Digital Marketing Strategy: Profitable Sales Funnel Mastery

1. Welcome!: Hey, everyone. My name is Maggie Stara, and I am a digital marketing strategist and a serious sales funnel enthusiasts. Sales funnel seem to have this aura of complexity around them for some reason. Like you have to be this crazy marketing octopus and have eight arms, and unlimited budget, and at least 40 hours in your day just to pull off a successful and profitable sales funnel for your business. What makes this class so special is that I will be taking away that complexity and overwhelm, and you will learn the exact steps you need to take in order to create a fully functioning and profitable sales funnel from beginning to end in just a few hours. Within this class then, you will be creating this gorgeous sales funnel that will have a landing page for people to sign up to your free offer. An email sequence to deliver their free offer. Sales pages, order pages, and even more complex email automations that will allow you to not just get customers, but make sure that they receive the love and care that they need from you after they purchase, making it much more likely that they'll want to buy from you again and again. But the important thing is that you're not here to learn a few fancy online tools. You're here to learn how people think and how they feel throughout the sales process, and why they actually think and feel that way, and how we can leverage the knowledge of this to increase your sales in your own sales funnel. You will have direct access to the templates we're going to be using throughout the class that will help you to write like a professional copywriter and create pages and emails within your funnel that your audience will look at and think, wow, it's like they're talking directly to me. You will also be taking a look at how to promote your funnel once it's live, and how to measure the success of your efforts. Then finally, we'll also be going through some more advanced techniques where you will learn how to increase your sales by adding in additional paid offers to your funnel, and using additional free tools to see how your audience is using your pages, and adding some social proof and a live chat tool to your pages so that you can increase the success of your funnel. Throughout the entire class, you're going to be learning some really important principles in the world of user experience and human behavior. The role that emotion and other psychological principles will play on the creation of your marketing materials, and really, overall, just how to create an awesome and authentic and human experience for your audience throughout your entire sales funnel. This class is perfect for any existing or aspiring freelancers who want to learn how to build awesome, profitable sales funnels for their clients, or anyone who wants to learn how to do this for their own business. Even if you don't yet have a paid offer that's live or an audience to sell to, I'm going to be showing you how you can get around both of these challenges with just a few cool little tricks. Now if you're brand new to the world of sales and marketing funnels, and it's all a little bit intimidating still, I would really recommend that you check out my digital marketing strategy sales funnel fundamentals class because that's going to give you a really good foundation for the theory and the principles behind what we're going to be creating here. But for those of you who are just keen to execute, the next lesson is going to be a summary of my fundamentals class. That's going to give you a really great foundation for what we're going to be creating here today. Now, I'm going to be super transparent with you about sharing my own experiences as well as some client experiences with you. About things that have gone well and not gone well, just so that you can really learn from my mistakes. But also so that you know that it's okay that things don't go right the first time or even the tenth or hundredth time. Because great marketing is not about perfection, it's about adaptability, and that is what's going to become your superpower. Please start by going ahead and downloading the class guide in the Projects and Resources section. That's getting give you access to all the templates we're going to be using throughout the class, and additional resources like your free 30-day trial, forget response, and other tools that we're going to be using throughout these lessons. Thanks so much for being here today, guys. I'm really excited to get going. Now if you're ready, let's dive straight in. 2. Sales Funnel Fundamentals Overview: In this lesson, we're just going to go over a few basic elements of what it takes to actually build a profitable sales funnel. That I would like you to be familiar with so that you don't feel like I'm speaking marketing as a foreign language as you're going through the lessons within this class. I've also included some key terms and some definitions inside of your class guide, so if you're ever listening to me and you're kind of thinking, I've no idea what she just said and what is this thing? Then hopefully, you'll find a definition and also some really helpful resources within your class guide that can help you out, okay. So make sure if you haven't already, to go to the Projects and resources tab on your desktop, and make sure to download your class guide and store it somewhere where it's really accessible for you because we are going to be using it quite a lot throughout these lessons. Now if you're ready, let's get going and figure out what sales funnels actually are, why your business needs one, and how they're structured to make sure they're really profitable. Let's first talk about why your business actually need sales funnels. Well, legendary business executive and marketer, Jay Abraham teaches us that there are really only three ways to grow a business; you can either increase the number of customers, the average transaction value per customer, or the number of transactions per customer. So effectively, you need to find a way to get more people to buy your stuff, get each person to pay you more for that stuff or get each person to buy more of your stuff. So ideally you want to achieve all three of these things with one system which is exactly where a really effective sales funnel can come into play. So when we talk about a sales or marketing funnel, all it really is, is a framework that businesses use to turn strangers into customers. The reason they're called funnels is because the funnel is wide at the top and small at the