Sales Funnels 101: Part 3 The Minimalist’s Guide To Scaling Your Sales Funnel

How To Get More Sales On Autopilot.

 In this 3rd and final part of the Sales Funnel 101 series, I’m going to show you how to scale your new sales funnel so that more of the right type of people know, love and buy from you – whilst you sleep! 

Not sure why you need an online sales funnel?  If you’re struggling to get customers and if you want to get your passion project noticed, loved and bought by your dream customers read part 1.  This explains what a sales funnel is and why you need one.

Once you realize how crucial a sales funnel is to your success, you’ll want to know just how to create one – read part 2 for the exact system.  This shows you how to lead someone who has just become aware of you, on to liking you through your great and useful content, and eventually trusting you enough to buy.

If you haven’t already, I strongly recommend you go back and read parts 1 and part 2.  

Now you’ll understand the power of a sales funnel and you’ll have had a stab at setting up it up.  You’ll have created your lead magnet, written your email sequence and built your sales page.

Ready to scale up and expand your audience?

In part 1 I showed you this simple sales journey:

Now I’m going to show you how to avoid the major mistake that a lot of small businesses make when starting out.

Let me explain:

Do you see the problem?

Unless you are constantly sending traffic to your opt-in and building up your email list, your sales funnel will wither and die.

There are a thousand ways you could send traffic to your opt-in. 

If you’re a blogger and have great content you could try guest posting on blogs related to your market, or forming partnerships (the ultimate guide here Byregina) with people in your niche who have a similar audience and complementary offering. 

These can be a lot of fun and highly effective once you start networking with the right types of business.  But if you are starting from scratch it can take time to find and build these relationships.

You could try posting to your Facebook page.  Make sure your page is set up effectively first.  Circulate your blog posts and articles or your opt-in freebie.  But because it’s mainstream Facebook is also highly competitive.  On average, each of your regular Facebook posts will reach only around 4-8% of your followers – ouch!  Which means your content will not be found unless you pay to get in front of them.  

A more effective way to reach your audience on Facebook is by joining and participating in Facebook Groups (or any social forums).  Find the ones where you see your dream audience hanging out – follow the conversations and help out where you can.  Once you’ve built up a reputation as an expert in your field, then you’ll find users coming over to check out your products. 

Here’s how to become an expert in other peoples Facebook groups.  Or if you’re itching to run your own then read this by the leader of one of my favourite groups the Ladypreneur Community.

Warning: This is the long game.  If you’re a natural at social conversations and are happy to spend plenty of time researching and helping others then this can get you a real breakthrough.  But the downside is that it takes time.  A.  Lot.  Of.  Time.

And ditto for Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn.  If you already have an audience on these social platforms then remember to share and re-share your opt-in content regularly  (Try out a good scheduling tool like Buffer and Tailwind for Pinterest).  Or if you want to grow your followers read these to become the Pinterest pro.  This to hack the hashtag code on Instagram, or follow Kim to learn how to tweet from the rooftops.

SEO is another way to get traffic to your content and your lead magnet.  I wrote a post on how to get to the top of the search results here.  (Summary: It’s a lot of work and will take at least 90 days to see results). 

Great.  But these are no good when you want a fast route to sales.

If you’re impatient like me and want to test out your new funnel, you need a way to get lots of traffic to your content and lead magnet like er, yesterday!

Good news!  There is one tried and true strategy that will work literally overnight.

Social Advertising

In my past life as a marketing executive I tried everything.  Banner ads, Google and Bing Adwords, Google search network ads and other content discovery platforms, Facebook advertising and extensive SEO strategies.

But these days I’ve found the most effective platform is Facebook advertising. Especially if you have a digital product or service to sell.

More than one billion people are active daily on Facebook.  Which means it’s virtually guaranteed that your audience are active there.

But, it’s not the only platform that can drive traffic for you – it depends on who your audience are and where they hang out online.  For example if you’re targeting ‘mums’ online then you’ll be sure to find them on Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Google and Bing…aaaand the list is endless…

But trying to reach your audience on all these networks is a lot of work.  Talk about overwhelm!   And if you tried to master all these platforms at once you would dilute your effectiveness on each one.  I recommend starting with just one social network, where you know for sure you can laser target your ideal customer. 

And then, get good at it. 

I teach my clients how to master Facebook ads in a 30-day programme so they can fast track their learning curve and get quick results.  Because Facebook advertising is hands down the quickest and easiest way to start getting traffic to your sales funnel.

