What’s Holding Your Marketing Back?
No one opens my emails…
My landing pages don’t convert…
Even my social media posts are met with crickets!
How do you even start to figure out what’s wrong with your marketing?
Figuring out what’s holding your marketing back is frustrating!
There is some really great information out there, but learning about marketing for the first time is a recipe for information overload.
Like most entrepreneurs, you’ve probably spent a good chunk of time trying to demystify it for yourself. Of course we all want to grow our business’s revenue and we’d love for that to be easier, and faster.
But there’s an endless stream of strategies for Instagram, copywriting heuristics for emails and landing pages, and blueprints for Facebook advertising strategies.
Just figuring out where to start sometimes feels impossible!
Especially if you’re just starting to work on your systems and you know you want to revamp everything.
You’re going to learn 2 simple tools that will help you find out where people are dropping off, make planning a marketing revamp totally approachable, and help you make more sales by identifying (and fixing) the places could-be customers are leaking out.
What’s Wrong With the Sales “Funnel” You Know
If you’ve spent any amount of time boning up on your marketing trivia, you’ve probably come across this idea of the sales funnel.
Ohh, ahh…
Here’s what it looks like
And as it is, it’s already a pretty handy tool. (Although there are countless different methods represented as “the sales funnel”, so that can get confusing.)
The sales funnel visually represents that as customers go down their buyer’s journey (researching their problem, discovering you, reading about you, deciding between you and a competitor, making a purchase), less and less people progress to the next step.
There’s something majorly wrong with the sales funnel though!!
THE “sales funnel” assumes that gravity is working with you. It’s not.
What causes confusion with marketing is that the sales funnel just makes things look so easy.
First somebody finds them, and then they go down a slippery slide until they land alllll the wayyy at the bottom — buying the thing.
But that’s not what’s happening.
If you wanted to use 1 thing as a primary marketing analogy, it makes more sense to stand the funnel upright as a pyramid.
People aren’t going down a slide.
Getting someone to make a purchasing decision is more like asking them to walk up a flight of stairs.
Or up to the peak of a pyramid.
At the top of that pyramid sits your sale. (We’ll talk more about deciding what exactly to put at the top in a second.)
And just like climbing Mount Everest, gravity is pushing against your customer every step of the way.
So that goal at the top is a macro-yes.
It’s not just one decision, but the sale is the sum of all of the steps of the pyramid before it.
Now each step they “climb” on the pyramid is an action that you’re asking them to say yes to before you ever ask for that sale. (Note: We’ll talk about different priced products, having products in addition to services, and touch on what this means for consumer products in a second.)
Let’s say you’re running a Facebook ad campaign to one of your pieces of content marketing.
When a could-be customer sees your ad pop up in their newsfeed the headline (and image) has to get them to say “yes” to reading the paragraph.
The paragraph context has to get them to say “yes” to leaving Facebook.
The headline of your article has to get them to say “yes” to reading the thing.
The call to action in your post has to get them to say “yes” to giving over their email.
Then the headline of the EMAIL has to get them to say “yes” to reading anything.
The written context of the email has to get them to say “yes” to clicking out to the landing page.
The headline, text, overall argument, and call to action of that LANDING PAGE has to get them to say “yes” to the sale and commit to climbing to the top.
So “making a sale” isn’t a one punch kind of thing.
Marketing is about collecting “Yeses”.
Every small yes on the climb up adds up to the BIG Yes of the sale.
So that’s how the marketing funnel analogy fails you.
What might you see as just 1 yes is actually a journey that’s sequential where the could-be customer has to agree “Yes, this is worth it to me” to every next step you ask them to walk up.
This idea of a purchasing decision pyramid will help you optimize conversions because once you identify where people are falling off, you can learn how to “adjust” the gravity.
Your job as a marketer then is to experiment with how you’re explaining value to make it easier to say yes. To look at your problem “leaky” areas and ask yourself how am I making things confusing here? How can I make it easier to say yes?
What does all this mean to you?
You can make more sales by using the purchasing decision pyramid tool and this buyer’s journey framework to make more sales by discovering where people are falling off of your conveyor belt.
Your Buyer’s Journey
Here’s another way the sales funnel fails you:
People don’t fall down the middle of your funnel.
They climb up the sides.
The different sides, or faces, of your pyramid represent the different types of customers you have, and the different paths (journeys) to the top that you have.
So imagine this picture was painted on each of the 4 sides of your pyramid:
For us business owners, people really exist for us when they become customers.
This simple graphic represents the invisible steps that people mostly take before ever becoming customers!
Believe it or not they did have a whole life before you 🙂
So what do each of these steps mean? Understanding each of these roles will be very important when it comes time to optimize your own marketing for conversions.
