Over the past several articles, we’ve been exploring why every small business should use the flywheel marketing strategy to bring clarity, structure, and growth to their marketing efforts. We’ve already covered steps one and two of the flywheel marketing method which assist in helping to identify your audience, create clear messaging, and build a strong-foundation with a customer-focused, SEO-optimized website.
The next step in this marketing strategy for small businesses is to implement a content marketing strategy—which includes a marketing sales funnel that serves your ideal customers well and makes them want to further engage with your business.
Let’s recap the four phases that make up the flywheel marketing strategy.
As a reminder, the flywheel marketing method is a small business marketing strategy where your website and online marketing efforts are in sync and function as a flywheel to continually produce results.
The four-step flywheel marketing system includes:
- Understanding your audience and creating clear messaging
- Building a strong foundation with a lead generation website and SEO
- Creating SEO-based content marketing and setting up a marketing sales funnel
- Promoting your services and content
Next, we’re going to discuss the third step in the flywheel marketing strategy—content marketing, where you’ll learn what it is and how you can utilize a marketing sales funnel to attract your ideal clients.
Building a marketing sales funnel system starts with effective content.
In case you aren’t familiar with content marketing, it’s a marketing strategy where businesses create and distribute valuable, relevant, and engaging content to attract their ideal clients. And, when we say “content,” we mean blogs posts, videos, podcast episodes, infographics, organic social media posts, and any other medium that allows you to share a message and engage with your audience.
The goal of content marketing is to attract ideal customers through creating and promoting content that is relevant and helpful—not interruptive. Great content leads, guides, and directs customers where you want them to go. Those interested will find this content through channels like your website, search engines, and social media.
In order for your content marketing to be effective, you must use your audience and keyword strategies to understand who your audience is and what they want to accomplish. From this information, you will be able to determine what content needs to be developed, what will spark someone to enter into your marketing sales funnel, and how you should lead prospects through their buying journey.
There are three stages of a buyer’s journey including:
- Awareness
Someone has a problem, but they don’t know what to do about it or need to be made aware of something. - Consideration
Someone is researching or considering ways to get something done. - Decision Stage
Someone is ready to make a decision—meaning, they need to be convinced choosing you will be the right choice.
It will be important to create a content and marketing sales funnel strategy that includes:
-
Engaging & Informative Content
Use the buying journey stages above to create blog posts, videos, and infographics that solve problems for your ideal audience, highlight success stories, and bring educational awareness. -
Monthly, SEO-Based Blogs
Properly formatted blogs give you more opportunities to rank well in search engines, make your site more appealing to visitors, and be a guide to your customers. Be sure to be helpful, consider your keyword strategy, answer the most common questions your ideal audience has, and post the content (blogs) to your website on a monthly basis. -
Marketing Sales Funnel System
The secret to generating more qualified leads and to grow your email list is a sales funnel. In the next section, we will break down the strategy, elements, and workflow to building this lead generation system.
The secret to generating more qualified leads and building your email list is with a marketing sales funnel.
This strategy will work for your small business regardless of your size, what you do, or who you want to attract because it builds relationships with your ideal audience over a period of time and guides them through the natural phases of a relationship. (Remember, no one likes to feel as if they are being sold to!)
Your marketing sales funnel system should include a:
- One Liner
Be sure to develop a one liner for this campaign, which is a single statement you can use to help people realize why they need your product or service. - Website Landing Page
Build a website landing page (or opt-in page), as it guides customers through the curiosity phase of the relationship. It gives them the reasons why they should exchange their email address for the valuable information you’re offering, and provides them a way to access the offer. In the development of your form, you can decide if you want the submit button on your website to send them directly to the content or if they will need to wait for it to show up in their inbox. - Lead Generator (PDF) or Offer
A lead generator is an excellent way to generate highly-qualified leads. Because they are exchanging their email address for information, it allows an ideal customer to continue to engage with your brand without having too much risk associated. And, it gives you a way to build a more qualified email list.
The information you’re giving away needs to be worth at least $10 to them. Remember, this content should help them solve a problem, provide a resource such as a checklist, or assist in figuring out the next steps they should take. - Automated Sales Email Campaign
Because someone who gives you their email address is a highly-qualified lead, you’ll want to use this to your advantage and create an automated sales email campaign that “seals the deal.” We’ll break down this marketing sales funnel email series in the next section.
An automated sales email campaign is designed to educate and onramp your ideal customers.
A lead-generating PDF captures a prospect’s email address, and the automated email campaign works to turn that email address into a paying customer. Even though customers are led by emotions, their logic most likely won’t allow them to typically buy on initial impulse.
This is why this series of emails is so critical—as it continues to engage your ideal customers—helping break through any barriers—until they are ready to become customers.
Your automated email series strategy should include five emails:
- Asset Delivery
In the first email of this sales sequence, you’ll want to thank your customer for downloading the free resource—don’t try to sell them on anything, just deliver value for free. This will help you establish trust with your ideal customer. This email should be short and sweet.
- Problem & Solution
In the second email, you’ll need to identify a problem your customer is facing and tackle it head-on. By acknowledging their pain and then introducing a solution (your product or service) you show them that their problem can be solved—and you’re the one to help them do it.
- Testimonial
The third email in this series should be a customer testimonial that speaks to the success of using your product or service. Make sure the testimonial explains how your company or product resolved their main problem such as spending too much time on marketing, not wanting to have to clean their house, or being tired of spending their Saturdays mowing the yard.
It will be important to get a testimonial that describes the successful results a client experienced—such as how they felt (from overwhelmed to confident) or what positive thing resulted from working with you (more time with the family, less stress, etc.).
- Overcome an Objection
In the fourth email, you’ll want to overcome the most common objection your ideal customers have around buying your product or service. Be sure to focus on resolving the strongest point of resistance that is keeping them from working with you (pricing, time, complexity, stigma, etc.).
When you do this, you’re giving your ideal customer permission to make a purchase because you’ve already given them the logic they need in order to combat making an emotionally-charged purchase. This email will help them move forward in the sales process much quicker. - Sales Letter
The fifth email is when you work to close the deal. This email and content should call your customers to action and illustrate what success will look like when they follow your advice to buy your product or service.
And, as a side note—be sure to utilize your audience strategy and Marketing Guiding Statements when developing these emails.
Setting up the flywheel marketing strategy does take quite a bit of work upfront. But, the investment of time and money is worth it, because once every piece is in place, your marketing will more or less continue to work on its own. This allows you to feel confident in your marketing and focus on other important aspects of your small business and life outside the office.
By implementing this small business marketing strategy—including an extremely valuable marketing sales funnel—you’ll stop spending time and money on marketing tactics that don’t produce results and finally see the growth you’ve been working so hard to achieve.
Small businesses deserve to have a marketing strategy and partner that works as hard as they do.
Treefrog Marketing is a marketing agency for small businesses located in Lafayette, Indiana that builds effective marketing strategies and systems that help small business leaders take their companies to the next level. We specialize in marketing leadership, strategic marketing and advertising, digital marketing, graphic design, web design, social media, SEO, and more. For more information, please visit our website. You can also connect with us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.