Marketing Funnels
Peter Brissette • July 27, 2018
Hey guys, Peter Brissette here with our monthly marketing message, and this month we are talking about marketing funnels. Just real quick, what is a marketing funnel? Basically a marketing funnel is a simple way to walk a prospect through bit of a process that, ideally, is a fairly automated process or it could be some human interaction as well. But, how do you move someone along a process that’s fairly automated or fully automated so that you can move them from interest all the way to capturing this out? That’s the basic idea behind a marketing funnel.
Couple things in background, you can kinda see here our basic layout of the marketing funnel, which uses a simple formula that we can ACES Marketing, thank you to my mentor Go Go for giving me that, which is attract, capture, engage, and sell. One thing as a reminder before we dig too far into this … let me go back here to ACES Marketing. Again, just a reminder, you always gotta start with strategy. What’s your unique selling proposition? What makes you different? Why should people listen to you? That’s really critical in setting up your funnel for success.
Then look back in my blog past, past blog posts, for the 4P Framework of people, which is your demographic. What’s the problem that you solve for them? How do you uniquely solve that? What’s your process to do that? And then, the final P is: What’s the passion, the personality? What’s the epic story that pulls all that together? Once you know that, then you can do ACES Marketing. So, attract, capture, engage, and sell. What we see often times is people jump on social media or they jump on email campaigns, and it’s sell, sell, sell, sell right from the very beginning. Then they wonder why they’re not having very much success. Often, the reason is because they don’t take the time to nurture somebody to let someone get to know you and have a chance to trust you enough to move to the next step. That’s really part of what a marketing funnel does. A marketing funnel is about helping build trust so that people will move along through the process.
Let’s talk about these real quick here: attract, capture, engage, and sell. How can you attract the attention of your ideal prospect? What is it that your ideal prospect needs where you can answer a question for them, solve a problem that helps them go, “Okay, you solved this immediate problem, but I need more. That’s not enough, yet. I need more of this problem solved.” That’s some type of offer. What’s your offer to attract attention? Commonly you see eBooks. What I like to do or things that I call marketing widgets, what’s something that you can give away? A tool, a checklist, something that is something that’s useful and beneficial to your ideal prospect that may even get them to use it more than once. Maybe it’s some type of calculator where they gotta fill out some information. Maybe it’s what I prefer, is a decision making tool. How do I know I should do business with you? Answer these four questions and depending on your answers, here’s what you should do next. Those types of things are things that we can use to attract the attention of our ideal prospect.
Then you’ve gotta capture. It’s a little bit of a militaristic term, “Let’s capture them.” How do you capture them? Well, usually there’s a landing page. This is a page that has the information that you’re offering to them. A landing page basically is a page with limited navigation. So, there’s not a lot of things that they can do on this page. It’s very focused on, “Here’s the offer. Here’s the message. Put in your name and email address.” They’re giving you their information. That’s basically what a landing page, or a capture page, you could call it a capture page as well.
Then engage. So, how are you then going to take that information and nurture this person to develop and build that trust? This could be, in what we call an Auto Responder Series, where you have a set of emails already pre-programmed to go out and be sent to that person who’s giving you their email address for that. That could be three emails, that could be five emails, it could be an email every week for a year. You can pre-program that anyway that you want to.
Then, of course, we wanna sell them. What we like to see in terms of messages that are informational and helpful and useful, and then the actual asking for the sell, closing the sell, is that there’s a five to one ratio. Five informational messages to one, “I’m asking for the sale,” message. At some point, that’s our goal. All this stuff that we do doesn’t matter unless something happens. This could be just a phone call for a sales conversation that you use a marketing funnel for, but it could be an actual, “I’m buying something. I’m buying this service. I’m buying your offer.” Maybe it’s all online, but this works the same for any kind of sales process. Maybe you offer a service, so that selling part is actually a phone call or a face to face meeting where you go over the final details. You’ve answered all their questions already through your engagement campaign, they know who you are, they understand who you are, they trust you, now it’s just finalizing the details so that we can actually deliver the service and solve your problems.
