My Best Advice About Marketing Funnels

My best advice regarding funnels, especially if they were built by an internet marketer, is to throw them right on out. Yes, you read that right, just throw them away!

If you are using some sort of self-liquidation, throw it away.

If you are upselling, throw it away.

Why?

Your sales funnel should be an automated process that helps your customer get to the point where they're willing, ready, and excited about making a purchase from you. If that's not what you've built, then it's not going to be repeatable.

You may be able to snag a trickle of traffic using some ads. You might be able to buy a flood of traffic using ads – you’ll likely be able to get a decent amount of attention and dupe some people into doing your thing. But what is this doing for your business overall. How are these transactions impacting your reputation – and how are they impacting your bottom line.

Most of the philosophy around funnels is to create an offer that is relatively irresistible and throw money at ads to introduce that funnel to as many people as possible. At that point, you will likely be making a decent amount of sales.

But what if you haven't given that new customer enough information for them to feel secure about your process and for them to love your product and to love you, huh?

If you don’t spend the time…you’re absolutely going to get requests for refunds and get people trying to make returns.

Maybe even a lot of them.

If you’re using some of the most common and “black hat” funnel methods you're likely going to get people who are angry; you're going to get horrible comments in your Facebook feed.

You're going to get all of those things because that person was funneled…and they feel like they were tricked.

This is why I want you to throw all that nonsense out and start over from scratch by creating an actual buyers journey, where you take into consideration what information this person needs in order to get to the end, then determine how to deliver it in an entertaining and engaging fashion so that they like you after you tell them what you have to offer.

If you can design a buyer’s journey that is based on your potential customer’s actual needs (informational and emotional) – and start creating content that serves to help your customer make a self-validated decision – the only thing left to do is add some marketing automation to that content.

It can be just a little bit; it doesn't have to be some super heavy, elaborate, software-driven nonsense. Just throw on a little bit of automation here and there.

I have a feeling that this isn’t sounding like a “funnel” in this moment. This isn’t sounding like what you’ve created (or paid someone to create for you).

If you've got one of those internet marketing funnels right now and you’re holding on to it with both hands and your enormous Facebook Ads budget, yeah, good luck.

Okay, maybe just wishing you good luck is a little harsh – your funnel might be working. It might be doing exactly what it was designed to do. Maybe you’re not getting tons of refund requests or facing down a $10k monthly ads budget.

As long as what you’re offering is actually helping your customer, not just helping guide them to where they deposit their money from their hands to yours – honestly, keep it up. If it works, it works.

But, if that’s not what’s happening. If it’s not working, then maybe you should spend some time thinking about the funnel itself.

Let me just take a moment to say that I hate the word “funnel” – seriously hate the word. I’ll continue to use it here and in my videos, but just note, it’s against my will. (emoji)

So…why should you spend more time thinking about your funnel? If you’re going to have a funnel, then you need to spend a lot of time with it. This is because you need to develop a really good understanding of what your customer's journey is and re-evaluate this journey – as it interacts with your actual customers and as you experience engagement with your automations.

Spending just a bit of time and energy getting your funnel right is going to save you a ton of money and save your customer a ton of time.

Much of the effort and money taken up in traditional funnel building is directly given to advertising. A lot of energy is wasted try to get your potential customer to pay enough attention to you to give you their money.

The alternative is to start your customer relationship off by getting attention in a way that is sustainable and nurturing.

As completely cliché as it may sound, nurturing your potential customer will actually put you in a better position to build an ongoing relationship – one where they’d be happy to make repeat purchases, refer their friends and give 5 star reviews.

Plus, you will not have spent an excessive amount of money, and your customer will feel fantastic about the relationship that you built with them along the way.

All of this is to say – we need to change how we think about funnels.

Our work is to build relationships – not just to facilitate financial transactions

Adding automation along the way to ease the potential customer’s into long term and sustainable engagement with us. Letting the automation serve the customer – not you. Letting is serve to ease the transition from stranger to customer.

This is exactly how I want you think about it: like a journey to a relationship with a little bit of automation and not some predetermined sequence of events that can be scripted out because none of it is real.

In the end, you have to think about “funnels” more like relationship-building, and if you spend the time, the energy, and the effort on creating great content that's going to help your customer love you and feel great about you, then boy, this stuff really works. If you don’t do that work, then your potential customers will spend their money elsewhere.