(Note: How I’m going to teach you to think of this roles will differ slightly from the image above, which is Hubspot’s version of the buyer’s journey — but I thought their version was a good tool to show you.)
Attract
A marketing channel fills the “attract” role when its reason for existing is to bring people to you. (By marketing channel we’re talking about any individual marketing activity, it could be your Facebook it could be a page on your website.)
Many times social media is filling an “attract” role if you’re using it to distribute content. Especially if it involves using tags or hashtags to make your content “more discoverable”. (Later we’ll talk about other roles social media can play besides Attract.)
But keep in mind some of your website pages might also have an Attract role! Especially SEO optimized pages, where most of the traffic is coming from a search engine (rather than being directed to something like a landing page from inside of emails, or from another page on your website — that page would not have an Attract role).
Convert
Often pages on your website fill this role.
One example of a page with a Convert role would be if you have a specific landing page to get people to join your email list.
Squeeze pages where you give free reports in exchange for an email address also have a conversion role.
There’s another side to the convert role that many people often overlook though.
Any post where you’re driving traffic to something is also going to be a conversion.
So if you mostly use your Facebook page to announce landing pages to your community (Amy Porterfield is one example of someone who uses their page heavily to promote products), then that would be Facebook actually playing a convert role.
Ditto if you use Facebook mostly for contests, and to get existing audience to click on your blog posts.
Also keep in mind that an email’s 1 job is to get a click out to a blog, or to a landing page, or to content so email often has a convert role too. (Even though it seems a little bit weird that getting an email address is also in the “convert” category.)
Close
Every page that has a buy button!
This is mostly going to be your landing pages, your sales calls (if that’s part of your process), your ecommerce shop, and any 3rd party retailer page like Amazon where you may have content.
If you can make a payment as the direct next step, it’s a Close role.
If it leads to something where you can THEN make a purchase (but you can’t make the purchase directly from that first thing) it’s probably a convert role.
Delight
Finally, Delight is anything that happens after you’re customers!
So if you have a Facebook group that all paying members of your products get complimentary access too, that’s a Delight role.
One example is the Freedom & Mastery Journal group that you get access to when you buy one of John Lee Dumas’s products:
Let’s talk about how you can use the purchasing decision pyramid and the buyer’s journey to create a role for each of your marketing activities and make more sales by fixing what’s not working.
Action Steps to Get That Marketing Breakthrough
When you spend hours of your own time on “marketing” like writing Facebook posts, email blasts, or web pages do you know specifically why you’re doing it?
Do you know exactly what role your Facebook, email, Twitter, your Podcast, your blog, and your website plays in your would-be customer’s purchasing process?
If you don’t, taking the time to think through how your could-be customer finds you — every step of the way from realizing their problem, searching for answers, discovering you, reading their first thing from you, becoming a lead, reading your emails, deciding between your information and information from most likely a competitor, making a decision (even inaction is a decision) — will help you turn more No’s into Yeses.
Understand Your Buyer’s Journey
Step #1: Take inventory of all of the marketing activities you’re currently doing
Make a list of all of the marketing channels you’re active on right now.
This would be pretty much everything you do.
Do you have a website?
Do you use email marketing?
Do use Facebook?
YouTube?
Pinterest?
Twitter?
What other social networks?
Do you do any offline advertising? (Sponsorships? Direct mail? Newspaper ads? Count each activity of offline advertising separately.)
Do you have landing pages?
Make a huge brain dump of all of the marketing you do so you can account for it properly.
Step #2: Think of your customers
Do you have 1 main kind of customer you target? Or do you have 3 different types of “typical customers”?
Get clear on what customer avatars you’re serving.
If it’s only 1 great. If you have more than 1, assign each avatar a side of the pyramid:
Remember that different buyer personas will take different journeys to get to your product.
Step #3: Give your marketing channels specific roles
You might only have to do this once, you may have to do it 3x if you have 3 customer avatars.
Look at your YouTube channel for example:
What types of content do you post there?
Are you posting general lessons about your topic?
Maybe you’re a nutritionist and you make videos about how to incorporate more plants into your diet. The main way people get to your videos is through YouTube Search.
Your YouTube channel fills an Attract role for your business.
But maybe you post Skype recordings of you live coaching clients, and at the end you have a call to action at the end to direct people to your program. You notice that most people come to these videos from your website, and from your emails.
Your YouTube channel fills a Convert role for your business.
Maybe your YouTube channel is full of mostly “unlisted” videos, and you use your channel as a video library to support your coaching clients (or people in a paid course or Facebook group).
Then your YouTube channel fills a Delight role for your business.
