Marketing Funnel Strategies: Biggest Misconceptions, Essential Elements & More!

[Terence] (0:00 – 0:40)

Recently, we had the absolute pleasure of joining Jen Mancusi on her brilliant podcast, Demystified Marketing the Podcast, to share our best-kept secrets about building marketing funnels that don’t just generate leads, they fill up your calendar with appointments. In this special re-edit of our conversation, we break down the strategies that have worked wonders for us at Founders Go Naked and reveal how you can apply them to your own business. A big thank you to Jen for having us on her show and letting us dive deep into what it takes to create funnels that truly convert.

Get ready to take notes and don’t forget to check out Jen’s full podcast for even more marketing insights.

[Jenn] (0:40 – 0:48)

What’s the biggest misconception you see business leaders have about marketing funnels and appointment setting?

[Terence] (0:48 – 3:02)

So many times I see business owners, they kind of like jump from one funnel and then they pick up a new course and like, oh, I should jump to this other funnel. Now the thing is, I believe you should really test one funnel because there’s so many different things that you can optimize within that one funnel. And most business owners, they, you know, they try it for a month and then they’re like, oh, I give up because this funnel doesn’t work and they jump onto the other one.

So that’s the first thing. And second thing, once they got a funnel that’s working, they don’t test other funnels. So this kind of sounds like a dichotomy where I’m contradicting myself, but not really because you really need to work out your first funnel that really works first, then test out other funnels and see if the new funnel actually gets you a better return on your ad spend.

Because we, as marketers, we constantly want to find, you know, lower costs anyway for, you know, getting quality leads, right? So that’s the second thing. And the third thing is that most businesses, and this is where I do a lot of webinars that lead to appointments.

And the fact is that most people won’t show up for the webinar, even though they registered, they don’t show up because of whatever reason, you know, the cat got sick or whatever. So they don’t show up. So 80% of most people that don’t show up, right?

And most business owners don’t take care of this 80% of people, whereas they should aim to continue to engage them through a follow-up sequence or follow-up funnel, as I like to call it. We created this long tail funnel thing where we keep following up for 30 days after the webinar to attempt to get that engagement and appointment. Because the other thing to remember is that even if people show up for your webinar, 70% of them are not ready to buy.

It’s not that they don’t want your product, it’s that they’re not ready to buy. So if you don’t continue to engage them, you’re like leaving money on the table. So I think those would be the three biggest ones that I could think of right now.

[Jenn] (3:02 – 3:08)

What are the essential elements that every appointment generating funnel must have?

[Terence] (3:08 – 4:38)

I will start off with the first one, and that’s awesome copywriting and messaging, right? And this is where a lot of people have fallen into trap of just using chat GPT to say, hey, write me an ad for so-and-so. And then everybody, everyone’s ad sounds the same.

There’s no thinking, no research that’s done into it. And so your ads, to put it bluntly, suck when it comes to the marketplace. And you’re wondering, why am I not getting appointments?

It’s because your ads suck, right? So getting that messaging, having that good copywriter on your ads is super important. That’s the first thing.

So the second thing is your offer, right? I think you really need to be specific in what your offer serves. So why should they get on that one-on-one call with you?

And most people just say, oh, we’re just offering this free strategy session, which sounds like everybody else out there, right? So why not think of a really cool name to make it like a, if you’re in stocks, like stock coaching, like a stock portfolio realignment conversation, call it something like that. That sounds like, okay, I know exactly what value I’m going to get out of getting onto a one-on-one call with this person.

[Jenn] (4:38 – 4:49)

How do you think the evolution of digital marketing has changed the way we think about moving prospects through a funnel towards those conversion points?

[Terence] (4:49 – 8:43)

Actually, it’s kind of like a mistake that many people make is that, okay, they just throw out one ad and just ask for deployments, right? And as I mentioned just now, you kind of need to move people to those different levels of awareness. So what we do for many of our clients is that we have an awareness ad that actually just doesn’t sell anything.

And it could be just you appearing with a, interviewing a famous person, for example, right? Just to build that credibility so that it’s like, for example, if you interview Tony Robbins and you’re in the personal development space, people be like, oh, who’s this guy that’s interviewing Tony Robbins, right? And then you’re basically, but you’re just like, it’s pure awareness, right?

You’re not selling anything there. Then you might want to retarget these people later on, then with a VSL, basically add to a VSL, a video sales letter. And they say, well, oh, I’ve seen this guy before.

