AI Tech Entrepreneur, C-Suite Executive and Advisor. CEO, Co-Founder of Morphio.
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Times are tough. You don’t want to dish out tons of cash while growing your agency. There are many companies that have bootstrapped to massive success.
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak got their start building computers in a garage. BigCommerce grew to 10,000 paying customers without any receiving venture capital and was founded after Mitchell Harper and Eddie Machaalani met in an online chatroom. These stories are more relevant than ever with Covid-19’s impact on business.
I’m going to teach you how to build a lead marketing funnel that continually fills your pipeline without breaking the bank.
Start At The Top And Build Downward
People need to find your business. Otherwise, it becomes a ghost town. Since you’re probably not going to be spending thousands of dollars per day on advertising, you need to market organically.
Create top-of-the-funnel assets to draw people in. Think of it like throwing a big net in the ocean and capturing as many fish as possible. You want the lobsters, but you’ll get some kelp and rocks too. These assets can be blog posts, informational videos and podcast episodes, and you can produce them for a low cost when you do it in-house.
I recommend blogging on a regular basis and using a robust but free content management system like WordPress. It can be quickly installed on most web hosting accounts. Squarespace is another option.
You can easily create podcasts with tools like Audacity and Buzzsprout and then upload them to platforms like SoundCloud, Spotify and iTunes. You can make videos with tools like OBS Studio and Camtasia and promote them on YouTube and Vimeo. To generate the most traffic, promote them to your email list and on social media.
The key to these tactics — and what I’m talking about ahead — is researching topics that your ideal customer cares about. What keeps them up at night? What do they fear? What does their heaven look like?
Be extremely contextual. Topics need to draw in the highest quality users but in the greatest quantity at the same time. Use Google Trends or the free version of BuzzSumo to find popular industry topics and spin them into your own creation.
You can also repurpose top-of-the-funnel content into many other formats to get the most bang for your buck. Consider using tools like Canva or Piktochart to create infographics for Pinterest, or Google Slides or Microsoft PowerPoint to create slideshows for LinkedIn’s SlideShare. This maximizes content efficiency without spending an extra dollar.
Dig Into The Middle
You’ve attracted the largest amount of users with top-of-the-funnel content. Awesome. Now what? Research has shown that 92% of consumers aren’t ready to buy when they first visit a brand’s website, so you need to find a consistent way to capture them. How? Through a little trick called lead magnets.
Lead magnets are free resources you offer in exchange for a user’s email subscription and personal information. It’s a win-win. They get free value and you can now bring them into your funnel and remarket to them.
Lead magnet ideas include:
• E-books
• Checklists
• Cheatsheets
• Reports
• Case studies
• White papers
• Templates
Use Mailchimp to begin collecting emails and adding forms to your website. The free version includes up to 2,000 contacts. Use pop-up forms, sidebar forms, footer forms or embed them directly into the content. You also could use SendFox for email marketing.
I also suggest creating a drip campaign. This is an automated sequence that leads are run through when they sign up. It saves time and automates the lead generation process. For instance, you can drip free content over a period of a few days to build authority and trust before you present your final offer at the end.
Close Leads At The Bottom
At this stage, you have driven traffic to your website and filtered prospects with lead magnets, and now it’s time to close some sales. You can do this with the bottom-of-the-funnel assets, such as free consultations, demos, trials or audits. People willing to take the steps to receive these assets are much more likely to convert. These assets allow you to have a direct relationship and engagement with leads too.
The best part is that all of these stages and assets can be completely glued together through automation. It works like so: You optimize the original content for search engines, share it on social media and get traffic from repurposed channels. Then, prospects opt into the funnel for lead magnets, which places them into a drip campaign. One of the final emails within the sequence converts them into a paying customer.
Conclusion
These are uncertain times. Businesses have been hit hard by both the pandemic and its economic effects. But that doesn’t mean you have to fall. You can get back up and market without spending aggressively — or at all — using the tactics and tools I shared above.
Just start at the top of the funnel, keep it simple and apply some elbow grease.
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Author: Eric Vardon, Forbes Councils Member