When you’re going through and designating a role for each of your marketing activities, be honest with yourself about what function it’s playing in your business. Don’t just breeze through and put each social media network in the “Attract” role, and all of your webpages in the “Close” role!
Review what we learned earlier about the criteria for the Attract, Convert, Close, and Delight roles so you can think critically about how you’re using your marketing.
At the end of this exercise you’ll have a blueprint of your entire marketing system, and you can start to see how the different pieces work together.
Build Your Pyramid
Step #1: What’s your goal?
You’re going to want to start from the end and work backwards here.
Let’s approach this from the perspective of a service business who has both product and service options. (Because this works out a little bit differently for consumer products.)
It’s not just to “sell stuff”, if you have multiple products and services the reason for doing so should be to move people through a process of experiencing your products and services.
For this business, the highest priced consulting services are what’s on top of the pyramid.
When you have high priced products, you ideally have a ladder of lower priced services, products, and courses that people can get value from before making that commitment to your highest priced goodie.
If you’re a consumer product business, you might want to evaluate your customer data and look at your most popular products. Are a small group of products (only 20% of your selection) making up 60%, 70%, or even 80% of your sales? You can put those on the top.
Step #2: What comes before that?
You might look into creating some type of free sample offer of these products to create your value ladder.
You might also look to see if one of these products is significantly lower priced than the others. For example, maybe you’re a clothing brand but a small pack of stickers is also in this “most popular” category. Or socks.
You can use the cheapest most popular offer as one “rung” of your value ladder, and then focus on promoting your other top 20% of products to people who have made that smaller purchase.
For information businesses what this usually looks like is having a book for sale for tens of dollars before saying Yes to a service that’s hundreds or thousands of dollars.
For our high ticket consultant from before, this might look like having a peak that’s his $10,000 consulting service. Under that are courses in the thousands and hundreds. Under that are any cheaper products like books.
You should organize all of the paid ways to interact with you in a sequence of what people most often purchase (on the bottom), up to whatever your highest priced product is.
By this point you’ve probably detailed all of your “Close” steps in sequential order.
Step #3: What comes before THAT?
Are there any sales calls, white paper downloads, or ebook downloads that come before it? Do you have a Facebook group where you then drive people to offers? Do you have email sequences that are key for selling your products?
You’ll want to organize these steps in your purchasing decision pyramid next.
Whatever happens closest to the purchasing decision goes right underneath of it.
So if having a sales call with a representative is part of your process that might go directly under your paid products. (Remember: We’re building your pyramid from top to bottom.)
What does someone have to do to become qualified for that sales call? Download a report?
BAM, put that report right under the sales call.
How do people get to the report?
Is it part of your email introduction sequence?
BAM, put that email right under that.
How did you get that email address?
From a squeeze page where you give a free ebook?
You’ll want to detail all of you “convert” steps in order of closest to the purchase, down towards the “convert” steps that are further away from the purchase.
Step #4: How do they find you?
Finally, you’ll want to create the remaining steps with any Attract roles you haven’t yet put onto your pyramid.
When you’re done with this exercise you should have a step-by-step roadmap detailing how people find you, interact with you, how they become leads, what happens to them after they’re leads, what happens to them before they purchase, and specifically where and how you ask them to purchase.
What’s Holding Your Marketing Back?
Now that you have a complete map of every single step a could-be customer takes to become a customer, you can start the process of evaluating how well each step is performing.
The best way to see where the biggest deficiencies are in your marketing is now to evaluate by starting from the bottom and working your way up.
How many people find your Attract steps per month? Do you get 500 blog views? Do you usually get 200 new Facebook fans?
How many people who visit your blog sign up for your email list from 500? 50 email sign ups per month? Or 5?
Just looking at those 2 steps, if you only got 5 email subscribers from 500 blog views circle this step to come back to tweak it.
Let’s say you get 50 signups from your blog so that’s in great shape, but of your Facebook fan page of 200 only 1 of them are on your list.
Compared to your blog, your Facebook page is underperforming. Circle that.
You have a decision to make: Should you stop focusing on it all together? Because trimming the fat isn’t a bad thing.
Or should you tighten up that leak?
If you do want to tighten it up (you should decide after just getting the base results for every single step, and comparing which steps are doing the worst by conversion rate compared to the other steps — for a simple way to analyze your entire process), THEN you would start looking at those Facebook advertising strategies.
If you have an email list of 100 people and 25 click through to a landing page, and of those 25 people only 1 buys then you should work on your landing page.
If you have an email list of 100 and 2 click through to a landing page, and of those 2 people only 1 buys then you should work on your email.
Using the purchasing decision pyramid and buyer’s journey together is a simple, but deceptively powerful way to analyze your marketing, find out what’s holding you back, and optimize your conversion rates.