A couple of tools, just to mention, that we like to use for these types of campaigns. One is called Active Campaign. It’s a great email marketing tool and CRM System, where you can track both email marketing campaigns and sales activities as well. Then click funnels is kind of one of the biggest ones out there. There’s a lot of different tools out there where you can easily and quickly build marketing funnels that have landing pages and things like down sells and up sells and all these different things that you can add to that and be able to do that. It could be membership systems, things of that sort.
That’s the basic ideas behind a marketing funnel. How to attract, capture, engage, and sell. You use ACES Marketing to build your funnels. It gives you a nice little plan of the basic steps that you need to do that. I am going to do a much more detailed training on marketing funnels and some of the tools we use on creating marketing funnels that you’ll be able to find inside our full marketing blueprint. If you go to the home page of DMD.com, you can opt in to the marketing blueprints and you can get full access to our training that covers not just marketing funnels, but these eight key areas of marketing for your business.
This is this month’s marketing message. Hope you enjoyed it. Let us know what you thought in the comments and please like, comment, and share if you come across this video, wherever that might be.
Thank you and have a great month.
Hey there everybody, Peter Brissette, Digital Marketing Dude. I want to give you an update this month on email and website security, kind of a combination there. One of the things that we’ve noticed over the years is whenever you put an actual email address listed on a website, it usually just gets scraped by spam bots and AI now. And then that email gets used to send you spam. A lot of it can be fairly innocent, but in some cases, you can get a situation like this. Clients started to send me this email that they were getting, and it comes from [email protected] First sign, it’s probably not from us. We send from our dmdude.com email. But they start talking about support and due to one of the vendors that we use for some of our services, which our clients, you know, they don’t know that. So it’s kind of like, what is that? We always do a full SEO setup from the very beginning for all our clients as well, so it’s already been done. There’s nothing else to do anyway. Where they got this email and this information was basically just from the website itself. So we really highly recommend that folks use a form on the website versus just having your email address just sitting on the website, because it can get scraped and used for purposes like that. So we recommend, you know, have a contact form. Contact forms can get spam as well. And so we use, you know, Google’s got a tool for CAPTCHA to help limit the spam that can come in using CAPTCHA. So I’ve got a calendar there to book with, but I also have this basic contact form. It uses the CAPTCHA from Google to help prevent spam from coming in. It still does happen. It doesn’t prevent all of it, but it prevents the majority of it. But if you go through my website, you’re not going to see anywhere where it lists an email address, “Contact us at this email address.” So we recommend just using a form. For our clients, we’re just going to start changing that out and making those changes over time. And then the other thing where we get a lot of spam from as business owners, if you have a business email account, there’s this platform called Apollo that allows marketers to buy access to email lists. So what we recommend, and I’ll put this link in the blog post, is that you go to this link here where it says “Don’t sell my info,” and you can opt out your email address from being in their database. And that will help cut down on the number of spam emails that you might get from that. So to recap, this video is about your email address being actually on your website where it’s visible, or even if it’s a link there that says “click here to email” and then it opens up the email. We don’t recommend that either. We recommend that you use just a form on your website and not have your email address just listed on the website, because AI bots and other tools can scrape that off your website. You wind up in a database like this, and you wind up getting a lot more spam. And it can actually lead to things like this where you’re actually getting fraudulent emails, people trying to actually scam you out of money. So if you have questions about this, just put it in the comments where you see this, and I’m happy to take a look at your own website and make sure that you’ve got the right things in place for email security. Here is the link to Opt Out of Apollo Email Database - Click Here to Opt Out
Video Transcript: All right, hey guys, Peter Brissette here, Digital Marketing Dude, and I wanted to share with you something new about Google reviews that you want to be aware of. So Google now will allow users to update their profile, their name on their profiles, so they can be more anonymous. So they're not entirely anonymous, but if they want to use an initial on their last name or shorten their first name, you know, if it's Jennifer and they just want to put Jen or whatever, Dogmom1234. They can change that on their reviews. So that change here just recently was updated means a couple of things. I just wanted to go through this article real quick and talk about that. So what exactly changed in the review system? So Google now allows any user to set up custom display name and profile image, which will appear on all reviews, photos, videos, and contributions across maps and search. It's also retroactive to all the other reviews that