily with a little bit of freelancing and a little bit of working online and marketing tips. But our travel articles were incredibly well researched and thorough. Some of them over 10,000 words in length, so they were really discoverable on Google and Google rank them quite highly in search results. They do provide a lot of value to the people who read them. But is someone reading our ultimate guide to traveling in Vietnam going to purchase my course I'm marketing? It's quite unlikely. While this content is educational and entertaining and it fits that brief, it's also the wrong kind of content. You can see from this screenshot of my Google Analytics Website traffic report that to this day, I still have less people reading my articles on entrepreneurship and marketing and building an online business than I did those travel posts. But this smaller number of people who are reading these articles are also extremely targeted because they're already showing interest in content that's really aligned with my paid offers. I want you to always be thinking about what kind of content you want to create for your audience in terms of would someone who's reading this post or watching this video be likely to buy my product or service? If the answer is no, then maybe try a different angle or a different topic that is a little bit more closely related to your ultimate paid product or service. The second strategy then, is PR. Press has never really been my cup of tea because I do think it's a little bit more difficult to control who sees it and when, but it can work incredibly well for a lot of businesses out there, so I wanted to include it and I wanted to discuss the two ways to get a feature in big publications. One, is for them to either interview you or write about you and for you to submit maybe your own feature telling the story of how you maybe build your business or your achieved some crazy results with your business. This can be great because as long as you're being featured on relevant publications in your industry, your luckily guaranteed to get the right kind of eyes on that content. But it can be quite difficult to get this kind of feature when you're just starting out and you maybe don't have the kind of news with the results that they're looking for. Here's an example from Daniel DiPiazza, who is a bestselling author and entrepreneur. He found a lot of his early fame from these big ticket publications like this one from Business Insider. But notice that even this piece which was from 2015, is still related to freelancing and entrepreneurship, it's not just some crazy random story of how he did something really big that's totally unrelated to his niche. Seeing his actual business and his paid products and services are all about teaching young people how to start businesses. This kind of big ticket article is actually really, really related to his ultimate paid services. But as I said, it's quite difficult to get these kind of stories out there when you're starting out, so my preference is actually to pitch hyper relevant publications for guest posts in your area of expertise. A lot of publications will actually happily accept guest contributors who have knowledge in areas that their audience would find useful or interesting and might be able to find some different angle on a topic that they've maybe previously covered, but it's slightly different from what they've already got on their side. Here's an example of some websites that I've done this for in the past. This one is from the Leadpages blog, and you'll notice that it's in their Facebook marketing section, and it mentions me as an author. It also has a full bio at the bottom of the post where it links back to my site. This type of article is an in-depth article about Facebook advertising, which then positions me as an expert and shows off my knowledge and skill while leveraging the authority of a website that's a big deal in the industry like this Leadpages blog. Another example from the GoDaddy blog here, again, talking about branding, which is very closely related to my marketing in graphic design, ultimate paid content through my courses and leverages the power of a big website that then maybe e-mails it out to their subscriber base as well as obviously putting it out to their readers. Would you get more traffic putting content on a site like Business Insider or Forbes? Yes, of course you would, but it's not nearly as targeted as leveraging the power of smaller websites. It's also much easier to actually write guest posts than it is to get a PR feature. But it's almost as stepping stone because once you get a few guest post out there like these ones, you can then leverage that to position yourself as an expert and get that bigger PR feature later on. You can usually just google the publications in your industry and maybe use keywords like guest post or guess submissions, and it will direct you to a section on their website where you can then apply to be a guest author. Content marketing and PR are the two strategies for creating content at the top of your funnel. In the next lesson we'll talk about four more. 7. Additional Top of the Funnel Strategies: The third strategy at this level, at the top of your funnel is all about social media marketing. It can be difficult to get or gain attraction on platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn and Facebook, without a lot of time investment into engaging with other users on the platform, that's especially true for Facebook. Organic growth is almost unheard of these days, so you have to do a little bit of manual labor. However, platforms like YouTube and Pinterest and even TikTok, will actually put your content in front of people who aren't following you yet, based on things that they've engaged with in the past and things that they may be searching for, or just things that the platform thinks that they'll like. That makes it a lot easier for you to get discovered organically on these second platforms. Of course, you can leverage paid ads and promoted posts to grow quicker on social media as well, and we'll talk about that a little bit later on. Your fourth strategy then is SEO. If you're not familiar with the term, SEO stands for search engine optimization. It sounds a lot scarier, it really is, I think. Basically all that it involves is making your content as optimized as possible for the people who are looking for it. If I was looking for a florist in Melbourne and then I landed on a site talking about plumbers in New York City. I'd be pretty disappointed. Search engines definitely know that, so they prioritize content that is full of great useful content that talks about the keywords and phrases that people are putting into Google and YouTube and even Pinterest, by them putting that content at the top of the search results. For example, my digital marketing 101, a beginner's guide, YouTube video, has been viewed over 38,000 times, largely due to great searchable keywords in the title, the description, the thumbnail, and even as I talk throughout the video, because YouTube actually picks up on keywords that are used in the speech of the video. This has landed on the first page of YouTube search results, as well as Google's for people searching for digital marketing 101, because they're owned by the same platform and it also ranks for other search terms like Digital Marketing for beginners. But for this particular screenshot on the left, I actually had to scroll through to get to my video because it was actually the ninth one shown. Whereas on the first screen shot, it was the very first one shown on the very first page of search results because obviously, it's a much more targeted keyword with the title of that video, because it's digital marketing 101, whereas Digital Marketing for beginners is a little bit more wide and there are other videos that are also ranking for that keyword. It's just demonstrating that one video or one blog post can actually rank quite highly for a few different keywords that people would probably be putting into Google, and it can put it in front of a lot of people very quickly. On the right hand side here, my Adobe Spark tutorial video also ranks quite highly, and again it's been viewed about 60,000 times just as a result of really great keywords that's completely organic traffic. While a lot of people do talk about SEO in terms of ranking blog posts, YouTube videos work in a very similar way because Google owns YouTube, so if you do optimize your written posts or your YouTube videos, you are much more likely to get free traffic and free views just from people searching on these topics on Google. Your fifth strategy is leveraging influencers or joint ventures, which basically allows you to partner with people who already have an established audience in your industry. This is how a lot of people make money from their audience without actually having a product or service to sell that's their own. They'll go and promote other people's products or services, and then they get a commission of the sales created through their brand and through their audience. Here's an example of a super attractive screenshot of my Adobe Spark video, and I'm an affiliate for Adobe because I teach tutorials like this one for Photoshop and Lightroom and Adobe Spark and other Adobe products, so anytime anyone signs up for any Adobe plan using my recommended link, I get a percentage of that sale. You could do something similar for the top of your funnel, where you can get other people with established audiences to promote your content and get a percentage of that sale. This is pretty much the entire basis of influencer marketing, where someone with maybe a 100,000 followers on Instagram, tells their audience to use a code, this is my example, PEGI 20, and check out to buy a product that they're promoting and their audience then buys that product, gets 20 percent off using that code, and that code also allows the brand to track which sales are coming from the influencer so that they know how much to pay them for bringing an X amount of sales into their online store, just as an example. Of course, there are lots of influencers out there who get paid just to wear or use a particular product regardless of how it impacts sales. But smaller influencers and smaller brands will go through this particular system because you can measure exactly how much impact that person has made on your sales and then pay them accordingly, so you're not having to pay someone $10,000 if they're not bringing you at least $10,000 worth of sales back. Our last strategy, of course, is paid media. This is the easiest and quickest way to get eyes on your content, but it's important to think about your brand as a whole and ideally, having at least some organic content on your website and on your social media that can keep attracting your audience even when you're not running ads. Also because you'll want to be creating credibility and trust and authority with your audience; the only way you can really do that is by giving them valuable free content before asking them to pay and open up their wallets. Hopefully that has all made a lot of sense, and if you ever need a refresher on all these different strategies that you can execute at the top of your funnel, just check your course guide for the details on these six strategies. Now let's go ahead and see what the middle of the funnel holds in store for us. 8. Your Middle of the Funnel Strategy: Sadly, the middle of the funnel is often overlooked by those who are new to online marketing, and I've actually been very guilty of doing this myself, because it's natural to just want to skip straight ahead and ask for the sale when you're first starting out on this online marketing world. But the middle of the funnel is actually where you build enough trust that people then start showing an interest in what you do and what you have to offer. Your job in the middle of the funnel is just to provide enough value that your audience is willing to give you a piece of their contact information, which is when marketers will say that a visitor or your audience becomes a lead, that you can then use that lead and that information on your email is to nurture your relationship with them. In your online business, the middle of the funnel can look like a free piece of content that your visitors can access by submitting their email address in a contact form, for example. Your goal at this stage is just to convert as many website or social media visitors into leads as possible. But again, we're looking for targeted leads. Your metrics at this stage would be visitor to lead conversion rights. That's going to tell you what percentage of your website visitors become leads. Certain email marketing integrations that provide you with pop-ups or embedded forms will actually give you that metric of there was 100 people who saw this form, and two of them signed up so then you know your conversion rate is two percent. But otherwise you can also track this through Google Analytics as well. Then your second metric is number of subscribers. The actual number of people on your email list, that's exactly just how much your email list is growing over time. You can track that growth and also see if it's associated with any of your top of funnel strategies. Are you doing something at the top of funnel that is doing really well and actually moving people down into converting them into leads, and into the middle of your funnel? Then your email open and click rates. That's going to tell you how active and engaged your leads actually are. Because at the end of the day, there's absolutely no sense in having 100,000 email subscribers, if they're not actually reading your emails. Make sure to check in on what your subscribers are actually doing with the emails you're sending to them, and it can also be a really good practice and habit to get into to clean up your email list. If you have someone on your email list that's been there for a year and hasn't opened a single email, get rid of them, delete them because you're paying to have a certain number of email subscribers on your email list, and if they're not doing their job by engaging with you, then you shouldn't have to keep them on your email list. Some of the best marketers in this world do that very regularly through automations. They'll actually have automation setup to say if someone hasn't opened my email in three or four months, hasn't opened any emails in three or four months, just get rid of them. Or reengage them and send them an email saying, do you still want to hear from me? Are you still reading my stuff or what can I do better? Then if they don't open those then just fully get rid of them. Based on those metrics, you might have already guessed that your content and strategy at this level of your funnel is going to be all about email marketing. Like I said, at the top of your funnel, you have a lot of different strategies, once you get to the middle of the funnel, it's all about nurturing that relationship through your emails. A fun fact for you is that you don't actually own anything on the Internet in terms of your social media accounts, your Instagram, your Facebook, your YouTube account can all get shut down overnight, and there's really, actually not much you can do about it. You can try and recover some stuff, but even really big accounts out there have been shut down overnight because of some sort of breach, and you basically lose your entire customer base if that is what your business is dependent upon. It does happen quite a lot. Building an email list is smart, not just because it's a really great way to nurture your audience, and eventually sell them your product or service. But also because that is data that you own that no one can take away from you. It's important for you to not just continue to write great blog content, and produce great videos or social media posts, but actually think about how to get people's email addresses in exchange for something. This is where an opt-in or lead magnet will come into play. It can be something as simple as just a PDF or an Ebook, but it's not enough to just create a great lead magnet for your business or your industry. You also want to be thinking about how you're going to be promoting it, and also what product you will be selling to the people who obtain to it later. The more closely related all of your content is, the more seamless your actual sales funnel will be. Let me use myself as an example here again, because I do believe in learning from other people's mistakes, and for me to really learn from my mistakes as well. This is a very first opt-in existed on our website a long time ago when it was still very focused on travel. Is it useful? Yes. Was it actually very related to the content we were writing at the time? Yes. But is it aligned with my ideal customer? Not really, no. Here's another example of the ultimate guide of 67 co-working spaces in Vietnam for online business owners, remote workers, and digital nomads. Is it useful? Yes. Is it closely related to the post that it was promoted in, which was the ultimate