Quick Navigation:
- Professional Sales Funnel Development Costs Explained
- What is a Sales Funnel Agency?
- What Exactly is a Sales Funnel?
- How Sales Funnels Work
- How Sales Funnels Improve your Conversions
- Examples of Successful Sales Funnels
- What Makes a Sales Funnel Marketing Agency an Expert?
- How to choose an Expert Full Sales Funnel Agency
Professional Sales Funnel Development Costs Explained
You hear everyone talk about marketing automation and pipelines. However, business owners and marketing department leads are still confused about what they are and how they help them get more customers. If you would like to know what a sales funnel marketing agency does and how it can get you better results from your traffic (paid or free), you are in for a treat. Our simple guide will demystify sales funnels and help you understand the different services that are involved in building professional marketing automation systems.
What Is A Sales Funnel Agency?
Simply put, the phrase sales funnel agency is used to describe a company that helps clients build automations that improve their engagement and conversions. There’s a difference between a marketing agency and a full service funnel agency. They have a holistic approach to marketing, and not only the technical aspects are covered, but the creative and branding side of the campaigns, too. They really listen to the customer and work with them hand in hand. The main skills a full service sales funnel agency has are:
- Funnel strategy
- Funnel builder technical skills
- Web design
- Social media marketing
- Google analytics and optimisation
- Email copywriting
- Email marketing campaign setup
- CRM system knowledge and integration skills
As you can see, an agency will need to be able to build a strategy utilising different marketing methods for getting the best return on investment for their clients.
What Exactly Is a Sales Funnel?
There’s generally a confusion about what a sales funnel is and what it is not. It is simply a series of interactions with your ideal clients to get them to buy into your services and feel like they have a special relationship with you. Anything can be called a sales funnel; even a follow up call, a postcard, or an email. How these different elements (LMNts) work together counts more than the technical aspects.
A great definition of sales funnels by Ryan Deiss sales funnel describes it as a process that turns visitors to buyers. Our definition here at LMNts Marketing is similar:
“The carefully crafted process that includes every interaction between your prospect coming across your business and when they become a customer and a raving fan of your brand.”(c) LMNts Marketing
A good example of a sales funnel is a landing page with a quiz that leads people to the right resource they need. Once they request the details, they will be added to a sequence and be presented with engaging content. It is important that you don’t try to hard-sell immediately. Build that relationship first.
How Sales Funnels Work
Most marketing agencies – including us – use the AIDA model to build automations, which breaks down the pipeline to four stages:
- Awareness
- Interest
- Demand
- Action
Sales funnels need to take care of all the above aspects of communication, or they will not deliver results. If you are a startup, you will have to build a strategy for the Awareness and Interest part before you can sell. This is exactly where many business owners go wrong when they try to engage with a sales funnel marketing agency.
There is no point advertising your products until you have an audience that is warm enough. Lead magnets and free content will work really well when your main issue is to drive people to the top of your pipeline. An expert marketing funnel agency will know which aspect of lead generation, branding, and sales you should focus on to get more clients long term.
How Sales Funnels Improve Your Conversions
Let’s say that you are given one chance to convince the woman of your dreams to marry you. Your success rate is not going to be high. However, if you meet in a social setting, maybe bump into each other, you can help her out when she spills some coffee down her white top, you will have a chance to build a long term and meaningful relationship. Your chances of success will immediately increase.
Sales funnels give you more chances to communicate your value and help customers out. They will be more likely to remember you, look out for your content, and recommend you. It will depend on many things how many points of interaction (touch points) you need to build into your sales funnels. Here are a few things to consider:
- Your price tag.
- Your brand strength (value and brand recognition).
- Your existing online presence.
- Your competition.
- Your ideal client profile.
- The reputation of your industry (i.e. most people have already been burnt by business coaches and marketing agencies, so it will take longer to gain their trust).
Generally speaking, the higher the value of your products or services are, and the more trust based your business is the more engagement you will need to build into your sales funnels.
A sales funnel will be able to help you scale your business faster than any one-time advertising could. It usually includes various products and services, and implements something that Anik Singal calls “micro commitments”. The goal of a marketing funnel is not to sell one thing and then let the client go… it is to create a loyal client base and go even beyond that: turn them into raving fans.
Examples of Successful Sales Funnels
There’s no “one size fits all” solutions, but there are some proven to work templates that will help you scale your marketing funnels. We are listing a few below.
eCommerce Funnel
If you have a new site, you might want to create awareness of your online store. Showcasing your products on social media will take care of the Interest and Awareness stages. You can in fact build a funnel simply based on a series of Facebook ads, which we have done before.
Here are a couple of examples from an organic hair care range we have worked on:
- The first time the customer will be presented with a product image.
- Then – using retargeting ads they will be shown the brand itself and the ideology behind it (building emotional connections). This ad will also take care of the customer education stage that is a part of the “Interest” stage.
- To create demand, they will present the audience with an ad that shows the results.
- Finally, the last ad shows a special offer that takes them to the site to buy (take action). This approach can significantly improve your eCommerce conversion rates.
