Why more traffic won't fix a broken funnel. Online marketing tips. Ep. 176

If you've got an online marketing funnel set up for your business and it's not working as well as you'd like, you may think that you need more traffic. But the reality is, traffic alone won't likely fix your funnel. A broken funnel won't be helped with more traffic, especially ad traffic. You want to make sure everything is working organically before you start ads. Find out how to troubleshoot a broken funnel and figure out what to actually focus on because it's probably not that you need more traffic. 

Transcript

0:32

Hey there. So I've been talking to quite a few people recently and I keep hearing if I could just get more traffic, everything would be fine. In my business, my funnel would work, everything would be great. But I want you to understand that's not necessarily the issue. And I know that may sound weird seeing is I teach about SEO, I teach about how to get more traffic. But the reality is we need to make sure all the different parts of your funnel are working in order for that traffic to lead to lead generation and sales, they go hand in hand. Traffic alone does not solve the issue every time. So, hey, it's Rachel. I am so glad you're back here with me for today's podcast. This was an interesting thing that came up. In the free training classes, but it's also come up a number of times in the survey that I did recently with the audience, and that is I'm getting traffic to my website, but I'm not getting any sales and I don't understand why. And I thought, well, let's talk about this, like why are you not getting sales? And the other thing I saw in the survey results was, I'm getting traffic, but I get almost no leads. So my friend, something is broken. If you're getting traffic and you're not getting leads and you're not making sales, we don't need more traffic. In most cases. We need to fix the leaks within your sales funnel. So traffic, and this is also what happens when people are like, oh, I need just. To run ads because I need more traffic ads. Don't fix a broken funnel. Actually, a broken funnel will cost you a ton of money in ad spent, so we wanna make sure everything is working organically, meaning without ads, before we put ads behind something. Okay? So why does more traffic make things worse? More traffic is only going to amplify existing problems. So if you have a situation where you are bringing people into your world, maybe you've tried to do SEO on your own, you're bringing people into your world, you're getting traffic, but you're not generating leads and you're not making sales, that tells me. There's a breakdown somewhere. Either we're bringing the wrong people into the world, we have the wrong opt-in or freebie. Um, there's something that's making it hard for people to convert on our website. There's all sorts of things that can be impacting our ability to generate leads and sales from our website. The other thing that I see is often at this stage, people are frustrated. They're like, I'm getting traffic. I'm not getting leads. I'm not getting sales. I must just need more traffic in order to get leads and sales. I'm gonna start ads and. I know I talked about that a second ago, but I'm gonna caution you do not start ads in this situation. I do run them now, and I run them myself. I understand the strategy. I've spent a lot of time learning, and I also have a background in digital marketing, so I've spent a long time learning this. What I can tell you. Is that when you have the right strategy and everything is already converting organically, that is the time to start ads. Do not start it before that, unless you want to. You might as well just burn a pile of money in the middle of the table if you do it before that. So what you wanna look at is how is my traffic behaving once I get it to my website? Am I getting the expected number of people to opt in for my freebie? If they land on my landing page, am I getting at least 20% of them? 20 out of a hundred? Who see that freebie page? Are they joining? Are they requesting my, my freebie 20 is your baseline. Mine personally tend to be closer to 40 to 50%, which is considered to be high. Converting. Makes me happy. I've spent a lot of time working on those pages and making changes and updates and all of that revisions. In order to get them to that point. From there, of the people who become leads, what percentage of them become sales, because that's gonna be your ultimate conversion rate. You need to know whether your funnel is, you know, straight to a consult call if you're a realtor and it's, you know, a download on how to get your house ready to sell, or the five tips for getting ready to sell, how many of the people who request that. Go on to become a paying customer. That's your conversion rate. That's what you need to know. So we wanna make sure that we know that we're getting the right people, because the people who are coming to our site are downloading our freebies. They're signing up for our mailing list. They're becoming paid customers. So what we wanna look at to figure out what's broken, where are things broken, where is the mismatch between. The traffic in and the sales and the leads and the revenue. The first thing we look at is the