Company name: I Will Teach You a Language – www.iwillteachyoualanguage.com
Location: – United Kingdom
Industry: Online Language Courses
Product purchased:  Relationship Funnel Accelerator
Rating: 5

Results Achieved

Olly Richards turned his language blog into a successful business selling language courses but was having a hard time increasing the lifetime value of his customers. He signed up for Wild Audience’s Relationship Funnel Accelerator to grow his backend funnel and turn his customers into repeat buyers.

Through RF Accelerator Olly achieved:

• A 25% increase in revenue
• A 30% increase in segmented leads.
• 3x increase in overall sales
• A process for tracking and understanding his analytics
• A Facebook Ad retargeting structure toto improve front-end conversion
• Systems that can be replicated with every new product they release

Who are you, and what do you sell?

Olly Richards is the founder of I Will Teach You a Language, a blog turned course provider aimed at helping people learn languages at different levels.

What started as a blog in 2013 has turned into a substantial following and customer base.

How did you find out about Wild Audience and what made you jump on board?

After hearing Bastian on a podcast, Olly resonated with Wild Audience’s Respect-Based Marketing strategies. It was similar to what he was already doing with IWTYAL but he knew Wild Audience could help them elevate their current strategy.

“Once a business gets to a certain level, you can’t work with generic advice anymore. I knew Wild Audience would understand the particular nature of my business and could look under the hood and make sense of the numbers.”

– Olly

What was the main problem you wanted to solve for your business?

Olly never had a problem attracting an audience and generating traffic to his website. He actually had more traffic than he knew what to do with.

The main problem he wanted to solve was to increase his customer’s lifetime value.

He had a lot of products that were selling rapidly, but he didn’t fully understand what the value ladder looked like. In other words, he wasn’t sure how best to offer his other products to existing customers (frequency, method etc).

Why did you want to solve it?

Olly recognized that the way we deliver our message to our audience was the same way he wanted to deliver his message to his own following.

He knew that businesses are grown on the backend, by using Relationship Funnels and Respect-Based Marketing tactics to retain customers and turn them into repeat buyers.

If you’re not familiar with Respect-Based Marketing, here’s a graphic describing how it works.

He also knew that constantly launching products to new audiences was unsustainable. He had never been able to offer a series of products on the backend.

What was it about Wild Audience that made you resonate with us and think that this looks like a good opportunity?

Olly was a huge fan of André Chaperon and had already used his methods to spruce up his email copy. And he got tremendous results from it. His emails open rates were 70-80% and click-throughs averaged at 10-20%.

So he didn’t need any convincing on the power of storytelling and Respect-Based Marketing.

That’s what drove him to invest more in learning how to create engaging, valuable content rather than using in-your-face scarcity tactics.

For Olly, RF Accelerator picked up where André left off. He needed to learn how to implement the more technical aspects of these strategies and incorporate them into email campaigns and funnels.

It followed the same respectful ethos that he had learned from André. RF Accelerator incorporated a more technical framework to help him reach the next level of his business.

What results did you achieve with RF?

During RF Accelerator, Olly saw a 30% increase in segmented leads by changing the opt-in process to ask subscribers for segmentation information at the point of signup.

Previously, subscribers needed to check their email after opting-in and take a quiz which would place them into the right email sequence.

Olly worked with the Wild Audience team to put proper tracking and analytics in place so that they could analyze traffic line by line. This allowed them to identify that nearly 50% of the leads were being lost in this opt-in process.

They also implemented a new retargeting sequence which led to a 3x increase in sales. Now everything they’re running on Facebook is more efficient and more profitable.

What exactly changed for you and your business?

Our team helped Olly look at every single thing they were doing in their marketing strategy in extreme detail.

This allowed him to pick up on where things were and weren’t working. It was information he had suspicions about before, but never had the hard data to prove it.

Now, for every new course or product they launch, IWTYAL can use this information to build out a process with a proven record of success.

As they grow, these systems will help them scale quicker and more efficiently.

How much revenue did you make before? How much revenue do you do now?

After optimizing their Facebook retargeting, and implementing frontend segmentation on their website, Olly saw a 25% bump in revenue.

And that was only from optimizing one of their courses. Olly can now apply this same strategy on the rest of the courses they offer and knows it will exponentially increase sales across his entire site.

What is your ROI now? What was your ROI before?

Olly saw a 30% increase in segmented leads after adjusting his opt-in strategy, which effectively made the leads more valuable.

Additionally, the processes that were put in place during RF Accelerator will work for them exponentially in the future. As IWTYAL continues to scale, their ROI on RF Accelerator will continue to grow for years to come.

Can you walk us through your Relationship Funnel

• IWTYAL generates leads through Facebook Ads and organic traffic to their website and blog.
• When users land on a blog post, they are asked to opt-in to a language guide by choosing the language they want to learn and at which level (beginner, intermediate or advanced).
• Users are then automatically segmented into one of 36 email sequences that nurture the relationship.
• At the end of the nurture sequence, subscribers are offered various courses related to the language they want to learn and their skill level.

Here’s a diagram detailing what a Relationship Funnel looks like.

How does the future look for your business? Where would you like to be in 3 years from now with RF?

For Olly, the most significant takeaway from RF Accelerator, (even bigger than the increase in revenue and lead retention) was the systems they were able to put in place.

He knows that these systems can now be replicated at scale whenever they launch a new product in the future.

For Olly being apart of RF Accelerator was about shifting his mindset to re-prioritize and optimize the fundamentals of his business.

Who should invest into RF Accelerator?

RF Accelerator breaks down all of the fundamentals any business owner needs to grow their business. That includes identifying your audience, values, and customer avatar and incorporating Respect-Based Marketing into your copywriting and sequencing.

These might seem like beginner lessons for new business. However, a lot of seasoned business owners skip these crucial steps at establishing a true relationship with their customers.

Olly believes that if you don’t take the time to learn the basics, you’re never going to connect with your customers the way that you need to make them sustainable long term.

The ideal candidate for the 90-day RF Accelerator program should already have a successful product or service that delivers proven results. They have created successful client case studies but are still struggling to acquire customers and increase profits at scale.

The ideal customer has a desire to grow to 7-figures or beyond and is willing to take concrete action and implement the systems outlined in the program.

RF Accelerator can help with the following:

• Solving your customer acquisition problem
• Systemizing customer acquisition at profit and scale
• Attracting the right leads that will actually convert into customers
• Increasing conversion rates
• Lowering lead acquisition & customer acquisition costs
• Gaining clarity & transparency over how much it costs to acquire leads, book sales calls and demos, and how much it costs to acquire customers
• Providing a more personalized sales experience and customer journey by using advanced automation techniques
• Systemizing all marketing & sales processes to scale to 7-figures and beyond

Why would you recommend RF to other people?

Every business owner has blind spots. Things that they put off as being unimportant and that they will deal with later. If you want to grow, then at some point you need a second set of eyes to look at your numbers and give you a fresh perspective on details you were overlooking.

What type of results will a new client achieve if they follow the process and work hard?

RF Accelerator clients will receive guidance in figuring out the backend of their funnel. They will learn how to efficiently capture and segment leads, and use this information to create proper retargeting campaigns.

In addition to the technical steps, RF Accelerator will put in perspective the mindset needed to systemize your business in order to replicate it to scale in the future.

You will create an evergreen funnel that can be replicated across everything you do in your business.

Here are just a few of the incredible results our clients achieved through RF Accelerator:

That could be you.

Click here to learn more about RF Accelerator, and to find out if you are a fit.

You know you do good work and you stand behind your business.

So why does your sales calendar look like this?

Where are the calls? Where are all of the people who want to work with you.

You know they’re out there. But without an automated process in place, you’re left trying to book sales calls along with everything else it takes to run a business.

You desperately want to solve customer acquisition at profit and scale but your time is tied up actually running your business.

You keep putting it off and your business has plateaued.

So you’re left feeling stuck.

Sounds about right?

Getting this system in place doesn’t have to be overwhelming.

But putting it off longer will only put you further behind. Or even worse, cause your growth to stagnate.

Ok, now let’s fast forward 90 days.

Close your eyes and picture this.

Your calendar is no longer empty. Instead, it looks something like this:

Your leads are signing up for sales calls like wildfire. You can barely keep up!

You get endless notifications, not from Facebook, or your mom.

But from clients paying you money.

Sometimes even while you sleep. Who doesn’t want to wake up to money?

Your conversion rate is the highest it’s been and so is your ROI.

To make this happen you need to get good at building systems and SOPs to do tasks at scale.  

Most founders don’t experience this feeling for a number of reasons.

It usually comes down to either a strategic problem or a marketing problem.

• You don’t have a proven offer.
• You don’t know your client avatar well enough.
• Your business just doesn’t have the systems in place to grow at profit and scale.
• Your time is spent creating arbitrary blog posts or videos instead of comprehensive client success case studies.

Let’s change that.

By the end of this article, you’ll:

• Know how a Relationship Funnel and Respect-Based Marketing tactics can grow your business at profit and scale.
• Have an overview of our RF Accelerator and how it will work for you.
• Understand the investment required to join.
• See real results that clients have achieved using our methods.
• Realize that the cost of inaction is far greater than your initial investment.

You need support implementing a scalable funnel strategy that will fill your calendar with sales calls and build a real relationship with your audience.

Ok, let’s get right into it.

What Is RF Accelerator?

To understand what we’re offering with RF Accelerator, we need to zoom out and take a look at how our Relationship Funnel works.

Relationship Funnel is all about acquiring customers at profit and scale.

The screenshot below is a high-level overview of what a Relationship Funnel looks like.

That is the core of everything we do.

In order to grow, you need to systematize your customer acquisition process.

This is where Relationship Funnel comes in.

Systemized customer acquisition at profit and scale is best done through Relationship Funnels and Respect-Based Marketing.

Before your customers believe in your product, you need to build trust and gain their respect.

When you’re selling high-ticket items and services, it’s crucial that your customers resonate with you on a deeper level. Which means you need to dig deeper to identify the value that will impact them the most.

We do this with Respect-Based Marketing.

What Is Respect-Based Marketing And Why Is It Beneficial?

Relationship Funnels are like sales funnels on steroids. It’s how you build relationships and install buying beliefs with your audience before selling to them.

These funnels are powered by Respect-Based Marketing.

Respect-Based Marketing is our approach to install buying beliefs within our audience by bonding on a deep emotional level to move their minds, hearts, and wallets.

And guess what? It works.

For years, we’ve used this system ourselves and taught it to other business owners who are ready to put systems in place to grow their business.

See?

They let you remove yourself from the process as they run on autopilot.

Now let’s talk about RF Accelerator.

RF Accelerator is a 90 Day Program to automate your processes and put your business in a position to acquire customers at profit and scale.

It’s a done-with-you consulting service to support you and hold you accountable. It will give you the necessary templates, scripts, strategies and support to set you up for success.

RF Accelerator will force you to stop stalling and take action that will make a massive impact on the future of your business.

When you join RF Accelerator, this is what you’ll get:

• Access to RF Accelerator Training Program (3 months project plan to successfully setup your RF and get your first sales calls scheduled)
• ActiveCampaign Automation Templates, Landing Page Templates, Email Copy Templates, Scripts for ads, copy for ad copy and Phone Scripts
• 3 Group Coaching Calls per week (Strategy / Technical / Optimization)

Every week, you’ll dive deeper into Relationship Funnel, and follow a no-surprises schedule. You’ll know exactly what’s coming next and how far along in the process you are.

Here’s a glance at the week-by-week roadmap.

Since RF Accelerator is a done-with-you program, you’re not dependent on an agency who vaguely understands your goals and mission.

And you’re never left in the dark wondering what the hell the agency is even working on right now.

You also don’t have to worry about feeling confused and frustrated by trying to implement all of the steps yourself.

You’ll be part of a private community that will hold you accountable, call you out, and push you to implement your new and improved sales funnel. We are in this together. That means if you have any questions throughout the process, or during implementation, we are on your side and here to help.

Weekly group calls will guide you through the process of building a profitable Relationship Funnel and you’ll be able to ask a million questions along the way.

Who Is RF Accelerator For?

Our RF Accelerator Clients are high-ticket businesses that want to grow from 6 to 7-figures. They have case studies that prove they helped their clients get results.

To us, having a ‘high-ticket business’ means that you have an average customer lifetime value of at least 2,000€ ($). In other words, each customer pays you at least 2,000€ ($) each year.

Find out if RF Accelerator is right for you by taking this questionnaire.

A few other things they have in common:

• They’ve put together an email newsletter. Usually not a very good one (that changes quickly after working with us), but a newsletter nonetheless.
• They are founders who are still doing a lot of the day-to-day work like writing blog posts, scheduling sales calls, and managing other marketing tasks.
• They are from all backgrounds and include a range of tech-experts and creatives.

Don’t’ worry about being non-technical or marketing-averse.

We speak your language. Literally. Not only does our team interact with clients in English, Spanish, and German, but we relate and speak to the pain points of your business.

We break down the steps in terms that you understand, without the vague marketing jargon.

Now for the reason you’re reading this article.

How Much Does RF Accelerator Cost?

To get started with RF Accelerator, you’re going to make an investment of  €10,500 ($12,000) for a 90-day “done-with-you” service. At the end of the program, you’ll have implemented an evergreen Relationship Funnel.

We offer a couple of different payment options to split up the payments.

Now you probably want to know if the money you spend will be worth it to you.

You only need to close 1-5 deals to break even. If you go through the steps we lay out to achieve the results we promise, this turns into the cheapest investment you will ever make.

Just look at what Mirna achieved in her second month of RF Accelerator.

Since working with us, Niklas is buying sales sales calls for around 300 Euros at a 7% conversion rate.

