Have you ever experienced the pain of launching a new sales funnel, only to have it not produce sales or leads? If the answer is yes, I know exactly how you feel. And the good news is, I also have the right tools that will help you address the problem. My name is Sunni, I am an experienced coach at Online Sales Funnel Academy and I want you to know that you are not alone – our community is familiar with these type of issues.

Let’s say you’re in your 14-day trial and you build your first funnel. It is a very exciting moment to present a product or service in which one believes. After investing time in building the first Facebook ad, the next step is to invest money into promoting it, maybe 20, 30 or 40 dollars. And then you wait for the results, but what if nothing happens? What if the results are not the ones expected? I can tell from experience that disappointment can be strong. So let’s see first how to deal with that situation from the emotional point of view, and then we’ll get into the details of the technical side of it.

THE RIGHT MINDSET WHEN YOUR SALES FUNNEL DOESN’T WORK

Owning and running a business is a path full of ups and downs. That is why all business owners must be aware of the importance of being in the correct state of mind at every point of such path, especially the downs. It is perfectly normal to get upset when your metrics are not meeting your expectations and your funnel doesn’t perform. I have seen that happening many times. But believe me, you don’t want to get stuck with those negative emotions. Remember that it’s hardly ever an all-or-nothing situation. So your first thought might be along the lines of “everything’s riding on this one ad with this one funnel”, but that kind of mindset pretty much guarantees that it won’t be successful.

Russell Brunson says: “You’re either targeting the wrong audience or you have the wrong message”.

My experience tells me that when funnels don’t perform, they either flopped completely or it was a mismatch. And it’s not just my own experience talking. Russell Brunson, an American entrepreneur and digital expert, says that most likely you are either targetting the wrong audience or you are sending the wrong message. This means that there’s a good chance you selected, in a literal way, the wrong audience on Facebook or Youtube; or you have the wrong message in your ad. Knowing this, next time you see yourself in that situation, try to look at it with the following perspective: there’s a chance that it might fail, but there’s also a really good chance that it might succeed. Now let’s see what you can do to ensure your success rate increases.

THE RIGHT STRATEGY FOR SUCCESSFUL SALES FUNNELS

The main objective of any sales funnel is to generate quality leads. This means that people who are part of your audience will see your ad, will be interested in the information contained in such ad, and will eventually be redirected to your landing page where they can make a purchase. The place where the first contact with your business takes place is usually a large social media platform such as Facebook, Instagram or Youtube. This means that among millions of active users you have to make sure that your ad is seen by those who are potentially interested in what you’re selling, and then properly communicate them what it is that you’re selling. Again, we go back to Russell Brunson’s advice, but this time let’s read it as a positive statement: “target the right audience and communicate the right message”. Let’s get into it step by step.

There are plenty of strategies to target the right audience, almost as many as marketers. But the core idea is always the same. As the name suggests, targeting an audience means selecting the most relevant prospects based on interests, demographics, or any other suitable factor. The selection process is unique for every product or service that you’re trying to advertise. Once you go through it, you’ll want to make sure your ad connects with them in a way that they can see a clear solution to a problem they’re experiencing or a product/ service that matches their interests. Finally, they’ll click on the ad and arrive at the landing page. There each of them will decide if they want to make the purchase or not, and that decision is highly influenced by the content of your page. We’ve been talking about three main ideas, and to make it easier, we can turn them into checkboxes. In that way, whenever we’re dealing with a sales funnel that is not performing the way we were expecting it to, we can go through the checkboxes to see where the issue is.

* Am I targeting the right audience?
* Does my ad communicate the right message in the right way?
* Is my landing page attractive, informative, and easy to go through?

Let’s see how this whole process goes with an example. Imagine we have a business selling dog toys. In order to answer “Yes” to the first question, we’ll need to make sure our ad is being seen by dog owners. Other criteria could be the geographical location if the product is being sold locally, and so on until we get as specific as possible. Next, we want to make sure the ad is attractive. One largely used strategy to ensure this is to split the budget and launch several ads. This will allow us to measure afterward which ones performed better, so we’ll have some great guidelines to understand what type of content our audience is most interested in. Finally, is time to evaluate how the landing page is performing. If you’re getting a bunch of traffic over and then people aren’t taking action, that’s where the problem is.

At this point, it’s pretty obvious that all steps are crucial, but to what extent? According to the marketing specialist Dr Duggan-Herd [https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2019/04/15/audience-targeting] , a marketing campaign that focuses on quality content (aka right messages stated in the right way) and has an optimal audience targeting strategy can experience an increase of its organic traffic of up to 744% in one year. Yes, you read that number correctly. But one important thought to keep in mind is that in order to reach excellent performance, one learns from failures. Stay in the saddle and don’t give up – that’s the most important thing.

You just experienced the tip of the iceberg of what an online sales funnel coaching session looks like. As you can see, being successful in business starts with selling quality, but it goes way beyond that. Implementing the correct marketing strategy can multiply the revenue, but it is equally important to manage our emotions and expectations while doing it. Of course, it is easier said than done, so if you’d like to be guided during the whole process, make sure you follow us on the main social media platforms listed below and don’t hesitate to reach out and ask any questions you have.   Best of luck with your campaigns!