The No1 Reason Why Your Funnels Are Not Converting

(And the steps you need to take to fix them)

Are you creating funnels for your Online Agency? Struggling to get a consistent flow of new leads and sales? Then chances are that you are making the same mistake that thousands of other online entrepreneurs are making when building out their funnels! And what is this mistake? Let’s find out …

Typical Campaign Layout

With over 8,000 students worldwide and around 100 clients throughout my businesses, I get to see a hell of a lot of funnels on a daily basis. I see funnels from marketers, funnels from e-commerce store owners, online agency owner funnels, course creator funnels, and so much more. Thanks to people like Russel Brunson funnels have been made sexy again. The idea of having a system that takes a cold audience viewer of a traffic generating ad over to a structured capture page gets them to sign up to your list in return for some engaging lead magnet, and then hits them with an OTO product upgrade is amazing! Or is it?

You see, in theory this works great. Your audience have an issue they need fixing, they have a dream they need to make a reality, they have a situation they need to get out of, so that amazing PDF that you have created in order for them to finally learn how to achieve their goals is going to be clickbait gold, right? Not quite …

Why Are My Facebook Ads Failing To Convert?

This is one of the most common questions I am asked by my audience. “Scott, I am running ads to an amazing ebook I have put together which is going to help my audience out of a situation, yet no one is clicking on my ad!!”

The problem with this is that you are running ads to a cold audience who you know NOTHING about! The definition of Cold Audience is an audience of people who have never heard from you, never seen you, don’t know (or care) who you are or what you have to say. Then you are just presuming that everyone is in the same situation as each other, all facing the same business struggles, the same emotions to their pains, the same problems in their lives. To make things worse, you are assuming that your product has value, that your product is worthy of their time, worthy of their investment (money, email address, data).

This is the classic nice guy marketing that I talk about in my books and podcast — it’s making the conscious decision that everyone is the same and they all need you in order to get out of the situation they are currently facing. Want to know why your ads aren’t converting? It’s because they are YOUR Ads!

Sounds harsh I know, but trust me, it took me a long time (and a lot of money) to figure this stuff out! I was in the same boat as you. I was promoting the ‘Look At Me — I’m Amazing’ ads, and I can tell you from personal experience that it makes no difference how fancy your opt-in page is if no one is clicking on it!

So how do we make ads that convert?

The simple answer is … We don’t! Crazy right? But imagine this for a second …

You’re sat on your Facebook feed (or where ever you are running your ads) and up pops a sponsored ad with an engaging title. It talks about a situation you are experiencing right now — let’s say this is that your website is not performing and the ad is focussed around why your website is not performing. Now the ad tells you that there are 3 main points that you need to focus on in order to get your website performing. It states that they have written a 15-page ebook about these 3 points and you can download it for free. Would you click on it? I know I wouldn’t.

I don’t know what these 3 main points are, I don’t want to have to click on an ad and input my email address, and I certainly don’t have time to read through a 15-page ebook! And it doesn’t matter if the ebook is a 1 page PDF, a mini-course, a paid product or a free product — I don’t care enough about what 3 things you would change to my website at this point. The value of your lead magnet is not strong enough to me because I have no idea who you are and I don’t want another marketer hitting my inbox each day trying to get me to pay them to fix my website! I can hire someone and have less hassle!

Now imagine a different situation. Imagine that you see a video. Exactly the same concept, the same training, the same 3 points. Imagine if this had no CTA or link in the description. Just a simple video with the same engaging title. And in this video, the creator told you the 3 main points. They told you what changes to make and how to make them right in front of your eyes. Would this be more engaging? Of course it would!

My First Business

When I started my very first business at the age of 8 I had no internet. There were no mobile phones, no email addresses, nothing. However, I still had a funnel. I was selling random items from a classifieds paper that I would buy and relist with a better, more engaging copy. I would create a CRM in my school textbooks and I would keep the names and contact numbers of all my customers. When I would see a listing that I thought would make me a little profit I would start to contact my list. How did I do this? By picking up the phone and asking them if they would like to buy what I was thinking about purchasing. I would tell them that I had a product and tell them the price I was selling it at. If I got a few bites I would buy it. If no one was interested I would expand my audience by running better ads in the paper!

Action Point: What lead magnets are you currently running in your funnels? Can you get rid of the funnel altogether and simply give this information away for free in video form? If so then do this right away. Why would you do this? Well this brings me to the one mistake that people make in their funnels that stop them from creating daily leads and sales.

