How Do You Fill Up Your Marketing Funnel?

by Wendy Burge

Many solo entrepreneurs that I meet often express the challenge of finding new ways to make passive revenue without having to find more clients or work more hours. Recently, I consulted a service professional who was interested in generating more money and business, but she was unsure how to develop a strategy to do this effectively. Her website was more like a brochure of her services posted online– people would read about them this way. Then, shortly into our conversation she admitted she had written a book. However, she had made little money selling it and wasn’ t sure what to do with it or if all her efforts had any relevance to our talk.

It was at that point that I shared the outline of a MARKETING FUNNEL. Imagine a funnel, like you’d find in your kitchen or garage, turned upside down with the widest opening on top and the tip narrowing at the bottom. Now imagine the larger opening at the top as the place where you will generate your most PROSPECTS possible. At the opposite end of the funnel, where it narrows to the tip you would be place your EXCLUSIVE, high-end services and products. The middle area would contain the other, varying levels of services priced accordingly from least at top to the more expensive flowing down to the bottom.

The whole idea of the MARKETING FUNNEL is to get people to move through your business by offering services/ products at different price points along the way. The further down into the funnel the higher the price points go. Think for a moment about going to your favourite ice cream store where they give you those little spoons to taste the ice cream. Once you find a flavour you like you get a scoop of it in a cup. The next week you go back because you liked the flavour so much that you are more than willing to get three scoops of it on a waffle cone. Then on your next visit into their store you decided to order that nice custom made ice cream cake with your new favourite flavour again. This is a sample of a Marketing Funnel at work. It’s a simple marketing strategy that pays off every time.

Going back to my client, her marketing funnel at this time had her book and her higher end services. There was nothing in the middle of her funnel. I see this often with service professionals too. They will have a free or low cost product or service and a larger, high-end service with nothing else to offer in the middle. Most prospects are not willing to jump from free to a high end services. This often leaves few client conversations for many solo professionals because they have too few choices in how someone can work with them.

How do you create a marketing funnel?

First get people into your funnel by having a FREE offer of a give-away item like a report, ezine, CD or maybe even a tele-class. PROSPECTS easily access the item by signing up on your website and giving their email or mailing address (or both) to you. This allows you to contact this prospect in the future.

Next, turn your knowledge into INFORMATION PRODUCTS. Info-products are a super way to let people get a taste of your expertise for a fraction of the cost. They also help fill in the middle section of your marketing funnel. By offering these products on your website, you now turn your site into a silent, sales force 24/7 –generating passive revenue for you without your working any harder.

Here are a few of the suggested types of information products you can make.

Books
E-Books
Special Reports
Manuals
Workbooks
Journals
Audio (digital downloads or CDs)
Video (digital downloads or DVDs)
Home Study Courses or Tutorials (usually a mix of media; written, audio, and visual)

As well, you may want to consider offering tele-classes, tele-seminars, and webinars online as a way to reach more prospects that may not typically be able to afford your high-end services at first. This maximizes your time and leverages your income by offering a lower priced service to more people all at once.

A Sample Marketing Funnel

In the end, a sample marketing funnel could look similar to this.
 
TOP OF THE FUNNEL:
Free e-zine or report

MIDDLE OF THE FUNNEL:
Book ($29)
Book with Workbook ($49)
Tele-seminar ($79)
2-CD audio program with Transcripts($97)
4-week tele-course ($249)
4-CD Box-set with Transcripts and Handouts ($497)

BOTTOM OF THE FUNNEL:
One-hour private consultations ($250)
Specialty Service Package ($500)
2-day live workshop ($997)
One-to-One Live One Day Session ($1500)
Personal consulting/coaching/mentoring program ($3,000/mo.)

Now how will you fill in your Marketing Funnel?

Take some time and examine your current service and product offers. Where do they fit on your marketing funnel? Do you see where you can now add a few more items to help fill up your funnel? Consider where you can offer more value by adding your own information products so that your prospects can experience your expertise easier and be able to buy from you more often.

© 2009 Wendy Burge – Radiant Edge Consulting.

