This page answers the questions:
- What do I need to build my first Inbound Funnel?
- How can an Inbound Funnel help generate leads and sales?
- Is it easy to get started with Inbound Marketing and Inbound Funnels?
After following this FunnelBud Recipe you can:
- Build your first Inbound Funnel
- Create a structured template for future Inbound Funnels
- Get started with Inbound and it’s benefits
The way we buy today has completely changed – Buyers have instant access to information and are empowered to make educated decisions without depending on the seller. It is critical that sellers adapt to this dynamic shift and modernize how they sell and market their products.
Let’s go back to 2000 – the Concorde still graces the skies, Bush and Gore are fighting it out, the Gladiator is turning heads worldwide, and Santana’s Smooth is on the radio. Let’s say you need to buy a car – How do you go about it? You’d drive to your local dealership and Tom, the slick salesman tries to sell you on the “must-have” top-end latest family sedan. You spend the day driving to similar dealerships, each with its own Slick Tom trying to sell you their “must-have” family sedan. Now compare this to today – want to buy a car? Just google it, duh!
See the difference? Your initial research doesn’t even involve a salesperson! You have useful, unbiased information available to buyers at their fingertips, without needing a single Slick Tom. This applies to every single purchase today – does this mean you, as a seller, can do nothing to attract buyers? You absolutely can and should!
The sales phases for the customer have not changed, only the stage at which they make their first contact with the seller – this is where inbound comes in. Creating useful, engaging, and relevant content answering the questions in buyers’ minds – brings leads “in the door” and establishes your brand as a trusted source in your field.
Elements from Freepik
In this cycle, the buyer goes through 3 different stages - Awareness, Consideration, Decision – the stages of our Inbound Funnel. In this exercise, we will focus on these three stages – creating everything you require to build your first inbound Funnel.
Building your funnel
Our goal is to drive new leads to your site, build your credibility as a trusted advisor, demonstrate how your business offers a unique value proposition, and eventually drive them to buy your product or services.
Here’s an overview of what a typical inbound funnel looks like:
Click the image to view the full presentation
In Summary, we’re using a lead magnet to drive visitors to our site, provide them with useful and engaging content, and collect their information. This lead magnet can be a guidebook, a checklist, or even a video course! The lead magnet should provide your leads with enough perceived value for them to give you their email address. Lastly, we need to create content for the ads that will attract leads to your magnet, and the communications that will nurture the leads you collect. The example above had these assets:
- A landing page where the lead can submit their information to download the lead magnet
- Blog Posts to drive leads to the landing page
- Social media and search engine marketing content promoting the blogs and the landing page
- Emails to follow up with and nurture the lead until they are ready to buy
- A Workflow to automatically qualify the lead when we detect buying signals
Notice how this is a symbiotic transaction – new leads are more likely to provide their contact information since you’re giving them your expertise in return. Inbound is all about delivering value and empowering visitors to achieve their goals – the value and expertise you offer establishes trust and can become a deciding factor in whether or not a lead converts.
The beauty of an inbound funnel is that when executed correctly, qualified leads come to you all by themselves, ready to enter your sales pipeline.
Workbook & Checklist
We have compiled a comprehensive workbook to help you build your first funnel that goes through each asset you will need to get started.
We’ve also used our years of combined experience here at FunnelBud to create a checklist of everything you will need in place for building your first funnel. Once you use the Workbook to create your template Funnel, simply use the checklist on page 3 of the workbook (and the assets from your template funnel), each time you want to create a new inbound funnel.
How can you get started, today
Difficulty Level: Easy
Average Time to Build: 6-7 hours (Placeholder Funnel without content)
Resources needed:
- Subscription to a Marketing Automation Tool like FunnelBud or free tools like Mailchimp, WordPress, etc. and connect them together.
- Content Creation Agency/Personnel for Copy and Graphics
- Buy-in from your sales team or whoever is going to take care of leads that come in
If you're not a FunnelBud client:
- Download the workbook.
- Follow the steps. The workbook contains complete step-by-step instructions, and you can use free tools to build your first inbound funnel today, without paying anyting!
If you're a FunnelBud client:
- Cost of Setup: $0 (joint setup of inbound funnels are included in your license)
- Your effort: 6-7 hours (Tooltip if possible: Includes consulting, building assets and reporting after the campaign) + content
(you provide content, we build it out for you)
- Cost of Outsourcing: ~$490*
- Your effort: Content Creation (guide, follow up emails, etc.) Advise and slight revisions included based on best practices.
- You just add content to the workbook, we build it all out for you.
(we provide content, strategy, delivery and optimization)
- Cost of Outsourcing:
Part of Retainer package where FunnelBud manages your content strategy
- Your effort: Approvals & meetings with us