It seems like a steep investment on paper, but let’s break down the lifetime benefits you’ll reap from being on board.

Is RF Accelerator worth the Investment?

There are so many programs out there promising vague results like growth.

Here is exactly what you will get from your investment in RF Accelerator.

Here’s a closer look at what your business can look like 90 days from now.

A perfect implementation of Relationship Funnel means hitting these KPIs.

• Increased Number of scheduled sales calls
• Increased Revenue
• Increased ROI
• More leads are signing up for sales calls
• Leads are high-quality and exactly who you’re looking for
• Your CPA will go down

Just look at how Niklas turned his leads into scheduled sales calls

You Will Have Automated Systems In Place

On completion of the 90-day program you will have the following systems in place:

• Long-Term Marketing & Funnel Strategy
• Smart & Behaviour-Based Marketing & Funnel Automation
• PPC Lead Generation Systems
• Lead Quality & Engagement Systems
• Automated Sales Systems​
• Advanced ROI-Tracking​

The implementation of this automated Relationship Funnel and systems will remove yourself from the process and give you more time to focus on growing your business.

Instead of just telling you it’s a good investment. Let’s take a look at some real-life examples of how implementing our Respect-Based Marketing strategies have changed people’s businesses and lives.  

RF Accelerator Roadmap Will Fast Track Business Growth

It might be difficult to picture exactly what your business will look like at the end of RF Accelerator, so let’s break it down.

RF Accelerator roadmap will fast-track your business in these 4 ways.

1. Funnel Strategy

• You will build a strategy and foundation that include a detailed customer avatar, positioning, offer strategy, belief mapping, bucketing and segmentation, and funnel flow.

2. Funnel Implementation

• Implementing your funnel will include building a lead magnet, setting up automations, funnel pages, an RBS email sequence and a conversion sequence.
• You will also have a VSL (Virtual Sales Letter) and solid closing process in place ready to go when your funnel launches.
• Then your funnel will actually go live!

3. Funnel Optimization

• You’ll learn how to effectively monitor funnel performance and make adjustments along the way to create a retargeting funnel.
• This process is all about finding the winning funnel. The first version of your funnel is usually not the most profitable, and that’s normal! That’s why it’s on us to collect data, analyze the findings and fix what isn’t working.
• At the end of the first month, we should have a winning Relationship Funnel so that by the third month, we can really start to scale.

4. Funnel Scaling

• Once all of the pieces are in place, you are ready to scale your funnel! This means Introducing an evergreen newsletter and creating a traffic framework.
• You’ll have the framework for creating a PPC lead gen system for cold acquisition & retargeting.

What is the cost of inaction?

How long do you think it would take you to figure out how to implement a funnel like this on your own?

Based on past experience, we estimate probably around 1000-2000 hours.

Assuming you pay yourself $50 an hour (this is a conservative estimate of course ..) That’s easily between $50 – $100k worth of your time [$50/hr x 1000 hours].

Can you afford to spend thousands of dollars and man-hours working on something that you’re not an expert in and that you can’t guarantee results?

Probably not.

You can build these systems yourself or hire freelancers to implement each piece of the puzzle.

But you will still be underestimating the impact of having real experts on your side. We want you to win, whereas others are just there to get the job done.

You will still have to put in the work.

But with your expertise and feedback at your fingertips, the process becomes simplified. We’ve worked with enough clients to know exactly what works and only give you the strategies that we’ve found successful.

Don’t underestimate the time and knowledge it takes to build a funnel that actually works.

One that makes your audience yearn for more.

So the cost of inaction is simple.

You can work with us now, for a tiny fraction of that time and cost. OR try and do it yourself, get frustrated, spend too much time and money trying to figure it out. And then work with us later.

The only difference is that when you put it off, you will already be behind everyone else who invested in themselves and their businesses in prioritizing growth at profit and scale.

This is what we do. We have templates in place that will generate long-term ROI for your business over 6-12 months and years beyond.

Let’s do some math, shall we?

If your product costs 10k then you only need to close 1-2 clients and you break even on your RF Accelerator investment.

Some of the people we work within RF Accelerator are closing double that within the first few months of implementing their new funnel. Depending on the length of your sales cycle, you could have calls booked by the end of the second month, and actually close sales by the third month of RF Accelerator.

Let’s use John as an example.

John currently receives 10 leads per day and has a 0.5% conversion rate. His average order value is $2000, so his projected revenue is $36,500 per year.

After implementing Relationship Funnel we guarantee that his conversion rate will increase to at least 1.25%. That’s $91,250.00 in revenue.

And that’s us being modest. Many of our clients get conversion rates as high as 2.20% which would mean a revenue of $160,600.00!

Without RF Accelerator, you’re missing out on as much as $124,100 every year.

Think about the entire life of your business. What you invest in RF Accelerator now, is a grain of sand compared to the lifetime value your new funnel will continue to generate.

We are building a long-term system that generates steady, sustainable growth.

Need more proof? See how we used Relationship Funnel to help Justin from Superhero increase his conversion rates by 6x.

We can keep going. John and Landon made $20k in sales after tweaking their offer and tailoring it to better serve their customers.

And they’re not the only ones.  

In Summary

Your one-time investment in RF Accelerator will continue to work for you way after the program is over.

It’s not about miraculous growth quick fixes. It’s about building a relationship with your audience and installing buying beliefs so that you can close higher sales than you ever thought possible.

And we have the client success case studies and hundreds of customer testimonials to back this up.

You’re putting systems in place that will benefit the future of your company.

Wild Audience is trusted by hundreds of clients who are already implementing Respect-Based Marketing and Relationship Funnels into their businesses.

Your favorite influencers like Todd Herman, Bryan Harris, Ryan Deiss and more all know about Respect-Based Marketing and the massive value it adds to their customers and their brand.

Now, it’s time to find out if RF Accelerator is right for you by taking this questionnaire.  

Here’s the deal. If you don’t buy now, that is completely your choice.

But 9 months from now, your business will be in the same place as it is now. Nothing will change for you unless you take a leap of faith.

If you start today, your business will look radically different in 90 days and will only keep getting better.

Introduction

Do you want to make 2019 a year to remember?

To finally climb from your healthy six-figure business to a seven-figure powerhouse?

To walk into 2020 thinking, “We absolutely killed it this year.”

I hope so 🙂

That’s what we’re planning on at Wild Audience, and I’ll let you in on a secret.

The way that can happen for you is through a content marketing strategy template.

2019 is the year of content.

The marketing world knows it.

Everything is pointing toward it.

Here’s how we think about it:

Smart content + effective distribution + Respect-Based Marketing funnels = more qualified leads.

And more qualified leads means higher ROI and more profits for your business.

It’s easy to understand… a little harder to execute 🙂

But that’s exactly why there’s more opportunity than ever.

If you can master the art of intelligent, relationship-building content..

Well… you win 🙂

The stats speak for themselves:

One in ten blog posts are compounding, meaning organic search increases their traffic over time. (HubSpot)

84 percent of millennials don’t trust advertising and sales messages.

Compounding blog posts make up 10% of all blog posts and generate 38% of overall traffic. (HubSpot)

47% of buyers viewed 3-5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep. (Demand Gen Report)

55% of business professionals say a great story captures their focus and keeps them engaged with content. (Prezi)

96% of B2B buyers want content with more input from industry thought leaders. (Demand Gen Report)

Sources: https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics) & CMI.

It’s promising, yeah?

But the power of content marketing goes beyond lead generation.

Great content yields a great audience.

And do you know what a good audience is?

Loyal.

They trust you.

They trust your voice, and they will help you create better products for them.

It’s reciprocity at its finest 🙂

This is how Wild Audience started. How Nathan Barry started. How Rand Fishkin grew a multi-million dollar business.

With trust. With education. With content 🙂

I built WA off of content, but in 2018 I really stepped up my game, and the ROI has been amazing.

It’s how we’ve been able to trade ideas with the best marketing minds in the world — people & companies like Todd Brown, Todd Herman, HubSpot, ActiveCampaign and Rand Fishkin.

We make podcasts, turn them into amazing articles, create accompanying videos, and help successful business owners like you build incredible sales funnels every day.

You’re reading a piece of this strategy right now — this article stems from an amazing conversation we had with Rand Fishkin of Moz & SparkToro fame.

He built Moz and Sparktoro through content, and we’re going to cover exactly how he did that in a bit.

Anyway.

Here’s what you can expect from this article:

1. What is content marketing?
2. Why Content Marketing is the lead generation silver bullet
3. How content marketing made Rand Fishkin the SEO king.
4. The 2019 Content Marketing Strategy Template: How to build a future-proof business
5. Your next steps for an amazing 2019

Heads up: We think it’s worth demonstrating these tactics through Rand’s story, but the most actionable part of this article (The 2019 Content Marketing Strategy Template: How to build a future-proof business) where we walk through WA’s content machine is toward the bottom.

You jump directly there by clicking here.

Ready to discover the lead generation silver bullet?

Let’s roll.

What is Content Marketing?

Quote by CMI

Some people say if light touches it, it’s content 🙂

That’s a bit much, but the point is that content can be anything that you use to drive customer action.

These pieces of content are also usually what we call “inbound” content. Or content that isn’t strictly interruptive (commercials etc.)

Things like..

• Blog posts
• Podcasts
• Lead magnets
• Interviews
• Virtual summits
• Emails
• Ads*
• Social media
• Event marketing
• Experiential marketing
• Radio
• TV

*Digital ads have a wide variety of uses outside of strict interruptive advertising. E.g. they can be used to retarget and amplify existing content.*

Chances are, you’re already doing some of this in your business. There’s no end to your options as a business owner, but whatever you do, you need to make sure it’s good.

What makes good content?

That answer changes for every business. No matter what industry or what audience, each business-to-audience fit is unique, and your content should speak to that 🙂

With that in mind, good (and by good we mean sustainable content that reliably converts) content:

• Is specific to an audience.
• Is relevant
• Tells a story/builds a narrative
• Builds trust
• Establishes authority
• Has an original angle or perspective
• Spurs action

“Before you ever create content, ask yourself, ‘who will help amplify this, and why?’ If you don’t have a great, specific answer to that question, reconsider whether you should create it at all. Content that doesn’t earn links, shares, email forwards, word-of-mouth, press, etc. probably won’t stand out, won’t rank, and won’t be worth your energy to build.” – Rand Fishkin via Forbes

And that space between average content and great content is where your success in 2018 lies.

Here’s my bit of advice on this:

Do not rush or underestimate the time it takes to create good content.

It’s different for everyone, but whatever it takes to put out genuinely interesting and compelling content, pursue that — regardless of how frequency may suffer. Even if you have to start slow, putting out quality content will always be a differentiator worth investing in.

And then over time, you can start to build up what we call the content growth machine.

This your team and process. How you can reliably and consistently put out content your audience will respond to.

If you already have a system in place but aren’t getting the results you want, I guarantee it’s the existing system that’s incorrect — not content marketing itself.

Why Content Marketing is the Lead Generation Silver Bullet

Content Marketing is one of the best ways to grow a sustainable audience (and therefore business)

There’s no wrong way to grow or start a business, but there are smarter ways 🙂  

Content marketing is a fantastic method to invest in. By writing and producing content that speaks to your audience, you can begin to gain an audience and install important beliefs.

If people trust you, are entertained by your company, and look to your content for a type of interaction on a consistent basis — and your product is related to that content, then you’ll succeed.

Here’s the thing, though.

Content marketing is not a quick-win scenario.

It takes time, dedication, and effort.

Via Marketing Land

This graph by Marketing Land does a nice job of summing it up.

Content marketing is an exponential curve. It takes time to stoke the fire. You have to lay branch after branch and strike flint after flint before it catches. But once it does, you’ll find yourself in a rapidly growing business 🙂

Notice how the investment required starts high and climbs up and through the slog. You may find yourself a bit down 6 months in. Maybe you’re only getting a few downloads or reads for the enormous effort you’re putting in.

Under no circumstances should you give up then 🙂

That’s when most people do.

“Don’t assume SEO works right away. It’s the total opposite of advertising. It requires a large, upfront investment of creativity, technical investments, and elbow grease, and the returns will initially be small or nonexistent. It’s only after months or years that SEO begins producing great value, but when it does, it can dwarf the ROI you get from paid investments. The high upfront costs and challenges are what keep the field thin enough to make standing out a true competitive advantage.” – Rand Fishkin via Forbes

The more content you put out, the better at creating content you’ll be. And the better you get and the more content you put out, the more you will be rewarded from an SEO and audience perspective.

And here’s the thing. There is so much to do while you’re creating content and fighting through the slog — that’s also when you’ll be improving or building your product and designing a Relationship Funnel or other sales funnels.

A.k.a. Your conversion strategy.

A typical content-marketing funnel typically falls into segments like these:

Top of the Funnel (Reaches new people)

Blogs, podcasts, interviews, conferences, etc.

Middle of the Funnel (captures email)

MOFU blogs, how-to guides, lead magnets, downloadable PDFs.

Bottom of the Funnel (leads toward sale)

Case studies, blogs on company culture and unique mechanisms, explanations of process, etc.

We’ll cover more on funnel segments (TOFU, MOFU, BOFU) later on.

Content creates authority and builds trust

The secret of a successful content marketing and funnel strategy is the installation of key beliefs.

Beliefs about your company, product, value, etc. all play into a lead’s decision to pull out their credit card.

They need to believe you know what you’re talking about — this is the belief of expertise or authority.

And they need to trust that you are charging fairly, will deliver the product appropriately, and are generally trustworthy.

There are many more beliefs than authority and trust, but content is a fantastic medium for installing these two crucial beliefs.

Content — especially blogs and podcasts, demonstrate expertise through “performance”.

Words let readers inside the writer’s head.

