A huge mistake often made by small businesses is not having a sales funnel. In fact, the phrase “sales funnel” is not even discussed when small businesses talk about websites, marketing, offers, etc. I’m amazed to see how many businesses are leaving literally thousands of money on the table by not creating smart systems in their online marketing strategies to get more prospects and customers contact information, deliver strong irresistible offers to generate revenue.

In fact most web designers never ask this very important and critical question: “How are you going to make money with your website?” After all, they went to design school, not business school, therefore it’s hard for them to think strategically on how you can use your website or landing page to generate more revenue.

The goal of sales funnels is to convert traffic into paying customers. My mission is to educate businesses on why and how they should build a website that is part of their overall marketing strategy and helps them increase their profits. I can’t tell you how many people have told me, “Carlos, I wasted $10k on a website that does nothing for my business”. Very often business owners end up with a “brochure website” that sits there doing nothing.

I believe that your online platform is an investment in your business that should quickly pay for itself. I see too many businesses spending time and money on things that don’t matter. Things that create more expenses but not revenue. I’m talking about things like: SEO (Search Engine Optimization), Social Media, Paid traffic, email marketing systems, etc. I’m not saying these things are not important. They are important but each and every one of them has its time and place in the marketing process.

Until you have a sales funnel (a website or landing page) that’s successfully working to convert visitors into leads and sales then you are wasting too much time and money and no amount of marketing or traffic seems to give you the results you want. People come to your site and nothing happens. More people come to your site and still nothing happens.

Keep in mind that today’s buyer has virtually unlimited access to information. They have the power to find and discover products at their own pace and make their own decisions on when to purchase. They do this mostly online. This means that your website has become your single most important marketing asset and that’s why your website needs to be part of your sales funnel process. So what is a sales funnel you might ask? A sales funnel is a plan to allow a person to become aware of your company, learn about it, and make a decision on whether not to buy.

The purpose of a sales funnel is

1. Capture your prospects contact information such as names, emails and/or phone numbers
2. Build relationships with your prospects by providing real vale before asking for anything in return
3. Sell great products and/or services

Most people don’t want to share their email addresses. You have to have an attractive proposition or what we call an Irresistible Offer, that will help your audience solve a specific problem. Here’s where you have the golden opportunity of providing real value, establish trust and build relationships. Does this mean that you will have to wait several weeks or months before you start generating revenue? Absolutely no! If your product or service solves an immediate problem, your customers are willing to pay for it and your website does an excellent job in presenting that product or service so you convert those prospects into customers and generate more revenue then you have an effective sales funnel!

Here’s a quick example of a sales funnel:

Let’s say I’m a travel agent and have my own website where I offer basic information about me and my services. I have a contact information form, my phone number and button that says “call me for more info”. This approach might get me a few leads. However, doing it this way means that I’m just waiting for people to pick up the phone and call me. Here’s how I could turn this basic informational website into a sales funnel:

1. I create a fee report of a topic of interest for my audience that likes to travel.
2. The title of my report is “5 Things You Can Do Right Now to Save 50% on Your Next Family Vacation”.
3. I place the report on my website and give it to anyone that provides me with their name and email address.
4. I promote the page where I have the free report by mentioning it in social media, driving traffic to my site via Facebook or other social media sites and emailing the page to anyone I think might be interested.
5. People go to my site, give me their name and email address to access the free report.

Now, I have a list of prospects. People that might be interested in my travel agency services. My next step is to convert those prospects into buying customers. Here’s how I would do it:

Every week I send an email with more special reports, hotel specials, vacation ideas, last minute cruise deals, free travel, etc. Keep in mind the goal here is not to bombard your prospects email list with offers and “buy more from me” but combine helpful content with strong and irresistible Call-To-Actions. This is where you build relationships. Now, you are being strategic and intentional about using your sales funnel to build your customer list and generate revenue. This sales funnel becomes a critical par of your overall marketing efforts.

Do you have a sales funnel for your business, how is working out for you and what would you add to this post?

To Your Success!
Carlos Morales

Why should I buy from you right now, instead of buying anything else from anybody else next week or next month?

