2.01 – Transform Total Strangers Into Paying Customers
If you’ve spent even just a day learning about digital marketing, we’re almost certain you’ll have heard about “funnels”.
When most people say funnel, they are talking about the set of steps of moving a person from not knowing about you or your business to making a purchase or any other desired action. In other words, a funnel is a sales process.
A funnel is a great visual because sales is essentially a process of elimination. It’s widest at the top where most of the people in your funnel are. Then it gets smaller and smaller as people are disqualified until you get your eventual goal – the “conversion”.
The goal of a funnel doesn’t always have to be a purchase. It could be an email opt-in or registering for an event like a webinar, but all funnels have an end goal. The rest of the steps are up to you. We’ve shown a typically funnel starting from a Facebook Ad above – notice how the numbers in each section of the funnel get much smaller with each touchpoint a customer has with your business. This is why the visual of a funnel for a sales process is so accurate. It’s a great visual concept for beginning sales and marketing process. Funnels will be a concept we revisit in a number of chapters in this course.
Another great way of thinking about your funnel is by splitting it into three parts, as you can see below:
1. Top of the Funnel, or ToFu.
2. Middle of the Funnel, or MoFu.
3. Bottom of the Funnel, or BoFu.
Let’s take a closer look at each part of this funnel:
ToFu has the widest audience that’s the least ready to convert. These people, in this section of your funnel, probably aren’t aware your business or what it offers. Your goal here is to get some people in this large group to take some sort of action to indicate they are interested in you. You usually attract some of them with a content offer. The offer is usually content like a blog article, video, or even a small purchase. You’re not trying to make a huge sale, but instead you’re trying to attract attention. Once you have their attention, you move to the next stage of the funnel, MoFu…
MoFu includes targeted audience. It is usually a Retargeting list (you’ll learn more about Retargeting soon) and possibly an email list. In this stage, you have the interest of your prospects and they are considering your business’ products or services. You can send them to more specific blog pages, send more complicated ebooks, guides, or templates. All of these usually have a stronger call to action in them to make a larger purchase or connect to a salesperson and reach the final stage of your funnel, BoFu.
BoFu holds your strongest conversion content. This could be webinars, pricing options, comparisons, demos, and live sales phone calls. People at this level are the most valuable to you, so you can spend the most ad budget on them per person. Since there are far fewer people at this level, your overall spending usually isn’t as much as people at the higher levels.
Testimonials and customer success stories work at all levels of the funnel.
A small percentage of people will speed through your funnel all at one time. You should allow for this, but don’t emphasise that path since so few people will use it.
There are plenty of incredibly complicated funnel examples you’ll find online. Once you master the idea and implementation of one simple funnel to attract the attention of a cold audience, get them interested in your solution, and convert them to a buyer, then you can add more complicated steps. In later chapters of this course, you’ll see hugely successful examples of funnels you can implement in your business.
Need to know:
Retargeting is a technology that helps you keep in touch after they leave your website. For most websites, only 2 percent of web traffic takes any measurable action. Retargeting helps you reach the 98 percent of users who don’t.
