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welcome to understanding the marketing funnel my name is joe applebaum i am the ceo of ajax union a b2b marketing agency in brooklyn and i started the company back in 2008 and we grew to be one of the fastest growing companies in the us who are on the inc 500 and over the past decade we have helped over 1100 companies and today ajax union consists of a team of b2b marketing experts and we specialize in creating effective marketing funnels for businesses like yours i'm excited that you're here with me today our competitive advantage at ajax unity is that we understand your business we're marketers but we're business people first and we love getting things done we have great ideas but we understand that ideas are worth the paper they're written on if you don't execute on them properly that's why we make all our employees read getting things done we use the gtd method to actually get things done so who is this webinar for this webinar is for marketing directors directors of sales maybe you're a c-suite ceo cmo if you're in charge of your marketing operation somehow maybe you're a sales person or a director or business development person or a cro or a b2b professional maybe you're a coach consultant someone who needs referrals who needs high quality leads that has a high value client and anyone trying to grow their business and wants to learn about marketing funnels so ask yourself is this you and what you're going to learn is how to create a marketing strategy what you need in order for you to build your marketing funnel and how to execute your marketing plan so we're going to be teaching you so the question number one is on a piece of paper if you have one write down on a scale of one to ten how well do you understand the marketing process how well do you understand the marketing funnel in general most people don't understand the word marketing funnel the word funnel gets thrown around a lot but i want to explain to you today what a marketing funnel is why you need it why it's important and how it can help you be able to achieve getting more qualified leads for your business the goal of a funnel is to turn a lead into a customer and most people that are coming to your website believe it or not they're not ready to buy and so these people are on the top that's why it's called a funnel because the top is wider and the people on the bottom there are people that are ready to buy that's why it's skinnier because less people are ready to buy people that come to the top of the funnel those are the people that don't know who you are they just came to your website maybe they just heard about you and you need a different message to those people on the top of the funnel than you need in the middle of the final and that you need at the bottom of the funnel so if you want to dissect the funnel there are three parts there's the top of the funnel the middle of the funnel and the bottom of the funnel a funnel is a visual representation of your marketing process how do you take people from knowing you attracting them at the top to converting engaging selling and all that stuff so on the top of the funnel it's more about awareness and education you want to get them to know you the middle of the funnel you turn the desire you get their interest right you identify that there's a need and you turn that interest into desire and then at the bottom of the funnel you encourage a prospect to take action and build a connection with them so that they actually are in a position to buy from you now that you need that you know that they have a desire to buy this they're going to buy from the person who educated them and often what i see is that people are doing this incorrectly the most important step that you take before creating your marketing funnel is actually having a strategy now there are six components to creating a strategy but having a strategy with your marketing is super super important and the reason why it's so important to have a strategy for your marketing is because energy without strategy is a major waste of time and the right strategy will save you a decade developing a strategy is really the key to generating profit strategy has to be a priority in your business and realize that if you have the right target market you know who they are and if you understand exactly what problem you solve for them and what makes your business special to them well that's part of your strategy but before you do that you first have to identify your goal so the first step in creating a strategy is making sure you have very specific goals and when i say goals i mean asking yourself questions like what is your annual revenue right now what is your marketing budget how many clients do you currently have what is the average revenue per client and how long do they stay with you what is the lifetime value of a client what can you afford to pay for each client and how much does it cost for you to get new clients and if you can get any type of client in the whole wide world which ones of them would be ideal and how many of them do you want what does the return on investment look like in your business most people don't answer these questions upfront and if you try to start a marketing strategy or develop a marketing funnel or start creating assets or investing in marketing this is the biggest pitfall people don't have their business goals ready and communicated to their agency and to the all the stakeholders and as a result they end up just doing random acts of marketing and random acts of marketing will give you random results you don't want random results you want a return on investment so step number one is what are your goals step number two is who are you targeting what is the buyer persona in the b2b world there are lots of different people that are involved in purchasing your products or services think about not just the influencer or the