And reading lets the writer get inside your head 🙂

If you read an article or blog and are impressed by the thought process and expertise displayed in the article, you start to believe that the author knows what they’re talking about.

This is how content builds authority.

Trust is a bit more nebulous. Trust may be developed by consistency. If each and every piece of content you interact with is impressive and interesting, then you know a business isn’t a one-shot nobody.

And if the overall branding, style, and community resonates with you, this also plays into the trust.

Make sure you’re thinking about these beliefs when writing content, and you can learn more about belief installations here.

Content takes on a life of its own.

One of my favorite aspects of good content is how it will crop up and reach people you don’t expect.

For example, our Todd Herman article was recently used by Ryan Deiss of DM fame during a high-profile client conference.

He used our content as an example of what investing in content should look like.

And those same methods that got us there is what we’re discussing here. Everything you read here you can take and use for yourself.

The best content is reusable for years to come

One awesome thing about content is its ability to be redistributed and used in different mediums and portions of your funnel.

One blog can be used as the inspiration for a podcast, Facebook video, and Instagram posts. You could create a downloadable version and use that as a lead magnet.

You could use that blog as an ad to attract new subscribers.

You could take a portion of that and use it as an email hook in a marketing automation sequence — using it to both attract new customers through organic traffic and engage with existing subscribers.

And if you have a great piece that you’d like to still use but is getting outdated, then an update is all you need to doctor up an aging piece.

There’s really no limit here.

Why you should invest in Content Marketing alongside PPC

Content marketing drives consistent traffic and conversions without the hard costs of advertising.

And articles with proper keyword research can continue to serve you for years to come.

They can become evergreen 🙂

Think about that in terms of how much you spend on paid advertising.

If you are spending $2 per click on “vegetarian recipes”, then you’d spend $1,000 getting 500 people to your site.

But… if you spent that same $1,000 on a really great, comprehensive article on your favorite vegetarian recipes, it could potentially bring thousands of visits per month for free. If you even got 1,000 people to your site over 3 months it would be more than worth it.

And what if it really took off — attracting over 1,000 visitors a month. This would cost you $2k/month to buy minimum.

That’s what is known as the PPC equivalency. It applies to any form of paid advertising in relation to content marketing.

This also isn’t taking into account the probability of a great long-form piece of content ranking for multiple keywords and being used in other marketing capacities (email content, social content, etc.) — even more so reducing your spend.

Now let’s talk about how Rand built Moz into an SEO empire off the back of good content.

How Content Marketing Made Rand Fishkin the SEO King

There are many entrepreneurs/businesses to look at when searching for examples of businesses built with content.

Seth Godin… Neil Patel… Ryan Levesque… Wild Audience 🙂

And one of the most impressive examples of this model is Rand Fishkin.

Rand Fishkin is the co-founder and former CEO of the SEO giant Moz.

Founded alongside Gillian Muessig in 2004 as a consulting firm, the two of them shifted to SEO software development in 2008.

Rand has since left Moz to found SparkToro (more on that later), but the last full year he was there (2017), the company reported revenues of $47.4 million and averages of nearly 3 million website visits per month.

Rand and I recently spent an hour together discussing his story.

And when I tell you that Rand built his company off content, I really mean it.

Moz was a popular blog for 4 years before the launch of their software. And once they launched, they earned $400,000 in 6 months.

What’s the main lesson?

You have to start early 🙂

The worst idea is to wait until your product is finished to start marketing.

You will destroy your odds.

Rand first grew his audience almost entirely through his blog and a weekly medium Moz dubbed “Whiteboard Fridays”.

Every Friday Rand or another member of the Moz team would set up in front a white board and talk about an in interesting lesson, stat, or technique.

They’d post the video along with a transcript and audio version of the talk.

Whiteboard Fridays eventually became the go-to resource on SEO for thousands of marketers and business owners around the world — even saving the once struggling agency early on.

But why?

Why did this work for Rand and didn’t for so many other entrepreneurs working in and around content marketing?

It’s because his content is sharp, encompassing, consistent, and valuable.

All of the boxes of good content we mentioned earlier, he filled 🙂

And he’s using a similar strategy to build his latest venture, SparkToro.

How Rand is using Content Marketing to fuel his next venture, SparkToro.

SparkToro is a “search engine for Audience Intelligence.” It’s not released yet, but Rand is already doing a bunch of work on promoting it (more on that in a second).

SparkToro looks really promising.

Companies can put keywords and audience information into an engine that will pull out a variety of influencers across a variety of channels.

One thing to note:

Sparktoro is not a traditional influencer marketplace, nor does it play favorites.

Instead of focusing on Instagram influencers like many other companies, SparkToro equips entrepreneurs with influencers in less saturated spaces — namely blogs, publications, print magazines, etc.

That doesn’t mean SparkToro is ignoring Instagram, but they are focusing on blogs, podcasts, subreddits, events etc. instead.

The idea is to solve the “discovery” problem. No one likes sourcing influencers for days before a campaign.

And just like Moz, Rand is starting with a variety of content marketing strategies for building his audience.

Here’s everything Rand is doing with SparkToro:

1. He’s using his status as a prominent blogger by letting that audience live on Sparktoro.com through consistent blogs and updates.
2. He’s building free tools that are directly related to his future product.

Trending – It’s like Reddit or Hackernews for tech marketers. Trending counts all the URLs you and the community tweet as votes, so you can see what the web marketing world is talking about today.

SparkScore – Figure out your level of influence by measuring your fake accounts etc.

Fake Followers audit – Fake Followers Audit looks at 25+ factors correlated with spam/bot/low quality accounts to return a percentage of followers that are thought to be fake.

3. He’s using his book release engagements to talk about SparkToro.

You can get Rand’s latest book here.

4. He’s accepting interviews (like this blog!) and other PR/speaking events and plugging his new venture.

By combining these free tools, blogs, speaking events, interviews (like the one that sparked this article), and utilizing his existing Moz/personal brand audience, Rand is already building an audience of buyers before SparkToro is released.

So everything he does points back to his company in some form or fashion, but how does Rand define the success of these efforts? What do you need to be monitoring when building your own business with content?

Here’s how Rand defines content marketing success for SparkToro:

1. Branding and awareness increase is evident.
2. Email list growth
3. Free tools become well known.
4. Baseline level of traffic pretty solid.
5. SparkToro’s existing audience knows what they are building.
6. They develop a list of potential buyers.

Simple and easy, right?

As we mentioned, Rand is launching all of this marketing before the product is finished. This method is known as audience-first, startup second or “minimum viable audience” companies, and it’s one of my favorite topics 🙂

Go here for more on building minimum viable audiences

And here’s how Rand thinks about audience-first businesses.

How Rand Fishkin approaches “audience-first” content marketing

For Rand, it’s all about story.

You need to know the story of the problem you’re solving, and you need to be able to distill that into a solution.

That’s where you start.

Then you need to transform that story into something that is accessible and amplifiable 🙂

Start or improve your content marketing strategy by asking yourself questions like:

How do we build things that are consistently engaging and useful until we have the product? How do we both attract and retain future buyers?

That’s the goal, after all.

You also need to know the type of business you want to build on the onset

For Rand, he’s building SparkToro like a zebra instead of a unicorn.

Unicorns are profit-focused — with few succeeding but those who do almost always disrupt society. These are the Facebooks, Ubers, and AirBnBs of the world.

Zebra companies are alternative, more sustainable business models and can be described as such:

“These alternative models will balance profit and purpose, champion democracy, and put a premium on sharing power and resources. Companies that create a more just and responsible society will hear, help, and heal the customers and communities they serve.” – Sex and Startups

It’s slower growth coupled with more cautious investing that prioritizes social impact and culture above profits.

It’s about launching a profitable business out of the gate and having that same business be a place that is genuinely rewarding to work at while building a better world simultaneously.  

And for that to happen, you need a low-cost CPA, a good pricing model that means your paid costs are low, strong organic marketing, and to know what culture you want from the beginning.

This doesn’t mean unicorns are inherently evil or that you can’t pursue rapid growth, you just need to know what you want from the get go — that mentality will ultimately shape both your personal life and business culture in profound ways.

Even if you’re already running a healthy business, thinking in terms of lean, smart growth via content marketing is a useful exercise.

Now that you’ve seen a bit on how Rand is approaching SparkToro, let’s take a closer look at building a content marketing machine in the context of the business we know best, Wild Audience 🙂

Scaling Content Marketing: How to build a reliable and rapid-growth content machine

When it comes to building future-proof, audience-first businesses, we have a lot of experience at Wild Audience.

It’s how we built this business after all.

In this section, we’re going to open the doors and show you exactly how we run our content machine.

Then, you can take this system content system and apply it to your own business immediately by using our content marketing machine blueprint.

It all started with one blog

When I say you can start a business with one blog, I mean it.

For us, it all came to down to this blog. (actually this article)

That’s it 🙂

But it took a lot more than writing it.

Because that blog was built on months of market research and Facebook group relationships.

I spent hours and hours building up to when I would actually release the blog.

For more on building a “minimum viable audience” business, go here.

When Wild Audience first started, blogging was our main traffic driver. These days… it’s a bit more diverse 🙂

But before we look at our evolved content marketing machine, let’s cover the concepts you’ll need to understand it.

The segmenting theory behind successful content marketing

One of the biggest hang-ups with content marketing is knowing what to create and when.

Do you need more case studies? More awareness blogs? More videos?

Sometimes you can feel confident in most mediums but always feel like you don’t know if you’re creating the right content at the right time.

The easiest solution to this is by fitting your content into 3 main stages.

These three funnel stages are based on a customer’s typical journey — aimed at answering the right questions at the right time.

They are split into three branches:

Top of the Funnel (TOFU)

Buyer Question: What exactly is my problem? What is its nature and scope?

Example: I’m not getting enough revenue. I think that’s because my conversion rates are too low, but I’m not sure.

Middle of the Funnel (MOFU)

Buyer Question: What are the possible solutions for my problem? Which ones are best for my business and why?

Example: Okay. So it is my conversion rates. What’s better to focus on? Building a marketing automation system? Swapping out designs? Split testing? Okay. Right now it looks like creating a marketing automation is my best bet.

Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU)

Buyer Question: Why should I choose your business to provide that solution?

Example: Why is Wild Audience’s Relationship Funnel my best bet for increasing conversion rates? What makes them better than doing it myself or using a different system?

—

Each piece of content you create should be focused into one of these stages. Typically you have a lot more TOFU than MOFU or BOFU, but down the line you may find that your BOFU content isn’t specific enough and needs reworking or that people always go from TOFU to MOFU but never transition into BOFU.

Different types of content lend themselves to different stages. Check out the graph below for some ideas on how marketers fit content where it works best:

And now to Wild Audience’s current marketing machine.

Wild Audience’s 2019 Content Marketing Strategy Template

Copy and swipe anything as you wish 🙂

Step 1: Start with one awesome piece of content

For Wild Audience, it’s interviews.

And we’ve had all sorts of awesome conversations with people like:

• Rand Fishkin (obviously)
• Todd Herman
• Todd Brown
• Buffer CEO Joel Gascoigne
• And many more 🙂

You can hear those conversations here.

I conduct all of those interviews and focus on topics we’re currently trying to rank for via our content marketing machine blueprint.

Also known as a funnel silo, it’s the brains behind our entire operation.

This spreadsheet has all of the topics and keywords we’re trying to rank for, what’s been done, who is assigned what, the competitive articles we need to build, and more.

It’s what keeps us sane 🙂

The spreadsheet is designed around umbrella topics. These “topics” are short-tail, high-traffic keywords identified through keyword research.

So things like sales funnel, marketing automation, or any highly competitive keyword that would be fantastic for us to rank for.

Having structure is what will absolutely make or break you in content marketing. Do not rush into this world without a plan in hand and actual structure to back it up.

You can grab the spreadsheet and watch a video of us explaining exactly how you can take this content marketing strategy template and start using it to grow your lead gen efforts below.

Step 2: Turn that interview into a podcast

Podcasting is a great way to speak directly with your audience and earn enough credibility to attract public speaking gigs and other public opportunities.

We’re not alone in thinking this 🙂

17% of marketers plan to add podcasting to their marketing efforts in the next 12 months. (HubSpot, 2018)

For us, our podcast is a curated version of our interviews.

For example, we interviewed HubSpot’s VP of Sales and talked for an hour on everything sales and sales funnels.

Then we took that and edited it into a podcast to start with.

Now have a strong piece of content to start working with 🙂

Step 3: Match the interview with an umbrella topic and identify multiple blog opportunities.

Once we have our interview, we listen down and try to pick out the biggest lessons and most interesting conversation pieces. Then, we open up our content marketing machine blueprint and see where it fits in.

Our HubSpot one is pretty obvious.

Sales funnel, right?

Boom.

We have our umbrella topic 🙂

Then our team takes a few minutes to think of one long-form (5,000+ words) article on the umbrella topic and as many shorter-form blogs (1,500-3,000+ words) as we can.

The key is to link back to your longer-form piece with your shorter-form pieces. This strategy uses internal linking to boost your SEO and authority around a topic 🙂

Take drip coffee from our content marketing machine blueprint example.

Drip coffee is a short-tail, high traffic keyword. There are tons of blogs on this topic, and it would be great for our fictional drip machine company to rank for this.

Our first step is to create an ultimate guide for making drip coffee. This is a comprehensive, long-form blog that goes into great detail about how to make great drip coffee — mentioning our product as an ancillary piece or potential option.

Then, we split “drip coffee” into a bunch of other blogs ranking for longer-tail keywords that still have drip coffee in them. Things like: “drip coffee machines” or “best drip machine filters” or “drip coffee temperature”.