That’s your Unique Selling Propostion or as I’d like to call it your Unique Irresistible Offer. If you have a great answer to that  question, you can charge more money, invest more money into marketing or develop new products or offers for your audience, etc. If  you have an awful answer to that question, you’re in trouble before you even begin and there’s no headline or copywriting in the world  that can save you.

You might think you have an Adword, a Facebook Ad Campaign problem or a copy problem but most likely you have a Unique Irresistible Offer problem.

Selling to the right person is more important than all the sales methods, copywriting techniques, and negotiation tactics in the world. Because the wrong person doesn’t have the money. Or the wrong person doesn’t care. The wrong person won’t be persuaded by anything.

Having a Unique Irresistible Offer get rids of the wrong person, prospects, customers or clients. When you have a bad Unique Irresistible Offer you’re constantly fighting downward price pressure. You fight with other people in terms of prices and delivery. You feel the need to justify how much you charge or what your product or service does. You have to knock on lots of doors.

If that’s you, then there’s something you’re not promising, something you’re not guaranteeing or not communicating specifically enough that’s keeping you from being unique and keeping you from making more money.

There are four questions your Unique Selling Proposition or Unique Irresistible Offer Should Answer:

1) Why should I listen to you?

2) Why Should I do business with you instead of anybody and everybody else?

3) What can your product do for me that no other product can do?

4) What can you guarantee me that nobody else can guarantee?

What Can You Make “UNIQUE” about you? Think of these examples:

1. Your product is unique. It has guaranteed result. It’s tailor made for X kind of person. The user has a guaranteed “experience”

2. The market you serve is unique. Your focus is middle schools only or businesses with 15 employees or fewer.

3. Service. Guaranteed delivery in 24 hours or less. Guaranteed personal access to you. Guaranteed 24 hours support.

4. Your Price is Unique. You may have a premiun price. There are guaranteed add-ons that other competitors don’t offer at your price or which let you ask a higher price.

When you have a Killer Unique Irresistible Offer, you have the following: – Your products and services are easy to describe and fun to show off – Customers line up to buy from you – Writing ad copy is a lot easier – You raise your prices and get no resistance

– You dictate the terms of every transaction and your customer willingly follows.

So there you have it. Accept the challenge to be different. Take the time to create your Irresistible Offer before you do anything else in your business. Your uniqueness in the marketplace is what your right customers are looking for!

I challenge you to create your Unique Irresistible Offer right now or if you would like me to help you craft it for Your Lead Generation System, apply for a complimentary “Lead Generation Blueprint Coaching Session” where we’ll help you design a FREE marketing strategy for Your Business.

Click HERE to apply For a Complimentary Consultation. No strings attached.

I’m excited to see if we can help! 🙂

 

Need More Conversions? Look to Your Content!

Quite often content marketing and conversion optimization don’t even reside in the same paragraph, much less sentence, in terms of how we think about making it all work together.

There are ways to help your visitor get to that happy place where they’re grabbing their wallet, and completing the sale.

5 Ways to use content for better conversion rates

Use easy to follow navigation – Enabling your page visitors to go where they (and you!) want to is a cornerstone. Use one clearly defined navigation bar, and augment this with text links inside your content pointing to other pages or resources you’d like to show.

Use visuals! – The more images and videos you use in your content, the more often it will be read, shared and acted upon. That’s not opinion, but a fact. We love to look and watch, read not so much.

Optimize for mobile – With well over half of all web access and search now coming through a mobile device of some type, if you’re not optimized for mobile you are undoubtedly losing out.

Create unique, valuable content – The best way to help your conversions is by creating content that is valuable, sharable and leads logically (and one would hope with some urgency!) to the next step, conversion.

Create killer calls to action – Optimize your calls to action with some thought. Test the various elements just like you would content, and make every effort to make your CTA be noticed. Using colors that stand out yet are complimentary is key here, while remaining within the design elements of your page.

The best way to proceed is to be sure that when your content is being created, that conversion is part of the thought process. Thinking about it then will lead to more conversions afterwards!

