In this episode Oliver Billson talks to Graham and Kevin about his FSMC framework for creating hugely effective marketing funnels
Oliver Billson – Marketing Funnels
Oli Billson runs a results marketing agency in Stafford, England called Oliver Billson.
For Oli, marketing funnels are all about creating a journey for your customers. His agency goes a further step and creates dynamic lead to customer experiences. This means they can talk to people at a human level, to pivot and change the conversation, depending upon the information they provide, what their problems are and why they were coming to you in the first place.
By doing this, Oli creates contingencies in the marketing funnel to follow up with people effectively and create conversations that are meaningful for them.
Oli’s formula for marketing funnels is F.S.M.C.
F is for Finish.
Begin with the end in mind. What is the overall objective of the campaign? Distinguish the finish point. Don’t allow your campaign to become a large elaborate monster. Oli breaks campaigns into smaller chunks. He thinks about what is the end-point of this campaign that he is trying to get people to. This might be:
- Scheduling a call.
- Buying a lower end “tripwire” product.
- The customer calling you.
- Attending or registering for a webinar.
Have the end in mind. The end-point is not necessarily someone engaging in a purchase. However, Oli recommends to create dynamic lead to customer experiences you need to chunk down effectively. The finish point is the start point for the next campaign.
Oli mentioned a client he is working with, their initial campaign is to have a lead development call, with the goal of scheduling a call for a sales representative. Everything before that is the mechanics of the campaign, first attempt at contacting, the second attempt at contacting, the qualification element. The second campaign, is the consult scheduled to close campaign. The finish point of that campaign, that they have an intention of interest that leads them to their first purchase. Oli is breaking down the sales process into separate campaigns, and placing focus on each campaign.
This allows you to spend more money on the people who make it through to the second campaign as qualified leads. Perhaps by:
- Sending a “Shock and Awe” box in the post to warm them up before that scheduled call.
S is for Start point.
How do people actually enter the campaign? You could be sending people to an opt-in form on your website. Maybe paid traffic, Facebook, YouTube, or a direct mail piece to drive website visits. Using a house list you might invite them by email. There needs to be a logical start point where they begin.
By breaking down these start campaigns, it helps you to track, measure and monitor more easily by thinking of these as smaller bite-sized campaigns that have different start points.
If the campaign above is “Contact request to qualification”, then the campaign before that is “How do we get people to the Contact point” – so the start point is to send a series of postcards, to drive them online, to put in their contact information to drive lead development.
M is for Milestones.
Defining what goals that need to be satisfied along the journey from start to finish. There will be parts of the journey that you need to be clear about. If the first milestone is to click to download a video, then did they consume 20% of the video or 75% of the video. This allows you to move people through the funnel either progressively or non-progressively based on their behaviour. That’s where “dynamic lead to customer experience” comes from.
In the Milestones stage, they have to go through these milestones, the sequence they go through in order to get to where we want them to go. You must be clear on what those milestones look like.
The ‘critical path’ – we are choreographing the journey, through the milestones. In advance, you will know people will only take action when they want to.
C is for Contingencies.
If people don’t take the critical path from milestone to milestone, we need to help people keep to the right/critical path. Not to detour and go off in a different direction. They may exit completely, they might opt-out of our emails. It is important to understand what the contingencies are BETWEEN those milestones to get people back on track.
Good examples of this are mixing up the media – if they are not responding by email, follow up by text message. If they didn’t buy on the webinar, the milestone was they registered for the webinar and the next milestone was they got to watch the webinar and the next milestone is they saw the offer, the next milestone is they saw the offer and they need to buy. Using those milestones, you can look at people who didn’t get to the part of watching the webinar, and then taking remedial action – send them a replay. Those who attended the webinar but didn’t see the offer – as we had their address from lead capture, we can send them a recording of the webinar in the post, with a letter that says, we noticed you registered for the webinar but weren’t able to see what we had on offer, we think it might be of interest to you, here it is, here’s the cd.
Is it a great bug DECISION TREE?
Often business owners are not short of creativity or ideas. People can see these things, but they struggle to IMPLEMENT their campaigns. FSMC is about starting with building blocks to build out your campaigns effectively.
Is the power in the contingencies?
Yes, people will only buy when they are ready. We live in a busy world. How do we follow up effectively to keep people on track. Look at consumption and engagement. Ask the question, what if they don’t.
“FOR EVERY INACTION, THERE IS A REACTION”
Better still, “For every action OR inaction, there is a reaction”.
