Flipping the Funnel:
an InterNetwork Marketing Perspective
Dear Friend,
Here, I would like to present you the tools that successful
InterNetwork Marketers use to grow their business profitably. But
before I introduce you the toolbox, let me first consider a simple yet amazingly powerful concept: the Marketing Funnel.
A funnel is very wide at the top and narrow at the tip. Not
everything can come out the bottom all at once. And each funnel has
a certain capacity from large to small.
Your marketing funnel works just like a conventional funnel you
use at home - the only difference is what you put inside!
Imagine your target market as what can potentially come in
through the wide end of a funnel and look at all of your marketing
efforts as a journey you take them on through the funnel.
One of the easiest ways to boost your profits is to make it
easier for more prospects to begin a relationship with you. Once
prospects have experienced your expertise and professionalism, they
are more likely to spend money with you. The Marketing Funnel is a
visual representation of opportunities you offer prospects to
view you as familiar and trusted, a “friend” instead of as a
“stranger”. Each level in the funnel represents increased
familiarity, commitment, and trust - and increased profit
opportunities for you. Fear of making a mistake exceeds desire for
change. Fear holds back sales.
The Marketing Funnel is a well known concept in traditional
marketing, now lets looks at what happens when you apply it to the
world of InterNetwork Marketing: imagine two funnels put side by
side with the bottoms next to each other. Do you start to get the
picture?
Seth Godin,
the author of more than seven books that have been bestsellers
around the world, and formerly VP of Direct Marketing at Yahoo! puts
it as follows in his latest book Flipping the Funnel:
- Turn “strangers” into “friends”
- Turn “friends” into “customers”
- And then... do the most important job: Turn your “customers”
into “salespeople”
The math is compelling. Most of the people in the world are not
your customers. They haven’t even heard of you, actually. And while
many of these people are not qualified buyers or aren’t interested
in buying your product, many of them might be - if they only knew
you existed, if they could only be persuaded that your offering is
worth paying for.
But how on earth are you going to get them to know about you? We
live in the most cluttered marketplace in history. You don’t have
enough time or enough advertising budget to get your message to all
the people who need to hear it.
Seth defines “friends” as the prospects you’ve earned permission
to talk with - even though they haven’t turned into “customers” yet.
And your “customers” have been converted from total “strangers” to
interested “friends”, and then all the way to dedicated users of
your product or service.
The essence of Flipping the Funnel is that for most
companies “friends” and “customers” are underused assets… Well, not
in network marketing. And this is perhaps why network marketing is
increasingly more attractive to even Fortune 500 companies with very
large advertising budgets. Simply put, network marketing leverages
the single most powerful form of advertising: word-of-mouth.
It is about flipping the funnel and turning it into a “megaphone”.
How To Set Up The Most Efficient InterNetwork Marketing Funnel:
Your Success Toolbox
Now let’s come back to how “flipping the funnel” works for
InterNetwork Marketing. First let’s take a closer look at your
Success Toolbox and see how it works for the different stages of
your funnel and megaphone:
Step 1: Generate Traffic - Making “strangers” find you
Obviously it all starts with TRAFFIC. While creating traffic is
relatively easy, the real key to your success is to generate
TARGETED traffic. The more targeted your traffic, the more
profitable your InterNetwork Marketing business will be. In the
coming weeks we will discuss several proven and highly targeted
traffic generation methods, but an easy yet extremely powerful way
to jumpstart your business is Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising. PPC
marketing, as it is also know, allows you to quickly create and
direct a flow of high quality prospects into your funnel. A word of
caution though: PPC is paid advertising, and so you don’t waste
either time or money, I highly recommend the following resource that
will get you up to speed in no time and put you ahead of at least
90% of your competition: Perry Marshall’s Definitive Guide to
Google AdWords.
Step 2: Capture Leads - Turning “strangers” into “friends”
As your traffic generating efforts are starting to pay off, you
next challenge is to turn your visitors from “strangers” into
“friends”. You can accomplish this by giving them something of value
(usually an info-product such as an ebook or audio file) and gaining
their permission to continue “talking” to them. This is why defining
this “doorway” into your funnel and getting it right is absolutely
critical. Remember, you only get one chance to make a first
impression, so again you want to use the best tools available out
there. My top choice here goes for this
Lead Capture Page generator.
By the way, there are several terms used here: gateway page,
landing page, squeeze page, splash page or opt-in page, it’s all the same!
To see a good illustration of how it works, go to
www.QinetiQWealth.com.
Step 3: Monetize Your List - Turning “friends” into “customers”,
and “customers” into “salespeople”
Finally - in fact, this is where it all really begins - you need
to nurture the relationship and build trust between you and your new
“friends”. And remember this is a two way process. You are also
allowing these “friends” to self-select themselves so you only
invest time for and focus on building long lasting relationships
with the right ones. This is where your
Autoresponder tool will come to your help. As you don’t have
time to speak individually to each new “friend” you want to be able
to communicate with them in a series of emails. Your autoresponder
allows you to put this process on autopilot. Of course, you invite
them to get in touch with you for any questions – but you don’t ever
need to chase them or cold call them.
You then invite your self qualified friends to consider your
product, service or business opportunity, or whatever else your have
to offer. With internet network marketing, again you have tools to
do the job for you, so your business can work for you 24/7 anywhere
in the world. Your website, and your online demo, video or
presentation, can give the best sales pitch each and every time for
you and your team. If you are part of one of the new generation
network marketing companies like myself, you will most likely have
those tools readily available to you.
As your perfect sales pitch is delivered, some “friends” will
turn into “customers” right away. Most of the time, however, you
will need to follow-up and address their questions before they can
decide. But in any case, as successful internet network marketers
know, the fortune is in the follow-up. Always do your utter
best to have happy and satisfied “customers”, so that they
eventually become your best “salespeople”. Next, make it easy for
them to be your spokespeople by using viral marketing for instance.
If you are in network marketing, remember that your distributors are
your primary “customers”. You will also want to use online training
tools as much as possible to create the maximum leverage for
yourself and the best duplicatable success formula.
I think you get the picture and maybe understand better why
InterNetwork Marketing is bound to be the next big thing!
As a final note, let me summarize below a few specific tools that
I have selected for my own use:
Please let me know if you have any questions or remarks about any
of the above.
To your success and may you achieve your dreams,
Luc Andria
Founder of QinetiQ Network
Creator of The World’s First Internet Network Marketing School
www.QinetiQNetwork.com
www.InternetNetworkMarketingSchool.com
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