they have left as well. So you don't need to have a different Google account to protect your identity. You can just update your profile information. So in practice, what this should mean is that customers can leave reviews under a nickname instead of their full name. All past, future Google Maps contributions, adopt the pseudonym, applies across Q&A, images, and videos. So Google still knows the account behind the review, only the public name is going to be different. So it should allow, in some industries, folks to be able to leave reviews where maybe in the past they haven't. For example, legal services. So in legal services, can you imagine if you were charged for a crime and your attorney helped you and kept you out of jail or whatever it was, and you went on to post, hey, I got charged with shoplifting. And thankfully, my attorney helped me out. You may not want to put your name on that and have it out there. So things like that, mental health is another big area, various medical or health care practices, a lot of health care practices, I think this could affect. Definitely addiction treatment and recovery, financial advisors, and some sensitive home services. The big question is, does this is, The Increase fake review risk. Most people don't think so. Again, this article is from taprocard.com. They certainly don't think so because it's still a real account. It's not like it's a fake account or something like that. So I think it's still going to produce good reviews, but it should increase the number of reviews. And that's really why this matters for business. You should be able to get more reviews. What you want is more frequent reviews, more recent reviews, and that will help build trust from potential customers. And even with all the AI hype and everything that's going on, it's going to help you with your SEO in maps and search, in particular from phones. So how do businesses adjust the review request strategy? How One thing that can be added when you're requesting reviews is to mention if you'd like extra privacy, Google now allows you to leave reviews under a custom display name. And so that can be something that you add in there. I'm also going to put a link here in the post on how to change your Google display name so that you can see that and be able to offer that for your clients as well. So I just wanted to throw out this quick little update. If you have any questions about this, I want to talk about how your reviews are being managed right now. If you're using our services or someone else and would like to talk about that, please reach out. Thank you again, Peter Brissette, Digital Marketing Dude. Visit our website at dmdude.com. Here is the link to the original Post: https://taprocard.com/blogs/article/google-anonymous-reviews-update-2025 Here is a link that explains how to change your display name on google. https://support.google.com/maps/answer/15294714?hl=en
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The last question that should we follow our competitors on social media? Sure, why not. You know, you want to see what they're doing and see what's happening there. You know if you're going to be active and you're really trying to use social to build your business then having a good idea what's what your competition is up to is probably important. And you know sometimes what I find with so called competitors is that we you know often times find people that we can collaborate with. It doesn't necessarily mean they are competitors so we work with a number of other marketing agencies and provides some services for them for their clients that they don't necessarily do, but they hire us to do it for them. So like I work with other marketing agencies, so they're not necessarily, you know, your competitor and everything. So but yeah, see what's going on you know, investigate, read up on them, see what they're doing, check out their websites, see what they're ranking for. You know, the more you understand the competitive landscape, the more you know what you should be doing and what you need to do.
And the last question that we have is, can you say more about running a test on TikTok yeah, I so I'm not on TikTok I'm not using tiktok. I wind up watching a lot of TikTok videos on Facebook and the Facebook reels. I think it's fascinating. I find it very interesting. But it's not a platform that I've taken the time to jump on at this point. Again, based on where I'm at with strategy and so forth, it's not a fit for me. But anytime you're using any platform, if you're going to do something, you want to come up with some means of measurement. How am I going to measure success? What does success look like? Is it I, you know, posted a video and I got a thousand views. Is that success you know or is it actually driving traffic and are you tracking how much traffic and then are you tracking what happened to that traffic? Did they fill out a form, did they make a phone call? Like what's the, where do you want that to go? So we really need to step back and think about that whole process. Of creating content, I'm pushing this through to, you know, to my website. And this is what I want to have happen. This is what I wanted the results to be. And then how am I going to track it? How am I going to measure it and do that so anytime you're spending, anytime you're doing something new in particular. Or you're spending any money you need to track it all the way through. All the way through.
The next question that we have is if you have a GoDaddy web page already and are having some issues, are you able to switch over somehow? You can build your website on any other platform and then just you just change the domain where the domain points. So yeah, you can do that anytime. Thank you, Peter.