These give us the opportunity to explore those topics in a bit more depth, link back to our main article, and rank for those longer-tail keywords.

And sometimes these interviews point us in new keyword directions as well — always be keeping an eye out for new keyword opportunities.

Step 4: We write!

Armed with our blog topics, we write our long-form piece first. This often takes a lot of research and time, but the idea is to create something above and beyond anything else that is out there.

We’re going to be using this piece a lot, so the trick is to do whatever it takes to make it a really strong piece 🙂

So we write, write, and write until…

Huzzah!

We have a finished product.

Our blogs reference both our videos and podcasts (which you may have noticed in this one).

Notice how everything ties into each other but also offers different ways and avenues for exploring a topic?

That’s content distribution at work 🙂

Step 4: We hook everything up to our Relationship Funnel.

After we finish writing, we take the blogs, interview, videos, etc. and hook it all up to our Relationship Funnel.

The screenshot above is high-level overview of what a Relationship Funnel consists of.

We use emails, ActiveCampaign automations (you can get our automations here), lead scoring, Facebook messenger, multi-channel retargeting on social platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Youtube) and more to develop real relationships with prospects and earn their trust before asking for a sale.

Including individual emails like this one 🙂

Relationship Funnels are smart automation systems that regularly convert >$100 products at 6% or more.

If you’re looking for ways to grow from six figures to seven figures, just imagine what even a 1% higher conversion rate would do to your monthly revenue.

I recorded a video all about building your own Relationship Funnel, and you can find it down below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRyHx7R0YkA

Step 5: Adding fuel to the fire with Retargeting and PPC

Once we have everything prepped and / the Relationship Funnel is ready, we set up the final step — the retargeting and PPC campaigns that will really set things in motion.

PPC can be an incredibly powerful tool when used wisely.

But using it wisely is the catch 🙂

There are two types of advertising we always use in our content marketing 🙂

Retargeting and PPC.

Let’s talk retargeting first.

Retargeting increases engagement and pulls people through your funnel

Retargeting is widely known through Facebook Ads and Google Adwords targeting.

The idea is simple:

When someone visits a specific page on your site, you can then send them curated ads and communications.

This is like Pandora’s box for marketers 🙂

Let’s continue with our HubSpot example.

If someone reads our blog but doesn’t download the HubSpot lead magnet we have, we can encourage that user to take the next step by showing them an ad that is related to the HubSpot article and/or send them and ad that pitches the lead magnet.

We know they were interested enough to read a bit of our article, now we just need to enroll them in our Relationship Funnel by getting their email.

This almost always leads to cheaper CPA costs and higher CTRs (click-through rates).

And retargeting can get extremely sophisticated — moving audiences in and out of ad campaigns to avoid ad fatigue and wasted money by making sure that an ad that a user converts on isn’t shown to them again.

A.k.a. If someone enters our email automation system, we don’t need to show them the lead magnet again 🙂

Retargeting is also an awesome way to engage your existing audience. By uploading customer lists to your ad platform, you can show exact segments of your customer base specific pieces of content or upsells.

Retargeting also opens up some pretty amazing storytelling possibilities through ad sequencing. Ad sequencing is when you set frequency caps and arrange pieces of content to be shown to your audience in a particular order.

So once a lead sees one ad, they will see the next one in the sequence. And once they have seen that ad, the next will be triggered by FB/Instagram/Youtube — it’s a multichannel retargeting effort.

You can also combine this with super specific ad scheduling for really clever ad sequences:

For example, if there was a conference with a bunch of potential customers, you could hyper target the conference location across peak hours advertising your talk, booth, and follow-up contact details in that order.

The possibilities are pretty cool.

We do a lot of retargeting and sequencing with our RF Accelerator clients, which you can learn more about here.

But what about advertising to people who haven’t been to our site?

PPC and lighting the fire

While you have to be a bit more judicious on your spending with PPC, paying for cold clicks can be a great way to reach new audience members or build up social proof for your new content.

If you see great organic results already (high session time, low bounce rate, lots of shares on social media etc.) on a piece of content, then it’s probably worth investing in PPC a bit.

By taking subscribers and customers who you know are already engaged, you can create a lookalike audience that finds people similar to the ones who already enjoy your content.

Then, we take the videos that did well organically and send it that new lookalike audience. Take this Facebook video we did, for example 🙂

This is is only the tip of the iceberg with the power of PPC, but identifying those top performers and amplifying them is a great place to start.

Step 6: We release everything EVERYWHERE

Once everything is set up, we roll out.

Here is an example of how far we take this:

We take one interview with an influencer and turn it into…

5,000+ word article (this article, e.g.).

2 podcast episodes per interview.

One ten minute video for YouTube.

One ten minute video for Facebook.

Three 1 min videos for Facebook & Instagram.

Three 15 second stories for Instagram and Facebook.

And that’s just the organic platform posts. We also post on relevant industry sites like Growth Hacker 🙂

In total we publish 6 social media posts per week on across channels like personal Facebook profiles, Facebook pages, our Facebook groups, the Wild Audience Instagram, LinkedIn, and Youtube.

That’s a lot of opportunity to reach people 🙂

The idea is to be consistently ubiquitous and engaging with each piece. This helps you encourage both share ability and depth of value — allowing you to entertain both your internal tribe and pull new audiences into your Relationship Funnel.

Step 7: Repeat

After all is said and done we do it all again.

Good thing we love this stuff 🙂

We currently release two of these articles and all of their ancillary components (interviews, videos, etc.) a month.

And in order for you to maintain consistency like that, you have to have an established content process.

We spent years fine tuning ours, and it’s the same process we work on with our RF Accelerator clients 🙂

You can learn more about that here.

Quick tip: We’ve found content banking to be super helpful. The more articles you can have in your backlog, the better.

So try batching at least 1 interview a week over a few months. This should give you enough time to prep for each interview, keep up with your other responsibilities, and be consistent. Overdoing it just sacrifices quality of work and life 🙂

There’s no better feeling than knowing you have 3 months of content stacked up and ready to go.

Conclusion

Remember that a content marketing machine is only a piece of the puzzle.

Content marketing brings in traffic and can convert on its own in small ways if CTAs are presented, but content marketing is never going to be fully utilized without a sales funnel behind it.

And nothing is better than a Relationship Funnel.

Here’s a link to that Relationship Funnel blog again.

We covered a LOT here, so as a recap we learned that:

1. A content marketing machine is one of the best tools we have for lead generation.
2. Rand Fishkin got where he is today through content.
3. A content marketing machine consists of keyword research, centralized content, and smart outreach.
4. A content marketing machine is simply the organic traffic generator for your sales funnel.

Ready to discover what a Relationship Funnel can do in your business?

We love working with smart, passionate entrepreneurs who already have a successful high-ticket business and client case studies but want to grow into a sustainable seven-figure business.

Sound like you?

Get in touch and make 2019 a year to remember.

Best of luck!

Bastian – CEO/Founder of Wild Audience

Who is Todd Brown?

Today, we’re jumping headfirst into the mind of Todd Brown, but who is this guy?

Todd Brown is the marketer’s marketer.

He’s widely considered the authority on direct response and customer acquisition campaigns.

And when you take a second to look at his experience and his students’ results, it’s easy to see why.

Todd has a rich history in engineering some of the best marketing campaigns and sales funnels around.

He’s worked in 65 different markets in 33 countries, and is said to have built “more six and seven-figure marketing campaigns than any other expert online today.”

This includes helping Todd Herman make $2.4 million in sales and John Hutchison get $100,280.40.

The guy gets results, simple as that 🙂

And Todd practices what he preaches, building up an impressive suite of products and businesses of his own.

Todd’s Product Suite

E5 C.A.M.P / Masterclass
This is Todd’s life work in direct response, and he sells an 8-module workshop that costs $2,487 (more on this later).

Top 1 Masterclass
This an exclusive group of 40-50 top-tier entrepreneurs who meet about coaching, consulting, and guidance in person with Todd a few times a year.

Acquire & Monetize Academy
Todd releases all of his newest thinking and creative marketing concepts through a course membership service / academy. This is the newest addition to his services.

Marketingfunnelautomation.com / MFA Live
This is the home of Todd’s blog and podcast, and it’s also what he organizes various events and conferences he hosts which he then sells the recordings of.

His agency
Todd also runs a successful agency, but they aren’t accepting any more clients for the time being.

Todd’s focus lately has been promoting and generating leads for his E5 camp product, which he promotes through both a multi-day webinar and evergreen webinar.

To give a bit more social proof / context to these webinars, let’s take a look at his most recent webinar test’s numbers:

• $296,508 in sales.
• $2.38 per click revenue
• 1,572 leads
• Average cart value of $1,335.62

Keep this scale in mind as we dig into the strategies he swears by.

Video Summary

Listen to the Podcast

What you’re about to learn will shape the rest of your career…

Now, I’m going to level with you.

This article is going to be a bit different than our usual funnel breakdowns.

We’ll be covering a bit on his webinar funnel, but we’re mostly going to focus on Todd’s creative marketing concepts and how he uses them across his businesses.

Like most of us who work in and study marketing, we all soak up information from different sources and bring our own experience into the profession.

You could argue Todd has cracked the marketing code, and I love understanding how other successful marketers got to where they are today.

I think it’s useful to compare each other’s strengths and try to get to the bottom of what makes us different.

And believe me… If you take this blog to heart, you’ll immediately start making smarter, faster, and more profitable business decisions.

Here are the creative marketing concepts/ideas you’ll learn about in this article:

• The importance of marketing history
• The difference between tactics & strategy
• Using urgency to spur action with scarcity, time devices, and more
• The amazing bond of reciprocity
• The power of a unique mechanism
• How to organize your ad efforts according to the Rule of 7.

Marketing Concept #1: Human psychology NEVER changes

For Todd, it all began with the marketing greats.

Understanding what worked in the 20th century is your first step to discovering the underlying truths in marketing. Just because we’ve shifted to digital doesn’t mean the strategies have changed.

People like:

• Master advertiser Eugene Schwartz
• Prolific marketer Robert Collier
• Master copywriter Joseph Sugarman

Studying 20th-century marketers like these three means drawing from a more substantial body of experiments and research.

Marketing has changed dramatically in the last 30 years, but human psychology has not. This intersection of psychology and marketing technology is where Todd Brown (and any marketer worth their salt) operates.

With this in mind, we’re going to take a step back and look at these underlying truths of human behavior and how they apply to marketing.

Many of the following truths were pulled from the greats listed above, and they’re evident throughout Todd’s webinar funnel.

It’s time to think big 🙂

If you want to see examples of Todd Brown’s most effective sales emails, download your PDF below.

Marketing Concept #2 – Don’t confuse tactics with strategy

Tactics are not strategy, and strategy is not a tactic.

Tactics are strategy in action.

In other words, all tactics are driven by strategy.

But… tactics don’t always transfer between strategies 🙂

As you engineer your marketing machine, you need to avoid discarding a proven strategy because a particular tactic failed.

Check out Todd’s example on this:

“If you’re running a new business and notice that someone larger in your space is using a Facebook comments widget, and you decide to steal that tactic without having adequate social proof, it will hinder you instead.”

Todd chose to include a Facebook social proof widget because he has the engagement to back it up. If he didn’t have any engagement, it would hinder his efforts. This doesn’t mean someone without engagement should write off social proof as an inefficient strategy, it means that the Facebook widget tactic isn’t a good fit for this marketing situation.

And it’s not just about strength and size of audience, tactics go in and out of fashion.

Tactics that worked 6 months ago won’t always work today.

Here’s Todd’s example for this scenario:

“Years ago, doodle videos were super useful. They were great for grabbing attention and functioned as a pattern interrupt. Users weren’t expecting them and were intrigued.

But nowadays they are so popular, especially in the fitness industries and sites like Clickbank, that they can’t interrupt in the same way anymore. And that doesn’t mean the strategy of a pattern interrupt is wrong, it just means the tactic or vehicle for executing that strategy is now outdated.”

See how that works?

Tactics are how you execute strategies, and launching tactics without defined strategies will almost certainly fail.

And strategies have longevity, but tactics come and go.

Remember that.

Now, let’s talk specifics.

Marketing Concept #3 – Use urgency and scarcity to your advantage

Urgency and scarcity are not the same thing, either.

Urgency is related to time sensitivity.

So think “the cart closes at 11:35 PM tonight!” etc.

Scarcity is related to finite resources.

But… scarcity often promotes urgency too 🙂

And it’s all around us, for better or worse.

Limited time only!
Act fast! Only a few tickets left!
Time is running out! Don’t wait!
From now until we arbitrarily end this sale.

Scarcity is a strategy that can be overdone — it is overdone, all the time.

Fake scarcity is also a contentious issue, dividing the ClickFunnels diehards from the inbound savants and stirring up opinions in every shade of marketing green in between.

Which, I get 🙂

Fake scarcity kinda sucks.

It feels unethical because it’s sort of predatory, right?

It’s an exploitation of fundamental human psychology. Humans hate missing out, and many marketers have no issue alluding to X amount of spots being left or explaining that being close to full capacity justifies price hikes when it’s actually bullshit.

But! If it’s true that you only have so much space or are using time windows as a motivator, then that’s okay!

So to be clear, our team at Wild Audience doesn’t mean fake scarcity when we’re talking about scarcity, and nor does Todd Brown.

Fake scarcity undermines trust. It undermines reciprocity, which may be useful for short-term number spikes but affects your customer relationships, business reputation, and customer lifetime value (CLV).

And scarcity… Real scarcity, now that has a lot of amazing uses 🙂

Here’s how Todd Brown uses scarcity and urgency in his own funnels:

In his E5 Masterclass funnel, Todd has an offer that explains that the cart deadline is Sunday AND the first 50 people get a free call and live strategy session with Todd.