Are you chomping at the bit yet?  Want to know how to get started?

The key is to drive your ideal customer to your opt-in freebie and capture their email address first.  Then you can build a relationship with them through your email content and your funnel:

Let me break it down for you.

There are just two parts you need to get right to make this work:

1 Targeting (who)

2 Creative (what & how)

As an example, lets say you are an online meal prep service for busy working mums of toddlers who want to lose the baby bulge.

Targeting

We’ll start with targeting.  Who are the exact right kinds of mums on Facebook? 

Using the brilliant Facebook audience insights you could begin by laser targeting women, in the US, who are 24-34 years old, are working and have children under 3 years old:

This will give you an audience of around 350k to start delivering your ads to. 

Or if you want to niche down further, add in a target interest such as a Facebook page they like.  Lets try adding ‘Babycenter.com’  into the ‘interests’ field:

Now the size of the audience drops to around 150k – which is still a great size to target with your ads.  Now just click ‘save’ and give your new audience a name  (e.g. working moms 24-34 kids 0-3 BabyCenter).

Repeat ten times with different audience variations. 

EXPERT TIP: Try swopping out the interest group for other related pages and keeping the rest the same.  Purpose here is to test and discover which audience gets you the most opt-ins and sales for the lowest cost.

Creative

Next up is to create your messaging and images.

This is the next most important part before you even think about setting up your advert.

I suggest you write out your ad copy first.  I use a template in Asana That way I can easily copy and paste it into Facebook when I’m ready to upload the adverts.

Your ad copy doesn’t have to be long winded or complicated and in fact simple and clear is far better.  Trouble is, simple and clear is often times really hard to actually write yourself!

So, shiny shortcut for you ;0)

Here are two templates you can use to create your ad copy – I’ve tried and tested these in many markets and they convert (although you will need to test out variations of your own to find the perfect copy).

Alrighty, so shall I show you how this might work?

Does that sounds compelling to you?  It would do if you were worn ragged from being up all night every night for the last 6 weeks (trust me I know!).  But lets try another version:

And here’s how you could apply it:

Do you get the idea?  Give these templates a go and start looking around you for examples of great ads in your niche; the Adespresso free swipe files are a good place to get inspired.

Now it’s picture time. 

Lets create your eye-catching and click-worthy image!

The single most important principle for designing images that convert is ‘product demonstration’.  If there is a visible result that you can help them achieve, then show it!  But if its not visible them show the product in action.  Let your image show that result so that they can imagine it.

You can make an ad for Facebook for free and super quick with no design skills using Canva, here’s a great 4-minute tutorial if you’ve never used it before.

Think, what will capture the right person’s interest? Does it invoke feelings of emotion, will they connect with the image, and is it relevant to them?  For my example earlier of aromatherapy blends to help mum and baby sleep peacefully every night – would you use an image of aromatherapy oils?  Or, a peacefully sleeping baby?

…The baby image is likely to win because it can capture the essence of what every frazzled new mum wants.  Images of people are powerful and can instantly illustrate the result of the product or service you are offering.

Your image must include an enticing value or benefit to your audience that’s in line with your offer copy.  If you’re promising tantrum free homework, then show that through an image of a parent and child sitting happily doing homework together.

Plus, most importantly you need to tell people what to do next.  Sounds simple, and so often I see this missing.  Like, literally ‘Click here to download’ written on the image! 

Now you have found your dream audience, you’ve written your compelling ad copy and designed your click-worth image.  When you put the two together and upload to Facebook you’ll quickly attract your ideal audience to step one in your sales funnel.  You’ll kick off the relationship by delivering a piece of stunningly useful content (your lead magnet) that will help and motivate or inspire these people to get to know you more. 

By running brilliant ads to a relevant audience you will guarantee there is always a flow of potential customers going through your sales journey – getting to know, like and trust you, all on autopilot whilst you sleep.

Sound like the perfect solution for you? Then make sure you use this guide to get started testing out your funnel with Facebook ads.

But if you’re still feeling a little overwhelmed and want someone to hold your hand then check out my Facebook Ads Mastery programme where in just 30 days you’ll have a complete Facebook advertising campaign up and running, tested, optimised, and delivering relevant visitors to your website (and addresses to your email list). What’s more, I’ll do it all for you while teaching you how to do it yourself in future!