I’ve seen Jen before. So I think Jen’s pretty trustworthy because she interviewed Tony Robbins. So let’s click on it and let’s watch a video, what she has to say about solving this problem of mine.

And then after that, as well as we talked about just the retargeting, because people may not be ready to take action at that point in time, they see your VSL, but they’re like, oh, this is great, but I don’t have time now, maybe later. And then if you don’t have those retargeting ads, you’re kind of missing out on them, right? So that’s the first thing is just having that ecosystem of ads.

So don’t just have one ad, but have a whole ecosystem of it, right? And just the second thing is that I want to bring up is having a holistic marketing plan. And this is where it’s not just about running ads and funnels, right?

Even though that’s what our agency does. But what we’ve noticed is that for a lot of our clients, when they use social media, have a strong following on social media, they get on various podcasts, they appear on stage, they write books, all this stuff actually helps to build their credibility. And it actually builds that awareness and that presence.

And it actually gets them better results with the ads. Like just this month, right, we ran ads for two clients. One has a very, very strong social media presence, written books and all that.

The other one does not have it. And the cost per lead, the difference between the cost per lead and then similar niches is like three to one. So the one that has no authority, no presence is costing us three times more compared to the one that has all this authority, social media and podcasts, all that kind of stuff.

And the third thing, if I would bring up, it’ll be like using multi-channel marketing. Like most people just run ads on Facebook, right? But what about like YouTube?

What about Instagram, TikTok? And also don’t forget offline marketing. Offline marketing is incredibly effective.

Direct mail is still very effective, right? And if you have all those in place, like a friend of mine, Vance Morris, he’s got all this newsletters going out to key people that, he’s got a paid newsletter, but he sends it to people like Ryan Deiss, like Damon John and all these other people, right? And now he’s like secured all this speaking gigs with all these high level people because he’s just keeping front of mind with a physical newsletter.

Whereas everyone’s just sending this email newsletters, but he’s gone physical. So yeah, it’s like, once again, it’s the whole like holistic multi-channel marketing thing that people should engage in.

[Jenn] (8:43 – 8:56)

Now, I mean, this is always my favorite question whenever we talk about any marketing strategies on the show, but what are the most important metrics that people should be tracking with their ad funnels and their appointments?

[Terence] (8:57 – 12:10)

Okay. I’m going to look through my notes here so I don’t miss any of them. First of all, I think it’s cost per sale.

That’s what you really need to know. What’s your cost per sale? And I think cost per sale beyond that is about also looking at the customer lifetime value, which most people don’t do, right?

They just see, okay, I spend like $10 on ads and I got $12 in sales, but they don’t see the value of the long-term value of each customer because each customer could be spending more than $12 with you. It could be like over five years on average, they spend like $100 with you. So then if that’s the case, you’re 10Xing your money with advertising, right?

So that’s one thing I just want to quickly bring up. The second thing is obviously show ups, right? Cost per show up is important for appointments.

Cost per lead is obviously important as well. And I think the landing page conversion rate, that is something that is like a low hanging fruit where it’s so easy to just improve your landing page conversion rate by say 20% or 30% just by changing the headline sometimes. That is something that we definitely want you to look into on a consistent basis.

And in terms of the ads, we want to look at several metrics, right? One is your CTR all. Your CTR all is everybody who clicks on any part of your ad, right?

So if you have a CTR all of like say 5%, it’s basically saying 5% of the people see your ad actually stopping to scroll and actually looking at your ad. So the higher the percentage there, the better, right? So if you don’t have like a good CTR all, that means your ad is basically boring.

It doesn’t stand out. The image doesn’t stand out. Video doesn’t stand out.

Something is not right. So you need to fix that. Then the next thing is you want to look at on the ad is the CTR link percentage, right?

So how many percent of people who actually see your ad actually click through the link to the next page, whether it’s your webinar, whether it’s your VSL, whatever it is, okay? So if say for example, you have like a 5% CTR all and a 0.5% CTR link, that means your ad copy is not persuasive enough or your video is not persuasive enough because you are stopping people from scrolling, but you are not getting them to click. So that’s where you need to look at the body of your copy or the content of your video ad to try and improve that.

And of course, if you’re using videos, you need to look at your video view percentage to get them to the landing page, right? So it’s like you want to look at how many people stop at 25%, at 50% of the video at 75% and how many actually view all the whole video. By doing that, you’ll be able to like tweak your video to optimize it and just make it get more people to actually click on the video to go to the next page.

And whether it’s VSL, webinar, or quiz funnel, or whatever it is.