guide to Vietnam? Not really because the post was around a two-week itinerary to traveling around the country Vietnam, and wasn't focused on freelancers or remote workers. Would it appeal to my target market? Kind of, but not really, it's not that targeted, it's adjacent to what they would be looking for. Now finally, what about a digital marketing resource guide like this one? Or better yet, a free training on the five steps to becoming a digital nomad and starting your own online career. That's starting to be a little bit more like it. You can see as I went over time, my free lead magnets and my obtains became more and more targeted. In fact, this free digital nomad training alone resulted in me getting 543 new email subscribers, and making over $4,000 in one month just from his online training on my very first course launch back in 2017. Because at the end of the training, I gave people the opportunity to move to the bottom of my funnel and purchase my paid offer, and because my paid offer was really closely related to this piece of content, it was a no brainer for them to say yes. The way that this has actually worked in principles of the funnel, at the top of the funnel, I was writing some blog posts about what it's like to be a digital nomad. I was posting a lot on social media about my digital nomad journey, and then encouraging people to sign up for the free training where I got their email address, and I was able to maybe nurture that relationship a little bit more saying, here are some extra tips, if you want to be a digital nomad, then come and actually watch the training, and then at the end of that training, I then gave them the opportunity to become a digital nomad. It was all very, very related and it had a completely different result because of that. Trust me that I have done enough trial and error to know that the relevance of your free opt in really matters a heck of a lot in the long run. But it doesn't have to be super complicated, the best thing is just to create thing and see how your audience responds, and then keep adjusting, because no one gets it right the first time. No one has ever created one lead magnet and gone yes, this is a goldmine, this is giving me everything I want for my audience, I never have to create another thing ever again. It took me alone, about 10 different free Ebooks, guides and trainings, until I found one or two that actually got people to take action after they were done consuming my free content. Now in terms of actually creating this, you can use a free tool like Canvas to create a free Ebook in just a couple of hours to give away for your ideal audience in exchange to get their email onto your email list. But just make sure to keep in mind your customer's problems and pain points as you're thinking about what content to create for them. Also keep in mind where you're going to be promoting it. For example, here, HubSpot has written about the 10 revealing principles of human behavior as a marketing psychology piece. Then they have a pop-up promoting their free guide to marketing psychology, which is basically a more elaborate version of this article that require someone to give them their email address in order to receive it. They're much more likely to download it here reading this article, than if they were reading a recipe for quiche or something. It's really important to know where you're going to be actually promoting that piece of content to your audience, and making sure it's aligned with that as well. Now of course, the more effort you put into your free offer, the better the result in converting subscribers into customer later on. A free training or webinar will take a lot longer to create and put together what it will engage visitors a lot more than just a simple PDF or Ebook. But the best thing to do is just create something, anything, and then just test, test and test again and see how your audience responds, and then create more and more because you're not going to get it right the first time. I promise you, it just doesn't happen, and if you do, give me a call because that's an amazing result that I've just not seen before. If you're sitting there thinking, well, this whole free content in exchange for someone's email thing doesn't really work for me in my business, I wanted to present you with the thrifty homesteader Academy, which has a free course on copper deficiency in goats, which allows goat enthusiasts and owners to get to know the teacher, and their teaching style completely free with the aim of getting their email address and then ultimately getting them to sign up for their paid offers. Honestly, if it works for goats and goat enthusiast, then you can bet that it's going to work for you and your industry as well, because this is probably the most niche thing I could find. Just to recap, in the middle of the funnel, your focus is just on building trust with your audience and getting them onto your email list so that you can continue to deliver value, and eventually get them to move to the bottom of your funnel, which brings us to our next lesson. 9. Your Bottom of the Funnel Strategy: Here we are at the last stage of your funnel, the bottom of the funnel. At this stage, you've already built a sufficient level of trust with your leads that they're ready to be presented with the main offer. Your job at the bottom of the funnel is just to present that product or offer in a way that really inspires your leads to take action. It makes them feel like you are presenting them a solution to their pain point or their problem. It could be a limited time offer for your product. We're going talk a little bit more about the strategies that you can leverage at this stage of your funnel to really get your leads to take action. Your overall goal is just to turn leads into customers and get sales. It's as simple as that. When it comes to the metrics at this stage of the funnel, you're going to be measuring your total revenue, your number of new customers. That is especially important if you have products and services at different price points, because it's going to actually allow you to calculate a revenue per customer or a customer lifetime value. Not every one of your customers is going to bring in the same number or the same level of revenue to your business. I might have discounts, some might be paying an ongoing subscription. There might just be various things that are in play that reflects the actual amount that they bring into your business. We're going to go into exactly how to calculate this in a later lesson, but for now, just think of it in the simplest way possible. We have one customer who bought a $20 a month subscription service and kept it for four months before canceling it. You got $80 from that customer. Then the second customer came in and bought a one-off service for $400. Then two months later they purchased another thing from you for $100. That brings you to $500 from customer too and your total revenue is $580, split between two customers which brings you to an average customer lifetime value of $290. Knowing this number will actually give you a really good idea of how much you can spend in terms of time and money on acquiring one new customer. Because you know, on average you're going to get $290 back for each customer. Then you also want to be measuring your actual conversion. That's likely going to become one of not the most important metric that you are going to be measuring this stage of your funnel, while your revenue and the number of customers is going to tell you how much money your funnel is generating. Your bottom of the funnel conversion rate is a really great indicator of just how effective your tactics are at converting lead into customers. How you determine this number is really going to depend on what you're using to make your sales. If for example, you're using a free training or a live consultation via Zoom or Skype or another video software. Then you would just calculate how many people took the training or attended that call? How many of those people converted into customers? Or maybe you're just sending out an e-mail to your subscribers with a paid offer and also promoting it through your social media also hosting a free training. Then you might want to look at how many people visited the sales page from all of those various sources, and how many of those sales page visitors then converted into customers. Don't worry if that sounding a little bit confusing and you need a bit of a visual of how to see exactly how that is calculated and why it's important. We're going to go into more detail later on. But just for now, know that your bottom of the funnel conversion rate is quite an important metric to keep in mind. My aim at this stage is really just to get you familiar with some of these terms and strategies. We're going to go into the actual implementation and execution side a little bit later on. Now moving on to the actual content at the bottom of your funnel. Your content at this stage should just really be aimed at helping your audience make a purchase decision. This could be maybe through a killer sales page that also might have really powerful testimonials. Or you might have a really great nurture e-mail sequence which is basically a series of e-mails that people will get when they sign up to your e-mail list. That's going to help them really be solid in making that purchase decision. Of course, paid ads can also be a really great way to convert people at this stage, this can be really key if you're doing a product launch for which there is a cutoff deadline for enrollment. In which case you can maybe send a series of e-mails leading up to the deadline to really peak interest from your subscribers and promote urgency. Then also use paid ads to then reinforced that deadline. You can send a handout should people saying doors closing soon, you've got two days left. All of that triggers an emotional response in your subscribers and in your potential customers. That brings us to the actual strategies that you want to leverage at this stage of the funnel. The first one of these is scarcity. Have you ever been looking at a flight online? Suddenly, it tells you there's only three seats left at this price. It makes you want to really hustle and buy it because you're not sure if you're going to be able to get it at that price for much longer. I've been a travel agent and I can honestly say that a lot of the time that actually is true. There might only be three seats left, but you never really know if it's just a marketing trick or review really are running out of time to get it at that price. Limited time bonuses work really well for this exact reason. Never ending sale or an unlimited number of tickets just don't have the same appeal as a 48 hour, 50 percent or frenzy or a special bonus for the first 100 people that buy that product or service. Scarcity is really, really key in eliciting that emotional response. The second strategy is urgency. Much like scarcity, urgency is very key in getting people to take action and really getting them to hustle and how that emotional reaction. Countdown timers work really, really well for this. You can actually just have a countdown timer that starts a one hour clock from the time that a user lands on a landing page. Then generate a special discount code that's available only during that hour and then it's gone forever. Which gives the user the urgency to decide right then and there, whether this is something they really want. Then we have this strategy of up sales. We are going to talk in more depth about up sales in a later lesson in terms of how to actually use this in your strategy. How to configure them in a way that's going to really work for you and your audience. But for now, just know that it can be a really effective bottom of the funnel strategy to increase the average revenue you receive from each of your customers. It essentially involves offering something that is directly related to what your customer is already buying or has just bought, and give them a really quick and easy way to purchase it when they're already in a buying mindset. Think of it as the McDonald's supersize effect. The person is already buying a burger combo, and really at that point what's an extra two bucks to supersize the whole thing and get a lot more value for a really small extra cost. That's pretty clever stuff. McDonald's is not the only company in the world that's using it. It works exactly in the same way with almost any other business. I'm going to teach you how to leverage that in your own funnels a little bit later on. That brings us to the fourth strategy which is bundles. They're similar to upsells, but it's more about pairing things together in a logical sense to give people more value. Remember the old school infomercials where you would get a [inaudible] and a diet book at a Shakeaway. Then just when you thought you couldn't get anymore things, you would hear those magic words, "But wait, there's more," and all of this is valued at $5,000. But if you order now you get it all for the low, low value of $39 a month for as long as you live. I don't know if you remember that, but there's a reason that they were structured in the way that they were. I'm obviously exaggerating because you wouldn't do that now. But bundles work in very similar way where you get a lot of value at a very discounted price. This can work really well especially with digital products, because they don't actually cost the creator any extra money to give more stuff away for free. The beauty of it is that you don't just have to do this with your own products. You can leverage other creators as well. Here's an example of almost an extreme case of something I purchased recently, where I received access to 78 courses valued individually at anywhere from $49 to $499 with a total value of somewhere around $20,000 for all 78 courses if I was to buy them individually. I got access to all of it for a $100, which is a little bit insane. These particular instructors did this not so much for the revenue, but more so that they could leverage each other's audiences. It doesn't really cost them anything to offer a digital product. But since there's going to be 77 other creators promoting this offer, they could then be sure to get access to a lot of like-minded audiences that are in a similar industry that might then in the future purchase their higher ticket items once they get to know them through this really low price offer. But generally speaking, this is again an extreme case where it's like a 1,000 percent off. Generally speaking, bundles would be more of a get two for the price of one, or get three for the price of one, not get 78 for the price of one deal, but you get the point. Basically, it's a crap load of value for a very low price. My fifth strategy for you is presales. Presales can be fantastic. Remember that $4,000 launch that I did back in 2017? I didn't actually have a live course to sell yet. I didn't lie to my audience cause I think that's the first thing that people think. I was very, very honest with them in saying that the course is not going to be ready right away, and because of the inconvenience of the delay that they would get after they purchase, they could actually get the $799 course for a discounted price of 600 bucks, but only if they purchased it before the actual launch date. As a bonus, I would also throw in a one-to-one coaching session with me personally valued at $200. This is leveraging a few different strategies that we've already talked about at the bottom of the funnel, but presales being the most prominent one here. Now, the other brilliant thing about presales other than the fact that you just get money in the bank, is that if it doesn't work and then you don't actually have to spend time creating something that wasn't going to sell anyways, it gives you time to validate your idea and see if there's a demand for it before even putting in the man-hours to actually create something that was destined to flop. Because if people purchase it during the presale period, then it gives you the motivation to keep going and launch it. However, imagine if you spend like six months creating something and then you go and sell it and no one buys it. It's a pretty terrible feeling. People are more than happy to get into presales because very small number of people buy something with the mindset of, "I need to start this course straightaway." They just want to take advantage of a good offer, and they're more than happy to start a few weeks and sometimes even a few months later on the actual content, and that makes it good for you and good for them at the same time. The next strategy is remarketing or retargeting. It's a more advanced strategy that leverages the power of paid advertising, but it can be incredibly powerful for helping you increase your conversions and revenue. Any company that's spending money on marketing and not leveraging effectively marketing tactics, is potentially wasting easy money. The reason I say that is because it's actually a lot easier and a lot cheaper to convert someone who has already been to your sales page, maybe even added an item to a cart, and then started the checkout process, but never completed their purchase. As opposed to the cost of converting someone who is a complete stranger, who has never heard of you and try and get them to become a customer. You've likely been at the receiving end of retargeting campaigns like this one from, let's say from Amazon, telling you that you looked at a panda adult onesie, but you never completed your purchase, and would you like to go ahead and get your panda onesie? Now, how much more likely do you think you are to say yes, than someone else out there on the Internet who may not even like pandas or onesies or Amazon or any of these things? They are a lot less likely to actually buy that thing, whereas you've already expressed interest. Converting you is a lot easier. Of course, remarketing doesn't just have to happen through paid advertising, abandoned order or retargeting emails are also great at having an impact on customers. Here's an example of a really great one I got recently from AppSumo. I was looking at a course from an awesome marketer, Noah Kagan, that they currently have on sale for $7 down from $1,000. I had the tab open without taking any action for longer than 30 minutes, which then triggered me to receive this email. Because I'm already one of their subscribers, they could track me and were able to send me the email straightaway. It's a bit of magic, but when it's done right, it can have such a great impact on your conversion rates. It's definitely worth exploring for your own business. 