decision maker but there's the actual users and the actual buyers and sometimes there are gatekeepers so figuring out a persona for each one of the buyer centers is really important who are they what do they do what do they hear what do they see what do they feel what do they think people make decisions based on emotion they back it up with logic but the decisions they're going to be making is based on emotions so in order for you to create effective messaging you first need to know your buyer persona based on your goals so my question to you is do you have a clear picture of your ideal prospects what their environment looks like and what are their pain points people get motivated to make action take action based on their pain either they want pleasure they want something they desire something they have an interest they have a need or they want to change something take away a pain once you understand this once you understand who these people are then you can create a unique selling proposition then you can figure out what do you do really well how do you stand out from your competitors what does your customer really need and you know sometimes using your competitor strength your competitor's strength as your unique selling proposition so what your competitor is strong at that's not what you are so somebody once compared us to a web design agency they're like why should i go with you i want to go with this web design agency to do my marketing i was like if you need a beautiful website go to them but it doesn't look like you need a beautiful website it looks like you need marketing it looks like you need a return investment it looks like you need a funnel because if i go to your properties right now you don't have assets there are four levels of companies different types of companies and the ones that are on the bottom they're old school they don't even have a website they don't even need a website and there are people that have a website but they don't have a proper brand they don't have a unique selling proposition so what do you offer your competitors what do you offer that your competitors don't offer why is this your service worth your leads time and money and the next thing you want to do is you want to develop a swot analysis both the internal things your strengths and your weaknesses and the external stuff that you have to really identify your opportunities and your threats if you haven't done a swot analysis in your business how can you effectively create a marketing strategy if you have no idea what your strengths are your weaknesses are the opportunities outside and what are the threats from competitors in the industry and negative press and other things like that so doing this is essential for you to properly have a strategy and then you want to create your messaging now your messaging changes based on where your prospect is on the funnel on the top of the funnel you have one type of messaging in the middle of the final different type of messaging and on the bottom of the funnels different is completely different messaging most people are sending bottom of the funnel messaging to top of the funnel prospect what does that mean that means that you're sending people buy signals when they're just getting to know who you are you're telling people bye bye bye people hate to be sold people don't need to schedule a call with you right now people don't need to watch your demo right now they don't even know who you are they don't even know they have a problem so you want to make sure that you have the right assets in place and that those assets are strategic now there are companies that have assets maybe they have a website but they don't have all the right assets they don't have all the right messaging created then there are companies that have the right messaging created but they don't have a strategy they're not thinking about their brand experience the sixth component of a strategy and brand experience is the tone and the message that you want to send people what do you want them to experience it's one thing to use language it's another thing to think about feelings when your lead comes and visits your website or your landing page you want to create an atmosphere that invites your lead further in while also conveying the company's values you want to carry this experience throughout your other marketing materials and mediums you have a cohesive approach kind of like salesforce they have a cohesive approach with their brand experience so once you factor those six things in thinking about lastly with your brand experience now you can start building out your marketing funnel now you can start building out okay what path do i want to take this person in what are the assets do i need to create inside my marketing funnel so there are a couple of different assets that we're going to cover today the first asset is going to be a lead magnet instead of selling people right you don't want to be selling people because people hate to be sold but they love to buy you want to create some type of a lead magnet so if you find a prospect hanging around on facebook or instagram or wherever people are maybe linkedin maybe google or youtube you might be tempted to say hey prospect buy my products and services but that's the last thing they're going to do if they're not ready to buy right now and most of the people are not ready to buy instead a more effective way is to find a problem that they have right now and create a piece of content that solves that problem maybe it's a tip maybe it's a trick maybe it's an industry secret maybe some advice maybe it's some behind the scene knowledge you want to be able to connect with them in that way you want to be able to leverage your leave magnet so that your prospects give you their basic information maybe their name their email address and then you can send them a series of emails after that because you have their information