How to create a digital marketing funnel for your business that actually makes money
If you are new to promoting your business online you have probably wondered how to create a digital marketing funnel for your business. Let’s face it, there is lots of information out there on using sales funnels to grow a business, but can you really make one that actually makes money? In this post, you’ll learn how to create a digital marketing funnel for your business step by step that actually makes money.
Determine your end goal and offer for your digital marketing funnel
Now before you even start creating your digital marketing funnel you need to do a little groundwork first. First and foremost you want to begin with the end in mind and determine what your back-end offer is going to be.
For example, let’s say you had an HVAC company and your end goal was to replace heating and air conditioning units. You may also have the goal of selling a monthly repair protection services plan to those who didn’t immediately need a full repair or replacement unit.
These back-end offers should usually also be your high-ticket offer, but you can follow these same steps to build a digital marketing funnel for anything you sell.
Once you know the backend offers you want to sell and promote, designing the rest of your digital marketing funnel is much easier. Without a clear goal for your sales funnel, it becomes much harder to promote it and to make money with it.
You’ll design the rest of your marketing plan around this funnel so take the time to map out each goal and offer you have upfront.
Determine your free give away
Once you have determined your back-end main offer you want to decide on a free giveaway to start your digital marketing funnel. Some people make the mistake of going immediately for the sale.
Certainly, a percentage of people will buy from you without knowing much about you or your business, but those are more exceptions rather than common. Typically you will need to take people through a process of them getting to know, like, and trust you before they will buy from you.
One digital marketing strategy to build this trust and to add people to your email list is by creating a lead magnet. The barrier for someone to enter their name and email to download something for free is much lower than buying something.
Once someone is on your list then you can nurture that list and build trust through content marketing. As that trust builds it is much easier to sell to those people.
Make your free giveaway something that with beginning to help with a problem your ideal customers have and that is congruent with your main offer. For example, if you sold personal training and health coaching, you might create an eating plan for weight loss as a free giveaway.
Someone who downloads an eating plan for weight loss is likely also going to be interested in personal training and health coaching. Therefore selling your main offer as an upsell to the free offer is natural and makes sense as the next step for getting even better results.
Set up a website or sales funnel system
The next step is to set up a website or sales funnel system like Clickfunnels to host your digital marketing funnel. Which option you go with really depends on your marketing budget and the strategies you want to use to promote your digital marketing funnel.
Typically a website is going to be the better choice as it gives you more flexibility to scale your business in the future. However, a sales funnel system can work well if you aren’t very techy and aren’t familiar with website design.
A website can give you options to use content marketing as a strategy to drive traffic to your website, which we’ll cover more later in this post. The benefit of using a sales funnel system is that typically they have built-in high converting designs.
When you own your own website you’ll either need to hire a marketing agency or web designer to create and optimize the pages. You can also learn how to design a website yourself, but this can take time to learn.
If you want more of a “plug-and-play” style of website, a sales funnel system could be a great place to start.
Create a landing page
The first page in your digital marketing funnel is the landing page. When you run ads or send people to your funnel the landing page is going to be the first thing they see.
Because of this, it needs to quickly grab your ideal customer’s attention and it must speak to them specifically. See an example of a high converting landing page for a digital marketing funnel I use for an Instagram Marketing Course of mine.
You’ll notice on this landing page there are a few things you want to include. The first is a headline that grabs the visitor’s attention and highlights something they are looking for.
In this case, my ideal customer needs more leads and they are looking to do it with Instagram. Hence the headline of “Secret Instagram Blueprint to Get Leads For Any Business“.
One other thing you’ll want to include if you can is social proof. This is something that documents what you are saying. The photo above highlights my actual Instagram profile with over 30,000 followers. You could also use screenshots of results, or even testimonials from happy customers who have used what you are offering using your system, products, or services.
Finally, simply tell the person what they get and include a call to action to take the next step. In this case, the “Yes, give me instant access” button, which then prompts them to enter their name and email to download the offer.
Create a thank you page
Once someone enters their name and email, you want to send them to a thank you page. This page will serve several purposes and it can also help you increase sales for your business.
The most generic thank you page will just say something along the lines of we have received your submission. Then you should also deliver whatever it was the person was supposed to get from entering their information or let them know where they can access it.
Doing this will let people know they submitted their info successfully, and you also delivered on your promise. By doing this you will build trust with people that opted-in for your free offer.