10. Cater to the Buyer's Journey: I know that the intricacies of each stage of the funnel might sound a bit complicated when you're first starting out. I wanted to simplify this by assuring you that all you're really doing with your funnel and the tactics at each stage is just keeping your audience the type of content that caters to their mindset along their buying journey. Here's what I mean by this, you might have heard about a variation of this kind of customer flow. All customers have to start at the awareness stage before they can even consider purchasing your product or service. All the different funnel stages are really just the three different stages of the buyer's journey and their mindset. The top of funnel strategies are catering to people at the awareness stage, where they're just looking for answers and resources and looking to be educated and looking for opinions or insight or inspiration. Then the middle of the funnel strategies are catering to people at the evaluation or consideration stages, where people are doing a bit more heavy research on whether or not your product or service is a good fit for them. Which is where the training and the free options come into play because they're looking for a little bit more insight on who you are and whether they should trust you and your business. Then the bottom of the funnel caters to people at the decision or the purchase stage, where they're just figuring out exactly what it would take to become a customer and whether that is the right move for them. How quickly someone moves from not knowing anything about you to them buying your product or service will depend on a few things and these are the main ones that I want you to think about. The first is the time investment required on the customer's end. As in, are they signing up for a year long program that has weekly calls and a lot of work required in between those calls, then you can bet that someone would really sit on that decision for awhile, several weeks or even months maybe. Whereas if your offer is a 30 minute haircut, because you own a barbershop near their house, then that is a decision they might make on the spot. Think about it in the terms of the time that it takes people to decide on which university or college to go to. Depending on the degree, it might be a three or four-year commitment, that's one of the biggest decisions that you will ever make in terms of time. I know for me personally, there was a lot of research leading up to my decision to choose where to go. Which meant that my university had to produce a lot of content, have brand ambassadors come to my high school, have videos online, have flyers and students, excess stories and merchandise and just about everything that they can throw at me until I decided to go there. Then there's the actual monetary investment required on the customer's end. People value their time, but it's no secret that the bees hurdle for a lot of people comes down to the price tag. If what you're selling is a $5,000 handbag, you're going to have to do a lot more work to get that sale than someone selling a $100 knockoff. A mentor of mine recently bought a Tesla and he joked that they've been stalking him around for about seven years until he bought his Tesla. Seven years, that's probably the longest funnel of all time, but it worked and it's such a big monetary investment that, that is the length of time that it required for them to show him their advertisements and their billboards and show up in the media. Until he felt like they were talking to him through his online presence and through the presence of just his world around him until he was ready to purchase and then it was a no brainer for him to buy a Tesla. The final point is how closely your business model fits into what is important to them. This is one that people often forget, especially people for whom this is not a part of their purchasing decisions. This is another one of those mistakes where business owners are thinking about how their customers make purchasing decisions, but you would actually be amazed at how much our values are influencing our day-to-day purchasing decisions. They can actually overtake the other two objections. Using Tesla as an example, people generally buy a Tesla for one of two reasons, either the environment is important to them and they want to do their part to build a sustainable future or they love what the Tesla represents in terms of innovation, design, speed, and in overall cool factor, I guess. It's a status car either way depending on which side of that fence they sit on or maybe it's both and the best businesses really understand that people feel first and they think second. Let me use a personal example of how emotions and values can overturn objections in terms of time and cost. I consciously overpay for toilet paper every month just so I can order from who gives a crap, a company that's dedicated to sustainability and clean sanitation for all. It's not as quick as buying my toilet paper at the store and it's definitely not as cheap, but none of that really matters because I know that with every wipe I'm standing up or sitting down for something that I really believe in and that really outweighs all of my other objections. Now the reason that this plays into the buyer's journey is because if your product or service is exactly what someone is looking for and it's aligned with their mission and vision, they are so much more likely to make a quicker purchasing decision and also less likely to refund. Now, if all you really have is features and benefits and there's no emotional connection there, it's going to take a lot longer to convince someone to make that purchasing decision. Of course, the longer this process takes, the more content you will have to create to take your audience through to a purchasing decision. For a quick two hour $10 course, you can maybe even just advertise it straight away to complete strangers out there and get people to purchase it, as long as it's aligned with what they're looking for. Now for a $1000 a month, three month minimum commitment on and digital marketing agency package, for example, you would then have to create videos and blog posts and social media posts and give out free trainings and e-books and free consultations and provide them with a really professional proposal, and maybe a presentation in order to secure that purchasing decision. Knowing this and tapping into how people think and what they really need from you and how they need information presented to them is exactly what's going to take your funnel from being unnecessarily long or far too short to being just brand. Basically, you're going to become the Goldilocks of sales funnels. 11. Use Metrics to Build Profitability: We've already talked about some of the metrics that you would want to be looking at to measure at each stage of your funnel. But really, why is it important to measure metrics? Surely you can just calculate that you're spending 200 bucks on ads and you're making $400 in sales. Isn't that enough that you know that you're profitable? Sadly, this is how a lot of companies operate and it results in some pretty terrible marketing habits. I actually recently worked with a brand that spent over $100,000 on Google ads without a single qualified lead or a sale. They just kept putting more and more and more money into it, thinking that eventually it would have to become profitable. But most people don't have a couple of extra 100 grand line around for testing. So it's incredibly important that you understand what to look for at each stage of the funnel in order to know what to fix and why things maybe aren't going as planned. Because pouring more money into a broken funnel is like trying to put more water into a leaky bucket, thinking that somehow that's just going to fix it. By the way, I actually don't know a single marketer that has ever launched a funnel, and it worked perfectly from day one. If they're out there, honestly kudos to them. But I can confidently say, that even though a lot of the work comes in building and planning your funnel, there's still a lot of work to be done once your funnel goes live, and this is where your enthusiasm, let's say for numbers will really come into play. It's also really going to help you to adjust your strategy, because the most successful marketers out there are the ones who are willing to be wrong and adjust according to the numbers in front of them and not their own biases of what they think will or won't work. For example, I spent hours, even days maybe writing blog posts when I first launched living to Rome and optimizing them for SEO, and it took me a few months to realize no one was really rating these from organic Google searches. Because there was just way too much competition for this in my industry. But if I was willing to make a YouTube video on the same topic instead, these were much more likely to be found organically because there's a lot less competition, and I could then post the transcript of that video on my website as a blog post, essentially killing two birds with one stone. Now if I wasn't measuring the effect of my content, I would probably still be wasting my days writing content and no one was reading. So you can see that this particular blog post on the left had less than a thousand people reading it, which is absolutely nothing in comparison to the nearly 40,000 views of the same video on my YouTube channel. But you might have a completely different result with your own business. You might find that your written stuff does really, really well and your video content sees crickets. That is why looking at your numbers is so important, and not just taking the advice of people like me for whom one strategy has worked and another hasn't, and you assume it's going to be the same for your business. That's why I'm giving you the tools and the skills to really assess your own business and come up with your own decisions of where to invest your time and energy. Let's now take a look at what you should be looking at a measuring to avoid problems and the leaks in your funnel. As a reminder, these are a few of our organic TOFU metrics. We've got the percentage of new sessions, not just returning visitors and the total sessions as well, then the bounce rate. So that's the percentage of sessions that ended with the user had not going on to take further actions. Then we have the traffic per channel. So where are they coming from, E-mail, social media, organic search. Then here are some additional ones that I want you to think about in terms of running paid ads as well. The cost and the number of engagements with a post for ads that's aimed at getting people to engage with a post from Facebook by reading it, or maybe watching it if it's a video, or maybe liking that post, depending on what your aim is at this stage, and then maybe also measuring the cost per click for your ads that are aimed at getting people to your website. Now there are a lot more metrics that you can measure at this stage and it will depend on your strategy. Here are just a few that I wanted to make you aware of because these are probably the most common ones that you would be looking to measure at this stage of your funnel. Now here are some problems that you might encounter at this stage. Targeting the wrong buyer persona. Maybe you're just trying to talk to someone who isn't your ideal customer with your content at this level, so they're not engaging with your content because it's not relevant to them, or maybe the people are right, but they're not receiving the right message at the right time, or your message is going out to the right people at the right time. But maybe it's a bit too confusing because maybe there are too many points in each blog posts or your content offer, and people are just leaving your website straightaway before actually consuming that whole piece of content, or maybe your website takes way too long to load, so people are just jumping off straight away before even having a chance to look at that blog posts, or your website content doesn't match at all the content that got them there. What I mean by this is that maybe it's a bit too click baby. You know those articles that you see on Facebook that are promised that you'll lose 10 pounds in 10 minutes, and then you get to the website and it's completely unrelated content. That is a very bad user experience. You want to make sure that you're delivering on what you're promising and that you're getting it out to the right people who are your target audience. As a recap, here are our middle of the funnel metrics on an organic level. We've got the visitor to lead conversion rate, the actual overall number of leads, then our email open and click rates. Then a few additional ones that I wanted to include for paid ads at this level would be the cost per landing page view. At the top of funnel, we were looking at cost-per-click, which was just how many clicks do we get over a particular post, and how much did it cost us to get those clicks. Whereas, at the middle of the funnel, your aim is really just to get subscribers. The clicks are really not a great measure of what's actually happening because you want to make sure that those people are getting to that landing page and they're seeing that opt in. Then you also want to see what the cost per conversion of a visitor to that landing pages to get them to actually sign up and become a lead. You might get 20 people seeing your landing page and looking at that opt-in, and maybe only five people actually sign up. This is all the stuff that you want to be measuring, so you can make sure that you are really getting an optimized experience for your users and that as many people as possible are really jumping onto your e-mail list and signing up to get your free offer. Then I've also included some for e-commerce businesses here. You might be measuring things like, how many people initiated checkout? How many people abandoned cart? How many people really just engage with your online store at this stage? Now some issues that you might be encountering in the middle of the funnel here is, you might have too many distractions on a form that is designed to capture contact information and people are just not taking an action because they just don't know exactly what to do there. They're distracted by too many colors, or just too many fonts, or too many images. Or maybe the call to action is weak, and it's not persuasive enough, so not enough people are actually converting. Or people are converting, but they're not qualified leads that you want to be progressing through your funnel. Maybe people aren't quite sure what your often is, so enough of them are just signing up, but then they end up on your e-mail list, and they view the offer, and they realize it's not what they thought it was going to be, and they are not really interested, so they are not reading your e-mails, they are not opening your e-mails, or they are unsubscribing. There are quite unqualified leads, which is not correct, or then they are qualified leads, but they're not receiving the right amount of nurturing. You don't want someone to sign up for a free e-book or a free training, and then pitch them on a $4,000 program straight away. You want to make sure you're nurturing them through your e-mails, and give them more value and develop more trust, and maybe just invite them to watch a video, or another free training, or webinar, or something like that before they're ready to buy your high ticket item, and