Marketing funnels can be a fantastic way to generate sales for your company. We help companies set up marketing funnels from time to time, and they work great! However, in most cases building a marketing funnel should be fairly far down your list of priorities.
At its core, a marketing funnel is just a series of techniques to get a lot of people interested in your product (starting at the top of the funnel) and then work them through other information and offers to get a few clients out the bottom of the funnel.
They’re great, but you probably don’t need to set one up — at least not yet.
Before you worry about a big, complex funnel, I encourage you to get the basics in place first, such as:
- Make sure your website is rock-solid.
- Track usability of the site and improve as needed.
- Produce consistent fresh content on your site, likely through a blog.
- Develop an appropriate level of social media interaction.
- Build an email list.
If you’re doing great with all of that, then perhaps a marketing funnel is a good next step. However, 99% of companies are missing at least an item or two on that list and should focus there first.
It reminds me of the famous gun scene from “Indiana Jones – Raiders of the Lost Ark“, where the “Arab Swordsman” was showing impressive sword skills but was killed very easily by Indiana’s gun. See it here:
I see a lot of companies that are the man with sword. Flashy and flamboyant, very impressive looking, but they’re lacking some key pieces.
Make your website awesome, develop fresh content, be engaging on social, send helpful emails, and once you have all of that humming along then (and only then) it might be time to look at building a funnel to take things to the next level.
