Unlock the secrets of skyrocketing your online business as we delve into the power of sales funnels. Discover how this single concept 10x’d revenue for Angela's first business and enabled her clients to achieve millions in sales. Learn how to tailor your messaging to captivate your audience at each stage. Whether you're new to sales funnels or a seasoned pro, this episode equips you with the tools to optimize your website and drive growth.
Specifically, Angela shares:
The three key steps in every funnel.
How to use PS and PPS models to improve your conversion rates.
Key differences in messaging at each stage of the buying journey.
Angela Frank is a fractional CMO with a decade-long track record of generating multimillion-dollar marketing revenue for clients. She is the founder of The Growth Directive, a marketing consultancy helping brands create sustainable marketing programs.
Her new book Your Marketing Ecosystem: How Brands Can Market Less and Sell More helps business owners, founders, and corporate leaders create straightforward and profitable marketing strategies.
Angela is the host of The Growth Pod podcast, where she shares actionable tips to help you build a profitable brand you love.
Transcripts
Angela Frank:
Welcome back to The Growth Pod. In episode one, we discussed the secret formula for a winning website. But how do you get customers to your site to begin with?
Today we're demystifying sales funnels and learning how to hook your customer the second they land on your website. What I'm sharing with you today is the one thing that took my very first online business from making $10,000 a year to to over $100,000 per year.
Since learning this, I've seen it work for my clients over and over and over again. Unlocking this understanding of funnels is the number one way that I've been able to bring in millions of dollars in sales for my clients.
So then, what exactly is a sales funnel? In its most basic form, a funnel is simply the journey that all buyers take when making a purchase. All funnels follow a three step process.
The steps in the process have been called many things, but cold, warm and hot is what I see used most often to describe these steps.
This does a good job of helping to illustrate the process of warming someone up to your product, but I don't think it truly illustrates what you need to be telling prospects at each step. Instead of using cold, warm and hot, I want you to think of P.S. i bought it or P.P.S. i bought it.
You know, like people at the end of a letter saying P.S.
i'll explain exactly what this means in a moment, but the most important difference between these two is that when they will come into play for your business is different. All businesses start with P.S. i bought it. And then over time your business will mature into PPS I bought it.
So let's break down what PPS means and how this can work for your business. PPS is an acronym that stands for Pain Problem Solution. As buyers move through your funnel, they move through three phases.
The first is Pain Aware, the second is Problem Aware, and the third is Solution Awareness. Pain Aware is when your buyer knows they are in pain, but they might not know what problem it is that they have.
This is also the most difficult and expensive group to convert into a customer. Problem Aware is when your buyer knows the problem that is causing their pain, but might not know the solution that will take the pain away.
Solution Aware represents a group of buyers who knows the solution to their problem and how it will take their pain away. If you're able to position your product as the solution, this person will become a buyer of your product.
So if you're familiar with cold, warm and hot, you'll be able to see how Pain aware buyers are cold, problem Aware buyers are warm and Solution Aware buyers are hot.
The entire process from Pain Aware to Solution Aware can be quick like for a product like chewing gum, or it can take a long time for a more involved decision, like choosing a contractor for a home renovation.
Understanding PPS is the key to making your sales funnels work harder for you because each of these audiences need to know different things about your product. Let's see how this would work in action. Let's say you're marketing an anti aging cream. How would you market this with a PPS specific messaging?
Your Pain Aware buyers will be the hardest and most expensive buyers to message to, which is why I recommend that most businesses skip this group until they have perfected their funnels. We will save this group for last your Problem Aware buyers, however, know they have a painful problem. In this example, their skin is aging.
At this point they've identified their problem and are likely starting to research some solutions for this problem.
At the Problem Aware stage, buyers aren't quite ready to make a purchase, but they can be easily influenced into making a purchase if you're able to explain why your product is the solution to their problem and address any lingering concerns or objections in their minds. Again, they might not know the solution for their problem, but at this stage buyers know they have a problem and they're starting to research.
When considering messaging for our anti aging cream, we can show before and after images, discuss how clean the ingredients are, and also distance ourselves from our competitors by highlighting a key feature that we have that others don't. For example, maybe our cream gets great results and only has three ingredients.
We can make it a point that our competitors have over 50 ingredients and rouse some suspicion towards these ingredient heavy creams. If we're able to do this effectively, a buyer could discover our product and name it as their solution and become a buyer all at once.
The key here is understanding what concerns your buyers have at this stage as they move down your funnel and become Solution Aware buyers are ready to make a purchase, but at this stage they're much more knowledgeable for our anti aging cream. Our buyers at this stage may know the exact ingredients they're looking for.
They may know the features that they want, for example an overnight cream or a daytime cream. And they also may know how long it will take our competitors cream to show a visible difference in their skin.
So we need to approach this step in a similar way to the Problem Aware buyers. But we also need to keep in mind that these buyers are laser focused on their decision.
They know what they're looking for and that also may know how we stack up to our competitors and so therefore we need to tailor our messaging to the points that they care most about.
Understanding how to effectively message to the Problem Aware and Solution Aware groups is dependent on your product and your business, but it's also the most critical step to get right when building your funnels. So let's say you have a great Problem Aware and Solution Aware funnel, but how can you bring in even more customers?
This is where you'll take the PSP ibotta model and turn it into a PPS ibotta model by adding in the Pain Aware audience. This audience doesn't know they have a problem which makes them more difficult and expensive to reach. However, they do know they have a pain.
So for an anti aging cream, a pain could be that they don't feel good when they look in the mirror. That's their pain, but they don't know why they don't feel good. Do they need to dye their hair? Do they need to refresh their wardrobe?
Or is it something else? It's our job to understand the pain that our buyers are encountering and bring them all the way through the funnel as efficiently as possible.
This has happened to you. If you've ever purchased something spontaneously through an Instagram ad. You're scrolling and you see, oh, this is a cute top. I needed a cute top.
So your pain would be you don't like your wardrobe or you want to refresh your wardrobe, or even that the person in the ad looks better than you do. That's painful. So, so you click through and you purchase the shirt.
By addressing the pain, showing the buyer their problem, and positioning our product as the solution, we take control of the entire buying journey from the very start.
However, this is much more costly to do than the PS I Bought it model and so that's why I recommend it only to my clients who have really unlocked their problem and Solution Aware buyers already. I told you at the start of this episode that understanding the concept of PS I bought it is what 10x'd the sales of my first business.
For that business, I had no paid ads, I had no email lists, I had no fancy marketing software or CRM.
Instead, I was able to use this concept and convert my existing organic traffic at a much higher rate than I had previously, all by changing how I was speaking to buyers. And I want this for you.
So today, get inside your buyer's heads, map out your sales funnel, and ask yourself these three questions for each step of your funnel. 1. What information does my buyer need to make an informed decision? 2. What are they worried about at this stage in their buying journey? 3.
What is a key differentiator that sets my product or service apart from my competitors? After that, you can start implementing these messaging changes.
If you understand your buyers, this is going to make a huge difference in your business. I hope you enjoyed this episode of The Growth Pod. I look forward to seeing you in the next one.