that's especially key if that item is high ticket, so it's over that kind of $500 mark, people need a lot more nurturing then if you're trying to sell them at $20 product. Now this section of the funnel is really quite interesting because, it's actually relatively easy and cheap to get leads onto your email list. The tough part comes next when it's time for them to buy, and if you have an email list that's full of the wrong kind of people, they are never going to convert into customers and you're essentially paying to have the wrong kind of people on your email list, and that is why the middle of the funnel is so key to get right, because it's almost the most integral part of the funnel because you want to make sure that you're attracting the right kind of people onto your email list so that when it's time to sell them onto your paid products and services, it's much easier for you to do that. Now, talking about our bottom of the funnel organic metrics, so we're talking about total revenue, number of new customers, and then our customer lifetime value, or the revenue per customer. Of course, all of these are actually still important on the paid front as well, but here are some additional paid metrics I want you to consider. We have the cost per conversion, and the actual rate or the percentage of conversion, and the total order value, average order value, and then your ROAS, which is your return on ad spend. For example, if you put $200 into ads and then you generate $300 in sales, your ROAS is 1.5. So for every dollar that you put into that funnel, you get $1.50 back. There are a lot of leaks that can happen at this stage of the funnel. One of them is a messy hand-off from marketing to sales. For example, if you set up a funnel, and it's been your clients job or someone else's job to convert people over the phone, for example, but then they don't call in time or they're really bad at selling, this can really, really impact your actual conversion rates. Or maybe they have sold them, people have bought, but then you have a really inadequate on-boarding system, which leaves customers really confused as to how to use the product or service. For example, if you have a membership site without any follow-up of what to do after people join, or there are payment issues with people's recurring payments, or maybe you're getting them onto a monthly service, and they don't really know what's happening on your end of growing their business if you're an agency, for example, all of that can have a really big effect on what happens at the bottom of your funnel, especially for subscription services or recurring payments. Because it can be really likely that people will pay once, and then never really return again, and along the same lines is limited follow-up, which can really prevent customers from transforming into repeat customers or advocates for the business, which is the goal for them to have a really great experience until all of their friends and really spread the word of mouth marketing, which is stuff that you don't pay for, but as incredibly effective. Following up with your customers once they've already paid for something is really key for this. Then we've got sales page issues. This happens a lot. For example, your copy on your sales page might be really vague and not drive enough desire for people to convert, or it might have broken links, or videos that won't play, or slow to load, there are so many things that can be wrong with your sales page, and all of them can have a really big impact on whether or not people convert into customers. This is one that people forget, but honestly, not having enough payment methods can also make a really big impact. A large percentage of people don't end up converting to paying customers because you don't have their preferred payment method. It's not always possible to accept multiple payment methods, but whenever it's possible, definitely do so, because imagine you're requiring someone to putting a PayPal account and they don't have one. Or likewise, what if you need a credit card, and they don't have a credit card, all they have is a PayPal account. So you want to make sure you're giving people different options for how to check out. Of course, costs of shipping can be a big one for a lot of people. There's nothing worse than seeing that the cost of your shipping is more than the actual thing you're trying to buy, and this is also why you can then maybe re-target your visitors with a free shipping coupon to try and overcome this objection. So it can work to your advantage if you think the cost of shipping is the reason that people aren't buying. Knowing all of this is really key and this is exactly why I was saying that it's not just enough to know you're putting $200 into your advertising, and you're getting $400 in sales. It's important to know how everyone's tracking at each stage of the funnel, because you might be getting a lot more out of your funnel than what you're currently getting, and there might be a specific point where people are getting stuck. Measuring each stage is really important. For example, maybe you have a lot of visitors to your website, but they're all leaving straightaway, and that might just mean that your website is too slow to load, or it's not clear in terms of presenting you and your business, or maybe they are sticking around on the site, but maybe they're not ending up on your email list. Then maybe it's because you have just put a sign up to our newsletter call to action on the page, which no one really fills out because why would they, there's no value in it for them, so you might need a stronger value item to give to your visitors to get them onto your email list, or maybe all of those things are fine and your email list is growing, but no one is actually buying your products or services, meaning that your email list is probably full of the wrong people. Are you starting to see why each step is so important and why it's so key to check in on the health of each one? I've spoken to a lot of people who have spent thousands of dollars on Facebook ads, for example, that aren't getting them the results that they want, and then naturally they think the problem is with the ad, when in fact, the problem is on the landing page that people come to once they click on the ad. That page might be missing a completely clear call to action, or it's accidentally missing the contact form altogether, giving people no actual way to sign up. It happens so much more often than you would think. So always look at the big picture, and then zero in on all of the individual moving elements of your funnel to see what's working and amplify that, and then see what's not working and try and fix that. Let's use this funnel here to demonstrate everything you've learned up until this point. This is a very basic structure of how you would want to measure where are the areas that you can improve upon. Naturally, your success of turning your website visitors into email subscribers will be a lot cheaper and have a higher conversion rate, then turning those people into customers. But just looking at a funnel like this one where I maybe put out an ad encouraging people to read my article, and that article has a free e-book that people can download, and out of the 500 people that read the article, 100 downloaded my e-book, and then I sent out maybe an additional two emails to these people offering more value, and then promoting my $50 training, and 15 people read those e-mails, 10 of them visited my offer page and two purchase my product, and this is a relatively healthy funnel because I'm still making a profit at the end of the day. This is 1.6 return on my ad spend, meaning that for every dollar I put into this, I get $1.60 back, which might not seem like much, but once you start to scale something like this, it can be quite profitable, but it's not as successful as it could be. Looking at something like this, I would maybe try to see what else I can do to my article to promote that e-book, and get more than 20 percent of people to sign up to my email list. Then I would maybe look at those emails that I'm sending out because 15 percent of people reading them is a little bit lower than I would like to have in terms of my open rates, so maybe I could test out different headlines to try and get more people to click, and open, and read them, and eventually I would also want to play with my sales page to try and actually improve my bottom of the funnel conversion rate, but the most important thing with doing things like this, and trying to improve is to always focus on just improving one thing at a time, and then tracking your progress, because if you change seven or eight things at a time and suddenly you're not receiving any sales, or you start receiving a lot of sales, you don't actually know where the problem is or what was the thing that made it successful. That makes it a lot more difficult to replicate in the future when you go and create a new funnel because you don't really know what was the thing that made it really successful, so try and change one thing at a time, see how it works, see if it's made a difference, and then change the next thing, and the next thing, and always test and evaluate as you go. So hopefully that is all starting to make a little bit more sense in terms of how all of these different stages work together, and now let's get into some more elements that can help you get the most value out of your funnels. 12. Become a Tripwire Marketing Master: We briefly discussed upsells as a solid bottom of funnel strategy and the reason that upsells work really well, especially if they're targeted to the item or service that your customers in the process of purchasing or has just purchase is because they're already in that buyers mindset. Buying a $200 pair of leather shoes, well, if you try and sell them on a $30 polish to keep those shoes looking as beautiful as the day they bought them it's a no brainer. This is because people are 60 percent more likely to purchase from you when they've already purchased something from you once. Tripwires leverage the same principle in a bit of a different way, which is why I wanted to create this individual lesson to talk a little bit more in depth about Tripwires. Tripwire marketing is the practice of offering leads a low cost product with the intention of selling them a more expensive product later. Now this is a common practice intended to basically increase first customer acquisition. The theory behind marketing Tripwires is that higher cost purchases also result in higher friction and a reduced willingness to pay on the customer's end, but once a lead has become a customer, they are so much more likely to become a customer again. Starting with a really low cost product or offer makes more leads more likely to become customers in the future. While upsells are leveraging the momentum of a customer who's already buying one of your products and adding more to it, Tripwires do something similar, but they come much earlier in the sales process. An ideal Tripwire is less than $10. In fact, I would say the cheaper the better without going too cheap you don't want to be selling people on a $1 product, but the goal is to get someone to become a customer, any kind of customer. The value is almost irrelevant at this stage because revenue is really not your objective. Your objective is customer acquisition instead of having leads on your e-mail list. The revenue is nice to have. Let me show you how this works in practice using my own Tripwire. I created an Ad here on the left, promoting my super simple social media checklist and then this Ad went to a landing page that had a very similar wording and the same image from the Ad, creating a really consistent customer experience but it was still just a free lead magnet for that checklist. Then once they opted in, they would receive a timed offer for a 90 percent discount on my social media graphic design for beginners course to just get it for $9 instead of the usual $89. This then led to about $844 in sales over the years, which really not a massive amount at all, but again, the purpose of this was not to make a huge amount of money, it was to get them to become customers. I could have actually given this away for $1 and still been way ahead because I would have completed my objective, because this course that they would have received for just a couple of $ has so much value in it that it will intrigue them to want more of my higher-paid content and services. In fact, I actually landed a client who I ended up working for five months at $4.5 thousand a month I think, because of this little Tripwire for $9. That's about $22,000 all up in additional sales of my freelancing services and then other core sales of my higher ticket offers from the people who opted in for this Tripwires as well, of course. The reason that I like things like this, is because people don't value things that they get for free the way that they value paid stuff. Russell Brunson, the founder of click funnels, famously always said, people who pay, pay attention and this is exactly why he's strategy is to give his book away completely free but to have people pay for the cost of shipping. He basically inflates the cost of shipping slightly to cover his costs of producing the books but he certainly not making money on this strategy. It's simply a way for him to get more e-mail subscribers and fans who have already purchased something from him, even if it was just the cost of shipping but either way they've given him their credit card details. They are essentially customers and they are so much more likely to then go and purchase his 1,000 or even $20,000 offers. Plus as a bonus point, his Tripwire is educational and positions him as an expert. Really a big takeaway from this, is that just like with everything we've discussed up to this point, the more targeted that you're low ticket Tripwire offer is to your ultimate high ticket offer, the better off you'll be in terms of having a really smooth sales funnel and marketing funnel. Let me give you one of my examples again here, I have a free lightroom course that has a really quick little Tripwire allowing people to purchase the lightroom presets that I use and demonstrate in the course for five bucks. Now this is very closely related to my offer, but people who are looking for ways to edit their photos might not ever purchased anything significant from me because they might just be editing photos for fun and not for business. For this reason, this is not an example of a great Tripwire strategy, but it's a right idea in terms of offering my audience a shortcut to the program that they're enrolling in for free. It's like you could watch a two hour tutorial and struggle through doing your own makeup or you could pay someone $40 to do it for you because it's going to save you the time and effort. These are the different keys to a really successful Tripwire, it should be closely related to the proceeding free offer, it should also be really closely related to your ultimate higher ticket offer and ideally, it should also be a bit of a quick win or instant gratification. Now, this last one is not as key as the other two, because a lot of Tripwires are actually longer pieces of content like my four hour graphic design course or Russell Brunson book. However, whenever possible you want to be looking for a way to give people quick wins, because think about the way their brain works, the quicker they get through that Tripwire and they love your offer and they really trust you and they know you and they like you, then the quicker they will be to actually purchase your other products and services. Now, Tripwires as a whole are certainly not a necessary step over your overall funnel but it's a good strategy to be aware of for the future. If you'll be looking to grow your e-mail lists with more targeted leads who have already made a small purchase from you, because they're going to be so much more likely to purchase from you again in the future one presenting them with a higher ticket offer. 13. Plan Out Your Profitable Funnel: By this stage, you have a really comprehensive view of the anatomy of your funnel and how people move from being complete strangers and not knowing anything about the business, or just becoming aware of it at the top of the funnel stage, to then moving through, to jumping onto your e-mail list with a value item or free offer and moving into that consideration stage where they're developing more know like and trust for you and your business. They're learning more through articles and videos and more value that you're providing to them through your e-mails and then they move through to the actual consideration or decision stage at the bottom of the funnel when they're hopefully ready to purchase. But how do you actually know what to put into each of these stages of the funnel? How do you know what lead magnet you need to be offering them to get them onto your e-mail list or how to select the perfect traffic source. How do you know actually how this fits into your business? That's what this next stage of the class is all about. This is where we're going to be going into the seven easy steps that are going to break this framework down even further, that will be easier questions that you just need to answer in order to develop the perfect framework for your particular sales phone for your own unique business. if you're ready to see how all of the pieces of the digital marketing puzzle fit together and how to execute on all of these three stages of your perfect funnel, then let's get going into the next lesson. 