Another advantage of using a thank you page is that you can use it for tracking purposes. Sending someone to a thank you page and tracking when someone reached that page can be used to track conversions.
You can also set up goals in Google Analytics to further track when people visit your website what percent of people visit specific pages and then download your free offer. If you are running Facebook ads you can also install pixels on your website and track conversions that come from your ads.
A more advanced thank you page may also sell a product or direct someone to take the next step in your sales process.
Create a tripwire product and upsell pages
We mentioned above that a more advanced type of thank you page would include either something for sale or lead people to the next step in the sales process. One version of this is to create an upsell page that offers a tripwire product.
A tripwire product is a product that is congruent with your lead magnet that also has a low cost to purchase. For example, it could range from $7-$97 depending on how expensive your backend product is.
Ideally, you also want to have this product be something that doesn’t require your time input. For example, you might sell a $7 ebook or $47 video series, or if it does require time from you to deliver you might charge more. An example of this could be you offer a one-time discounted rate on your services.
As an example, we offer done-for-you marketing packages as one of our high-end offers, but as a tripwire product, we offer people a discounted digital marketing audit. Instead of paying for our full marketing services upfront, we offer a special discount to new leads and we run an audit of their current online presence and review their current marketing plan over a quick Zoom call.
While not everyone buys the tripwire product, some leads do and it not only prequalifies them for our services, it can also help offset the cost of advertising. When you are trying to scale your business with paid advertising having low-cost offers that convert leads into buyers can help you scale more effectively.
Also once someone buys that initial tripwire product, you should then offer more upsells on higher-level products. Once someone has made the decision to buy from you it’s much easier for them to buy more, than to find a new buyer.
Set up an email autoresponder
It would be great if everyone who landed on your website and that went through your digital marketing funnel bought from you on the first visit, but it isn’t reality. Most people are going to require some kind of follow-up or research phase to build trust and rapport with you before they buy from you.
If you don’t have a means to get in contact with your site visitors again they likely won’t return to your site ever again. This is why having a means of capturing their information so you can remarket to them in the future is so important.
An email autoresponder is one way to do that. Most email autoresponders will integrate with your lead capture forms on your landing pages or many like Aweber allow you to create landing pages and popups right in the system.
This will allow you to automate some of your follow-up processes and you will build your email list at the same time. An email list is a powerful asset and it can allow you to maximize your profits from your digital marketing funnel.
Your email list can also be uploaded into Facebook to retarget them with ads, or to build lookalike audiences to target with ads. These audiences tend to convert very well and tend to buy your offers more often compared to a cold audience.
Write a follow-up email series
In addition to building a list and setting up an initial follow-up email, an email autoresponder also allows you to create a follow-up email series. This is a series of value-based educational emails that can further educate and sell your leads on why they should buy from you.
When you combine a follow-up email series with your digital marketing funnel your profits can significantly increase. Every email should provide additional value related to your offer and include calls to action to take the next step in your sales process.
The great thing is you can do this in a way that isn’t overly pushy or salesy. You want your email series to focus on the additional value that educates your potential customer on the benefits of buying your products or service. You can also provide value in things related and congruent to your main offer.
For example, if you help prospects buy and sell real estate your email series could include education on things like building credit, remodeling tips, how to improve the sales value of a home, etc. Then your call to action at the end of the email could be something simple, like “P.S. If you are interested in buying or selling a home or have questions give me a call at 111-222-3333.”
As you showcase your expertise through your email series, those who see value in what you offer will be interested in following your calls to action which leads people into the next step in your sales process. It could be requesting more information, scheduling a call, or even directly buying from you.
Build a content marketing strategy for organic traffic
Now that you have the above steps in place to maximize profits from your digital marketing funnel, you need to create sources of traffic to promote your digital marketing funnel. The content you create can be on a blog and should be similar to the content you made in your email series. In fact, you can even send people to blog posts in your email series to further build value on your services or products.
You want to create content that answers common questions, educates prospects about your services or products, and helps ideal customers avoid common problems associated with your service.
Let’s say for example you sold makeup and skincare products. You could create blog posts on choosing the best mascara or the best skincare products to prevent wrinkles. Another idea could be choosing the right skincare products based on your skin tone.
Try and put yourself in your ideal customer’s head and think about what their thought process is when thinking about your products or services. If you can anticipate what kind of questions they have and create content that answers those questions you can attract a lot of people to your content.
