WTF is a Funnel?

A funnel is just a fancy way of talking about a customer journey: the journey that you take your customers on from awareness through consideration to a purchase.

It's where you take cold audience, or people who are completely unaware of you, through a nurture sequence, giving them lots of valuable information, to build that know like and trust factor and inevitably leading to a sale.

Content Strategy : Video

Do you ever struggle knowing what to post on your social media? Having a clearly developed content strategy will help overcome that and help you become a clever and strategic marketer.

Ask yourself: What piece of content, naturally forms the bridge between the free content and someone picking up the phone to have a sales call with you?

i.e. What should I post on social media to get people to enter the top of my funnel.

I’ve found that short (about 5mins) video content works really well to quickly build rapport, express domain authority and educate.

Test out various content types on your audience and see what video topics convert best.  What would your audience search for on Google?  What common questions do you get asked again and again about your area of expertise?

A super simple video type is where you give your potential buyers a behind the scenes view of what it’s like to hire you.

For instance, if you’re selling a coaching package, or anything where you will be on a live call with your clients, why not record the call (privacy permitting) and edit it down to be a quick-fire Q&A style video.

We did this recently for one of the coaching calls you get inside of my signature e-course Freedom Funnels: How to launch a profitable E-Course and scale it to freedom using Automated Sales Funnels. (You can check that out here: http://www.amberrenae.com/freedom-class)

We edited one of the weekly coaching calls and included timestamps when each question was answered.

The beauty of this type of video is two-fold:

1. It takes your potential buyer inside. They get to truly experience what it’s like working with you 1-on-1.
2. It develops expert status really efficiently as your potential buyer can you see you firing off answers which quickly establishes trust.

You can see the video my team put together here: http://bit.ly/ff-content-funnel

This entire funnel including the top of funnel content (the edited down coaching call) took less than 2hrs to build.

Content Landing Page

Once you’ve created your super high-value video, create a super simple landing page using your favourite landing page builder.

Remember to keep this page clean: no external links to other content such as blogs etc.

The only way off of the page is to buy your OTO or schedule a call.

Then start spreading the news about this excellent piece of content you’ve just created.

Think about repurposing that one piece of video content into multiple posts :

Post 1: Post the entire video

Posts 2, 3, 4 : Edit down 30s grabs and post these

Posts 4, 5: Create Quote Cards out of punchy one-liners

Post 6: Publish the transcript as a long form style of content

You can see the possibilities here.

All social posts lead back to your content landing page with the full-length video at the top of the page.

OTO: One Time Only Offer

Think about including a self-liquidating offer just to give you some extra $ that you can spend on serving Ads to cold audience.

This could be a small offering such as an E-book, or a Mini Video Series that you sell for $7.

There will be a small percentage of people watching your highly valuable training that will want to take an immediate next step with you – so give them the opportunity!

The OTO should be for a product that is the next logical step in the customer journey. Ask yourself “What do my customers need right now, to continue down the purchase path with me?”

Sales Video

Think about including a quick, 3min sales video with more information about your signature offering.

You could always include this at the end of your content video, but as I’m sure you already know, the large majority of people will not watch all the way to the end.  So instead, include it separately at the bottom of the page.

You can see mine in action here: http://bit.ly/ff-content-funnel

Your sales video should help your leads identify that this would be right for them and break any objections they may have in scheduling a call with you.

Prequalify your leads with a link to a Survey Monkey or an online form that requires some level of commitment and potentially identify whether they can afford your package.

This will also weed out the people who are not really that serious.

After all you don’t want to schedule up your calendar with a bunch of calls that never show.

Sales Call

Once someone completes a pre-qualifying survey and you have a call booked in, think  about what content you can send them before the call in order to build that know, like and trust factor.  Things like Testimonials, Case Studies, or W11FM videos (What’s In It For Me = everyone’s favourite radio station) work really well here.

Secure the Bag

If you ask the right questions you will get a pretty good understanding of what problem your client is looking to solve, how urgently they are looking to get their problem solved, and what lengths they are willing to go to solve that problem now.

Be discerning and remember that there is no “one size fits all” offer.

Consider the buying cycle and that only about 10% of calls are ready to buy your first offer and are ready to buy now.

Instead think about alternate package options: both upsells and downsells to your original offer that you can sell to any buyers.

And think about different packages and pricing structures that will get the non-buyers across the line.

Content Funnels to Sales Calls are an efficient way to reach new audience, connect more closely with your existing audience and to establish you as top of mind.

They’re easy to build, cheap to run and tend to convert really well due to the intimate nature of having a 1-1 call with someone.