14. Embrace Customer Value Optimisation: All right. You now have a solid understanding of the basic principles behind creating a profitable funnel. Now it's time to see how the pieces all fit together and create a plan. Now the reason that I have included a lot of detail about upsells and tripwires and a bit about the email nurture sequences up to this point is because of the system of customer value optimization which will really assist in your planning process. It will give you an exact framework that some of the world's best marketers follow and now you're going to have the inside knowledge as well. Legendary business executive and marketer Jay Abraham teaches his audience that there are only really three ways to grow a business. You can increase the number of customers, increase the average transaction value per customer, or you can increase the number of transactions per customer. The top and the middle of your funnel are focused on bringing people in and turning them into leads and hopefully increasing the number of customers later on. But the bottom of your funnel is really where that magic happens. It's also the more complex part because it's where you actually have to turn your audience into paying customers. This is where the customer value optimization framework can really help because it leverages all three of these methods in perfect unison and it allows you to get the most out of your bottom of your funnel strategy, which is what makes it so powerful. It's been leveraged by everyone from McDonald's and Starbucks in Sports Illustrated and Amazon, and just about everyone and hopefully soon enough you as well. It can seem quite complex, but it's also incredibly effective. Hopefully, everything you've learned up until this point has really prepared you for nailing the execution of the seven steps inside this model. First is the determine a product market fit. Then we choose a traffic source. Then we offer a lead magnet and a tripwire. Then you offer your actual core product, and then you offer a profit maximizer, which is also known as an upsell, and then you create a return path to try and get the most out of your existing customers. Now these have largely been talked about by Ryan Deiss of digital marketer. There's a lot of great resources and examples out there for how these have been applied by companies of all sizes. I've included some of these resources inside of your course guide, so make sure to go ahead and check that out there after you are done with these lessons if you still have any further questions and want some more examples. Now let's go ahead and actually tackle each of these steps based on what you've learned up until this point. The first step of the customer value optimization framework is to determine a product market fit. What I mean by this is that people don't buy the features of products and services. They buy transformations, the outcomes they're going to get by purchasing a product or service. Great marketing will actually show the person how a product or service takes them from their current state, which is their before state, to their future state which is their after state. Let me go and actually show you what I mean by this. The key to this before and after transformation is all about communicating to your audience and tapping into their thoughts and emotions before and after them actually purchasing your product or service. What does your prospect have before they actually purchase your product or service and what do they have in the after state? What do they feel before they purchase your product or service and what can they possibly feel after they already have it in their life? What is their average day like before and after? What's their status? Then what is the evil that your product or service solves for them? In other words, what's their pain point that you're solving for them? You could then also include a section where you're going to write down your customer segments which are your ideal customer avatars that you created earlier. This is where you can really start to get to put them into action by writing down how you solve their problems with your products and services, which is really going to help you to shape your marketing strategy. Let's actually go and see this great and action because I know it can be a bit confusing if you haven't seen how it works with a customer persona. Here's digital marketers example of their marketing executives avatar. That's a part of their target audience that they're looking to target with their services. These are the people who are in some way, shape or form in charge of a marketing department in their company. They might be a chief marketing officer or a VP of marketing or Director of Marketing. Either way, they are involved in the marketing department and they're quite high up in their positions. Here is their before and after grid. They go from having a disorganized team to having a team that's a well oiled machine. Then they go from feeling really frustrated and overwhelmed and scared of losing their job because things are not going well to feeling really confident and in control. They also go from having an average day which they really have to spend having to coach up underperforming team members to an average day in which they're really free to just focus on big picture strategy because they can trust other team members to take care of details correctly. They go from a status of being disrespected and behind the times to a status of being really respected up today and even up for a promotion within their company. They go from the evil of being a victim of an old school university model that doesn't prepare graduates for the reality of marketing today to the good of helping to train the marketing leaders of the future. They would then do this chart for each of their different customer segments as well. But you can already start to see how different this is in terms of the messaging. You'll see a lot of marketers just going around and listing the features and benefits of a product or service. But truly great marketers like you will speak to the transformations around, how someone's going to feel and how their average day is going to change, and how their status will elevate, and how they will solve an evil for the world. Digital marketer then took this before and after state comparison and wrote marketing copy that is very specific to the answers that they have selected. They could say something like, "turn your disorganized team into a well oiled machine that's ready to kick some serious marketing but or tired of having to coach up your team day after day. With Digital Marketer HQ, you'll be free to step back and focus on big picture strategy or just imagine feeling confident and respected in meetings, knowing that your next promotion is coming soon." I really encourage you to pop into your course guide and write down your own before and after transformations, because it'll really help you to go through the rest of the steps a lot easier having this in mind. Another hot topic had a lot of people get curious about, is how much to actually charge for this transformation or your product or service. I did want to briefly cover that before moving onto the rest of the steps in the customer value optimization framework. Think about this in terms of a stick of gum is really inexpensive and yes, it's cheap to make, but it also is really cheap because it covers a very short distance or very short transformation from, I have a bad taste in my mouth to I have a good taste in my mouth. By comparison, something like a car covers a much greater distance from, I'm stuck at home I'm forced to take a really crowded bus to work to I am free to travel whenever I want in the privacy and comfort of my own vehicle. So that car provides a lot more value and because of that, it's a lot more expensive. Now, you're never going to be able to charge for a piece of gum as much as you do for a car. Although, yes that will definitely make the news. This is an example of serendipity in New York City famously charges $25,000 for their luxurious Sunday. On the right is absurdity Sunday, which is sold for $60,000 at the Three Twins Ice Cream in California. So yes it's possible, but assuming you're regular human who doesn't want to cover their piece of gum in diamonds, there are still ways for you to raise your costs and still out do your competitors. There are companies that charge more for seemingly the exact same thing and sell more than their cheaper competitors because of the notion of perceived value. Take a look at these two cereal boxes. They're exactly the same, but one inherently triggers more value in our brains. Remember that in terms of the transformation you're providing, distance equals value. If you want to charge more for your products and services, the solution is pretty simple. You just have to create more distance between the before and desired after state by either creating a better product or service, which is a better offer or articulating the actual movement from before to after differently and more clearly, which is the better marketing. These are your two options for actually being able to raise the prices of your product or service. 15. Select Your Traffic Source and Free Offer: While all of the other elements of your funnel are largely dependent upon your own offer and your own limitations, there's actually no limitation to how much traffic you can get. Your only limitation really is just whatever your budget is and the budget that you can spend on getting that traffic. That can be budget in terms of time and money really. But it's important to focus on one strategy at a time and make that profitable before adding additional strategies into the mix. A lot of people teaching this stuff in terms of sales funnels will give you a foolproof plan to follow and execute, and then they forget that not everyone is a multi-million dollar agency with nearly unlimited resources. That can end really badly for small business owners or solo entrepreneurs that think that they have to exactly copy what people are telling them. Just as much as you have to be able to take these strategies and cater them to your own unique audience, you also need to be able to cater them to your own unique business and your own limitations. I always see people getting really overwhelmed in thinking that they have to create great blog post and engage in videos, and they should start a podcast and create awesome graphics for Instagram and Pinterest, and they should run Google Ads and Facebook ads and LinkedIn ads. It's so overwhelming unless you have a great big budget and 40 hours in your day or team of 20 to help you out. Don't try to focus on every single possible thing inside of your funnel especially if you have a limited budget. Focus on one or two traffic sources and then add a third and a fourth once you're comfortable and confident that everything is working. You'll have the most success by narrowing in on a single but impactful strategy because there's also a lot less room for error if you're only trying to focus on one strategy at a time. I want you to go ahead and write down what is the one traffic source or two traffic sources that you will focus on to promote your offer. Will you post a law on Instagram and engage with your audience there? Or will you be posting regular YouTube videos and promoting your offer there? Or maybe you're not going to be doing any of these and you're going to be partnering with people in your industry and leveraging their audiences to promote your products. Or maybe you'll just be going straight down the advertising route and run paid ads straight into your funnel, and maybe you'll be focusing on Facebook and Instagram ads in that case. Just remember to think about your audience and what will resonate with them the most. Think back to our top of funnel strategies and figure out which one might be the best suited to you and your business. Then think about what you can offer as a lead magnet. As a reminder, a lead magnet or opt in is an irresistible bribe that gives a specific chunk of value to a prospect in exchange for their contact information. This doesn't have to be fancy. In fact, the simpler, the better but it does need to be very clear and specific as to what people are opting in for. Remember that just saying, "Subscribe to my newsletter" is not specific in terms of a call to action because it doesn't really show people what they're going to get and it doesn't really connect with your paid offer because you're not giving people value and you're not actually giving them a reason to opt in. You want to be as specific as possible. A good landing page will convert about 50 percent of its visitors or more. Consider what you could offer your audience. That's going to make at least half of the people who are going to be seeing that landing page go, "Heck, yes, I want this, I need this in my life and I want to give you my email in exchange for it." Is it going to be an e-book or a free training, or a free trial or a discount for their next purchase if you're an e-commerce brand? Or it could be a free mini course on good health. Honestly no matter what you decide on, it just has to solve a specific problem for a specific segment of the market. 16. Leverage the Power of Pricing: Now we're getting to the bottom of the final steps within the customer value optimization framework, which are steps four through seven. That is where you're going to be leveraging the power of pricing. We already talked about tripwires and up-sells, and now we're just going to talk about it in a little bit more detail, with some more examples as well to give you some ideas of what you can do for your own business. After step three, you now have people on your e-mail list. That's awesome, but that's not helping you generate customers and generate sales yet. This is where a low ticket purchase through a tripwire can come into play. Again, remember that the goal here is just to simply change the relationship from a prospect or lead to customer. The value at this stage is almost secondary. The entire business of Fiverr was built on the tripwire model. The Fiverr platform, if you're not familiar, shows thousands of freelancers offering a really low price quick service for five bucks, assuming that people will love it and want to work with that freelancer on their higher ticket services. Now these days there are very few freelancers on the platform still offering any of their services for $5, even on the basic package. But the principle of low introductory offers still remains and also bear in mind that my account is set to Australian $, so these $739 basic package here is about $5 US. That's a bit of a sneaky exchange, but I finally found a few freelancers who are still offering their rights at $5 as a basic package. But yes, most people have changed from this model, but that is how Fiverr built their business. Think of something that you might be able to offer at a really low cost to your audience, whether it's an introductory $5 trial or free product with the cost of shipping. Now remember that the sweet spot here is under $10, but I would argue that the value is also very relative on the industry. If I got an unlimited two-week pass to a yoga studio for 40 bucks, I'd still be super excited by that because I can compare it to the regular ongoing price, which is two or three times that amount. Use your own judgment there in terms of the pricing. But as basically the Groupon effect, where you go in for a cheap introductory haircut, but then you love it so much and you love your hairdresser that when they ask you if you'd like to upgrade to the luxuries special shampoo, that's going to make you look like Jennifer Lopez, for the low price of $200, you say, heck yes. Not only that, but then you come again next time and you pay full price for your appointment because you now have an emotional connection with that hairdresser and with that salon because you had such a good experience. Think about how you can create your own Groupon effect with a tripwire offer. Then it's time for us to move on to step five. Often you will see people making two big mistakes in their funnels. One we already talked about, which is to present their core offer too early and skip all of the previous steps that got them there and the second is to rely solely on their core offer to make them all of their profit. Now you might be surprised to find that the most successful businesses in the world, actually make no profit up until they pass this stage, because they'll