WANT TO USE THIS ARTICLE IN YOUR EZINE OR WEB SITE? You can, as long as you include this complete blurb with it: Radiant Business & Marketing Coach Wendy Burge publishes the On the Edge! weekly ezine–Where business, marketing, and lifestyle meet. If you’re ready to have radiant marketing, make more money, and have more freedom in your small business, get your FREE tips now at www.RadiantEdgeConsulting.com

Friends, Followers, and Tribes: Social Network Marketing 101

by Wendy Burge 

In this day of digital communications, an evolution of social networks have emerged connecting people without geographical boundaries. Social networks in their purest form let people connect who have a commonality. It’s these commonalities that create “tribes” or groups of people who relate to their similar aspects, collectively. Social networks have become the greatest marketing tool for businesses to utilize because of their targeted, cost effective strategies for relationship marketing. However, social network sites like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn do have cultural distinctions that must be considered when choosing them for marketing purposes.
 
Let’s start with MySpace. This social site is largely dominated by 17- 25 year olds. Personal profiles host commentaries, video, and music. Musicians, bands, and artists often use it as a multi-media gallery to showcase their works. However, the nature of MySpace tends to feel “noisy” as profiles have individualized personalities. In general, MySpace feels like a voyeuristic glimpse into a teen-ager’s bedroom where friends come to hang-out and anything goes. MySpace has very few privacy features and profiles are open to full public viewing so businesses geared to younger consumers could take advantage of interacting with them on this site with relative ease.
 
Facebook, on the other hand, is like the office water-cooler where people share stories of their lives and things they’ve done. The median age on Facebook is 35 years old, and with 1 million users a week signing on, it’s the fastest growing social network site. It hosts 200 million active members and is predicted to hit ½ billion within the next 2 years, if not sooner. This makes it one of the best places to do business online.
 
A person is limited to having only one profile listing on Facebook and only 5000 ‘friends’-those people who are linked to your profile. As a privacy feature, people may not read your profile until you both agree to be ‘friends’. ‘Friends’ can make comments to your posts which run like news feed to your Facebook networks. For small businesses, this news-feed profiling becomes viral throughout networks that can consist of your customers, prospects, and colleagues and read by their networks attracting new clients. Their commentary to your posts allows them to co-create the experience with your business. For this reason careful consideration should be made about the content of posts, in general.
 
Your business may not host a profile page itself, but you may set up a ‘fan page’ where information relative to your business including updates on product or service offers, special events, and or activities your business may be involved in can be listed. Fan pages are open for full public view, have no limits to the number of ‘friends’, and offers target-specific broadcast of information directly to people who are interested in what you have to offer.
 
If Facebook is the office water-cooler, then LinkedIn is the corporate boardroom. As one of the largest professional network sites online, members showcase their career profiles, ‘link’ to others within their industry, and connect with people from jobs they have held or done business with. The adage “Its not what you know, but who you know’ that best describes this site. If you are a solo-professional, LinkedIn is an important site to join as your profile is like a virtual resume for other to see. It’s a great site to target other businesses for joint ventures, collaborative opportunities, and or add as referral resources too. On a note, LinkedIn has become the hottest place to be “headhunted” because companies can easily check out potential candidates who might possess the skills they are looking for.
 
Last, but definitely not least, is Twitter. Described as a micro-blog, it allows people to post up to 150 characters of information about themselves at a time. Twitter hosts over 8 million users and has no limit to how many people can follow your profile. Like a cocktail party where you share sound bites of information within a group conversation your ‘followers’ or “tweeps” can and do make comments or contribute to your posting and overall discussion. As a marketing tool, it can be used to post info regarding business products, services, or offers. Innovative businesses are using it to drive traffic back to their websites for special promotions to their consumers.

Social network sites have given businesses an innovative and new way to reach their consumers. Building upon relationships-even those without borders, considerations and courtesies should still be kept in check because potentially the whole world is watching.
    
© 2009 Wendy Burge – Radiant Edge Consulting.

WANT TO USE THIS ARTICLE IN YOUR EZINE OR WEB SITE? You can, as long as you include this complete blurb with it: Radiant Business & Marketing Coach Wendy Burge publishes the On the Edge! weekly ezine–Where business, marketing, and lifestyle meet. If you’re ready to have radiant marketing, make more money, and have more freedom in your small business, get your FREE tips now at www.RadiantEdgeConsulting.com