In addition to that, you want to target keywords that people are actually searching for. A big mistake most people make with content marketing is only making content they think will be helpful but don’t frame it in a way people are actually searching for. To get past this problem you need to combine your content marketing with SEO to really get traffic to your website.
Then at the end of your content or throughout your content you simply tell people to visit your digital marketing funnel as a logical next step to solve their problems or achieve better results.
Focus on the build, engage, sell method on social media to promote your digital marketing funnel
Now that you have a growing content marketing strategy to promote your digital marketing funnel in place it’s time to utilize social media. Social media can be a great asset to grow a business, but you need to follow the build, engage, sell method if you actually want to make money.
Typically we see people make the mistake of posting content on social media but they either only post their sales messages, or they don’t have an actual following. Even if you post quality content on your social media profiles, but don’t have a large following it’s hard to convert that into income.
However, if you focus on building an audience, posting engaging content, and then finally selling it works best. Social media can be a huge asset to promote your digital marketing funnel when done right. With a large audience, when you post content, people are more likely to engage with it.
As you do this on a consistent basis you can start to develop a relationship with your audience. When you occasionally post your sales content or digital marketing funnel people will actually take action. If you neglect to build and engage with your audience, when you make offers you won’t get many conversions.
Set up Facebook ads to scale your offer
As you develop your organic marketing strategy into one that converts you should also consider paid advertising. Using paid advertising can allow you to scale your results quickly by reinvesting your profits back into marketing.
A great place to start marketing a small business and your digital marketing funnel are with Facebook advertising. Facebook advertising has a lot of benefits. One of those major benefits is that you don’t need a huge marketing budget to get started.
If you are just getting started your digital marketing funnel and offer may be your first step into entrepreneurship. With this being the case you might only have a small budget to invest back into your paid advertising strategy.
Even if you have a large business Facebook advertising can be a great way to test your digital marketing funnel. Starting small so you can test your results. Then scale your ad spend by continually increasing it when you find a winning funnel and offer.
With Facebook ads, you also have the ability to build lookalike audiences. You can also implement retargeting which can help maximize your ad spend. Check out the video below to learn a simple 3 step strategy to use Facebook advertising to grow your business.
Run a Google Ads campaign to target relevant keywords
Another form of paid advertising to scale results from your digital marketing funnel is Google Ads. Google ads are different than Facebook ads. Unlike Facebook ads, they target keywords and search terms your ideal customers use.
Facebook ads use what are considered interest targeting. This means you are targeting people who have similar interests to your ideal customers. Google Ads uses search-based targeting. This means you need to bid on keywords and search terms your ideal customers use. Ideally, you want to target keywords that have a high buying intent.
For example, let’s say you sold weight loss products or Keto products. You might target terms like best keto recipes, or how to get into ketosis quickly, or other relevant search terms. You could even target a competitor’s product line and add the word “review” after it.
If people are looking for reviews of a similar product they are usually almost ready to buy. Using keywords with “review” in them can get you a very targeted group of people. Typically people using “review” are far along in the buying process.
Often using Google Ads to promote your digital marketing funnel is more expensive when you use buying keywords. However, they also usually convert at a high rate. Even if it takes a bit more ad spend it often converts well with the right keywords.
Conclusion
A lot of digital marketing experts say that a business should have a digital marketing funnel. That’s true, but most don’t teach you how to use it to actually make money. Having a digital marketing funnel isn’t enough. You also need a lot of other back-end systems in place to maximize your profits.
The foundation of building a successful sales funnel is beginning with the end in mind. Knowing your back-end offer makes it much easier to build a funnel that supports that. After you know your back-end offer and congruent lead magnet, you want to set up your website and landing page.
Create a thank you page to improve your tracking and tripwire products to help generate additional revenue. Follow-up is another essential aspect of building a successful digital marketing funnel. You can improve this process with an email autoresponder and email series.
Once these systems are in place you’ll want to promote your digital marketing funnel with content marketing and social media. After you experience success with organically promoting your funnel you should scale your results with paid advertising.
Follow these steps to maximize your results from your digital marketing funnel and to actually make money!
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Mike MacDonald
Facebook: facebook.com/coachmikemacdonald
Email: [email protected]
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“I help business owners generate more traffic, leads, and sales with digital marketing, paid ads, and automation.”
P.S. If you aren’t generating leads for your business it’s because you don’t have a system in place to do it. CLICK HERE to set up the exact system I use to Rake In Quality Targeted Leads Daily.
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