TT#055 - 4 Ways To Screw Up Your First Marketing Funnel...
“I hate feeling anxious about my business. How do I get off the emotional rollercoaster?”
I get that question a lot. And the more experienced I get, the more certain I am of my answer.
The majority of solopreneurs’ anxiety boils down to some variation of “I don’t know how to get more clients”.
And here’s the thing. When you’re operating from a place of scarcity, anxiety is the appropriate reaction.
Not knowing how to grow your business is scary. And not knowing how you’d replace current clients is even worse.
So we become over-dependant on particular clients, unsure about our businesses future, and we wonder if we’d be better off in a ‘normal’ job.
The solution? To create a simple, effective marketing funnel.
In other words, a system that reliably produces inbound enquiries for our services.
When we build it correctly, a simple marketing funnel can change the trajectory of our business.
For first-timers and experienced funnel builders alike, there are 4 big banana skins to avoid.
This newsletter is my attempt to highlight 4 of the most common mistakes that solopreneurs make, so you can avoid making them yourself.
Enjoy.
Banana Skin 1: Skipping Ahead To This Part
“Success is the sequence.”
Baking a cake is partly about getting the ingredients right.
But it’s also about going through the steps in the right order. If you start halfway through, your cake is probably going to taste like shit.
The same is true when it comes to building a marketing funnel.
If you start here, without having done the strategic work first, your funnel won’t work very well.
So: before you start investing time and bandwidth into creating an awesome marketing funnel, ask yourself:
Do I know who my ideal client is?
Do I know what problem I’m solving for them?
Do I know the language they use to describe that problem (and the associated pains)?
Have I got some form of confirmation that my service fixes their problem?
If you can answer those questions with clarity, awesome.
And if you’re not quite there: that’s absolutely fine too.
But in order for your funnel-building to be effective, you’ll want to first get clarity on the 4 questions above.
Banana Skin 2: Getting (Unnecessarily) Overwhelmed
Solopreneurs hear about marketing funnels and feel immediately overwhelmed.
It checks out. If you’re not marketing or tech savvy, the idea of a ‘funnel’ can be intimidating. It feels like there’s a whole new skill to learn, and so it’s easy to approach creating a funnel from a place of fear.
But it’s totally unnecessary.
The whole purpose of building a funnel is to make your life easier, not harder.
This actually isn’t a marathon of activity. It’s not this exhausting ‘thing’ that goes on forever.
Instead, we’re aiming for a flywheel. Something that takes some effort at the start, but then more or less produces results by itself.
But feeling overwhelmed actually makes it difficult to build a great funnel.
Because what happens is that solopreneurs see that it requires initial work, notices there’s some tech involved and bumps into some new terminology.
And it either puts them off building a funnel full stop, or they sort of ‘half’ commit.
And then when their funnel doesn’t produce great results, they assume that funnels are just ‘not for them’.
Here’s my promise: if you were able to answer the 4 questions above, you can build a highly productive funnel.
But if you can approach it as something exciting that’s going to grow your revenue, it’s that much easier to pull off.
Banana Skin 3: Over Complicating The Tech
“The person with the fewest tools wins”.
As solopreneurs, we like building for scale. And it feels good to know our tools can handle complexity.
But when it comes to building your funnel, simplicity is the key. Because if you find your funnel complicated to use, chances are your prospects will too.
I was guilty of this: I created a patchwork of tools, thinking I was creating something that was going to work in 3 years time.
But in practice, it made getting version 1 off the ground way harder than it needed be.
My advice is to start simple. Use the smallest and simplest tech-stack possible. And when you need to upgrade, you can.
Just get it working so you can start measuring results and making adjustments.
Banana Skin 4: Farming This Out To An Agency
I came into the solopreneurship game from an executive role. I’d been trained to delegate as quickly as possible.
But building your first marketing funnel is not something that I recommend farming out. If you want to get some help, that’s totally fine.
But here’s the thing: there is so much value in you understanding your own funnel.
I want you to understand what makes it work well, what makes it underperform, how to set it up and how to make changes when things aren’t working (without expensive agency fees).
But when you farm out your funnel to an agency, you never really learn how to do any of that.
And the truth is, there’s no agency on planet earth that cares about your business nearly as much as you do. And even if they did, they don’t understand your messaging/client/USP as well as you should.
So the funnel they set up might be pretty good, but it won’t ever be great.
In addition, your funnel is going to change a TON over time. And if you’re relying on a 3rd party to make any adjustments, you’ll find the process exhausting.
But when you own it, making changes is pretty simple. And you might even find that you enjoy the process.
