How to Diversify Your Top of Funnel (And Add a Figure in Revenue)
Kevin remembers, on a recent episode of the Predictable Revenue podcast, the mistakes he made with marketing early in his career. When he and his business partner founded one of their past companies, a San Francisco-based on-demand flower delivery company, they thought that if they built a cool product and put it on the internet (website, Twitter, Facebook) the customers would just come.
This is a misconception Kevin sees with a lot of startups, especially those building innovative tech products. Eventually, after rebuilding the company’s website and adjusting their branding on social media didn’t bring any new customers to their door, Kevin realized that what was missing was a strong marketing strategy.
DIVERSE TOP OF FUNNEL
Several years and many successful startups later, Kevin has turned his expertise into a performance-based, full-service agency that specializes in creating diverse online marketing funnels to drive revenue and help brands cross the threshold from 6-figures to 7-figures, 7-figures to 8-figures. This is their top of funnel strategy:
1. SEO:
SEO is the keystone of Voy Media’s top of funnel strategy. Kevin recommends starting with a great SEO tool, finding the words your target customers are searching for, and then building a lot of your strategy based on what you discover. This allows you to see if people are out there searching for a specific product, service, or topic and ensures when you create any content that you’re definitely using the terminology your audience is looking for.
Once you find a high volume of a certain group of keywords, use them. Write an article on that topic. Put those words in the title of your video. Title your podcast after a common search.
2. Podcast:
A podcast is a great inbound channel. If people have seen you and heard your voice before, they will be that much more comfortable with you when you hop on a call. But back to the SEO piece: the title of your podcast needs to be chosen carefully. Kevin’s podcast is called Digital Marketing Fastlane.
3. Free Product:
Create a simple tool that your target customers can use, free of charge. But here’s the catch: while your tool should provide value, it should also be a place for you to gather information and insights on your target customers. have them share their email address with you. For example, Hubspot has a free email signature template generator. The user gets a free, professional-looking email signature, Hubspot gets their full name, title, company, and email address.
4. Private Facebook Groups:
According to Kevin, private Facebook groups are currently an underused channel. They’re still unaffected by Facebook’s relevance algorithms, so when you make a post in a group, everyone in the group sees it. And if you’re the moderator or admin of a group, that information appears next to your name and anything you post or comment carries a little more weight.
Facebook groups also have the option to ask questions of any person requesting to join said group, so ask for people’s email addresses and there’s your lead capture form.
5. Affiliate Programs:
Offer commission when someone refers a customer to you, but make sure the commission you’re offering is better than the commission your competitors are offering. For example, if you’re in the ecommerce space, Amazon has one of the biggest affiliate programs in the world. So make sure you’re a more appealing partner.
6. Reviews:
The second most searched phrase for your company, after its name, is going to be its name followed by “reviews” (see? Back to SEO). Kevin suggests reaching out to bloggers and YouTubers to have them review your product or service for their audiences.
You may hesitate about this idea because you don’t want someone writing a bad review of your offering. But in Kevin’s experience, these influencers feel indebted to you for receiving something for free, so more often than not if they don’t like it, they just won’t post about it.
Psychologically speaking, someone is a lot more likely to write a bad review if they spent money on something and had a bad experience. So you might as well try to get some additional good reviews from bloggers and YouTubers.
7. Video Testimonials:
Another way to take advantage of your company’s review SEO is by posting reviews yourself. Instead of publishing text-only customer testimonials, get on a call with your customers to talk about their experience, record it, and then post it online with keywords (your company name + review) in the title. Anybody can write a testimonial, but video is authentic.
8. Video Webinar Funnel:
Kevin’s video webinars are pre-recorded, in-depth examinations of accounts that are performing well. During 40-60 value-packed minutes, Kevin takes popular brands and dissects what’s working well and the strategies at play. He draws registrants in with a catchy headline about what they will learn and has them opt-in with their emails.
On the thank you page at the end of the webinar, there is a 20-odd question quiz where registrants can fill in information about themselves, their roles, their companies, and their goals. The quiz is followed by another thank you page with a link to book time with Voy Media if a registrant wants to get in touch right away. This page sends Kevin and his team a notification via slack so they can check the answers to the quiz, qualify the lead, and reach out accordingly.
PRO TIP: How to create engaging video content:
- Entertain and educate, or “edutain” if you will.
- 10x your energy on camera and share every piece of information like it’s the most interesting thing you’ve ever heard.
- Be authentic: show your personality, make people laugh, gesticulate, say something controversial.
- Don’t worry about people liking you. Some will, some won’t, and being self-conscious about it doesn’t help.
9. Free Plus Shipping:
This funnel is one that Kevin views as a little outside the norm. Kevin and his partner recently wrote a book. They titled the book Digital Marketing Made Easy to, again, take advantage of Amazon’s SEO. They offered that book to people for free, if they would just pay $9.99 for shipping. The book costs Voy Media $6 to print, and is printed on demand by Amazon after each order, and shipped for $3. So the reader is covering the new customer acquisition cost of the book printing and shipping, and Voy Media breaks even.
On the thank you page, after purchasing the book, is an opportunity to upsell the customer by offering them additional, relevant content in PDF form for an additional $9.99. By using a payment processing software like Stripe, for a short period of time after the initial charge is made to the customer’s credit card, an additional charge can be run automatically without requiring them to enter their payment information again.
The 2 types of upsell products Kevin has seen work here best are something that allows you to achieve something faster (ie. the step by step of how to achieve the results detailed in his book), or simply the same thing that was initially purchased offered at a discount (especially in the case of a physical product, the customer is already psychologically committed to the product and there is a good chance they’d buy it again). Either way, Kevin now has an email list of people who purchased his book that he can retarget down the line.
BREAKING EVEN
You don’t need to profit from every single strategy. Every time you pull someone into the top of the funnel you add one more person to your email list, and that’s one more person who knows who you are and can learn more about you. It’s not about achieving ROI from a single channel but from the diverse strategy as a whole. The more different ways you put yourself in front of people, the more opportunities you have as a company to attract different types of customers. So think about what you’re already doing and how you could apply that to different channels. Do you have a podcast? Could you share the video on Youtube?
CONCLUSION
You spend a lot of time working with your marketing team to come up with a great top of funnel strategy, and when you find something that works it’s a total relief. But sometimes making a profit on one individual strategy is less important than switching it up a little. And if you’re not trying new, innovative ideas to get people into the funnel, you’re losing out on valuable leads. Try out a few of Kevin’s ideas and let us know what you think!
EDITOR’S NOTE
Here are a few more blog posts on inbound strategy:
Simple, Sane & Successful Inbound Marketing
Why Inbound and Outbound Work Together
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Experience and a lot of testing have shown us that it is possible to create email templates that people actually resonate with.
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