When you recover people BACK to the critical path, is the initial recruitment method important?
There is a lot of congruency, it makes sense to be congruent. If you do offline to online and recruit via postcards, if you want a response, you take them back offline for response as that’s originally how they responded.
Facebook lead ads. They can run purely on mobiles. If the download is a video. They deliver the link to watch the video as an SMS. It is more congruent.
Facebook allows you to create an objective through Facebook advertising called lead generation. Primarily it is for mobiles. Now for desktops too. When you click on the ad, within 2 taps, it allows you to submit a form. The form they submit is within the Facebook environment, so they are not clicking on an ad and being taken away from Facebook, which means you are not creating that FRICTION about taking them outside an environment they didn’t want to be taken out of.
These ads by nature are an interruption. Once the ad is clicked, it will present a pop-up form, pre-populated with information Facebook holds for you. That means the accuracy of the data that is being provided is greater. We can customise those forms to ask some questions. Such as asking whether they want to be contacted by an adviser. We’ll deliver the video on SMS, and depending on whether they said YES or MAYBE get an adviser to contact me, they are handed to lead development, and with MAYBE they’ll get a further SMS. A 2-way automated text message sequence. So the first text might say, is now a good time to call, text YES, if not text NO. Then that response triggers the call or not. Oli calls this a PRE CALL SMS. They prime the call with a text and that increases the contact rate. Oli has found the SMS delivery mechanism has meant the time between REQUESTING INFORMATION and CONSUMING INFORMATION has been a lot shorter.
The key point is: When people are at their hottest, you don’t want to stop that motion.
With lead ads, it is reasonable to ask for their mobile number as that is why they ask for the mobile number. There are multiple modalities to follow up, so they also ask on lead ads for their email address.
A big mistake people make. Business websites are littered with content, so gating the content to exchange contact information for lead magnet or piece of value. Stagger the request for information. Sometimes it is good to ask HOW they want to consume the information – post, email, mobile.
If someone comes from Google Adwords from an intentional search, then we know they are specifically looking for something. THEY do not want to download “5 Things You Need to Know About…”. They want the information pack, they want the scheduled call, they want to speak to somebody.
It’s about providing the right amount of value they need to get them to the next milestone.
Motion
“Motion beats meditation.” Gary Halbert
What is important – you don’t want to stop people whilst they are in motion. A good tip is to have a low-value product offer on your THANK YOU PAGE. To segment those people who are in motion, between buyers and leads. Changing the relationship between lead and buyer changes what you can do.
NO DEAD THANK YOU PAGES. Give them a splintered version of your core offer.
Oli advises a good strategy for marketing funnels is to:
- Drive people to un-gated premium blog content from paid traffic.
- Don’t ask for their email address.
- Set a re-marketing pixel on the blog
- Then re-market people back to a lead magnet.
- This is NOW congruent with what they originally read and you have already offered value in advance in exchange for their name and email.
- You have value in advance.
Facebook remarketing pixel helps with contingency events.
The beauty of building audiences off different pages is you begin to build a picture of these buckets of these lists. That then when you do have an offer, you can very effectively drive traffic to in a very targeted way. This means, your conversion costs are going to be a lot lower.
Inside a funnel, Oli uses software that links between Infusionsoft CRM and Facebook Audiences. Depending upon what milestone they are at in the campaign, it is matched with and synced with that Facebook audience. This allows you to send a message that is congruent with where they are and the milestone that they next need to take. Oli says it is very effective and affordable – see https://syncsumo.com/pricing/
How would Oli advise starting your marketing funnels?
For those of you who want to take action, Oli has provided a FREE infographic, populated with an example, that you can understand and follow through. It is a worksheet to help you design your own campaign – with instant access.
Go to: http://www.oliverbillson.com/fsmc
Oli’s latest tools…
#1 https://syncsumo.com/pricing/
An effective way to sync your lead ads directly into your CRM or autoresponder sequence. Allows you to capture data. It syncs ads with Facebook Audiences so people can dynamically move through your funnel.
#2 https://fixyourfunnel.com/blog/
Very well integrated with Infusionsoft. It provides a triggered text based service. The conversation text automation. This can start automated and then become ‘real’ with a sales person taking on the text thread.
These people do unlimited graphic designs for a flat fee.
A swiss army plugin knife. Supports Infusionsoft.
Other ways to contact Oli and his content:
