Are you using your sales funnel effectively? There’s a lot of hype around sales funnels. And that’s for good reason! They streamline your processes so you can provide qualified leads with a nurturing and compelling experience. This enables them to reach the mindset where they can make an informed decision about whether to purchase from you or not. 

There is a misconception that this is a one-and-done situation. You set up the lead magnet, email sequences and sales pages and then your offers pretty much sell themselves. Especially if it’s passive income like an online course! That’s the passive income lifestyle you’ve been mis-sold. 

Passive income isn’t completely passive. The delivery is. The marketing isn’t. 

It comes down to this: Your sales funnel can’t get you sales without active and qualified leads. That top of funnel marketing can’t be automated. 

Reframing the sales funnel

Don’t get me wrong, I love sales funnels and have happily written the copy for sales funnels for my clients. It’s just the only way they can be leveraged is if they are fueled by new leads and that’s a part that’s often omitted when talking about the value of sales funnels. 

So instead of using them to sell passive income, get in the mindset of using them to sell limitless income opportunities. These are offers that you can never sell out of because their content is digital and has already been created. They just need the right people to see them and a curated experience to be able to weigh up its value to them. 

What’s this ‘top of funnel’ marketing?

Your sales funnel starts with your lead magnet or whatever free entryway to email sequences you have set up. So to get leads into your funnel, you’ve got to get leads opting into the first stage of your sales funnel. How do you do that?

You’ve got the landing page for the opt in. Then you draw traffic to that opt in through content marketing. You know the stuff you update regularly like social media, blogs and your email newsletter. Those bits of content are what fuel your sales funnel. 

Are you attracting qualified leads?

I’m not the first person to tell you to take advantage of content marketing. In fact, you’ll probably hop on Insta after this and see a reel all about it. It’s such a known concept that it’s really easy to fall into autopilot and create content for the sake of creating content. If you look at the bigger picture, it’s not really doing anything for your business. 

Social media, blogs and email newsletters all have in-platform success indicators such as likes, comments, open rates and views. Often they become a distraction because they only tell part of the story. They don’t track whether the content is actually adding to your bottom line. It can condition us into creating content that does well on individual platforms but doesn’t boost the business. 

We end up attracting leads that will view, like and comment on our content but that aren’t right for our offers. So what’s the point of directing them into your sales funnel anyway?

How to create business-boosting content

1 Always have the end goal in mind

Build your marketing strategy backwards. Think about who would be perfect for your offer. Then make sure your sales funnel is attractive to them. After that, think about what top of funnel content would attract them and encourage them to enter your sales funnel. Never forget about the most important success indicators - whether you’re getting customers and clients!

2 Map your customer journey mindset

As well as understanding the infrastructure that makes up your customer journey like opt-ins and email sequences, understand how your ideal client changes and develops. The mindset of a completely fresh lead and the mindset of a lead contemplating purchasing are very different. Their knowledge base differs in terms of their familiarity with your business and their understanding of your industry. Their belief in and loyalty to you grows throughout the process. 

That means what they need to hear from you when they’re first discovering you on social media is not the same as what they need to hear when they’re reading your sales page. 

3 Practice being active 

There’s no point asking your leads to run before they can walk. So asking them to buy too early on in the customer journey won’t work and could potentially damage the relationship you’re building. Instead ask them to take smaller actions first to prove yourself as trustworthy and worthy of their effort. 

For example, asking for engagement such as likes, comments and shares is a good place to start. Then you can build up to clicking on links to other pieces of content and signing up for your lead magnet. A gradual process feels a lot more natural. 

A sales funnel is a very powerful thing. Use it wisely to get more sales more easily. You’ll get into a rhythm of how to use top of funnel content to fuel it with qualified leads. For a specific interconnected, cross-platform strategy, sign up for my 11 minute training 1 blog = 10 pieces of content.

I’ll talk you through the whole thing and show you how to implement it efficiently. Ace your top of funnel content to make the most of your sales funnel and scale your limitless income streams. It’s all in the 1 blog = 10 pieces of content training!