If you want more marketing funnel customers. Stop saying you build marketing funnels.
Do you find that you’re struggling to discover and attract new customers for your marketing for projects? If you’re a marketing funnel builder, you know how much you can help so many different markets and businesses. So why are you struggling to find new customers?
I’m going to show you exactly how to find more customers for your funnel business.We’re going to see how successful funnel businesses find more customers and the secret to discovering and finding more customers for your funnel business.
We need to be really clear about what we mean by customer. This blog post is not designed to show you how to close sales or convert leads (you can find that in our other blog posts). This post is designed to show you how to find people who need your marketing funnel services.
Alien
The problem that most marketing funnel businesses face, is that the majority of our potential customers and market are essentially ignorant to what their options are. The concept of a website and social marketing and video marketing is still alien to them.
Do you love probing people? Then you need the Probulator 2000. Trusted by over 10 000 weird gray faced people. See? It’s about choosing a customer. Photo by Miriam Espacio on Unsplash
So the concept of buying a complete marketing automation and traffic funnel process from someone is at the moment beyond their comprehension.
If we want to find more customers for our funnel business, we need to understand what would make someone buy a marketing funnel.
Lots of funnel businesses suffer from mediocre projects, low value customers and leads and enquiries few and far between. How can we increase the number of people who are interested in our products and services, trust us enough to buy and understand what we can deliver for their business?
Maybe you’ve tried everything else in the past. Facebook advertising, referrals, email marketing, social marketing, comment marketing. You’ve attended networks, joined mastermind groups, attended local Chamber of Commerce meetings and still you are struggling to find repeat and profitable marketing funnel customers.
It doesn’t make sense right? Marketing funnels are an inherent part of online business strategies now we know they work, we know they convert well, and we know that they can add both revenue and profit to a business. So why are you struggling to find customers for your marketing funnel business?
Electricity trees
There are two massive misconceptions about finding more customers for any marketing funnel business.
1. The amount of people selling marketing funnels either locally or globally, has got absolutely NOTHING to do with you succeeding or failing at finding new customers.
It’s got absolutely nothing to do with whether they are more expensive than you, cheaper than you or whether they attend the same networking events and groups as you.
2. Another misconception is that you have to be really good at explaining WHAT you do.
When someone asks you “what you do?”, how often do you explain the process behind building a marketing funnel?
The more I’ve helped marketing funnel businesses find more customers, the more I realise that explaining what you do is the least important part of the interest and attraction part of the journey for a customer.
Mr. Killen, for the last time. “Electricity trees” are not a thing. Please stop asking us to plant one in your garden. Photo by Janice Lee on Unsplash
We believe that if we get really good at explaining what a marketing funnel is, and what we do. Then we will get more customers. To me that’s like someone telling me how a nuclear power plant works to sell me an electricity supplier.
I don’t want to know how they make the electricity (electricity trees I’m assuming), I want to know if my bills will be low and my neon “open” sign will turn on when I want it to.
How it can benefit them?
Our customers, our market and even ourselves are subjected to so much information overload now, that we are immune to all the promises and language that many marketing businesses use.
- Fully integrated marketing solution
- Beautiful websites designed perfectly
- Amazing marketing solutions for e-commerce businesses
We see these kind of statements over and over with so many marketing funnel businesses. We see people tell their customers that they build marketing funnels, design beautiful marketing funnels or develop high converting market funnels.
You might think that you’re adding a little flair or differentiation to your language, but in fact you’re falling into the same trap as being the exact same as everybody else.
Customers don’t want to read about you, they want to read about themselves. If they can’t recognise themselves in what you tell them you do, they simply won’t be interested. The uphill struggle to force someone to understand what you do by taking the time to explain it to them, hoping that they will understand what you do enough to see value in what you do, is both expensive and frankly not worth the effort.
“Customers don’t want to read about you, they want to read about themselves”
So important that I gave it it’s own quote.
Our customers are subjected to so many marketing messages now, that all the other promises and explanations are falling on deaf ears. Customers just aren’t interested in understanding what you do. They want to know how it can benefit them.
