Episode 48 – Building Your Digital Funnel

This week, our host Matt pauses to take a beginners look at digital marketing and how to get started with your first digital funnel. From preparation to implementation, he outlines every step you need to take to start finding new clients online. Join us every Monday for more great information on technology, marketing, and design from the Digital Natives.

Planning Your Funnel [1:15]
Preparing Your Content [10:30]
Putting it Into Action [15:15]

Planning Your Funnel

Prior to putting any marketing or sales funnel into action, in the digital or physical space, you need to plan its contents from start to finish. To begin, Matt explains what you should be looking at in the planning phase, where to start, and some helpful tools to expedite the process.

“Typically you have your traditional sales funnel to establish awareness, trust, and eventually a conversation. The digital funnel is very similar but in a different space.” -Matt
“Many of these funnels are built around a lead magnet like a whitepaper or e-book that attracts leads.” -Matt
“Always consider your sales cycle in your traditional marketing when you’re building your digital funnel because they’re usually similar.” -Matt
“Deciding on organic vs. paid promotion usually depends on how well your existing content is.” -Matt
“You can almost always show up first if you spend enough money.” -Matt
“You can funnel hundreds of people to your website with ads but it really comes down to the optimization of that page, will it convert?” -Matt

Resources to Reference: Unbounce Whitepaper – Google Whitepaper

Preparing Your Content

Once you’ve finished planning out your funnel then you get into the bulk of your work, putting together all of your content. In this phase, Matt explores where to start, how to do it, and gives some great examples of existing pieces that you can use as a reference.

“By this point, you should’ve established the route you want to go and you should begin by creating you lead magnet.” -Matt
“If you create your large content piece first, you know the topic that will interest your audience which can help guide how you build your ads or write additional blog posts.” -Matt
“Once you’ve got all of your small pieces put together you can start to look into automation.” -Matt
“After you’ve got everything set up, go through the process that our customer will need to go through to test it.” -Matt
“If your campaign doesn’t look good and attractive to you, it’s not going to look good to your leads.” -Matt

Resources to Reference: Ad Parlor to mock up Ads – SemRush – Answer The Public

Putting it Into Action

After you’ve prepared your content and mapped out your funnel it’s time to put it all into action. While this concept seems simple, it’s a lot more in depth than flipping a switch or saying ‘Go’. To assist with the final steps of your campaign, Matt outlines where you should be watching and the basics of optimizing.

“Before you start your campaigns, you need to start out by doing some benchmarking.” -Matt
“Give yourself specific numbers that you’re going to be shooting for with your campaigns.” -Matt
“Organize you campaign goals on an Excel document or a Google Sheet and check against that constantly.” -Matt
“Run three ad sets with three ads each. With 9 ads total, you can do a lot of different A/B testing and simply disable ads to re-allocate budgets.” -Host Name
“If you aren’t reaching your goals, change something to reach those numbers you’re aiming for.” -Matt

For more information, download "Online Lead Generation, The Three Part Process" here!

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