In this blog post, I’m going to talk about how to build marketing funnels for your specific type of customer. If you think that your customers and your niche are very specific and unique, I’m going to show you how to build marketing funnels that are specific to that niche as requirements that I’ve learned from scratch.
If you’ve ever felt that you don’t know what you need to be building for your specific customers, I want you to know that you’re not alone.
You think your market is unique
It’s a really common problem with funnel builders to attract a niche. Then for that market or that set of customers to say “our market is very specific, it’s very unique. I’m not sure that all of your marketing techniques will work with our particular market because our business is very different.”
Unfortunately, all businesses think that their business is unique. Your customers think that they’re unique. You think that your unique. 99% of all businesses have got way more in common than they’ve got different.
In this blog post, I want to talk about how to deliver something that is specific and unique to your niche without actually having to do too much crazy custom or bespoke work.
If you’d like a custom action plan just for your funnel business, I’ve got a bespoke report and assessment that you can access here:
That’ll generate a specific action plan and focus report for your funnel business, telling you what you need to work on next.
But in the meantime, let’s talk about how to build a specific marketing funnel for your customers.
Do your research
The first thing you need to do is do your research.
While the marketing funnels itself for the majority of businesses is probably going to be almost identical and almost all businesses can benefit from two or three kinds of specific marketing tactics, a lot of businesses feel that their position is very unique.
A lot of businesses feel that no one else understands their customers quite as they do.
The way that you need to do your research is by going out to the events, to the groups, to forums, to magazines.
I’ve had a lot of people in the past tell me, “I’ve tried research and there’s nothing out there.”
There are huge global events with tens of thousands of employees, with tens of thousands of delegates, just for washing machines alone.
Don’t tell me that you’ve tried to research, because if you haven’t found anything, that means you’re not looking hard enough.
What you want to do is find out what that particular customer is struggling within their industry.
There will be industry events. Even during a global lockdown and pandemic, there are still online events.
One of my favorite ways to understand what your industry is struggling with is looking at those event agendas and having a look through what the topics are. Typically keynotes and end of the day are really good indicators of the biggest problems that an industry is struggling with.
Have conversations
Then following on from that, I want you to start having more conversations with your network.
Get over the fear of getting in your own head and saying, “I don’t have anything to offer them.” or, “I don’t know what I would say.”, or, “I don’t want to sell to them.”, or, “They don’t want to sell to me.”, or, “They don’t want to be sold to.”
Get over all of that and just try to start having conversations with people in that industry. Ask them what they need, ask them what they want, ask them what their problems are.
The more conversations you are willing to have with your potential market, even people who you couldn’t sell to right now, the better informed you are for the types of funnels and systems you’re going to be setting up.
Another really easy way of understanding what your market wants is by talking to their suppliers.
If your niche is predominantly health and fitness chains, they’re going to have suppliers themselves, everyone from machinery to food, to staffing requirements. There will be people serving your niche already.
If you talk to those suppliers and speak to them and say, “I’m thinking of entering this industry and niche, not competing with you, but maybe even potentially partnering with someone like yourself.
What are the biggest problems that you find that change gyms have? What are the biggest problems with staff management? What are the biggest problems with food and hygiene requirements?
You want to start looking at how other people are serving that market.
Typically when people build marketing funnels for a niche, the only thing that really changes is the language and the lexicon of the copy. The majority of the process of getting someone to convert from someone who doesn’t know you exist into a lead, into a sale, into a super profitable customer, is pretty much identical for every business on the planet.
The only thing that’s slightly different is the need or the requirement or the problem that’s being solved positioned within that funnel.
By doing your research and having conversations both with your target market and with people who already supply that market, you’re going to get a really good understanding of exactly what it is that they’re looking to solve and fix.
And ultimately that’s telling you what they’re going to pay for.
It’s not just leads
One of the biggest mistakes I see businesses make is just focusing on leads and calling themselves like a performance marketing agency or a lead generation business.
A lot of businesses don’t have a problem with leads. This might sound counterintuitive, and a lot of businesses think they need more leads.
Actually, what we found is that most businesses don’t have a problem with leads. They have a problem with follow-up and talking to their current customers.
Don’t immediately think that your best bet is saying, “I’m going to show gyms how to generate more leads for their business.” Because it might be that that particular market you’re going after, their biggest problem is not lead generation.
This is my biggest bug bear with marketing agencies in general is that they all think that the only thing they can offer is lead generation.
That’s not true and I’m going to show you something that goes over exactly what you could be offering to your customers.
APEX model
This is called the customer product matrix. A very simple kind of four section quadrants and down the bottom here, we’ve got current customers, new customers, current products, and new products.
Now saying that you just want to focus on generating new leads for your customers is basically focusing on this half.
Either new customers or new products, and a lot of businesses think that the way to growth and scale is launching new products to new customers. Even if your business is established, this quarter, it’s called the graveyard, because it is where marketing budget goes to die.
Trying to attract new customers to new products is extremely expensive and chances are the majority of the businesses that you’re working with, have already generated leads and customers and their biggest problem is not creating new products or generating new leads. That biggest problem is, they’re not currently serving their current customers with their current products enough.
The most profitable quadrant to work on is this one. The current customers to current products ratio. Basically, looks at who has bought from us beforehand and what can we currently sell that we know sells already.
There’s a few areas you can work at. First of all, there’s things like recurring revenue, which is basically, does your customer have a product, that acts as subscription or some kind of membership whereby every month, the customer is billed every month, every week, every quarter or whatever for the service that that business provides.
There’s also something called consumption, which is basically things like, food boxes. Although, those are subscriptions as well every time the customer uses the product, they have to come back.
Petrol or gasoline or fuel or whatever is considered a consumption product because they can keep selling the same products to that same customer, because they know the customer is going to use it up.
You’ve also got things like your high ticket products and your splinter products and things like this. If I was building funnels for my customers, this is almost exclusively where I’d focus in the meantime.
Typically, we find that most businesses aren’t converting their current customers into continued sales and generating lifetime value, but are instead trying to launch new products to new customers all the time.
After we’ve created funnels that do sell current products to current customers and we’ve nailed that, that’s when we’ll start to launch new products to our current customers.
This is the launch area or the relaunch area where we’ll basically take a new idea and we’ll push it out to our current customers but it’s because we figured out the current customer to the current product section here.
First of all, we focus here is one, two, and then we’ll look at acquiring new customers for our current products. Acquiring new customers is the most expensive thing a business can do.
This is where we start looking at campaigns and lead generation. If you look at things like lead magnets and offers as a product, you are essentially looking at a product that works already like a lead generation system and we’re trying to acquire new customers.
This is the acquisition stage. It’s very expensive, but ultimately what we want to do is convert these new customers into people who are going to buy all of our products within this ecosystem.
Then, we have it. Those are the marketing funnels that I would build specifically to my customer.
I might be ignoring lead generation entirely at this stage, knowing that my customers might be okay with leads. Their problem is probably generating revenue from their current customers and their current products.
Typically, that can be fixed with things like upsell campaigns and follow-up campaigns and even good old-fashioned calling people up and trying to sell.
That plan, by the way, in all of the campaigns in each of those quadrants are available in APEX Campaigns.
Apex campaigns allow you as a marketing funnel agency to sell audits and consultation, and then build out each marketing campaign within each quadrant and delivering it to your customers for maximum results.
Remember, if you would like a completely bespoke and custom action plan just for your funnel business you can get that above.