“But don’t I need a portfolio?”
One of the most common questions I’m asked when people want to start finding more marketing funnel customers for their final business is “don’t I need a new portfolio?”
The answer is no. Portfolios are fantastic and they’re a great way to show off what you can do for your customers. But they are also one of the methods of increasing trust within a customer.
Think about when a customer wants a portfolio from you. It’s because they want to see what you’re capable of, what you can do, and if they can see themselves using your services.
The portfolio is not designed to sell your marketing funnel services. The portfolio is designed for customers to see themselves in your past customer shoes.
Remember what we said earlier, about customers not wanting to read about you, they want to read about themselves? A portfolio is one of the ways that we do this. Customers want to see portfolios, when a) they don’t trust that you can deliver the work that they need or b) they want to see if you’ve worked with customers like them before.
The logic goes, in the customers mind, that only an expert who has worked with their type of business before would have a portfolio that supports their vision of what they want.
Interestingly, that this is not the only way that we can increase trust and show that we work with their types of businesses.
So if you want to find more customers for your funnel business, stop saying you sell funnels and start doing the below.
Decide who you can help
First, without a doubt the most critical part of finding more customers for your marketing funnel business, is deciding WHO you want to help.
The most common question I’m asked is “how can I find more customers? Or where can I find more customers?”
My answer is always the same and it’s a question “tell me who your customer is?” I need to know who your customer is before I can tell you either where they are or how to find more of them.
Pro tip: your customers are NOT businesses who want or need a marketing funnel. That’s like saying Ford and Porsche’s customers are people who want a car.
Imagine going hunting and telling someone that you wanted to hunt an animal. The first question they’re going to ask is “which animal do you want to hunt?”
If you’ve got absolutely no idea which animal you want to hunt, you don’t know whether you need to bring a bow and arrow, a rifle or fishing rod. You don’t know whether it’s going to be in thick forest, open waters, rivers or a mountain range.
This is the scariest part about finding new customers. I don’t doubt that you can help every single business in the world. I don’t doubt that any customer, person or business who needed your help, if they spoke to you, would benefit from spending time with you.
I don’t doubt that given enough time and resources, you’d be able to help every single business in the world with a marketing funnel. However, we can only help one customer at a time.
Deciding who you want to help is difficult. But it’s not impossible, and it is the fastest way to find more customers.
“Businesses are defined by the markets they serve, not the products they sell.”
Pro Tip #2: Your customers are not SMALL BUSINESSES. Small business is not a market. In the UK alone, small business is responsible for 99% of the U.K.’s GDP.
It’s also not a location. Your niche or customer is not small businesses located in Bristol, England. Or Bozeman, Montana. This is the most common trap that businesses fall into when they say that they want to get into “niche marketing”.
It doesn’t have to be an industry, Although that is often a good place to start. But you need to think about what you do and who that market serves. We’ll talk about that next.
What is it that you you do differently?
One of the ways to start finding your customers is to write out your entire process. Take a piece of paper, and write out your process for helping a customer at the types of results that you can get them.
What is it that you can really achieve the customers? What kind of results can you get for them and what kind of benefits can you add to their business and life?
At its core all we’re trying to do is make customers lives easier and their businesses more profitable. This might be traffic, leads, email subscribers, social media growth, customers, sales, lifetime value of sales, increased average transactions. The list goes on.
Take one of the results that you enjoy getting the customers or part of the process that you enjoy working on. Maybe there’s something you’ve done a few times now for different customers.
Start at the end and write down the result of increased traffic or more email subscribers. Work backwards and write out each stage even to a micro granular level, of what you do to get someone that result. For example take the below for increasing email subscribers.
- Increase email subscribers
- send lead magnet delivery email
- redirect new subscriber to thank you page
- traffic opts in to opt in form
- traffic reads compelling squeeze page copy
- traffic lands on squeeze page
- traffic clicks on Facebook advert
- Traffic reads Facebook advert copy
- something catches the reader’s eye
- traffic sees Facebook advert in feed
You can see here that the visitor journey for the traffic that we driving, goes through a very specific set of steps. This here is our process.