actually reinvest everything that they earn from selling their tripwire and their core offer into traffic and lead acquisition. Which is why the entire purpose of breaking everything down into all of these steps is so that you don't feel like you're putting all of your eggs in one virtual basket. Your core offer here is just one piece of the big puzzle, and everything before and after does depend on your core offer. It is important that everything within your funnel aligns with step number five with this crucial core offer step, before you then move on. Write down what your core offer is that you're looking to get more sales of before you move on to step number six, which is to offer a profit maximizer or an upsell. If you remember, the second of Jay Abraham's business growth methods, is to increase the average transaction value per customer. McDonald's is one of the most successful fast food businesses in the world, and they actually make no money on their core offer, which is the humble hamburger. Because they offer it so cheap that the cost of making it is actually a lot higher than it should be, but it's also a lot higher than it is to just make a bunch of fries or pour a Coke, which is why they make most of their money on the coke and the fry profit maximizers. Apple does the exact same thing with $400 AppleCare, when you purchase any product. You purchase a $700 phone and then you pay 200 bucks for AppleCare. You purchase a $3,000 laptop, you pay 400 bucks for AppleCare. You may or may not use it, but it gives you a peace of mind to feel like your piece of tech is protected and it's something that gives them extra value on selling that product. You'll see Amazon do something similar with their cross-selling profit maximizers, to increase the average order value, by saying, "People who bought this product that you're looking at, also bought that other product that goes along with it." It's a bundle profit maximizer as well through their Frequently Bought Together section. If you were buying a laptop through Amazon, it will then maybe say, "Do you want to buy this laptop case and this backpack because other people who bought this laptop bought this case and this backpack? " That is such a big thing when you're already in that buying mindset, that you're more likely to be like, well, this is a $3,000 laptop, do I want to protect it for 200 bucks or for 40 bucks? Yes, I definitely do, and honestly, I have bought so much crap I probably don't need because of these clever marketing tricks. It's important to remember that the single biggest expense most companies will incur is the cost of the initial acquisition of a new customer. Everything that happens after they've already acquired a new customer, is just maximizing that profit. Think of something that you can do to add additional cost and additional value, to your core offer that can serve as your profit maximizer. Then we're off to the final step of our customer value optimization framework, which is to create a return path. The goal of the return path is to have frequent and strategic communication with your buyers, and your prospects that cause them to buy again and again. Of course, this is also why it's never going to be profitable, if your business is just selling one product or service because there's no room to grow. You need to be able to offer additional products or services in order to really take advantage of your hard earned prospects and customers and get the highest lifetime value possible out of them. You can do this through frequent and relevant emails and exit offers on your website, and keeping in touch with your audience through social media and offering them loyalty programs and re-targeting them through ads and creating more valuable content for them to consume so that they're aware of any new products and services that you're coming out with. Or if you're promoting other people's products and services. That's another way to leverage the return path, if you yourself don't have anything new to offer, but you want your audience to keep buying from you and keep seeing your paid offers. Hopefully that's all making sense. Next I'm going to take you through an example of how I would actually go about planning this out for a client during a strategy consultation. I think that's really going to help you get some ideas for your own business and maybe clarify some questions you might still have about how all of this fits together and how you can leverage all of these seven steps to get the most value out of your customers. 17. Build Out Your Profitable Strategy [Example]: The aim of this particular lesson is so that we can go through everything you've learned so I can show you step-by-step how I would go about creating a marketing funnel for a client using the three overall stages of the funnel and the seven steps of the customer value optimization framework, because I know it's a lot of information and it can be quite hard to visualize how it can all be put together into practice for your own business or your clients businesses if you're a freelancer. It does get a lot easier with time and with practice, of course, but hopefully providing you with an example of how we would actually put this into action instead of just saying these are the steps and go and figure it out yourself. It will help you to see how all of these different digital marketing jigsaw puzzle pieces begin to come together. But do keep in mind that there's never going to be one way to execute on all this. While I might be giving you my suggestions, you might have done it totally differently and that's the beauty of marketing. Once you know the principles, you can create eight different scenarios of the same thing and they might all be equally successful. There's no one right way to execute on this, but this is just an example of how I would go about doing this. This is the business overview template that you're going to find inside of your course guide. Now, this is based on my own checklist of information that I like to gather about a business before them proposing a strategy based on the seven steps. I don't always get answers to all these questions, and I might get some additional answers that I haven't asked questions about, but especially if the business hasn't made any sales yet, they might not actually have the answers to all these questions, but the more information you can gather at this stage, the more successful this strategy will be. If I was doing this for a client, I would essentially just find out every single thing that you've learned up until this point, in terms of, what are their goals? Who is their target audience, or their several audience segments? Also, additional things like, what is their business model? Is it aimed at consumers, so operating as a B2C model? Or are they dealing with selling to businesses in a B2B model? Then, are they maybe restricted to a geographic location? Which will really impact how I would go about the marketing of the funnel. Then also thinking about, do they actually have a website? Is it good or does it maybe need a bit of a revamp before we start actually getting traffic to it? Then, are they on social media? If they're on social media, are their social media profiles good, or do they need a revamp? Are they doing some organic or paid marketing? Do they have a plan in place already? Who are their competitors, as well? Then, what do we like about what their competitors are doing and what do we dislike? What can we leverage for our own strategy, and what do we not want to be doing that the competitors are maybe doing? Then, of course, I would want to know how much people are already spending with them because it would give me a good idea of where to focus my efforts. For example, if they have 500 customers, but their customer lifetime value is $50, then I would know that I need to increase the value of the core product or offer a profit maximizer to get this number up. But let's say they have 10 customers, but their customer lifetime value is $400. We know, their core offer or profit maximizer, or maybe they have a tripwire, they're all priced really well because people are obviously spending quite a bit of money with them, but we need to focus on everything leading up to the sale because they just don't have the volume of sales coming in because they only have 10 customers. But they could also be a completely blank canvas and have no sales at all yet, which is fine, but again, just trying to get as much information as possible, and then I would go through each of the seven steps of the customer value optimization framework and select the solution for each step. Now, it is important to note that just like there's not an answer for every single one of the questions that I have in my business overview template for every client, there might not be a use for every single step in that proposed strategy based on those seven steps of the framework. Not everyone will be able to, or want to offer a tripwire. Well, they might not have a profit maximizer, which is fine. Again, it is a framework that is designed to be targeted and tailored to each individual business and their audience, as much of it as you can use, obviously the better off you'll be, but if you can only use a few of those steps, then that's perfectly fine as well. But I'm actually going to go through an example with you of how I would go about leveraging each of these seven steps for a client. First, let's go over the business overview of this client. The name of the business is Mary Smith Photography. Obviously, this is Mary Smith, and the business model is B2C. Even though Mary does work with business owners and entrepreneurs, they are the ones who are actually buying the service and making that purchase. It fits more into the B2C model rather than a B2B model where there's usually a financial department decision or an accounting department decision or other departments and other stakeholders are involved for the business as a whole. It's much more B2C. Their core offer, or her core offer is a $250 lifestyle photography session, where people get one hour with her to take as many images as possible, but then they will receive 30 final edited, beautiful images. Yes, normally, the core offer comes under the seven steps of the proposed strategy section of the template, but I do like putting it into my business overview section as well just because it gives a bit of context to the rest of what we're showing an overview of within the business as a whole. Then let's talk about her goal. Mary's goal is just to get more value per customer without raising the price of her core offer. She's really confident with the $250 session. She's happy with that price point, but she just needs to get a bit more value out of each customer. Now, as a photographer, obviously, she is location specific, so she's located within Toronto in Canada, but she's willing to travel around the whole of the greater Toronto area for bookings as well. The reason that that is important to know with each client, is because it will really affect how you use your marketing because you're not able to target people in America or in Australia, because obviously Mary's not able to actually provide her service to those people. So it has to be a little bit more targeted within her specific area and region in terms of actually putting her services out there. On an organic level, it would mainly affect the kind of hashtags she uses on Instagram because people might be looking for a hashtag Toronto photographer, or hashtag Toronto based photographer. Or there might be very location specific hashtags that she can use to get her organic posts out there in front of people, and then obviously with her paid efforts, then she can use it to only target people within the Toronto area plus 30 kilometers, let's say. Now, Mary does have a website, but it has a slow loading speed, so that's something that I would look at maybe fixing or trying to improve. She also has an e-mail marketing list, but it only has 300 subscribers on it, and they're all past customers. Obviously she hasn't really put any effort into getting more people onto her e-mail list who are maybe potential customers. Yes, she has social media profiles set up. She's got Instagram and Facebook, which is perfect for her industry, and they look good because she's a photographer, so she produces beautiful images. Now, her target audience are young, trendy business owners and entrepreneurs within the greater Toronto area, so that is the target market we're going to be going after, and her rough budget at this stage is around $500 a month. Now, I do like to get a sense of just where people's minds are at in terms of how much they're willing to spend, especially on advertising. Now, I want you to just keep in mind for those of you who are learning the sales funnel and building skill because you're looking to do this for clients, it's important to break that down into: is that their overall budget for your own fee and advertising spend or is $500 a month just going towards Facebook ads or Google ads, and then are they paying you for your services and your creativity on top of that? So that's very important because sometimes people will literally have 500 bucks to spend and if that's the case, they may not be able to actually afford to run any profitable marketing campaign, if that includes your fee as a freelancer. This budget will also serve as a point for you to really evaluate whether they're realistic with their marketing spend. Because if their product or service is a $2000 coaching program, but they only want to spend $10 to acquire someone, then that doesn't really line up. It gives you a point to be able to manage their expectations and say, "If you are looking for people to purchase a high ticket item like a $2000 program, you need to be willing to spend at least $500 to actually acquire that customer." So you still have $1500 profit, but you can't really expect to only spend less than $100 on your advertising and make that profitable. It's more of a check point for you to then be able to give them a bit of an idea of whether or not their budget is realistic as well. Their current marketing efforts or Mary's current marketing efforts include organic social media. She's also writing blog posts, and she's partnering up with other photographers who are sort of referring clients to each other because she's specializing in brand photo shoots for entrepreneurs, and she has other photographers who specialize in other areas, referring clients to her. Now her fictitious competitors are Grace Holland photography and Sunshine Studios. Her customer lifetime value is $250 because at this stage, it's the only thing she's offering. So each customer's really only spending the $250 with her and there's really no room for her to give them an opportunity to work with her again and buy from her again. It's obvious from this breakdown over her lifetime spend per customer that Mary needs help in creating additional offers for her audience and leveraging the power of repeat business so that she can increase her spend per customer without necessarily increasing the cost of this service. I would also maybe go through evaluating Mary's competitors to see what they're doing and see how her current presence is shaping up on all of these different platforms and her website. Maybe her Instagram would be a mess if she wasn't a photographer and needs to be revamped before I would think about launching any funnel. Maybe her website is too slow, which it is in this case. So then I would focus a little bit of time in just making sure that all of those pieces of the puzzle are functioning correctly and are representing her and her business in the way that she wants it to be before actually proceeding to directing future potential customers to her social profiles and to her website. We would wanna make sure that we have the optimal conditions for a great customer experience before actually executing on our strategy. But in the meantime, we could actually plan and build out the strategy while we're focusing on making sure that everything looks good and is working like it should. So let's go ahead and do that. We want to start with the product/market fit transformation. This is where we would be thinking about how her product or how her service solves these pinpoints for her target audience. Remember the before and after states of having and feeling and status. Somebody could go from having trouble getting the right images to represent them in their business online to having professionally taking authority building images ready within five to seven days. They'd also go from feeling overwhelmed and frustrated, but never getting the right image of themselves and their team to having someone who's going to walk them through the entire experience and make sure that all of their concerns are addressed. They can go from having a status of having only shaky iPhone photos of themselves up on social media, to having gorgeous, professionally edited photos to share with their audience. Finally, they would go from the evil of the