That’s a great example of urgency + scarcity + a great offer = action.

This doesn’t have to be tied to inventory, either. Check out how Todd promotes urgency with a time-bound offer when you try to leave his evergreen webinar:

Or his discounts in his email funnel that reward quick action:

Ideally, you want to strike a balance of both. You need to give people a reason to buy right then. It needs to prevent them from leaving right then and come back tomorrow.

And part of what plays into that decision to buy is determined by what has happened in the past… which ties into a lesson we’ll cover later on, reciprocity.

But first… let’s talk about unique mechanisms.

Marketing Concept #4 – The Power of Unique Mechanisms

Todd Brown loves unique mechanisms.

The most important thing you need to understand is that your business’s product is not its unique mechanism.

A unique mechanism is the unique way that your particular product or service delivers its benefit to prospects.

So if you have software that delivers top Google rankings, the benefit or solution is the ranking, the mechanism is the algorithm.

It’s a subtle difference but one that carries wide implications in copy and strategy.

Make sense? Cool.

Every campaign Todd creates begins with identifying its unique mechanism. Without that, you’re marketing commodities. No one buys commodities because they can get that information somewhere else.

For example, if someone just teaches you the first 5 things that benefit you from Facebook advertising, you can get that anywhere.

Instead, Todd would take those benefits and build them into a unique process. His entire message would then by explaining why his unique program for delivering those Facebook ad benefits is the best way to succeed.

This is what Todd did with E5. He isn’t demonstrating the effectiveness of direct response and customer acquisition funnels, he’s explaining why the E5 method is the best way to build them.

His E5 Masterclass is the product, but his unique mechanism is the E5 Camp (Customer Acquisition Marketing Protocol) process.

The Masterclass is simply the vehicle for delivering the C.A.M.P. protocol 🙂

It’s all about marketing your unique mechanism, and what you need to understand is that selling and marketing are not the same thing.

Marketing is telling the prospect why your mechanism is unique. Selling is talking about your product.

Peter Drucker, the famed management consultant, said the job of marketing is to make selling superfluous.

The key is to make a marketing campaign that takes someone’s desire for a result and turn it into demand for a product before even introducing the product.

At the core of that is the unique mechanism.

And the only place someone can get that unique mechanism is your product 🙂

Marketing Concept #5 – Reciprocity

rec·i·proc·i·ty
/ˌresəˈpräsədē/

noun

the practice of exchanging things with others for mutual benefit, especially privileges granted by one country or organization to another.

As mentioned, marketing and psychology are closely linked. When you boil it down, marketing is just wielding human nature to a brand’s benefit.

The better you are at understanding what makes humans human, the better you’re able to sell your products.

Reciprocity is a fundamental law of social psychology. It’s a social norm to respond to positive action with another positive action, and we’re all familiar with this behavior.

When we were young we let the kid who gave us a seat at lunch cut in front of us in line. When we hold the door open for someone, that same person may hold the next one for us. When our boss gives us more time to recover from the loss of a loved one, we reward them with a stronger work ethic.

But the power of reciprocity extends well beyond simple social interactions.

When used it can spur action exponentially. When we are given something we recognize as valuable for free or little cost, we become socially indebted to that person.

The power of reciprocity comes from the desire that accompanies it. When real reciprocity is reached in a social dynamic, the receiving individual has a legitimate and genuine desire to give back.

But how do you foster genuine reciprocity in online business?

By offering authentic, transparent, and excellent educational content & products.

If you make and achieve those three core tenets, you will succeed.

The most common way is through blogging, video, and email content.

When we approach reciprocity from a marketing perspective, it becomes our job as business owners to give enough value, whether that’s through educational materials, the promise to deliver a solution, the solution itself, or any other offer, to build enough trust to merit a purchase when present the buyer with an “ask”.

Some of you may recognize the “ask” method from our friend Ryan Levesque. He’s built much of his business by capitalizing on reciprocity.

This is exactly what is happening during Todd’s video funnel.

Todd Brown uses reciprocity in every bit of his funnel, but he puts the most emphasis on the beginning when approaching new audiences.

For example, Todd Brown runs a cold traffic, evergreen webinar funnel.

In the webinar, he makes sure to cover a few important bases:

1. He addresses the problem and why the prospect needs to act

2. He explains the unique mechanism and why it will solve their problem

3. He positions his product as the best delivery method for the unique mechanism

Todd delivers so much expertise and help in that first video (or first three when using a multi-video webinar) that new prospects are completely sold on the unique mechanism and are grateful for the product being delivered.

When executed alongside these other strategies, reciprocity functions like the red strike of a match — once a prospect recognizes the value you’re delivering, they appreciate it enough to take that first step, sparking the journey down your marketing and sales funnels.

So how can you capitalize on reciprocity?

It’s simple 🙂

Make better content. Make more content.

Anything you send to your base needs to be excellent.

In effect, what you’re sending should feel like your product. By opening a channel of consistent communication (or value), customers are getting a bit of what it would be like to work with you. They learn your style, what your company is like, how you think.

By anchoring this trust to smart products that tie directly into those thought processes, you can begin to build a base of engaged and paying clients.

For more on tying your products to your marketing funnels, go here.

Marketing Concept #6 – The Rule of 7

The Rule of 7:

A prospective buyer should hear or receive the marketing message seven times before they decide to buy.

The Rule of 7 is one of the oldest principles in marketing, spearheaded by the early Hollywood marketing legends in early 20th-century America.

They would organize their efforts around this frequency target.

We can define frequency as such:

The number of times a prospect has been exposed to your brand regardless of medium.

Social media, banner ads, phone calls, eBooks, webinars, — you name it.

The Rule of Seven is exactly what you’d expect. The marketers of old estimated that a consumer needs to see a brand an average of 7 times before they make a purchasing decision.

It seems a bit high at first, but when you breakout how easily (and quickly) these can be accomplished across mediums it makes a bit more sense:

Here are a few example of Todd’s customer touchpoints:

1. Sees a Facebook Ad once

Notice how Todd is already displaying his unique mechanism in his ads 🙂

2. Sees a second Facebook Ad

3. Hears a podcast advertisement

4. Sees an Adwords Ad

5. Goes to your site and signs up for an email list

6. Reads an email

7. Sees a retargeting ad

Etc. etc.

That could happen in a matter of days, even hours with a proper funnel.

It’s worth noting that the Rule of Seven does not apply to individual ads and is and should be treated with careful respect to ad fatigue.

Ad fatigue is when the same prospect is exposed to the same ad too many times and either becomes apathetic when your brand is viewed, or worse, so frustrated that they act out in some way.

So how accurate is the Rule of 7?

Well, that margin is impossible to know, but it’s been reliable for decades. That answer varies based on what you qualify as a touch as well, and not all touches are created equal.

In other words, the quality of your marketing message has a direct impact on the necessary frequency a user needs to make a decision.

No surprises here 🙂

Todd puts a healthy bit of stock and skepticism in the Rule of 7, but still relies on it as a guideline for his advertising and overall strategy.

Download this PDF that dissects a bunch of Todd’s emails and shows you exactly how to employ these strategies in your own evergreen funnel.

CONCLUSION

So where do you go from here? How do you use these awesomely creative marketing concepts in your own business?

Well…

Write them down. Print them out. Internalize them.

You only benefit by referring back to them when creating and upgrading your marketing message(s).

To recap, we covered:

1. The importance of learning from the marketing greats.
2. The difference between tactics and strategy.
3. The importance of urgency and scarcity.
4. The power of reciprocity.
5. What a unique mechanism is.
6. The Rule of 7.

I can’t stress how important these lessons are for establishing your marketing understanding.

At Wild Audience, we’re still finding new ways and uses for these lessons, and part of what makes building funnels so exciting is the chance to discover those latest tactics while using strategies we know we can rely on.

Ready to unlock the power of these lessons in your own funnel?

And good luck 🙂

HubSpot’s Entire Online Sales Funnel Uncovered. How They Convert Cold Prospects Into Customers. This step-by-step sales system (you can easily steal) built a $375.6 Million a Year Online business.  

Have you ever struggled or thought about any of these questions?

• • How do we sell?

• • Who do we sell to?

• • How many markets do we go after?

• • How do we cross-sell vs selling to new prospects?

• • How many sales reps do we need?
  • Can we create a more efficient sales process with automation?

If you’ve had any of these problems, this may be the most important article you will ever read.

We’re going to uncover exactly how HubSpot sells …

All the way from A to Z.

This is everything from taking an anonymous visitor all the way to the close. How to get convert cold leads into paying customers. The entire process Hubspot uses to continue this insane growth.

If you even implement 1% of what we talk about, you could build a $300,000 a year business with the right product / service.

This is the “best example” you can follow for establishing a profitable relationship with customers. Using inbound marketing and your existing sales funnel.

Note: this doesn’t mean you have to have a corporate structure to learn from this article.

In fact, a lot of what we will talk about will be even easier to install if you don’t. As long as you have SOME sort of online sales funnel, you’re in the right place.

At the end of this article, you’re going to understand how to:

1. 1. Have a more personalized sales experience.
   2. Have a more automated sales process.
   3. Increase your sales call close rates.

You’ll get the most out of this article by outlining your own sales process beforehand. Then looking for ways you can “plug in” what Hubspot is doing into your own business. Not everything will fit, but there are a bunch of cool techniques we’ll talk about that you can start implementing right now.

Almost everything we’re going to talk about came out of an amazing conversation I had with Hubspot’s VP of Sales Strategy and Operations. Channing Ferrer.

You can check that out below 🙂

Video Summary

Listen to the Podcast

Let’s dive into the steps ..

What we’ll be covering:

1. 1. How to turn prospects into leads.
   2. How to use Key Engagement Indicators to help movement through a sales process.
   3. Using specialized sales reps and pathways to match leads to sales reps.
   4. How to handle a discovery meeting.
   5. How to run a perfect demo/sales meeting and how to use that momentum to close the sale.
   6. Using proper evaluation and incentives. To build a sales machine that is efficient without sacrificing humanity.

Are you ready? Let’s do this 🙂

In order to have a functioning sales machine, there is one thing you need above all else: prospects.

Also known as visitors.

Also known as traffic.

If you don’t have your primary traffic generator, you should.

If you don’t know the conversion rates for that traffic source, you should.

(more on how to calculate this later ..)

There are many common sources: social media, ads, organic traffic, etc.

For HubSpot, their main traffic generator is content.

More specifically, their blogs.

Their content machine is almost too big to believe 🙂

They are currently fifth in the online marketing space for overall traffic rank and attract over 25 million visitors per month.

Yeah. Pretty cool huh?

This was accomplished through:

• • Writing new content

• • Hosting guest posts

• • Rehashing old blogs

• • Releasing free tools (e.g. their Website Grader) that are useful to their target market.

• • Webinars (both educational and demonstrative)

• • Events and Conferences
  • Certifications

Hubspot’s blog machine is impressive. They create hundreds of articles every month and are constantly switching and matching lead magnets with the best blog posts. They keep a consistent eye on which blog post / lead magnet combos are converting the best. All the way from first-touch to sale.

This style of mix-and-match experimentation is super important for increasing your conversion rates.

You need to evaluate everything.

Your best traffic sources. Your best blog posts.

Weight them accordingly ..

.. And measure them regularly.  

Don’t stop at evaluating conversion rates based on sources. Sure, you should know your conversion rates on social, organic traffic, and advertising, but your analysis shouldn’t end there.

HubSpot weights different blogs and white papers as varying levels of ENGAGEMENT. Using lead scoring, HubSpot puts more weight on prospects reading a research article over a short blog post. E.g. a 2,000 word, long-form blog on the effectiveness of blogging in 2018 over a lighter 600 word blog post like 10 Funny Blogging Headlines.

They give the 2,000 word long form blog post more weight.

While both blogs are on the same topic, one is clearly for those digging a bit deeper. Take a close look at your content, and see which pieces demonstrate more depth and weight them accordingly.

When it comes to blogging in your business, it’s all about consistency and quality.

HubSpot recommends a minimum of 1 quality, well-written, 600+ word article per week. These should offer better information than your competitor’s, for the same keywords. Your traffic numbers will only continue to go up as you increase frequency.

These constraints are due to Google’s algorithm placing more value than ever on relevant, informative content. Gone are the days of just keyword stuffing and rehashing other articles without adding any value.

Once you have consistency and quality, you can get a bit more granular with your approach while beginning to scale.

HubSpot’s go-to habits for converting prospects into leads:

• • Match your blogs with the most relevant lead magnets or next step CTAs. Mix and match these to see which ones work best with which blog posts. An ideal lead magnet conversion rate is between 4 and 10%. If your numbers are lower than this, it’s time to change something!

• Use emails to warm up prospects and identify their interests while installing beliefs. This is our favorite thing to do at Wild Audience 🙂

Learn how to use install beliefs to dramatically increase your prospect ->   customer rate with our VideoFruit case study.

• Use a lead scoring system based on user behavior to rank your prospects. You shouldn’t treat someone who has read 5 blogs and 1 blogs as if they’re the same quality. And again, different blogs can indicate different levels of engagement.
• Take your unicorns and amplify them with social advertising. Are user retention, conversion rates, and organic traffic super promising on a new piece? Don’t let that momentum go to waste! Spread that blog around using strategies like GaryVee’s content distribution methods and complement it with Facebook advertising to capitalize. This might be your chance to go viral 🙂
• Create a community for your prospects and customers to interact in. Allow your customers to learn from each other.
• Don’t hesitate to reach for keywords that aren’t directly related to your product. As long as they are relevant to your audience, then it can be used. For example, HubSpot has a released a bunch of Excel guides. Is this relevant to their product? Not really, but they know that marketers and the people using their product live in that world.
• Never cold call! Make absolutely sure a prospect has raised their hand either by responding to an email or requesting more information. Before you reach out.