Most funnel businesses spend an enormous amount of time being able to explain this process to their customers.
We often believe that the better we get explaining this process above the more likely we are to find customers. It’s as if we believe that getting really good at explaining marketing funds to customers, makes it more likely that someone wants to buy a marketing funnel from us.
If this was true, wouldn’t you be finding more marketing funnels than anybody else? I don’t doubt that you know so much about building marketing funnels, marketing automation, email marketing, paid social traffic and more. And yet, you still struggle to find customers.
So why have we written up this process? We’re going to get to that. What I want to do first is add some more steps to that process. So above we have the traffic journey that our customer’s customers could potentially go on.
But instead, what I want to do is then go through the process that OUR customers will go through.
So before we can start showing Facebook ads to our customer’s customers. We need to go through a content and social advertising process. It might look like the below.
- Email list created in active campaign
- new email subscriber tags created for individual lead magnets
- Facebook advertising pixel created
- compelling lead magnet created
- delivery email written
- delivery page copy written
- delivery page designed and built
- lead magnet offer copy and content written
- squeeze page designed and built
- Facebook advertising copy written
- Facebook ad image created
- Facebook audience created
So here we now have two lists of a process that helps us increase email subscribers for our customers. First of all the top list was the eventual journey that our customer’s customers will go on. We now also have a list that are actual customers will go through if they buy a service from us.
Your job is to now work out what you do DIFFERENTLY from your competitors. For example in the above list, we redirect all our traffic to a thank you page. This to me is critical because it a) is easy to measure conversions and b) protects us from spam email addresses.
If you’re struggling to see what you do differently, or even better, UNIQUELY. Write out what you know your competition and the average marketing funnel business builds and does.
Do it for both parts of the process do it for the execution part the process and the creation set up by the process. Find what you do uniquely or differently compared to the two lists.
Why do you do it differently?
Here’s where we can start getting into killer marketing funnel customer territory.
WHY do you do that part the process differently? Why do you insist on redirecting everyone to a thank you page? Why do you insist on sending a three email series welcome letter at the start of your marketing email automation?
Why do you do that differently to everybody else? This point of differentiation is what we call “insight”.
Insight is critical to our customers. This is the equivalent of going to the gym every day and doing the same exercises. Or using the P90X workout system, which uses “muscle shock” to help you gain results from working out faster.
Let me go into this in more detail. Gyms have a hard time differentiating themselves from one another. Even the concept of 24/7 open, minimalist gyms has been utilised by so many different businesses.
We are so used to hearing about the kinds of results that going to the gym can get you, that it’s just become part of the background marketing noise that we hear every day.
The guys behind the P90X workout system understood that providing a new “insight” is the way to cut through the noise. They said that instead of going to the gym every single day and doing the same exercises, what your body needs is “muscle shock”.
Muscle shock to me is when my muscles do ANY exercise. Photo by Katleen Vanacker on Unsplash
The concept being, or the insight, is that if your muscles are in a constant state of shock and doing different exercises every day. That the results are faster than if you just go to the gym.
This kind of insight is genuine differentiation. They coined the term “muscle shock”. Some people call this category definition, some people call this USP or UDP. Frank Kern calls it authority premise. It doesn’t matter what you call it. What matters is that you have some kind of insight to prove why your process is different.
So tell me why you do something differently? Now, our job is to find people that both need that insight and would benefit from that insight.
Who would benefit from you telling them that “did you know don’t use a thank you page you risk conversions being lower?”.
Or, you are missing out on vital income, instant conversions and higher conversion rates (as well as lower spam email addresses) to increase your email list by not using “thank you redirects”?
This is a far more compelling insight than just telling someone how marketing funnel works. Now we need to find out who would benefit from the insight.
Who benefits?
So who benefits from that insight? Think about the types of businesses, industries and markets that would benefit from that kind of insight. Chances are obviously that they want to grow their email list. But “businesses that want to grow their email lists” is not a strong market.