money sucking media industry and overpriced corporate photographers to a good, personal, kind and honest experience based on mutual trust and connection. Then, I think there's a lot of benefit to Mary putting out quite a bit of organic content as well. As a marketing freelancer, and in terms of what I could do for her, I would select Facebook and Instagram ads, targeted ads, small business owners and local entrepreneurs that I could execute for her because this is a very visual business, catering really well to these platforms and because it's a very local specific business, these are really great way to do that because you can target people locally. Now I could go straight to just advertising her services, but I would like to actually run a bit of a competition. My lead magnet for Mary Smith would be to enter to win a free photo shoot with one winner picked every month. The reason that this works really well for this business model is because Mary can then contact everyone who didn't win at the end of the month and offer them a discount or maybe a value-add of 10 free images if they sign up for her core offer, which is the $250 session, because she already knows that they're interested because they enter the giveaway. So they're interested in the session, so she just needs to sweeten the deal to get them to buy even though they didn't win it for free. Then her tripwire would be a $9 how to plan and prepare for the perfect personal branding photo shoot book. Now this could actually just tell people how to take their own photos and arrange their living room or their home office to get the right vibe and all that good stuff. But it would also then show Mary's core offer to people to just hire her for the low, low price of 250 bucks to get her to plan, arranged, shoot, and edit the whole thing. Now you might think that $9-250 is a big jump, but just remember that people are going to pay based on perceived value. If Mary communicated the time and efforts saved in just hiring her instead of doing it all yourself, then it's a no-brainer for people sign up. But seeing as her audience might have just entered a free giveaway and maybe they don't want to purchase the core offer quite yet until they know if they won, she could let them know that purchasing the session doesn't disqualify them from the free giveaway, and if they win, they can have up to two years to claim their free session. So they can always make sure that they have saved photos of themselves in their team. Because they could do one session now and one in a year or in two years when their team has changed and they've changed and they can keep having more personal brand photo shoots because this is something that people would purchase on a repeat basis because they want to make sure they're having up-to-date images. We already know her core product is the $250 lifestyle photography session, and then her profit maximizer would be 500 bucks for an additional team photo shoot or product photo shoot depending on the business, which would be a half-day photo shoot with 60 final images. The return path is, for Mary specifically, the ideal return path here is to eventually remark it to her customers with content about her additional services and offering a referral bonus to all her past customers or maybe offering them a discount for friends and family because that is perfect. Because then you're still getting more value out of each customer, even if they themselves are not necessarily purchasing more, but they're referring your business because they had such a great experience. Hopefully it's all starting to make sense and you're feeling a bit more confident in creating this for yourself. Now keeping in mind exactly what I said at the start of this lesson, you need to tailor this to your own business. So if offering a trip wire or profit maximizer isn't right for you at this stage, then create your framework in a way that works for you. This here is the general skeleton from digital marketer of everything we've just gone through in a way that also shows you how to customize each step to what works for you with a bit of a yes and a no path. Also including e-mail marketing as a really integral step to getting people through the sales funnel by nurturing that relationship. In the next lesson we're going to go through how to actually create your visual sales funnel based on this exact framework, using a free funnel building tool. I can't wait to see you there. 18. Project Introduction: All right, guys. So now is the exciting part where you're big, beautiful funnel can come to life as you map it all out. But I did also want to take a little bit of time to say that, yes, sales funnels can be so, so profitable, but there's also a lot of room for error. That is why I really encourage you to have patience and take a lot of time, especially in the planning phase, because the more time and attention and love you give to your funnel in the planning and preparation stages, probably the last time you'll be spending on troubleshooting when there's already money and people within your funnel and your maybe spending time because there's a broken landing page or an email's not going out, or your ad has a spelling error in it. That can be a nightmare and a very expensive one. You can end up spending thousands, if not $10,000 on fixing something when it's already live and people are running through it. You really only have one chance to make a great first impression on your ideal customer avatars. You want to make sure that you're doing that and the best way you can do that is by taking the time and the care to really plan out your funnel and map it out and make sure that all of the elements really play together very well before you actually go and make it live to the universe. We're going go through and map everything out inside of the tool called for Funnelytics. Now, it's really time for us to put everything you've learned into action. I'm going to see you inside of Funnelytics. 19. Execute On Your Project: Previously this lesson was conducted in a tool called Phonalytics, which used to have a free plan which was awesome. They have converted to a free trial only, which requires you to put in your payment details, which feels a bit icky to me. So I was looking for lots of really great alternatives for mapping out our funnels. And as far as I can tell, there really isn't a whole lot on the market that competes with phonalytics. We're going to do this the DIY way, I hope you guys don't mind. I have essentially created this myself within Canva, so that's what we're going to be using. But of course you can also just go old school with a pen and paper and submit that instead. That's totally fine. If you'll use my template, this is what it'll look like. It'll say use the template for a new design. It'll ask you to either log in or sign up with Canva. So I'm just going to go in and log into my free account here so you can see what this would look like for a free user. And I'm not going to go into a huge amount of detail on Canva because I do have a dedicated Canva course, you can check out if you're interested. But in the Elements tab is where you're going to find everything you need outside of what I've already provided you with. So you can search for elements or you can navigate to the section that says shapes or sticky notes. And that's where you will be able to grab anything and add it to your whiteboard. So once your shapes are big enough, you'll see these arrows appear on all the sides. And when you click and drag them, it will allow you to create other shapes and connect them in this sort of mind map fashion. You do also have some sticky notes that you can use in case you want to have sort of reminders around your funnel, but I don't really see a huge use case for this. If you want to zoom into these sticky notes, you can see that you can type some texts into them. But yeah, these are probably more for more presentation style or org charts or things like that and not so much funnels. You do have all of these tips here on the left hand side about how to use this different shortcuts. You know, you can always hit R or C on your keyboard and that'll bring up a rectangle or a circle. So you don't necessarily need to keep going into the elements tab. You can also use the drawing function in case you're like, I just want to draw my own stuff. Anytime you do that and you exit out of it, it'll create a shape that's a vector. So you can change the colors and you can mess around with it that way and use it within your funnel. Again, probably not a huge use case for this, but it does give you a little bit more flexibility within camera as a tool as opposed to some other funnel mapping tool. So I like it for that, but I'm going to actually erase this from my template now. It's not going to affect what you guys see, just so you know. It's not going to affect anything else. But we are going to basically start mapping this out. So you can either grab the two circles, one has an outline, one is just a blank, white circle underneath it. Or you can just hit C on your keyboard. And that'll bring in a circle for you to use as a shell for the different parts of your funnel to allow us to use these connecting functions. I'm just going to be copying and pasting my circle here. And you'll notice that there's this quick flow functionality, which means that every time I click on one of those arrows, another circle pops up. If you ever don't have this functionality, just right click on your circle and go to Enable click flow, and that will bring this functionality back up. All right, so I'm just going to command C on my Mac and command V to paste these circles in or control C and control V if you're on a PC. And then we can start mapping out the different parts of our funnel. At the very beginning of our funnel is going to be our traffic sources. So this could be social media post, blog post. Anything that would be considered top of funnel for you would be on the very left of this funnel for me. Let's say it's organic. Instagram posts, real stories, et cetera. And then perhaps I've also got Facebook marketing efforts that are potentially on an organic basis at this stage. And then let's say this is a blog post icon that I can use as well. And these would of course be leading to a page where my lead magnet at this stage would be offered. These page icons are irrelevant, they're just placeholders like visual placeholders, so it doesn't matter which one you choose. And then you can either hit on your keyboard to bring in a bit of text to say what your lead magnet is all about, or you can use my pre made ones over here. Now, of course, yours wouldn't say lead magnet. It would say what the lead magnet actually is. So it could be ten ways to optimize your hairstyle. Okay, that's a terrible lead magnet idea, but you get what I'm saying. That's where you would put the name of your lead magnet, and then we would continue on. So somebody would go from Facebook, let's say, to the lead magnet page. They would then become a lead. And then the next section would happen, which is where our trip wire would potentially be presented, if that's relevant for our business. So again, not every business is going to have a trip wire. But at this stage, I'm sort of mapping it out with all the different sections of what we've learned about throughout the course so you can see what that would look like. So we would have a trip R page and possibly an order page, to be honest. They might be one and the same because this is a very simple step. So if it's $110 trip R, then potentially there would be no order page. But let's say in this case we have one. And then I want to create like a yes path to say somebody went from the Tripwire page, so the order page and yes, they did actually purchase. I can zoom in and out using the slider or just using the command plus or minus, or control plus or minus keys on my keyboard to zoom in and out. I'm just going to speed this up a little bit because at this stage I'm essentially just replicating what we've already done. Where I'm copying and pasting the different elements from my core assets section of the page and just inputting them into my bubbles or circles. And of course, at any stage, if I need to create a bit more room, I can just highlight my entire funnel. And then zoom in and out. And then sort of move it across so that I can create a little bit more space. It is a little bit of a limitation, but to be honest, I was doing the same thing within final lytics as well. So you're always kind of shifting things around regardless. All right. So that's looking good. That is my Yes path. Now let's talk about, you know, what needs to happen as these people are going through my funnel. So somebody has become a lead. Now obviously, I need to be sending them an e mail and then I need to be tagging them in my e mail marketing software so that I know what needs to happen next. So at this stage of the process, I am going to be sending them an e mail to say, here is your freebie, here's your lead magnet, here's the thing you signed up for. And that's going to happen immediately after they opt in. And then I'm going to have a bit of a time delay before the next thing happens, and that will be dependent on their actions as well. Again, hitting on my keyboard to bring in a bit of text. I'm just going to make that a little bit larger. And this is just going to be a, here's your free thing again, you want to make sure you're titling that or you're labeling that with the name of your free thing. So this could be the time where you say, here are the ten best travel trips to Vietnam. Again, I'm making these up, whatever your thing is. Then we would have a wait, 24 hour timer within our e mail marketing software after that has been sent to them. Then what I would want to do is make sure that I'm checking to see if a tag exists that tells me that they have also purchased the trip wire. Now, it depends on if your trip wire is potentially timed. So a lot of trip wires might be a case of buy within the next 5 minutes, in which case 24 hours is not a relevant waiting period. You might, you don't have to wait that long for a lot of things, but sometimes it's nice to give people the opportunity to just marinate on things. Yeah, I think 24 hours is a general good waiting period. What I would do is I would change the line color to red. Which tells me that the answer to the question, does the trip or purchased tag exist, is no. If you want to also write the word no next to it so you know exactly what you're talking about, you can also do that as well. For me, generally doing the colors seems to do the trick. But essentially what I'm saying is if this tag does not exist, then send them a follow up e mail to say, hey, here's your trip wire. Again, if it's a time trip wire, this won't work because you want them to act within the set time. But if it's not a time trip wire, then you could send them a reminder e mail. And then we're effectively going to do this exact same thing for the core offer stage and the profit maximizer stage. With the exception that, of course, after they receive their trip wire at this stage I would add the tag that the trip wire has been purchased, which then signals to the first part of my funnel to say, don't send them a follow up e mail to purchase the tripwire because they've already done it. We would do the same thing at every stage. If they purchased the core offer, we would add a tag that says they've purchased the core offer. And then I would also, at the next stage, want to check if they have purchased the next thing, which in this case a profit maximizer, if they have awesome. If not, send them a reminder e mail. So this is a yes path. This is essentially, everything's gone really well. This person has purchased all the things great were set, but what happens if they aren't purchasing? So we also need a bit of a no path. We need to know what happens if somebody doesn't purchase our trip bar, our Cooper, our profit maximizer. If we have these steps, obviously not every final will, but if these are not going through smoothly, we need to add in some potentially re, targeting or remarketing efforts. This is where you would grab the set of icons that I've created for you that have the dollar signs next to them so that you know that these are paid ads. For example, at this stage I could grab the linked in icon that has the dollar sign next to it and bring that into my retargeting efforts. Now you'll notice that I didn't actually use linked in at the first stage of my funnel, but I'm using it for my retargeting efforts. And this is the beauty of doing retargeting ads is that as long as your tracking is set up correctly on your website, you actually can use completely separate platforms for your top of funnel stuff and your middle or bottom of funnel stuff because Linked in ads particularly, are quite expensive. So you don't really want to be blowing your budget on advertising your lead magnet, which is the free thing. But maybe it's worthwhile for you to spend a little bit of extra money for linked in ads or other