Have you ever wondered how you can quickly grow your business from an amateur hobby to a professional career? Do you want to know the best strategies to direct your audience to your offers?
Enter Funnels.
Funnels are amazing! They can help you narrow your marketing down to your ideal customers as well as show you the best ways to reach them. My husband Bill and I have 15 years of experience in online marketing and we’ve compiled a list of 6 common questions, and our expert answers, to help you break down the funnel formula, from the tech you’ll need to make it and the mindset you’ll need to write it.
- What is a funnel?
When I look at a funnel, I think of it as a system of actions that happen from the moment somebody becomes aware of you and your business. You begin with what we call a “cold lead”– meaning your customers have never communicated with you before.
What gets them to click that buy button or to engage with you is all the communication that goes in between. That could be through social media posts, a freebie, or an email.
From there you want to engage with your audience to determine for yourself (and help your audience determine) if they are your ideal customers.
- How do you know if you need a funnel?
In my opinion, you need a funnel, if you want to go from being an amateur to pro.
When I first started my business, I was doing what I call the hey gurl hustle. I was going to all these different people in the network marketing industry. It was almost like knocking on doors trying to get in front of enough people to get my business going.
If you want your business to grow professionally, you need some sort of funnel system– whether that’s manual like linking your audience to offers through your blogs and social media posts– or something more automated.
If you’re looking to have something that’s more automated, it’s definitely more work upfront. But that’s how you go pro! You start building!
You start with one funnel, but then you start building multiple funnels, which help with creating that consistency in your messaging. People are constantly being able to hear from you and you’re able to build trust.
To determine if you need a funnel, ask yourself, “Do I have a consistent flow of leads into my business?” and more importantly, “Do I have a consistent income?” If you have either of those, then you definitely need a funnel!
Once you know you need a funnel, you need a specific plan about what steps you’re going to take to funnel your customers to you.
Decide what platform and offer to use. How are you going to warm them up to buy your product? Then, give them a chance to buy.
If you are doing any type of Facebook ads, run an ad that has a conversion. That way you’ll be able to track the metrics of your funnel and see how well your ads are working.
- What are the Benefits of a Funnel?
Some of the benefits of a funnel would be that you are getting to a point where things are on autopilot. It still takes work to set up your social media posts, your email series, and your freebies, but once you use a funnel and set up measuring metrics you can forget about it.
That means you can focus your time on other, important areas of your business like creating content that helps move your business forward!
Funnels are also extremely helpful in that they narrow your pool of customers down to customers that are ready to interact with you. If you picture a funnel, it’s really wide at the top. But then, as people move through the funnel, the crowd gets thinner.
The funnel reveals customers that download your freebie or subscribe to your email list. And just as funnels help you figure out who to reach, funnels help customers figure out if they want to do business with you. This is called self-selection. It’s important because it ensures that you won’t spend your time with people that aren’t interested in you, which is super helpful because time is one of the most valuable resources we have!
What’s more, is that funnels can help you interact with customers on multiple levels in various ways. Someone once said that you need to see content and ads 11 times to take action because there’s so much noise out there! And with so much noise, you need to be strategic about how you reach people.
- What are the components of a funnel?
There are three different segments in a funnel.
The first part is the top of your funnel. This may be referred to as TOFU, or the top of the funnel. Most of your social media posts and ads exist in the TOFU. These are cold leads with your audience. Aka, this is their first time hearing of your business.
Next, you want to move onto what’s called MOFU, or the middle of the funnel. At this point, your customers have heard of you and your goal is to build trust and rapport with them. From there, you want them to take some sort of action like joining your free group or downloading your freebie. Ultimately, you want them to be on your email list (the point of giving away a freebie is that they enter in their email information so you can continue to connect with them).
The last step is BOFU, or the bottom of the funnel. This is where people convert into customers. Once you have customers, you want to retain them and get them to keep promoting your business through referrals and testimonials.
As long as you’re speaking to enough of the right people and meeting their messaging needs based on their place in the funnel your business is sure to succeed.
- How do you get your funnel up and running?
Maybe right now you’re a beginner, or you’re somebody that doesn’t have a funnel set up quite yet. Here’s the drill to setting up the perfect funnel formula:
At the top of your funnel, you’re going to start with social media posts. Social media is important because it showcases who you’re looking for, what you’re about, and your manifesto.
From there you want to bring people to the middle of your funnel, preferably through a Facebook group, which is a fantastic way to bring people into a community because it’s easily accessible! You can also have a freebie. Next, you would have an email list where you are constantly sending out messages that are moving people towards taking action.
The more technical side of making a funnel is that you can manually schedule posts on Facebook. You can also put an actual link to your Facebook group in your posts. Hashtags are also a helpful way to serve your content to people who are outside of your regular circle. So if you use those hashtags, it opens you up to a bigger search variety. Once you get a person into your Facebook group, you can connect with them and answer their questions.
To make messaging easier, you’re going to need an email autoresponder. Autoresponders allow you to send the same email out to multiple people at once. Once you have that email autoresponder you’re gonna need to drive people from links in the emails that you send. So you’ll be sending emails to people who have opted into your email list. And those emails will include a URL that tells that person to come over and visit your webpage. That page could be your sales page or your offer page. It could be another page that has a different offer for something else that you want to give them. You’ll need a sales page of some sort and a mechanical or digital way to collect payment. Typically the easiest way to do that is with WordPress in a plugin called WooCommerce.
- What is a nurture sequence?
A nurture sequence is a series of emails. The purpose of this sequence is to help close the gap between you and your customers. You’re building trust – building your case as an expert.
Therefore, the goal of the nurture sequence is to basically establish yourself as someone that can help your audience.
The nurture sequence falls into the middle of the funnel. So after a person opts-in from the opt-in page, they’re going to start to receive a sequence of emails and that’s part of that autoresponder that email service.
This allows them to start the sequence of emails. They get their emails in order at whatever time you select for them to be sent. You want to offer them value, until your immersion email where you provide them an offer or encourage them to buy something from your business. This immersion email is a crucial part of your email funnel.
After all, it’s in the immersion email that you present your offer and see whether the value you’ve previously provided your customers has finally won them over enough for them to consider a purchase.
Exciting news! We are going to be putting together A “Part Two” for funnels because this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to understanding how funnels function! In Part Two, we’ll dive into more options on how you can set up your funnel. We’ll also be looking at some of the metrics that you want to be looking at, how you can diagnose if your funnel is working or not, and how to make the changes to get your funnel back on track!
Meanwhile, do you want to know what 5 days of consistent posting on social can do for your coaching biz? We are having a posting party and it’s free! Sign up here.