most people aren't doing this so ask yourself what lead magnet can you create for your business that solves a problem for your ideal client for your ideal persona and then you want to create other assets like landing pages so what is a landing page i'm sure you've heard of this concept the landing page a lining page is often an uncomplicated page that provides your lead with some basic information in exchange for something from them maybe you'll give them an e-book a pdf or an exclusive article landing pages are very different than websites a website has your about us a website has general information it showcases all your projects a landing page is more like a sales call it's laser targeted your page has to speak directly to your target market and encourage them to take a specific action based on a specific need that you know that they have what are the most important landing pages that you need to create to help you with your marketing objectives and do you have them created and are those landing pages positioned correctly with the right lead magnets at the right stage of your funnel and then i want you to think about email automations after somebody enters their information inside that landing page and downloads downloads that lead magnet what series can you take them through is it the post purchase is it that they lapse three months is it new members and what is this five to seven emails that you're going to send them over a period of time to nurture that if you want an egg to hatch you got to sit on it and nurture it and most people are terrible at nurturing leads consistently so instead of doing this manually create automations using technology and using the right messaging to the right persona to help you with to get to your goal the key is to bring them back into the loop using the right nurturing approach most people are not thinking this through and when you see which are the motivated prospects those are the ones that you're going to reach out to then you want to create ads advertisements that target these people based on who they are based on their email address and based on what actions they took so if somebody downloaded a specific type of lead magnet or they paused or clicked on something on a specific email at a certain stage of your automation you can then trigger ads that will follow them around ninety percent of the internet that's super custom micro targeted to who they are this is a powerful way for you to stay top of mind and get people back into the sales process are you currently running retargeting ads to your potential clients to stay top of mind with them the best client is your existing client bringing back winning back clients and you can do this using retargeting ads the next thing you want to do is you want to make sure you understand your key performance indicators what are the exact measuring items that you have to measure what are the indicators that will tell you are you getting closer to success or further away from success most people are not measuring things i want you to consider the key numbers that you need to be looking at in some type of report on a daily weekly monthly basis to know if you're getting an roi or not if you're not sure what these are you have to be able to identify them and sit down with your stakeholders and your team to make sure you understand roi and if you can predict roi the next thing i want you to consider is what technologies you're using we have technologies that we implement for people telling them who comes to their website even if nobody filled anything out it's website caller id we also track your callers if somebody calls you we can tell you who they are we can transcribe the call we can tell you what keyword they clicked on on google and as a result land on your website and then call you so now we can track the people that are calling you offline as well back to your marketing efforts and this is really important so that you understand what tools you're going to need in order for you to improve your conversions why because if you know what keywords are producing what results you can increase the bids on those keywords if you know what social media channels are producing the results you can double down on those social media channels and get even more results just like the ones that you got but if you have no idea if you're throwing things to the wall if you're doing random acts of marketing hoping that something will stick well hope is a great thing it's just not a great strategy the next thing next technology that i'd like to talk about is mouse tracking technology we have technology that allows you to be able to track what people are doing on your website so if somebody's clicking on something if somebody starts filling out a form but they don't actually fill out the full form we will tell you what's on that form and then you can connect that directly back to knowing what companies they were even if they didn't fill anything out knowing exactly what they said if they called you and so on and so forth so do you know what parts of your website garner the most engagement if you don't you're not going to be able to effectively create your marketing funnel and then you want to create dashboards you want to bring together your google analytics your google adwords maybe some reports from salesforce some facebook pixel data and put it all together and really understand the key metrics we spoke about kpis before but how are you going to even measure those kpis once you know what those kpis are your key performance indicators you make sure that they're inside a proper dashboard so that you can track your success so ask yourself what type of reporting are you currently using and how often are you reviewing this with your team and then you want to consider your marketing budget there are five elements to a marketing budget people often ask me joe how do i get an roi and i always say well it