types of ads at the later stages of your funnel where you're just re, targeting people who have already expressed an interest in purchasing from you but didn't quite complete their purchase. So that's just something to consider. Now, we would probably set up some retargeting ads after the core offer stage as well. For people who didn't purchase, I wouldn't do it for the profit maximizer stage. It probably would may not even do it for the trip wire. It really depends on, yeah, your conversion rates, how things are tracking as to where you put your remarketing efforts, but that's looking pretty good now just while we're here, I also want to take the time dimension that it's got to Thank you. Page at the very end of this funnel, this is a crucial step so that you can tell your marketing platforms to remove people from those retargeting audiences or adsets. So that you're not continuously advertising to people who've already bought that thing from you because that's just a waste of marketing dollars. In order to share our funnel, we can go to share and download. And it's going to tell us there's some watermarked images because they're paid. But we can download just the draft version of it, which will be not as great as we needed to, it's not a big deal. Or you can hit R on your keyboard so that you can bring in a white rectangle for the back there, so you can see your funnel a little bit more clearly. Go to position or just right click and go to layer and send to back, change that to white. And this will then allow you to have a completely white background so you can take a screenshot of your funnel to share instead, which will also remove the core assets and all the other things out of your image so you don't have to bother cropping it. That's also another alternative in order to be able to share it. But for now, I just wanted to show you how it would go about simplifying this funnel. Because I find that when I demonstrate these things, I often just end up with an exact duplicate of what I demonstrated as people start submitting their assignments. So I wanted to just show you how I would do this for a slightly different funnel which doesn't have a trip wire and is a slightly different set up. So let's say the lead magnet is actually a three day free training that then leads to a core offer. So let's say the core offer is a $5,000 coaching program, or mastermind, or retreat, or something like that. So that's a relatively high ticket offer. The audience needs a little bit of nurturing in order to be presented with it. It also wouldn't make sense to go from like $110 trip wire to a $5,000 offer. So that's why the trip wire doesn't make sense at this stage at all. So we want to simplify our funnel in this stage by just having the three day E mail sequence with 24 hour waiting times in between. And then going straight to our core offer. And then potentially also incorporating some sort of profit maximizer. So let's say day three has happened. I've made my pitch, and now I want people to go straight to the core offer from the e mail or from the training. They've gone to the order page, they've got retargeting ads. And we don't necessarily need these additional steps here. So that's looking pretty good. It's just a simplified version of what we did before. And now let's just do out and we're going to just highlight and copy this funnel and do one last version for an E Commerce clients because that is quite a different beast. And then service based businesses, we're just going to copy and paste that across in a different section of our whiteboard here. Now for our purposes, we're going to be assuming that we're dealing with an E commerce business that only has a couple of products. So we can do like a 10% off or free shipping lead magnet to get people's E mail addresses and send that to them. Something really simple at the initial stages. And then of course there's no core offer, it would just go to the order page of whatever products people are buying. If you were dealing with an e commerce shop that has like hundreds of products, then obviously you would do like a high, high level funnel and it would look very different. You would probably be using a tool like Clavio. That's an E mail marketing platform that also deals with building out funnel specifically for E commerce. But for our purposes here, let's say we're not dealing with, you know, two too many things. Just a couple of products. And we want to make sure that, you know, we've got sort of these yes and no no paths. And the additional thing that might be slightly different is that our no path is not necessarily, you know, people didn't purchase it might be somebody added to cart but didn't initiate checkout or they initiated check out but didn't complete it. There might be slightly different steps within an E Commerce funnel then there would be with a service based business because it's very much did they buy, yes or no. With E Commerce, there might be slightly more complexity to it. In this case. Let's say we have somebody who added to car and purchased. In which case they just sort of get an e mail to say your items on its way or they didn't purchase after adding to car. In which case they need a little bit more convincing through, let's say linked in and Instagram ads, depending on the type of income. But I would probably switch this to Facebook ads perhaps. But let's say in this case, we've got our ads, we've got an e mail to say, hey, did you forget this? And also key to note here that I've written there dynamic product retargeting ads. Which means that the customers can see exactly the thing that they put into their car in front of them in the ad. And make a decision about potentially returning to their purchase, which can be really, really powerful. So our profit maximizer wouldn't necessarily be a profit maximizer. It would probably likely be a quick upsell, just a bit of a different wording for it, but essentially the same thing. And then we'll just have a thank you page. So this is our E Commerce Funnel. These are three different examples of funnels. Hopefully it's got your ideas flowing of things you can do and now we can go ahead and look at some real life examples of what this looks like with actual businesses. If I was to Google semi permanent tattoos, I can see some ads from Stat.com I can also see from their Facebook page that they are currently advertising to called audiences. So if I go to about page transparency, it's going to show me that they are running ads. I can go and check that out in the Facebook ads library and see all the different ads that they're running on Facebook, on Instagram, on Messenger, and everywhere else. And of course, in addition to these, they're also working with influencers and posting organic social media content. So they've got a lot of different topophonnel traffic sources here. And all lead to their website, where they then have an offer for 20% off your first order, which gets me to add in my e mail address. Then I presumably go through to shopping for a couple of things. Now, obviously, I'm not going to go through to purchasing this. But I did actually purchase from them, so I know exactly what happens next. Once I completed my purchase, what I got was this timed offer for 2 minutes that I could get half off and get these two flower power really quick, beautiful tattoos that were related to what I purchased as well. Really good deal. And I could just buy it with the click of a button. So that's a really powerful quick up sell because I know all of what we're talking about here is all digital. I did also want to offer you a live example of a physical store that does this. Ganda is a clothing brand here in Australia. They have an actual physical trip wire out the front of their stores where they have five to $10 items at the door. They're usually oversized, they're not all that great, but it actually doesn't matter. It just gets people through the door because they're like, oh, five bucks. Yes, I want a T shirt. And then it gets them through to the store to check out their core offers, which is basically all the clothing they have. Then that gets them to go, oh, I was actually coming in here to buy one dress, but if I buy two, the second one is half off, it's basically free. I might as well buy a second one. And then their return path is people signing up to their membership card, which gives you 10% off on the day. But of course, it gets you onto their e mail list and it gets them to then have the ability to send you more offers in the future and get you back to the store as a return path. So hopefully, just having some of these different funnel examples and real brand examples as well will give you a really good idea of just a few things that you can do with your business no matter what your business is. And knowing that every single funnel and every single strategy is so, so unique. So make sure that you are so aware of the fact that the steps that we take within this course are just guidance. They're not an exact blueprint. And you need to make sure you're adjusting it to your specific scenario. Of course, make sure to check out my own example of Mary Smith photography and how I've set it up with my funnel which was essentially just the very first funnel we created at the start of this lesson is pretty much exactly the steps that I would follow for that type of business, but you can check out my example if you're getting a little bit stuck and you need a little bit of extra inspiration. 20. Post Your Project: I want you to go ahead and just take a screenshot of your funnel and pop it into the project section of the course. I also want you to tell me as much of the following in your project submission as possible. The more information that you are able to provide, the easier it's going to be to get the full picture of what you're aiming to achieve with your funnel and provide some feedback for improvement as well. I want you to tell me the name of your business and what are your products and services. What do you sell? What easy funnel ultimate goal? Then is your business location-specific? Because it's important for me to be able to know that in order to advise you on whether or not you need to expand your funnel or add some extra elements. Then, who is or are the target audiences that you're aiming to target with your funnel? Be as specific as possible with this one. Tell me how old they are? What social networks do they hangout on? Just refer back to your customer avatar worksheet. You don't necessarily need to provide all of the details about your customer persona, but just as much detail as possible so that I can look at the funnel and really understand who they are and how your product or service solves their pain points. Then talk about your proposed strategy. Not all of these might be relevant to you and your business and your funnel, but just fill out as many of them as possible. What is the actual transformation you are providing for your audience with this funnel? What traffic sources are you selecting? Obviously that will be quite clear from the funnel, but it's just a good idea to note this down, just in the actual project section. What's the lead magnet and any extra details about what's going to be inside of lead magnet. Then if you have a tripwire, tell me how much it's going to cost and what the tripwire is, and what is the core product or core offer, and how much is it? Same with the profit maximizer. Then any details about what you might be thinking for in terms of a return path. The return path is a much more advanced tactic that really marketers take years to learn and to nail down with their strategy. Don't worry too much about this, but any ideas that you might have about how you're going to continue to communicate with your audience, whether it's through monthly newsletters or are you just going to keep posting great stuff on social media? Just put that down in your return path strategy. Make sure to check out my own project that's already live in the project area of the course for your reference, if you get stuck on what to write. 21. Be a Crafty Communicator: One place that a lot of people get lost is in not communicating with their audience throughout their files. They will send their subscriber one welcome e-mail one "Here's your training," and then maybe a monthly newsletter and that's maybe about it. Or the opposite becomes true when somebody signs up and they get a free ebook, and then they get 20 e-mails telling him to join a webinar and a free training and watch a video and join a community, then it's just a way too much. Then when somebody actually becomes a customer then they get complete crickets and they can't help feel a little bit betrayed because it makes it seem like you only really cared about their credit card details and now that you have got them and they bought something from you, that's it. There's no more funny e-mails and no more nurturing. This is such a huge mistake on both ends of that spectrum because yes, your leads don't want to be bombarded with e-mails all the time, but they do need a little bit of context as to why do you do what you do. Why have you actually started the business that you've started and how can you help them? How do you do the thing that you do? Then finally, what is it that you do and what can you do for them? All of those elements can really come into play when they get to their decisions stage, and it's time for them to either purchase from you for the first time or purchase from you again and again. So yes, you want to send out regular newsletters to your subscribers as well, but you want to make sure that the first experience they have from being on your e-mail list is great by introducing them to you and your brand a little bit. Communication is such an integral part of this process and it can really make or break the sales funnel. I really encourage you to focus on really great communication from the very first introduction that somebody has to you and your business all the way through to them being customers and hopefully repeat customers, and them just shouting from the rooftops about how much they love you and your business. They recommend their friends and their family and their neighbors and co-workers and everyone to come and buy your stuff because they love it so much, because you've done such a good job of communicating with them throughout the sales process. This is especially true for service-based businesses. This is an example of a dental practice. They recommend that you have a checkup every six months, and it would be so easy for them to ensure that all of their patients are sent a really awesome personalized reminder six months after their appointment. Yet, so many practices are really focused on just getting in first hand patients through the doors and sometimes they really forget to reengage their existing ones. In order to really keep your funnel strong and profitable in the long-term communication is incredibly key and you won't regret investing a bit of time into writing captivating e-mails for your audience to really make sure that they keep feeling the love after they buy from you. That way, when you ask them to purchase a new $500 or $1,000 offer in six months or six years, they'll know your story, they'll know who you are and why you created this offer, and they're going to be so excited to buy it from you. 22. Thank You!: That's it. That brings us to the end of this class. I really hope that you've enjoyed it. If you are having any questions because I know this stuff can seem quite intimidating, not just when you're first starting out, but even if you're building your 10th or 15th or 100th funnel. Sometimes it's nice to just have someone to brainstorm ideas with or jump off of. Not everybody has those kind of business BFFs. Feel free to jump into the discussion sections of the class and ask anything and everything that's on your mind. Please make sure to publish your project in the project section. I just can't wait to see all of your beautiful funnels and everything that you create. If you're wanting to expand in your skills even further and actually execute on the funnel that you have just mapped out, then I recommend checking out my profitable sales funnel mastery class, which is dedicated to teaching you how to actually plan, write, and design your landing pages, emails, sales pages, and everything you need in order to actually launch, and even promote your funnel to paying customers and start making sales from your amazing funnel. Thank you so much for being here. I really couldn't do this without you. I really hope that if you've enjoyed the class, you'll take the time to leave a review. If you didn't enjoy the class, please let me know what I can do better so I can keep improving my instruction style and my learning materials for you and other students as well. I'm always working on something and working on my next projects. Make sure to follow me here on Skillshare so that you can get a notification when my next class comes out. Thank you again for being here. I hope you enjoyed it and I'll see you next time.