Are you using content to drive traffic to your website or offer and do you have a Call-To-Action (CTA) to increase conversions and ultimately sales?

Content Marketing. It’s very easy to agree with this, especially with the role that social media has and will continue to play in the SEO, traffic and authority of our web properties.

But what exactly should we be doing to make sure the mix we are using for our content marketing initiatives is as potent as we’d like it to be?

The shape of content marketing in 2014

The three buzzwords characterizing content marketing in 2014 are quality, multi-channel and social. Google’s Hummingbird update, along with the ongoing Panda and Penguin purges have left little doubt that in order to win with content, it’s going to have to be good, visual and able to be shared widely.

It’s no longer as simple as having a mobile or social media strategy: it’s all about being able to be found on any size or type of screen or device. With more active mobile devices than adults in this country, we’ve definitely passed the tipping point!

So what types of content are best these days?

Some content is worth far more than others. Today’s ability to secure a reach far beyond your site’s borders has seen to that. Let’s look at four types of content that wins in 2014.

Longer form content – It’s clear that Google is favoring quality long form content and rewards it with authority and rank. This can take the form of not only longer blog posts and articles, but reports, whitepapers, webinars, and even Kindle ebooks.

Videos – With roughly half of all web traffic going to videos, and that number rising for the foreseeable future, it’s clearly time to market on video if you aren’t already. The cost of video is hardly an issue anymore, and you are missing out on opportunities to tell your story online to a vast, ravenous audience.

Visual Content – This can be in the form of imagery, shared visual content (Pinterest, Instagram) and especially infographics. Neil Patel of KISSmetrics has revealed that by spending $600 per infographic over the last two years, (47 in all to the tune of $28,200) KISSmetrics has raked in 2,512,596 visitors, 41,142 links, 41,359 Tweets and some 20,859 Likes. This is traffic and leads that would have cost more than $800,000.

Tools and software – If you have the ability to create a free tool that your audience would find useful you run the risk of being swamped by visitors! This benefits you in many ways, from skyrocketing your trust and authority to long-term, heavy traffic. This one deserves some thought!

Content marketing in 2014 isn’t merely about blogging more, it’s a melding of what your audience is attuned to doing with their time and interests. Time to plant your content marketing strategy directly in that path!

Find Quick Results Using Social Media Ads

Love the concept of using social media to reach a huge pool of people, but are unsure how you can make this happen? While setting up a social media presence that is vibrant and popular can take some time and effort, reaching a multitude of highly targeted people on social media can be done using paid advertising on these networks.

Where you might struggle along for months attempting to create or find an audience, you can get one in minutes from the likes of Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Twitter, and to a smaller degree, Tumblr, Vine, Pinterest and YouTube. They all have a unique following, and it’s better to plan your ads in conjunction with your target demographics.

What are the benefits of using paid social ads?

There are several benefits to using social media advertising. Let’s examine just a few of them.

• Incredible targeting tools – It’s a piece of cake to target unbelievably small segments of your audience using highly relevant ads.
• Immense audiences – Your message in front of millions of people extremely fast.
• Opportunities for cheap ads – In contrast to Google Adwords, social media ad platforms are typically far less expensive.
• Fast results – Your ads can be up in minutes. Setup and approval times are short.

Suggestions for maximizing performance with paid social ads

• Test relentlessly – This will help improve CTR as well as lower costs. Test images, colors, copy punctuation: it all matters! A single percent improvement in performance can be the difference between success and failure!
• Target carefully – The beauty of social ads is the ability to target minutely. Don’t waste it! Get granular with your targeting.
• Tie in a sound content marketing strategy with your social ads – Having great content to not only present but follow us is a must if you don’t want to pay for followers that rapidly abandon you for greener pastures.
• Tracking is vital! – The majority of these platforms incorporate some sort of tracking for you, but make sure you use the best solution you’re able to, and it may differ for various platforms.
• Try retargeting – Simply put, retargeting works. It may look a little creepy to have your ads stalking customers across the Web, but numbers don’t lie.

Cheap ads, immense reach and easy implementation. What’s not to like?