bottom, which is exactly how a sales funnel works. Where at the top of the funnel you'll have hundreds or maybe thousands of people checking out your website, and social media, and watching your videos, then in the middle of the funnel is where a percentage of these people will actually give you their email address and become a bit more interested in what you have to offer. Then by the time you get to the bottom of the funnel, you are then left with a lot less people than you had at the top, but these people are super targeted. They've not only read your blog content and maybe seen some your social media stuff, but they've given you their email address, and they watched your free training, or downloaded your e-book or guide or checklists and they really feel like they're getting to know, like, and trust you enough, to open up their wallet and actually buy whatever you're selling by the time they get to the bottom of this funnel. So all you're doing with these various stages of the funnel is you're moving your audience slowly through the customer journey of awareness, consideration, and finally through to their decision to purchase from you. Though, let's break this down. At the very top or the beginning of your funnel, your job is just to attract people to your stuff, and make them aware that you even exist. Now you can do this through writing blog posts, posting on social media, creating videos or things like appearing on podcasts, or really whatever else you can think of just to get yourself and your brand out there. The key point here is that you're not really asking for anything in return yet at this point. You don't want anything from your audience other than their attention. Only after they've actually engaged with this valuable free content, do you want to move them to the next stage which is the middle of the funnel stage where your audience goes from just pure awareness, to actually considering whether or not your business is a good fit for what they're looking for. At this point, your goal is to get them to commit to receiving more of your awesome valuable content via their email. It's still free content, but they have to trust you enough to exchange their personal email address for that free content. So you kind of wooing them, you're dating, you're flirting, you're putting in the hard work, and you're convincing them that you're the best before actually asking them to buy anything from you. Now at the bottom of the funnel is where you actually ask them to buy for me. If you've done a good job of building your relationship up until this point, they're likely to not just buy one thing from you, but to buy from you again and again and become advocates for your business, telling other people to also buy your stuff through testimonials and social proof which will really help to increase future sales as well. I think everyone knows at least one person who's that crazy brand advocate for some brand out there. The people who are going to camp out the night before a new iPhone drops just so that they can be the very first person to spend $1800 on a new phone, or the people who are dressed head to toe in Nike clothing. No matter if they're going to the gym or a funeral. That's the dream for any brand, is to have people who are so ridiculously passionate about what you're selling, that they're ready to tell the world about it, and more importantly, they're ready to buy anything and everything that you sell now or for the next 10 years. Now coming back to the three ways to actually grow your business here. In order to get more customers into our business, we need to create lots of amazing, valuable content for our audience so we can attract as many people into the business. Then we need to make sure we're nurturing this relationship with more, both paid and free quality content in order to get people to buy from us again and again like that super iPhone fan who without fail will purchase a new iPhone the second a new model comes out so that we can increase the number of transactions per customer. Then our final step is step 2 here which is to increase the average value per transaction, per customer. The best way to guide your customers through the purchasing process is by providing them offers at different price points. Now everything within the sales process is a bit of a psychological mind game which is why in order to succeed with creating the most profitable marketing plan for your business, you really just need to understand how people think and feel when they're buying your stuff. So one thing and think of it as a real life purchasing scenario here. Imagine you walk into an Apple store and the first thing they offer you is their $400 Apple care plan. Which if you're not familiar with it, it's that service that they offer on all Apple products, which gives you free repairs and assistance for your Apple products. So $400 is an enormous amount of money to think about before you've even committed to purchasing the product itself, and this is why it's not actually advertised anywhere in the store, and they don't even mention it to you until you're already handing them your credit card and paying for your brand new iPhone or MacBook, and the way they mention it is also really important. It's super casual, almost as if you're grabbing a pack of gum at the grocery store checkout. Their tone suggests that it's a no brainer, and everyone gets it, but it's no biggie if you don't want it. It's not a hard sell by any means. And at that point when you're already agreeing to pay three, four or five grand for a new computer, and they say, " Hey, do you want to protect this beautiful thing that you've worked so hard to buy for just a couple 100 bucks?" You're so much more likely to say, heck yes, I do, because your mind is already in a purchasing mode, and you're excited, and your adrenaline is circulating, and you feel like you're on top of the world, and what's another 400 bucks anyway, right? This is exactly why, whether it's in a physical store front like this, or in an online store, it's really important not just to have a bunch of products and services at different price points, but to present these to your customers in a logical order of events as they would actually happen in the customers minds. And the best marketers cracked into the system, and leveraged it to sell almost anything online, on autopilot, with this general customer value optimization framework. So the general structure of this process goes like this: first, you determine a product market fit. So this step essentially will just help t