Subscribe to The Conversational Marketer Podcast

Stop Making Funnels And Start Building Campaigns

As hard as it is to believe, people struggle with the idea of a funnel. It’s not that they don’t understand what a funnel is, but more the fact that they don’t realise the dynamics of a funnel. They don’t understand that a funnel is more than a series of linked pages that take their potential customer on a journey. So I challenge you to stop creating funnels and start creating campaigns. What do I mean by this? Let’s take a look.

A campaign is a complete funnel or a series of funnels that make up the entire campaign. In my consultancy business I create campaigns for my clients. These campaigns consist of the following elements:

> ChatBots
> Email
> Facebook Ads
> Funnel Pages
> Funnel Blueprint

I strongly believe that to build out a successful campaign you need to have some element of these 5 different tools. So let’s use an example to help break this down. Let’s use the web design concept that we were talking about previously.

Imagine I have a web design client. They have been running cold audience ads to a 15 page lead magnet ebook and they are not converting. They come to me to fix this.

Here is what I would do …

I would start out by turning their ebook into a series of videos. Using the 3 main elements of a successful website idea that they built their ebook around, I would split this down into 3 different videos, each around 8 to 10 minutes in length, and each focussing on one of the elements. These videos would be stand alone in the fact that they would not make reference to each other. Imagine that they are single pieces of training content that do not need the other videos to complete the puzzle.

I would have no CTA in these videos, other than what the viewer needs to do in order to achieve the result that we are talking about in the video. And now that I have these videos I would put them out on the clients Facebook Page.

From here I would set up a Traffic Generator. A Traffic Generator is simply a marketing concept that you can run in your business in order to provide your audience you daily, weekly, or monthly content that they can subscribe to. In this example I am going to use a podcast.

Now that I have my Traffic Generator I can create a ChatBot and an Email that will be used to deliver the podcast and notify my clients subscribers as and when it is released.

From here I would need an offer. I would probably go for something simple such as a website review. I would create the funnel pages required for this website review, such as an opt-in page, leading to a thank you page where the audience member can book in an appointment to speak with my client once the review has been completed.

From Here I Would …

Create a One Time Offer upsell for a longer call, such as provide a standard 30 minute call as part of the review and give them an opportunity to have a more focused chat by paying a small amount of money (around $47) to extend the call to an hour in order to ask more questions about the results/changes required.

Now that the funnel pages have been created it’s time for the Facebook Ad. Now I know that I am not wanting to add any CTA in the clients initial ads, as these will simply be education only videos. So I will need to set up a retargeting audience. I will set up two custom retargeting audiences in total, with the first being a 25% video views audience and the second being a 10-second video views audience. This would be based on anyone watching any of the three videos I put out on the clients Facebook Page that relate to the 3 main website changes.

The 25% retargeting audience would then link over to the Free Website Reviewoffer and on to the funnel pages I have created. The 10 second audience would link to the Traffic Generator Podcast.

This would give me the foundations of a campaign. So why is this more important than a simple funnel? Because you have now covered all bases! No longer do you need people to click on your ad in order to download your 15 page ebook.

You now have video views which you can turn into profit. If people watch your videos then great, you can retarget them to your review, get them on the phone, and upsell your services. If your videos are not getting the views then no problem, the audience will be retargeted to your Traffic Generator and they have an opportunity to consume more of your content until they are hit with Buyer Intentcontent (content that moves them to the buyer intent stage).

When you are creating campaigns in your marketing funnel …

You are building the solid foundations to your business. Gone are the days of people wanting to receive your sales materials, looking forward to receiving your emails, searching for you on Google. This generation has given birth to the Nice Guy Marketer who will spend all their money on running Facebook Ads to them sitting in their sports cars and penthouse apartments telling you how amazing they are. But people are finally getting wise to this!

It’s the marketers and entrepreneurs who are putting in the hard work that are winning, the ones who fill out their blogs full of actual value, make videos that show their audience how to achieve what they want to achieve without asking for anything in return, who have packed out YouTube channels, and content-rich Facebook pages.

Start thinking about how campaigns can work for your business and put in the hard work. It isn’t a walk in the park but nor is it hard to do. Prove your worth, help your audience, and plug them into a system where they get to choose the journey they go on depending on the choices they make.

Do this and you will never have to worry about generating daily leads or sales again.