Coaching Funnel Example
If you are a life or business coach, the most important thing to remember is that there’s a lot of competition out there. The second thing to take into consideration is that you need to gain the trust of people, since you are in a trust-based business. Finally, you have to get really good at communicating your value through free content. You can’t ask for a huge commitment in the beginning.
- Awareness stage: you have to focus on personal branding in the beginning. Live videos, YouTube channels will take care of your lead generation.
- To create interest, you will have to introduce a topic in a video (or blog post) and then offer something even more valuable for free. Adding a link or call-to-action to your free content helps you create the interest and build a list.
- The demand stage of the funnel will be based on conversations and interactions. We recommend implementing a poll or a quiz that will help people recognise their needs without you trying to hard sell them something.
- Once people recognise their need, you will need to give them clear instructions on how to get help. This could be a free consultation or an assessment.
Read our full guide on sales funnels for coaches to see more examples.
Financial Services Lead Generation
In this industry, you will have to gain the trust of visitors fast and offer very quick answers. A typical sales funnel for lead generation would look like this:
- You create a blog post or video you send traffic to that talks about the issues your potential clients might face (awareness)
- To create interest, you will have to tell them exactly how you will solve their issue and why they should trust you as an expert. Give them as many reassurances and guarantees as possible.
- To get them to realise their demand, you might want to get them to fill out a quick quiz or take part in an online discussion.
- In order to get them to take action, reassure them about the guarantees (most financial services companies are regulated), and help them choose the right approach (education). This can be in the form of an initial interview of filling out a contact form while answering some questions about their circumstances.
Entertainment Services Marketing Funnels
Whether you are a musician, run a breakout room, or an online comedy show, viral marketing will work really well.
- For awareness, create unique content and use your personality, maybe sense of humour. Social media, but particularly YouTube is a great way of getting followers and making your content go viral. Avoid creating clickbait content and headlines, though.
- To generate interest, you will have to keep your followers engaged. Ask questions, answer the comments, and get them involved in co-creating your channel. This will create a strong emotional connection.
- Eventually, you will want them to subscribe to your paid content, and this means that you have to communicate “what is in it for me and why should I care”.
- Strong call-to-action is needed and some entertainers offer a free trial to get people “hooked” on their premium content.
Funnels for Personal Trainers
Personal training online is a competitive niche, due to the ease of setting up a channel. Most people start off with YouTube, but Instagram is a great place, if you know how to manage IGTV. We are currently working with yoga and HIIT trainers, and video content is getting the most engagement. Here are the main steps to take:
- Awareness: establish your personal brand and your YouTube or Instagram channel. Be prepared for going live several times a week.
- To create interest, start dropping links to guides, diet plans, or premium videos made available for free. This will help you build a list fast.
- Address people’s individual pain points with more targeted videos and create a paid program around it. Create an air of mystery to build up anticipation and excitement. This will help people build up demand.
- Once you have warmed up the audience with teasers, release your program and offer an “early bird” price. As you already have an engaged list, you will make sales (get people to take action).
What Makes a Sales Funnel Marketing Agency an Expert?
- They have the technical skills.
- They have an in-house team collaborating on each project and follow the same strategy.
- They have plenty of experience across niches and platforms, and – preferably – your industry, too.
- They are good at copywriting, which is the most important skill in digital marketing.
- They can support and guide clients to become a co-creator of their digital marketing campaign.
- They are able to provide you with easy-to-understand conversion and traffic reports.
- They have a proven track record of getting a high return on investment.
How To Choose an Expert Full Sales Funnel Agency
There are many marketing agencies that call themselves experts at sales funnels, but they can’t explain what they do for you. It is important that you check the funnels they have built and their feedback score.
A couple of years ago there was a boom on the internet offering training to set up your marketing agency without experience and people simply gave you a system to hustle and outsource different jobs on freelancer sites. Some of these programs include Agency HyperGrowth and Facebook Ads Agency Builders. While the programs are valuable, many people jumped on board without any knowledge or experience in marketing, just for the money. Check their feedback and reputation and ask whether they work with an in-house team or freelancers. This is crucial to avoid disappointments and the effects of “Chinese whispers”.
Of course, the agency will need to have the capacity and strategic knowledge to deliver your sales funnels and optimise your conversions, They also have to understand your goals and adjust their marketing to the desired outcomes of the client. While there are loads of templates available on ClickFunnels and other sales funnel builders, they don’t fit every business. Creativity is crucial to optimise your funnels.
Finally, it is crucial that you review the agency’s own funnel. How good are they at advertising and engaging with you? Do they have a questionnaire, a lead magnet, a webinar funnel, or a giveaway? How good is their social media marketing, and does it get a lot of engagement? The easiest way to check whether you are dealing with an expert sales funnel marketing agency is to determine how you came across them: was it them reaching out through a cold email (no-no) or did you find them on social media, Google search, or – even better – recommendations?
Hopefully this guide has answered your questions about what an expert sales funnel marketing agency does and helped you decide which route to go down. Why not set up a quick sales funnel assessment below to find out more about how to improve your conversions across all marketing campaigns.
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