—

Apart from the internal data and analysis behind the scenes, there’s a lot to be said about the blog and page design. Considering the sheer amount of time HubSpot spends working on conversion rates, keeping an eye on what they do is a smart move.

Let’s look at how they convert prospects on their site:

What Your Business Can Learn From HubSpot’s Prospect-Converting Website

Tip #1: Use short sidebar forms to get readers into your system.

HubSpot has one initial goal: to get people into their online sales funnel. They worry about collecting information later.

The first step is just getting people involved, and that means keeping forms as short as possible — just an email address will do.

Note: This can be adjusted based on the amount of “noise” in your online sales funnel. If you’re swamped with low-quality leads and don’t have the ability to automate that selection process with software like HubSpot, it may be smart to increase the barrier of entry by including more form fields.

Tip #2: Offer a lead magnet after someone signs up for your blog

Always provide a simple and relevant next step. Someone signs up for your blog? Offer a relevant eBook or lead magnet immediately. Someone signs up for your lead magnet? See if they want to see a case study. Someone views a case study? Send them a demo or free trial. You get the idea.

Tip #3: Put your key offer on the top of your page

Whatever your best offer is (free trial, schedule a demo, free tool), etc., offer it above the fold. HubSpot knows that getting people to try the software is their main priority because it’s a key engagement indicator (more on this later).  

Tip #4: Give people options to take the next step immediately if they want.

If someone signs up for your free trial, don’t hide the fact that they can go directly to a demo or purchase.

Don’t force it on them, but make it obvious. You’ll lose revenue if you prevent people from moving at their own pace.

Tip #5: Ask bucketing questions after users agree to try your initial offer.

At Wild Audience, we’re super fans of bucketing and segmentation 🙂

Bucketing questions help your marketing team send the right materials via automations and help your sales reps better understand your leads in order to figure out which services are best for them / which pain points are most important to them.

You can also use these to qualify your leads. For example, if you don’t work with anyone under $10k/month in revenue, then you should have budget as a bucketing question! If they don’t meet that standard, then you know to keep them in your marketing funnel until they’re ready so you don’t waste your sales reps’ resources.

But how does HubSpot decide which offers and upsells are most important to them?

That’s based on something they like to call KEIs. We go into detail on this in the next section 🙂

So what do you do with your prospects once they’re coming in? How do you sift through them, and when do you know when they’re ready to talk to someone?

One of the coolest things we uncovered in our interview with Channing is the idea of key engagement indicators 🙂

Sales is a science. Not an art.

If you know what key actions end up converting your customers at the best rate, then you have the opportunity to increase your close rate. Plain and simple.

To do this you need to know your numbers and what HubSpot calls your key engagement indicators (KEIs).

Key engagement indicators are the most important engagement steps that your prospects take to prove they are ready for your product.

The kinds of questions you need to ask are:

1. 1. What one engagement step do all or most of our buyers take?
   2. What happens to the sales cycle when they perform this engagement piece? Does it speed up but decrease close rate? Or does it slow down but increase our close rate or vice versa
   3. Does prospect source affect the effectiveness of the key engagement indicator we’re discussing?

And more 🙂

KEIs ultimately vary business to business, and it’s up to you to determine what is most important (by experimenting and evaluating with data), but here are some common online sales funnel metrics to keep an eye on.

• Attending an educational webinar
• Signing up for a free trial
• Using a free tool for X amount of time.
• Agreeing to a free strategy call.
• Completing a quiz.

HubSpot’s Most Important KEI

Channing said that they have a 25% close rate when someone invites a team member to collaborate within their software.

You best believe they are paying attention to that 🙂

Especially when you think about how expensive HubSpot’s products can be (they charge on a monthly retainer basis) and usually sign contracts for 6 months to a year.

That’s an amazing KEI, and one that they should (and have) immediately prioritized.

Check out what’s on the homepage of a free trial user:

It’s starting to make a bit more sense why they put that there 🙂

Of course, they’re going to pitch this to their prospects!

Once you have …

Your key engagement indicators identified …

You are experimenting with different prospect lead magnets and upsells …

And getting leads …

It’s time to think about who should reach out and when.

Now that we’ve identified a prospect as a lead (using a lead magnet or KEI), it’s time to reach out with an appropriate next step. At the right time. This next step varies depending on what you know about your prospect and the size of your team.

Here’s an overview of common sales positions as outlined by HubSpot themselves:

Take a second and think through your current sales team. Are any of these responsibilities not covered? Even by one person? Even if you think someone is covering them, it’d be smart to take a look — it could be affecting your close rate.

—

Back to assigning leads to reps and reaching out.

How you reach out and who gets the lead depends on the source and quality of the lead. So let’s start with how your team should evaluate their leads.

How to Evaluate Your Leads and Determine When They’re Ready for Outreach

For HubSpot, someone signing up to their blog is not a lead. They are still a prospect.

Their content machine is just too massive to waste the human capital contacting every single email subscriber. Instead, they let their content and upsells continue to separate prospects based on engagement and pull them toward their KEIs.

If your business is super niche, then this may be different for you. If you know that your blog to close rate is 5%, then your blog subscribers are worth much more to you.

What you need to do is to set a baseline for your sales reps to determine what qualifies someone as Lead, MQL, and SQL.

MQL stands for marketing qualified lead and SQL stands for sales qualified lead. These definitions are unique to each company.

Here’s a graphic that covers this:

For HubSpot, unless the lead is inbound (more on this later), then it’s not smart to reach out directly until someone is at least an MQL or SQL.

Let’s think through how your online business could outline your funnel stages 🙂

1. 1. Prospect/Visitor – Visit to the website
   2. Lead – Downloads a lead magnet OR reads >5 blogs OR views the sales page after reading a blog.
   3. MQL – Downloads >3 lead magnets, attends a webinar, attends a conference, has opened and clicked the last 5 marketing emails.
   4. SQL – Has downloaded a free trial called OR qualified themselves as an MQL by filling out the appropriate budget amount for your service (via bucketing & segmentation).
   5. Opportunity – Has met with a rep and is attending a strategy or demo call next week OR has finished a demo and is in the closing stage.
   6. Customer – Sweet, sweet victory.

Make sense? Take the time to establish these for your company if you haven’t already. Remember they are fluid. After you run with these definitions for a bit, you should tweak them according to the quality of leads that your sales reps are seeing.

For example, if your pipeline is full of people who aren’t ready, then you need to make it more difficult to qualify as an SQL. And if all of a sudden you see a steep decrease in sales rep communication, then you need to relax the definitions a bit.

You should also see if there’s a way for you to be smarter about who you assign leads to. If you work in a consultancy that services a wide variety of industries, it would be smart to send the lead that works in aviation to someone who has spoken or worked with aviation in the past.

Once you get people in your online sales funnel and they qualify themselves as an SQL, all you need to do is assign them to a rep and get ready to reach out 🙂

The next step is to connect.

This step is for your SQLs, and this responsibility depends on the size of your business.

For HubSpot, they have employees whose only job is to get a meeting booked and hand them off to a sales rep.

That’s it.

Their quota is for meetings booked — not actual sales.

For smaller companies, you may start with having the reps handle the entire process from start to finish.

HubSpot hates cold calling, so once a prospect identifies themselves as an SQL, it’s time to send out an email.

Speed and timing is everything in sales. So the sooner after they perform a KEI, the better.

Here’s how HubSpot approaches it:

Your one goal is to get a meeting.

The day after I performed the KEI of signing up for a free trial and exploring the tool, I got this email.

It’s short, it’s sweet, it has blanket bucketing, and it’s entire purpose is to get on the phone and start a conversation — to get to that connect meeting 🙂

If someone doesn’t respond, then you can follow up a week later. If they don’t respond after that, then you should downgrade them to a MQL until that person performs another KEI or reaches out to you.

Speaking of which…

How Your Plan Changes for Inbound vs. Outbound Leads

As mentioned, you want your website to not block people from moving quickly. So if someone reaches out directly via chat, email, or phone, you need to have a system in place for that as well.

This obviously has a lot more variables for what the next step should be, but you want to give certain sales reps on your team the space to field inbound leads. After all, an inbound lead is almost always further along the sales cycle than an outbound lead — they are performing the ultimate KEI! Initiating a conversation 🙂

Your sales rep should first try to understand and answer all of the bucketing and pain questions that usually happen on a connect call. Listen to the customer, establish authority, identify the key decision maker, and demonstrate value. After that, you try to get them into your complimentary strategy call or demo according to their qualification and needs.

Bonus Tip: Develop a Sales Hook for Your Best Prospects

Another really cool thing that HubSpot does is personalize a sales hook for their best leads. For HubSpot, these are the corporate clients, the multi-million dollar companies who have the potential to bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars to the company.

What they do is actually take 5-10 minutes evaluating a lead’s website, shoot a quick screencast (using Zoom or something similar) of what they could do better (SEO is lacking here, design is faulty, no lead magnet there, etc.) and use that delivery of value as the basis point for a conversation.

It wouldn’t be smart to do this for all of your leads, but take a second and think about a scalable sales hook that you can develop for those big fish 🙂

Other misc tips for reaching out:

• • Use your bucketing questions to get an idea of what your lead is interested in, but don’t prevent the prospect from going in a different direction.

• • Use templates to cut down on the ad hoc writing, but always personalize when you can.

• • Use Calendly or Hubspot Sales to make booking a conversation easy on your prospects.

• Don’t be afraid to point prospects toward other pieces of relevant content.

At this point you should have meetings on the books, but what needs to happen in that first meeting? How can your sales team make the most of that first real conversation?

Let’s find out 🙂

Alright! So you or your rep finally has a lead on the phone for the first time. What’s the game plan? Do you even have one?

Well, you should.

HubSpot has this down to a science, and I was curious what actually hopping on the phone with them would be like ..

So I did 🙂

And here’s what happened..

Let the Customer Lead by Asking Why

The initial meeting is all about the why. Why was the person compelled to sign up or display interest in your service? Why are they here? What made them curious? What are their goals for their business, and most importantly, what is making it difficult for them?

Here’s how the HubSpot rep approached this with me. This was her second line:

“Listen. Thanks for booking your call. I’m interested to know what’s driving your interest in HubSpot. What can I help you with today?”

She never pushed or went into some long spiel about the product. It was just establishing a connection, being personable, and listening to what I needed as a business owner. That’s respect-based sales 🙂 If your product isn’t a good fit for someone’s problems, they deserve to know!

Frame your product as the solution

After I responded, she knew I had a basic awareness of the software and its abilities, so she asked based on my goals of growth and formalization of sales, how do YOU see HubSpot fitting in?

This is important 🙂

Do you see what she did there?

She subtly pushed me to internalize HubSpot as the solution to my problem. Letting me work through it on my own. This is a smart technique that you absolutely need to employ.

After I responded, she continued to tie HubSpot’s services to the goals and issues I outlined.

Don’t Limit Your Products Based On Their Engagement

Part of the connect call is learning about the big picture for the lead’s business. Their dreams. Their goals. Be a close, personable listener, and don’t be afraid to mention other products or services that your firm offers that may be a better fit than what the lead originally reached out about.

For example, she referenced the sales product as what makes the most immediate sense for me, but she also referenced a few common problems and HubSpot’s solutions for those.

She’s basing those suggestions off people she has worked with in the past who were in a similar situation. This is a great way to avoid limiting your offerings as a business and incorporate social proof at the same time.

That brings me to my next point.

Discover Their Pain Points & Reference Other Customers in Similar Situations

Repeatedly throughout the conversation, the HubSpot rep would talk about other people and how they thought through the same pain and points and decisions I am. This establishes authority and trust in the process moving forward.

In other words, it establishes these beliefs:

1. 1. HubSpot has worked for other people (social proof).
   2. The rep I’m talking to knows their stuff (authority).

Discuss the Final Conversion Point

Always establish a next step. This changes based on the goals and product fit, but most of the time this is encouraging a free trial or KEI offer and then setting up a deadline for the next point of contact.

“I’m going to send you some information on how partner agencies are set up, and then you can look over things before I reach out next Thursday. Is that okay?

You’ve got options for this depending on how time-sensitive and qualified the lead is.

You can establish that you’ll be handing them off to someone with more expertise in their space (a sales rep that works in a specific industry etc.). You could go ahead and schedule a proposal review call. You can suggest reading materials or a free trial — that’s ultimately up to your rep and business model.

And that brings us to the most important part of the whole process 🙂

The Purpose of a Demo/Sales Call

All you need to do in a demo is prove that your product / service is a good fit for their problem. If you’ve done your job up to this point, then you know this to be true, and proving that won’t be hard! The only time you’ll lack confidence is if your product / service really isn’t a good solution for them.

How to Conduct a Perfect Demo

This is the most critical part of the close, but conducting a demo doesn’t have to be intimidating or difficult.

For SaaS businesses, this is just walking through your product and personalizing it to your opportunity. For online businesses or consultants, this is when you pitch exactly how your firm will solve their problem, typically through a presentation of data and specific steps.

Here’s how to make the most of it according to HubSpot:

• • Confirm the meeting is happening the day of and verify that the key decision maker will be there.

• • Use a personalized slide deck and software like GoToMeeting.

• • Take time to get to know the prospect before hopping into the presentation. Be human!

• • Set an agenda at the top of the meeting.

• • Reference past conversations

• • Explain the product while always referencing their specific pain points and why your product is the solution.

• • Always be open to questions and letting the customer figure it out for themselves.

• • Set expectations & next steps.
  • Record the presentation. This is useful to send to the opportunity afterward and to review internally to see what went well and what didn’t.

If you do most of those, then your team will already be off to a fantastic start.