depends on what your goals are what is your strategy before you think about roi you first want to think about your goals you want to think about where do you want to get to what type of customers do you want how much do they spend with you and once you understand what you want your roi to be then you can set a budget to test out if you're going to get that roi or not marketing is about testing and there are five areas of your budget that you should allocate funds to the first one is obviously strategy making sure that you have the right strategy because the right strategy will save you a decade so make sure you allocate some money to creating a strategy next is you have to create assets this is a one-time investment that you make in making sure that you will be successful by having the right assets including landing pages lead magnets email automations the right technology and once you have your assets in order and your dashboards in order then you can go and start advertising you can drive traffic to this stuff so number one you want to make sure you pay for your strategy you want to make sure that you invest and have a budget for your assets that you create and then on an ongoing basis investing in advertising investing in execution and investing in technology those are things that you're always going to need to invest in so making sure you understand what your budgets are and then connecting to that what you need the roi to be for it to be worth it for example if you're going to invest 250 000 in a marketing budget which includes those five elements i mentioned then how much more money do you need to make per year in order for you to justify the 250 000 a year investment in marketing you might say i just have to make a million dollars because my gross profit is 50 and so i can invest 250 000 a year you might say i need to make 10 million in order for it to be worth it it doesn't matter what the number is it matters that you know the number so that you can comfortably invest money to test you got to invest the test so you know what to expect now once you have that you understand your budget you understand your strategy you understand your assets you have everything in place now it's time for you to send traffic to your funnel you can test out things like seo ppc you can test out social media both paid and unpaid you can test that using emails both cold emails or warm emails like email newsletters retargeting banner ads videos podcasts there's so many different ways to get traffic the most important thing that you need to do is figure out where your prospects are are you targeting people that have intent right now like on google adwords people that are currently thinking about how to solve their problem or are you on social media targeting people based on who they are and based on that you're going to test out different campaigns whether it's top of the funnel to build awareness middle of the funnel to build credibility or bottom of the funnel to get people to actually buy depending on where they are depending on what the traffic is that's how you're going to create your strategy so think about ways to send traffic to your marketing funnel think about the organic ways and think about where in your marketing funnel you want to send that traffic to so as a recap we spoke about strategy the six components of strategy we spoke about four different types of assets we can cover many more in future webinars but at least you have the idea of the four basic ones and we talked a little bit about execution and traffic hopefully you got some value from this if you did uh feel free to connect with us somebody just asked a question they said joe how do i know if i should hire somebody in-house or i should hire an agency to do this for me this seems super complicated and the answer i always give people is it all depends on your marketing budget if you could afford to hire somebody in-house that has all this expertise already by all means do it but most people first start with an agency and they have some type of stakeholder in-house and then eventually if it's successful they start deciding what's it worth more to continue with this agency where i'm getting results or maybe to hire somebody in-house to save some more money depends are you in the business of marketing do you want the function in-house do you need to have the function in-house because you need that expertise maybe you're a law firm and you need the person that is doing your marketing to be a lawyer so i want you to consider that and of course email us amazing ajax union.com to set up a call with us we do free strategy sessions to have an initial conversation and learn about how a marketing funnel might be good for you maybe a marketing funnel is not right for you maybe it is right for you if you want more qualified leads if you want to target the right customer if you want to have a more profitable marketing systems and processes to properly scale connect with us amazing ajax union.com or just email us and let us know what you thought of this webinar we'd love to hear from you either way thank you very much for being part of this we're also going to be rolling out some more education so if you want to be on our list of education and maybe take a few more courses where we go more in depth into things like cold emails things like data scraping things like using big data to find your ideal clients and look alike audiences how to properly do seo in this new social media world how to properly set up different components of your strategy and take things to the next level based on what's going on with the new normal let me know just email us amazing ajax union.com we look forward to hearing from you connecting with you building a relationship with you and helping you take your life and your business to the next level thank you very much my name is joe applebaum this was another presentation by ajax union boom