Businesses that have 5000 email addresses and want increase that to 10,000 email addresses, who are struggling to double their email list size. That’s getting closer to a defined customer.
There’s specificity in that type of customer. If someone told you that they had an email list of 5000 people, and they were struggling to double at 10,000. Would your insight help them? Of course it would.
So what types of businesses are doubling their email list from 5000 people to 10,000 people? Well it’s customers who’ve currently already got a website, some kind of email list signup process, they clearly can be based anywhere and they most likely sell products online.
They are already getting traffic to their website. And they’ve probably been in business for over five years. If they’ve got an email list of 5000 people it reasonable to assume that they probably have an income of over $10,000 per month. Frankly, an email list of 5000 people could be a massive range of income levels.
I know businesses listed on the FTSE worth £500 million who have a list of 5000 email addresses. And I know small start-ups with a one off payment product of $79 who have a list of over 5000 subscribers.
Pictured: £500 million business “Put A Chicken On It” and it’s owner – Eagle the chicken. Photo by Sticker Mule on Unsplash
We also want to look at the types of characteristics that a customer would have in order to add value to the insight. What I mean by that is, yes, the insight is useful to them. But do they have the resources or the ability to actually make use of that insight?
List out some of the characteristics the company would need to have in order to make use of your insight. Once you have that list of characteristics, have a think about the types of businesses that suit those characteristics. They could be in manufacturing, online services, products, e-commerce businesses and more.
Pro tip #3: do not fall into the trap of thinking “service-based businesses” is a niche. It 100% is not. Again your accounting for an enormous part of the market and there is absolutely no definition there. The difference between one service business and another can be hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of members of staff.
Again, remember that your services and marketing funnels could absolutely benefit every business in the world. But they are only likely to seriously add value to 1 or two businesses. You have to decide who you want to work for and who your organ ago after.
Create authority around that insight.
Now you are going to create some killer high quality 10,000 words long blog post style content, around the insight.
You’ve discovered and stumbled across something that no one else is doing. So you need to demonstrate your value to that particular customer
For example, we know that “thank you redirects” is the vital step missing to growing your email subscriber list. We also know that the particular type of customer we’re going after is stationary manufacturers. People who create notepads, books and diaries or planners. They want grow their email list because they want a list of subscribers that they can sell to, right?
We want to explain to stationary manufacturers that they need to use thank you redirects in order to grow their email list.
That becomes a really compelling piece of content called “the killer secret to how stationary manufacturers can increase their email subscribers”. You write about the insight, or the differentiation in your part of the process.
You blow that out into a full-size longform piece of content with videos worksheets and other lightbulb moments or lead magnets. This here replaces the need for a portfolio because only an expert would spend this much time writing about such a small piece of insight for such a specific market.
This is how we found massive traction within the online course market. We created longform high quality content around that market, explained insight (Community Design for those wondering) and shared it with people within that marketplace. We also reached out to our current network and asked them to point us in the direction of any online course based businesses.
Very quickly despite not having the portfolio we were able to secure projects in upwards of $15,000 a time simply by writing a few pieces of blog content and explaining to people WHO we help. As soon as we understand who we help and put content in front of that market, with their specific customer name (they have to recognise themselves in the copy) we had a full pipeline of sales.
It’s scary to niche down
Look I get it. I really understand that nation down is scary. There is the perception that you are going to miss out on other clients.
Also, the second that you decide on one particular market, I guarantee you someone in a completely different industry will approach you.
That’s absolutely fine. Taking that work is completely up to you. I get it, we all have to pay the bills, we’ve all got to put food on the table.
But eventually unless you decide to become very specific about who you can help your never going to help anyone. Businesses who are specific about their customer and where their customers are, who their customers are, and what characteristics the customers have-succeed and grow.
My favourite part of this entire process is understanding the insight. I recently had a conversation with Al Ramadan from the consultancy Play Bigger. He explained to me that “insight”, is the fastest way to differentiate yourself in a very crowded and noisy marketplace.
What’s your insight you’ve discovered? Let me know in the comments below. Let me know who your customers are and make sure that THEY recognise themselves when you talk about them.