HubSpot also has a habit of using multiple sales reps on the call to let a newer sales rep learn and be a part of these conversations before taking lead.

After the call is over, it’s finally time to get the sale 🙂

Nothing kills closes more than letting too much time go by. At the end of your meeting, you need to immediately discuss when the customer how the customer would like to move forward.

This is best done by:

• • Validating that they enjoyed the presentation. Make them say it in their own words: “So… how did you like our call? In your opinion, do you think (your business) will solve your problems and help you grow?”

• • Rehashing the problem. Tie your product to the solution (again).

• • Making them understand the cost of the problem they have. This is also known as the cost of inaction. “Your problem is costing you $20k a year, our product costs $5k a year. Do you agree that this is a smart business decision?”

• Offer time-sensitive discounts if necessary. A little extra incentive goes a long way.

After all of that, remember that this is your time to cross-sell if it’s appropriate as well. Think bundled discount on software plans etc. 🙂

After the sale is over (win or loss), it’s time to evaluate what happened.

The thing about your sales process is that it should be constantly evolving based on feedback and experimentation.

Swapping out processes, variables, and techniques HAS to be a fundamental part of your culture, or you will lose out on revenue.

Key Metrics Your Business Should Keep an Eye On:

• Visitor-to-Lead Conversion Rate
• Lead-to-MQL Conversion Rate
• % Sales Accepted Leads
• Lead Work Rates
• MQL-to-Opportunity Conversion Rate
• Opportunity-to-Customer Conversion Rate
• Lead-to-Customer Conversion Rate
• Sales Cycle Length
• Average Cost Per Sale

HubSpot obviously makes it really easy to see these numbers in their software, but with different software or a little Google Analytics digging you can figure out any one of these metrics.

Get the list of key metrics your business should be tracking and their definitions here.

Try incorporating a monthly check-in to review all of them and determine where to focus your marketing efforts for the next month.

Tie Your Sales Team’s Incentives to Customer Success

Traditional sales models are outdated and ineffective. Your business isn’t going to survive if your sales reps keep closing unqualified leads through pressuring tactics — all this means is that your user retention is going to be awful.

HubSpot actually claws back commissions of their reps if their customer doesn’t stay on for more than four months (and sometimes even longer). This forces sales reps to only close people who are actually a good fit, and this makes your monthly revenue more reliable and develops a much healthier customer base.

Conclusion

Well, there you have it 🙂

A look inside how one of the biggest online businesses approaches sales.

There is SO much to unpack here 🙂

To summarize, you should:

• Establish your sales process.
• Determine your lifecycle stage definitions (MQL, SQL, etc.)
• Optimize your blog for prospect conversion.
• Identify your KEIs
• Assign the right leads to the right reps
• Reach out to the SQL
• Conduct a connect call
• Get a demo or sales call on the books.
• Close!
• Evaluate 🙂

Other Bits of Sales Gold from HubSpot

Here are few other awesome things Channing & HubSpot recommend for companies building their online sales funnel:

• • The smaller the business, the smaller the sales cycle.

• • Use form swaps to allow a customer to submit multiple forms of similarity but be flagged as a high engagement prospect.

• • Reps should only be allowed so many leads to ensure the quality of outreach.

• • Hire your salespeople according to a criteria based on company values.

• • Align marketing and sales by communicating as openly as possible.

• Match sales incentives with customer retention.

And here’s the link to the full interview again 🙂

—

Interested in equipping your new sales process with an online sales funnel that converts at 6% or higher?

Imagine what you could do with that level of engagement 🙂

We run a program here called Relationship Funnel Accelerator.

It’s a “done-with-you” service where we take everything we’ve learned at Wild Audience and apply it to your business.

So you can get results like these 🙂

Interested?

Let’s do this.

Quick Summary

Here’s a quick summary of this article so you can decide if you are interested in it or not.

I’m going to explain what Relationship Funnels are and how to create them. Including the following…

1. 1. What is the definition of a Relationship Funnel?
   2. How are Relationship Funnels different from normal marketing funnels or sales funnels?
   3. Do Relationship Funnels actually work?
   4. The strategy behind Relationship Funnels explained.
   5. How you can build your own Relationship Funnel in 9 steps.
   6. Benefits to Relationship Funnels

Video Summary

Listen To Podcast

When I started my own business selling information products, I struggled to even make a full-time income using marketing funnels and product launches.

With this approach, I also had to keep doing launches which were very time-consuming.

I also knew that if one of my launches failed, my cash flow could be crippled. And one day that’s exactly what happened.

That’s when I came up with the idea for Relationship Funnels and quickly grew my business to 5-figures a month!

Relationship Funnels are a powerful tactic. Other businesses have implemented them to boost engagement, achieve higher email open rates, better conversion rates, and significantly more sales.

And the best part is that it can be fully automated!

Do you want to learn how to implement this powerful marketing funnel in YOUR business?

Great! Let’s get started.

1. Relationship Funnel Definition

So what exactly is a Relationship Funnel?

Relationship Funnel is optimized for two things:

1) To establish a relationship with potential customers on autopilot and install buying beliefs

2) Once they are ready, present our offer as the solution to their problem at the perfect time.

Relationship Funnels focus on building a real relationship first. Build trust by teaching and focus on giving value to your audience.

Later, sell prospects the solutions to their problems. If you’ve done a good job of building the relationship, your prospects will be willing and even eager to buy from you.

2. Relationship Funnels vs a Regular Marketing Funnel – What’s the Difference?

Some people might compare Relationship Funnels to typical sales or marketing funnels, but they have some important differences.

Sales funnels often apply sales pressure tactics like scarcity and urgency to pressure prospects to buy now.

Relationship Funnels, on the other hand, don’t rely on high-pressure sales tactics. Instead, they focus on building relationships with prospects by giving value through content and education.

In fact, good Relationship Funnels may even cause prospects to ask you to buy something even before you present your offer.

Don’t be surprised if you start getting messages like this:

People that are exposed to a Relationship Funnel don’t feel pushed or pressured into buying something. Instead, they feel pulled towards buying due to the positive experience that they received through the Relationship Funnel.

A real-life example..

We achieved an incredible 8.66% sales conversion rate with our company Relationship Funnel.

3. Do Relationship Funnels Actually Work?

While most online entrepreneurs know about sales funnels, many still haven’t heard about Relationship Funnels.

Are they new?

Do people actually use them?

Do they actually work?

While Relationship Funnels are newer than sales funnels, they have been around for a while. Relationship Funnels have been featured in top media outlets and marketing podcasts including Neil Patel’s Marketing School, Mixergy, Forbes and many more.

More than 1,100 online businesses worldwide use Relationship Funnels in their business to sell their products or services.

Wild Audience clients have gotten results like this:

• Joe generates 1 million Euros each year with Relationship Funnels 

• Matias achieved an amazing 34x increase in his click through rate from 1.7% to 58%

• Mubaid achieved a 9-10% funnel conversion rate, converting roughly one out of 10 prospects into sales.

And hundreds of other students have shared testimonials, videos and screenshots of their results here.

If you want to see a real-world case study on how a 7-figure online business does this step-by-step, click on the image below and download your PDF.

4. The Relationship Funnel Strategy Explained

The strategy behind a Relationship Funnel can be explained in 4 simple steps.

Step 1 – Get the attention of your audience & maintain it.

Getting attention is hard, but retaining attention is even harder. Figure out the best way to get the attention of your prospects.

• • Select lead magnets that target the pain points of your prospects.

• • Stimulate their curiosity by sharing information they can’t easily find online.

• Test out different headlines and copy. See what works and what doesn’t.

Focus on creating awareness for your brand and and keeping their attention once they are in your funnel.

Step 2 – Segment your people. Understand that each person has different problems and different goals. Figure out how you can help them.

You can use your opt-in form to segment new subscribers by asking them 4-5 questions about their goals, problems and interests.

Here’s an example of how we segment people during the sign-up process. After clicking on an image or button to opt-in, the reader can answer a few quick questions.

When people answer these questions, the email marketing software will automatically tag them or segment them into groups based on their interests.

Step 3 – Use the data to personalize the experience.

With email marketing tools like Active Campaign, you can send different emails to different segments of your email list based on what they are interested in.

You want to send content that is relevant to your prospects because it will increase engagement. Higher engagement leads to more sales.

Help your prospects first. Build the relationship and gain trust. Then sell.

Step 4 – Engage your audience through content

Besides creating a personalized experience, you also want people to engage with you and take action.

So how do you engage your readers?

Here are a few suggestions…

1. 1. Add a CTA within your Relationship Funnel. A simple example might be to ask your readers to post a comment in your Facebook group.
   2. Allow readers to choose how frequently they receive emails. Give your readers a choice so that they can choose their own path.
   3. Use the Gmail-Zapier hack. By integrating Gmail and Zapier, you can send your readers an automated email if they take a specific action.

For example, if they click on the link to your sales page a couple of times, you can send

Then a message like this:

What’s awesome is that even though the email is automated, it looks like a personalized email that I sent directly to one person.

For more ideas on creating engagement, check out these 7 funnel techniques to increase your conversion rate.

Step 5 – Automate the whole thing including the email sequences, advertisements, and the entire sales process. Software tools make it easy for you to scale your business by automating everything.

This is what that looks like inside Active Campaign ..

5. How to Build Relationship Funnels in 9 Steps

Step 1 – Define Your Value Ladder
Start with a lead magnet, which can be a PDF or video or some other type of content.

After that, offer a low-end product that is inexpensive, but has high perceived value. This is called a front end offer.

For example, let’s say you are selling a $10 eBook as your front end product.

Make sure you deliver so much value in this eBook that your customers will be blown away by how much value you gave them for $10.

Focus on creating an experience that will let customers feel like you over delivered and that they got a ton of value for their money.

Why do you want to do this?

Because providing an amazing first purchase experience will get them excited about buying your next product! Since they know you deliver a ton of value in your lower-priced products, they’ll be eager and willing to buy your higher priced products or services.

To break even on your customer acquisition costs have an upsell behind your front end product.

A $50 – $100 upsell can increase the average order value on your front end product. This upsell will help us cover the cost of Google and Facebook ads.

You can then sell your core product to customers who purchased your front end product. Price this product higher than your front end product.

People who purchased your front end product will be pre-sold on this product because you’ve already delivered them a lot of value on their previous purchase.

You can also have additional back-end products that you can sell at even higher prices. For example, a few high-end customers might be willing to purchase a $10,000 done-for-you service or in-person consultation.

Existing customers are more likely to buy from you because they are already familiar with your brand and they’ve already had a positive experience and relationship with you from their previous purchases.

Start with just the core product and lead magnet and come up with your front end product later.

Step 2 – Creating Your Belief System
A belief system consists of any biases or beliefs that a person will have about you and your products.

For example, if a person eats an orange for the first time and has a bad experience because the orange was old and rotten, then they may believe that oranges are bad.

To convince the person that oranges are good, you will have to install a new belief. You may have to explain that oranges are healthy and convince the person to try oranges again to overwrite their old belief system.

What does your ideal customer need to believe before he or she can become your customer?

Write down all ideas that come to mind. You may come up with a few ideas or even a dozen beliefs that you will need to install into your customer’s belief system.

Step 3 – Map Your Beliefs
Ask yourself where you will install each belief. Each piece of content you create should be designed to install a new belief in your customer’s mind.

Step 4 – Create a Lead Magnet
A good lead magnet will filter out the wrong people and lead the right people to you.

Here is an example of one we use at Wild Audience. The article below displays an image that offers a free download of my Relationship Funnel graphic. 

Only people that are interested in Relationship Funnels will click on it, which allows us to build a highly targeted list.

Step 5 – Build a Relationship Building Sequence (RBS)
Your email sequence will build a relationship with your prospects and also install the right beliefs into their belief system. Your RBS should also be optimized to engage your audience so that they get excited, hyped and eager to purchase your product.

Step 6 – Decide On Your Sales (or Conversion) Event
Your sales page can be a text sales letter, video sales letter (VSL) or a hybrid page which contains both text and video. You can also use an evergreen webinar.

Keep in mind that what gets people to buy is not the sales event so much, but everything that happens before it. The RBS gets people excited for your offering. 

Step 7 – Launch Your Funnel
Try to launch to 250 new prospects to test your funnel. Facebook ads or groups can be a good way to get new prospects into your funnel.

You want to get new prospects into your funnel to test it because your existing customers already know you and are more likely to buy. Testing the funnel with fresh prospects is a great way to make sure that your funnel converts.

Your funnel might not be profitable initially and that’s ok. It may take 2-3 iterations to test your funnel and get it ready to scale.

Step 8 – Optimize Your Funnel
Once people have gone through your funnel, look at your numbers and figure out where the weak points in your funnel are. Improve on those areas, fix any mistakes and once you’ve optimized your funnel, you are ready to scale.

Step 9 – Scale Your Growth
Now that your funnel works the way you want it to, you can increase ad spend and maximize other lead generation channels to get as many people into your funnel as you want.

6. Benefits to Relationship Funnels

So what are the benefits of a Relationship Funnel? And why not just use a traditional marketing funnel?

a) Relationship Funnels work better (especially over the long run) because they focus on building the relationship first before selling.

Once people trust you and see that you are someone that delivers a lot of value, selling becomes much easier.

b) Relationship Funnels combine marketing automation technology and human psychology to achieve optimal results. They allow you to get into people’s hearts and minds and ultimately generate sales that will allow your business to grow.

c) Wild Audience customers achieve high click-through rates, open rates, and sales conversion rates. They achieve extraordinary results by engaging with the right people using what we call “engagement hooks” including open loops, cliffhangers, micro investments, and frequency selectors.

