Here’s the scoop.

Odds are overwhelmingly high that you already have a Marketing Funnel
in your business, but you don’t know it.

Just take a step back for a moment and let’s go back to the basics.

Let’s talk about AIDA.

Attention | Information | Decision | Action

So the basics of marketing tell us to get someone’s attention, feed them with
information about our product, get them to take a decision and then make a
purchase which can be a desired action.

Some businesses have got billboards with a phone number on it. So they are
using billboards to get Attention.

When customers call in, they are given more information about the product
being sold and are prompted to take a decision to buy by the inbound sales team.

Many businesses are currently using this exact business model and that is their
sales process or sales funnel.

Now according to Wikipedia,

Conversion funnel is a phrase used in e-commerce to describe the journey a
consumer takes through an Internet advertising or search system, navigating an
e-commerce website and finally converting to a sale

In my dictionary, a sales funnel is a set of marketing assets that helps remove all
objections and convert a prospect into a buyer.

The role of each step in a funnel is to bring the prospect closer to the sale, in any
type of funnel or business.

Of course, in this article, we’ll be talking about online marketing funnels.

To get started, let’s take a look at an information based business model.

In the old’en days of the interwebs, you would put up an eBook for sale on your
website and stuff some keywords in there and do some SEO and wait for sales
to start rolling in. Those were the golden days and they ain’t coming back.

Now in 2017, you need to have a well engineered marketing funnel to

1. Build a list

2. Nurture and build a relationship with that list

3. Sell a product to that list to separate the buyers from the freebie seekers

4. Upsell and cross sell to those buyers

5. Sell affiliate offers to both the freebie seekers and product buyers.

There you have it, your information based business model layout. You can use
this model to build your marketing funnels.

If you want to build a solid information based business, you need to use paid traffic.
In other words, you need high quality, reliable and scaleable type of traffic.. You
cannot rely on free traffic or organic Social Media traffic anymore.

I would go even further and say that you need multiple sources of traffic to be able
to sustain-ably grow an information based business or any online business for that
matter. The main sources of high quality, reliable and scale-able traffic at the moment
are Facebook, Google Adwords and Content Networks like Taboola etc.

1. Now let’s come back to the reasons why you need a marketing
funnel and here they are:

1. To control your buyer’s experience

When buyers come to your homepage. They look around, scroll, click on
different pages and leave your site most of the time. That’s a fact and I
am sure if you look at your analytics, you’ll get confirmation of what I am
saying.When you build a marketing funnel, you would generally use landing
pages and show them one piece of content or one offer at a time.

Yes, one offer might have 3 options, but the buyer doesn’t need to think
between various offers. You put one offer in front of them and you tell them
this is the best offer money can ever buy for you.

Then once they’ve bought the first product, you present the next product as
an upsell and so on. You’d want to get them to buy the cheapest product you
have then move them up your value ladder.

Remember, a confused mind doesn’t do anything, so make it as simple as
possible for your customers to buy.

2.    To reduce customer acquisition costs

As I mentioned earlier in this article, when you have a funnel, your conversions
rates go up as you’re able to control where you send the traffic, what the user
sees and what they buy etc. In other words, you’ll dramatically reduce your
customer acquisition cost and you’ll make more profit altogether.

3.    To be able to scale your business in a predictable manner

A funnel is like a profit spitting machine. You send traffic from one side and it
spits out profits from the other side.

When you’re building a funnel, your first goal is to get a positive ROI. Once you
get a baseline and you have your traffic source, funnel and conversion rates dialed
in, it’s time to scale.

Put more traffic through the funnel and make more money, it’s that simple.

4. To be able to make maximum profit out of every prospect

This is where your value ladder comes into place. You probably heard this a lot
but the money is in the backend.

Once you have a customer, not a lead, you upsell, cross sell and get them to buy
as many products as you can offer. It can be your own offers or affiliate offers.

5. To be able to automate your business.

You can have as many funnels as you want in your business to perform
different goals.

A funnel to acquire customers, another one to upsell, another one to cross-sell
etc. All that can be automated in such a way that your funnels are constantly
working your client up the value ladder without.

From a technical perspective, you can define your funnel through a bunch of
landing pages, follow up emails, order forms, sales pages, confirmation pages
and so on.

My favorite funnel application is Clickfunnels, you can try it out for free HERE.

Whatever type of business you’re in, a funnel can help you. Whether you’re a
real estate agent, an author, a coach or financial advisor, a funnel always
perform better than your traditional website.

You must have figured this out by now, but we build Marketing and
sales funnels for a living so feel free to get in touch with us HERE