For example, Landon Porter achieved a 6% conversion rate and made over $6,000 in 6 weeks from his Relationship Funnel:

d) Relationship Funnels also allow you to scale your business while staying relevant and forming a personal connection with your audience.

e) A Relationship Funnel is a 100% evergreen system that works 24/7, 365 days a year to generate more predictable and consistent revenue each month.

f) Unlike other marketing funnels, you won’t have to rely on repeat product launches and your revenue won’t rely on a single launch. You won’t have to go through the stress and work overload of preparing for launches.

Instead, Relationship Funnels are a well-optimized selling machine that you can continue to improve as time goes on. They use automation to continue to sell to new prospects as they enter your funnel.

g) And the best part about Relationship Funnels..

You won’t feel salesy, fake or slimy from doing them. You can just be yourself and use your own personality to establish a real connection with your audience.

Don’t be surprised if you start getting messages like these:

h) Relationship Funnels are future proof because they work with any platform and human psychology won’t change.

i) Because you are focused on creating real value for your audience and forming a real relationship, Relationship Funnels will also allow you to boost your engagement levels, sales conversions, and ROI.

Focus on bringing the right prospects into your funnel and your sales WILL increase.

j) Another benefit of Relationship Funnels is that they are more cost efficient because you won’t waste money on people who won’t naturally engage with your content.  Focus on creating engagement and you will end up converting more people with less traffic.

You can actually decrease your marketing spend and achieve a higher level of profitability with this approach.

k) With a Relationship Funnel, you won’t have to worry about finding a constant stream of new customers each month. You also won’t have to come up with new promotions every month to sustain your business.

l) Unlike sales funnels, Relationship Funnels will give you predictable cash flow, profits, and ROI each month.

To Sum It Up

Relationships and trust are everything in business. People seek to connect with other people in business, but many businesses focus on selling rather than building genuine relationships.

Be the business that focuses on relationships and you will experience more growth than you ever thought was possible.

To learn more about my Marketing Funnels, read this article.

And if you want to see a real-world case study on how a 7-figure online business does built multiple sales funnels and turns website visitors into paying customers, download your PDF below.

If you enjoyed this article, let me know in the comments below. I would love to connect with you! Peace out!

Summary:

1. [Stage 1] – Start up
2. [Stage 2] – Ramp up
3. [Stage 3] – Build up
4. [Stage 4] – Scale up
5. [Stage 5] – Leader up

This article is designed to give online business owners and anyone involved in entrepreneurship a framework for growth they can take and run with. We’ll dig into the pains and growth opportunities present in each stage of a business and explore how you can apply those to your own journey.

These stages of growth are based off of Todd Herman’s recently updated 5 Stages of Business Growth.

If you don’t know Todd Herman, you should.Todd is many things: an angel investor, speaker, author, and ultimately an 8-figure business owner. He built a powerful network of corporate and SMB clients across a variety of channels and products.

This is also the same Todd Herman who has worked with 86 Olympians (including some who recently competed in Seoul) and over 10,000 athletes.

Todd Herman helps ambitious people perform, period.

Pretty cool right 🙂

In other words, he knows how to build businesses, and he has fine-tuned those systems into a framework you can adopt and apply to your business. Your idea may be unique, but the challenges and growth pains you’ll experience are almost certainly not, and that means you can learn from those who have walked the path before you.  

I had the privilege of sitting down with Todd and talking to him for about an hour or so, and you can check out that super awesome interview here 🙂

—

When it comes to explaining the stages of business, I think we can all agree it’s best to do so with an actual, viable business. We decided to use Wild Audience..

I know… big surprise. 🙂

If you’d rather see how we increased a client’s conversion rate by 6x…

Go here.

I’m going to do my best to cover Wild Audience’s pain points at each stage, the decisions that helped us overcome them, and ultimately how we grew into a network of over 30,000 business owners.

By pairing our story with Todd’s 5 Stages of Business Growth framework, I think you’ll walk away with some really useful stuff.

I’m no Todd Herman, but I like to think I’m on my way. 🙂

My goal is to help save you some time and offer some direction in your business. Having an idea of what is coming while analyzing the present and learning from the past is the best pathway to success.

Each stage will begin with a little video talking about where I was at that stage, and then I’ll follow it up with some more insight from Wild Audience’s perspective.

Let’s do this!

Quick note:
I have never worked for or with Todd Herman. Everything below is based on my own experience as founder of Wild Audience and being an actual fan of his work. Take a look at the interview, and you’ll see how excited I was to talk to him. 🙂 Also, Todd is updating their marketing strategy a lot right now so what I share with you below might not be their most recent version.

Stages of Business Growth #1: Start Up

Definition:

The startup stage is the beginning of everything. It starts with your idea — your dream and ends when you release your initial MVP.

Key objective:  

Validate your product & market.

Pain points:

1. Feeling of self-doubt.
2. Getting overwhelmed.
3. Feeling like your business is unique in its challenges.
4. Inertia.

Solutions:

1. Talk to your market
2. Listen to your market.
3. Know WHAT to focus on and WHEN.
4. Just start!

—

The startup stage has two main components: a dream & an MVP.

This is the stage that kills more businesses than any other.

Why?

Todd surveyed over 40,000 wantrepreneurs and entrepreneurs and found that fear of failure was the overwhelming response for why people were scared to take the next step.

Scared of what their families would think if they failed. Scared of what would happen if they lost money.

In other words,

It’s the emotional experience of business that was scaring people away.

Fortunately, there’s a way to handle both fears of failure & make sure you don’t waste money: market validation.

The “startup” stage is all about four goals:

1. Validating your audience
2. Validating your product
3. Building an MVP
4. Acquiring initial sales

The key is to validate your audience and product before you ever build it. 🙂

Start Up Step #1: Build A Minimal Viable Audience

A.k.a. — what are people willing to buy, how many of them are there, and how can I reach them?

Let’s take a little trip back to 2015.

Wild Audience didn’t exist.

I was in Silicon Valley working for a Y-Combinator company called Close.io.

Life was good! Steli Efti was an incredible boss.

I enjoyed it, but I knew I wanted to start my own company.

So I decided to go to Costa Rica. 🙂

I cut my expenses to a couple hundred dollars a month and easily covered that with a part-time marketing gig…

Now all I had to do was build my business.

This is all I knew…

1. I wanted to start my own online business and potentially transition in SaaS.
2. I didn’t have a tech team.
3. I didn’t have the money to build a product upfront.

Not too much to work with. 🙂

I found the best place to find business inspiration is the crossover between the person you have been, the person you want to be, and rough market potential.

Your interests. Your passions. Everything that makes you who you are now… but also contributes to where you want to be 🙂

For me that was marketing automation, AI, and education.

Now, normally at this point in the start up stage, people would advise you to build a prototype of your product, lean canvas, raise some initial funds, build an MVP…

Exciting stuff, right?

Well, yes. But Todd recommends going about it a bit differently.

Here’s how Todd describes this process:

“Getting out into the market and validating the idea with the target group you want to serve is a necessity. If more people would take the approach of the mad scientist in the laboratory, attempt different combinations, and then go out and introduce the idea, product, or service to target people—then we’d have a lot more great things created – and probably a helluva a lot happier people.”

Boom.

Identifying product-market fit before heavily investing and pivoting as needed is the key to building a business you can count on. The product you envisioned and the product your market needs may be further apart than you think.

For Wild Audience, I decided to use education as my testing ground for my product & as a way to finance my eventual SaaS business.

Here’s what my market validation steps looked like:

1) Market Research:

I knew I was interested in marketing AI, and I knew marketing/sales funnels were the crux of that tech. With this in mind, I started thinking about all the businesses that need better funnels.

The answer? Everyone wants better funnels.

It’s the key to building a successful online business—the key to increasing revenue—the key to everything!

Now I just needed to begin building a tribe and identify what problems they needed help solving the most.

Here’s what I did with Wild Audience:

1. I started with one blog. This blog, in fact. 🙂
2. I offered a free email course through lead magnets.
3. I began listening and observing my customers for product direction.
4. I built my initial educational MVP.

How did I learn from my initial tribe?

1. I observed what questions they asked in email conversations.
2. I read & analyzed what they talked about in relevant Facebook Groups.
3. I talked to my customers about my paid educational products.
4. I asked questions. I surveyed. I kept my ears open.

Listen. Communicate. Iterate.

That should be your mantra in the start up stage.

Collect as much information as you can and compare it to your idea for your initial product. Does it match? If not, how should it change?

Improve your idea and take it back to your audience. See what they think.

They’re going to know best—after all they’re your future customers. 🙂

For more on validating your audience, go here.

Start Up Step #2: Build A Minimal Viable Product

Once you know your audience’s problems  and have interest (preferably monetary proof via educational products) in your topics and potential MVP, it’s time to start building.

At this point, you already have a huge advantage over anyone who is building an MVP without an audience: an audience. 🙂

This allows you to:

• Access information and data to figure out what problem to solve
• Build an MVP your audience cares about (because they actually have that problem)
• Get instant feedback on your MVP while you’re building it
• Attract early adopters because you have a list of people who want to test your newest stuff
• Finance your MVP via existing educational products
• Essentially build an MVP together with your audience—ensuring a perfect product market fit.

By having an audience before you build an MVP, you can minimize the risk of building an MVP no one cares about.
—

Start Up Step #3: Determine Your Future Trajectory

Okay. At this point you’ll have an engaged audience and an MVP.

Where do you go from here? You need to be thinking long-term.

For Wild Audience, I wanted to eventually create a behaviour-based automation product using AI…

Okay. So I knew a SaaS product was my next step…

But what then…?

Well, I knew I wanted to make enough money from my educational products to fund the creation of my SaaS products.

So in very simple terms, Wild Audience’s trajectory is:

1. Build an engaged audience
2. Build an educational MVP (Relationship Funnel)
3. Scale my educational business
4. Use those profits to fund a SaaS business
5. Convert my educational audience into the SaaS early adopters
6. Scale that business

And just like that, I have tangible steps to work towards. 🙂

Key takeaways:

1. Validate and build an engaged audience through educational content first.
2. Work with your audience to test your MVP’s validity.
3. Build and iterate with audience feedback.
4. Use this audience to generate initial interest & sales.
5. Figure out your rough trajectory.

—

 Stages of Business Growth #2: Ramp Up

Definition:

Ramp Up is all about creating the systems that will establish and promote the initial growth of your product & audience. You aren’t investing heavily into infrastructure yet, but you’re laying the initial foundation to do so.

Key objective:

1. Build your initial marketing strategy and funnel systems.
2. Establish company culture.

Pain points:

1. Hitting a ceiling — becoming a “lifestyle” business (this is a choice!).
2. Paralysis of choice.
3. Disconnect between a more in-depth marketing funnel and your existing audience.

Solutions:

1. Innovate > invent.
2. Trust your data.

—

Now things are getting “interesting”. 🙂

We have our audience.

We have our MVP.

We have some initial sales…

We could even be comfortably profitable.

For Wild Audience (and for almost all online businesses), your system starts with your funnels.

Specifically your marketing and sales funnels, which I would argue are really one in the same these days. 🙂

How To Build a Ramp Up Funnel For Your High-Ticket Service Business

I started “ramping up” Wild Audience in late 2015. I had beta-tested Relationship Funnel, and I knew people were interested in what I was selling, but the outreach and initial audience building were extremely time intensive, and I wanted to build out my evergreen funnel even more.

I was also teaching “relationship-based marketing” and knew this was a perfect opportunity to use my company as a larger case study.

The first thing to do in the Ramp Up stage is to reevaluate your “value ladder”—the level of services you plan on selling so you can identify your ideal customer trajectory.

While the names have changed, this is essentially the funnel we developed at the time:

Wild Audience’s Value Ladder

1. Funnel Crash ($12 tripwire)
2. Relationship Funnel
   – Starter ($600)
   – Pro ($800) Webinar Addon
   – Rocket ($1050) Strategy Call Addon
3. RF Mastery

I’ve linked you to the individual landing pages if you want to get an idea of how we sell these (and upsell the next ones).

This will organize your funnel creation process. Now that you’ve identified every piece, you can design your funnel to “pull” each customer from offer to offer.

For more on value ladders, check out our VideoFruit case study.

Build Your Relationship-Based Marketing Funnels

Relationship-based marketing funnels are how I built Wild Audience.

How do they differ from traditional sales funnels?

Well to start…

1. They’re evergreen.

2. They give leads the freedom of choice in how much and how fast they want to engage with you.

3. They center around essential belief installations and use psychology to foster engagement.

Let’s take a look:

                The Relationship Funnel

For any online business, this is the system you need to create in your Ramp Up stage. It will serve you for YEARS to come if you set it up correctly, and expanding your range and specificity within it is always an option.

It’s essentially a combination of lead generation ads, emails, and upsells that establish expertise and engagement and ONLY sell the most relevant products to the most engaged audiences.

These funnels work:

For a complete rundown of relationship funnels, go here.

Key takeaways:

1. Finalize your value ladder.
2. Use respect-based marketing to develop a passionate core audience.
3. Expand and build out your core funnels.

 Stages of Business Growth #3: Build Up

Definition:

Build Up is the stage where you create everything you need to scale up. It’s the internal scramble before the storm. 🙂

Key objective:

Build long-term infrastructure and systems to prepare for scaling.

Pain points:

1. Adjusting existing systems
2. Letting go of control

Solutions:

1. Don’t do it all yourself! Hire a business or operations manager if you need to.
2. Build a foolproof data & analytics system.
3. Check and proof all existing processes & systems.

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Build Up is all about preparing for future scaling.

If you plan on spending thousands of VC & personal cash on marketing in the Scale Up stage, then you need to make sure that:

1. Your internal processes are efficient. This includes your business hierarchy (management layout), having a company culture that can be taught & understood by the new employees, etc.