opt-in conversion rate. Like I was talking about, that landing page, that's the first place we look to see how many people come to the site Total. Of that, how many people get your freebie? Now, you should have your freebie available in many different places. It should be at the top of your homepage. It should be on your blog posts. It should be available on any other page on your site that makes sense, where the person reading that information would be interested in your freebie, your freebie. Should solve one pain point for them, and it should be tied back to your products and services. So depending upon what your business is, what your niche is, what your products or services are, you may have one freebie, you may have two or three. I have I think, four right now that are actively available. One is a beginner's guide to traditional SEO. One is a beginner's guide to podcast, SEO for my podcasters. One is a beginner's guide to AI based SEO or answer engine. And then I also have one that is on a marketing metrics or marketing funnel checkup that actually is applicable to like this episode today. There also is, are several free classes or several webinars, things like that. So. Each of them ties back to an area of the business and they're each something that is very helpful for the person who's trying to learn about that particular topic. So you wanna make sure you have that you are looking for, like I said, minimum 20% conversion on the landing page for your freebie. Now, if you're getting 5,000 people a month to your website and you're only getting two people to sign up for your freebie, you either haven't offered it in enough places. Or you have a freebie that is not speaking to your audience because you would expect to see some of the people coming to your site. Not everybody's gonna sign up for it, but you would expect to see some of the people coming to your site signing up for that freebie. Now, if you have a hundred people visit your freebie page, and you're gonna have to look at your analytics to figure all of this out. You guys, you gotta, you know, start to understand your numbers. You're gonna look at your analytics and you're gonna see if I have a hundred people who visited my freebie page. And four people actually completed it and got my freebie. You have a problem. They don't like something about the page, the content, the offer, et cetera. If 25 people out of those a hundred got your freebie, you're doing okay. Now you can move on to the next step. From here, we look at your email. Delivery. So when you send your freebie your welcome sequence, you deliver your freebie email. Open rates don't mean a whole lot to us today because of the fact that so many inboxes do a preview ahead of time. So I don't even really look at them unless there's something like, huh, that one is really high. Okay. That tells me that one actually works really well. Versus eh, that's about the average. What's more important here is your click through rate, so you really want to understand what percentage of the people who get your email click on something. We want that to be above 1%. Now, your very first one where you're delivering the freebie, if it's like a download or a PDF or something like that. It should have a much higher click through rate because again, they're downloading to get that item from you. But your subsequent ones, how many people are clicking on the different emails? Are you giving them something to click on in each email from there? We want to look at your conversion events. So do you offer consult calls? Do you offer webinar signups? Do people make a purchase from you? How many people have to go through your funnel? How many people have to visit your website, sign up for your freebie? Be part of your world to make a purchase. Do you need a hundred people to come through to get one purchase? That's a 1% conversion rate. If you have a hundred people come through and you get 10 purchases, that's a 10% conversion rate. If a hundred people come through and you get 50 purchases, that's a 50% conversion rate, and that is. Ridiculously amazing. And honestly, you're probably not at that level depending on what type of traffic you have and what um, your offers are and your price point and all of that. Your conversion rates are gonna be very specific to your situation. I have seen some as low as you know, half a percent, especially with cold traffic. All the way up to 30 and 40% for one-on-one services or, um, I have one client who's got a one-on-one conversion rate right now for warm traffic, it's a hundred percent. For cold traffic, it's different. It's much lower. But for warm traffic, she is a hundred percent. If she can get them on that consult call, they want to work with her because she's amazing and they can see it easily and quickly. So that's where we also want to talk about like your show up rates, your close rates. So if people schedule the consult, people come, they sign up for the webinar, what percentage of those people show up for the consult call? What percentage of those people show up for the webinar? What percentage of those people. Are part of your world that you can actually meet with them, and then of them, what percentage actually buy. I know there's a lot going on in this episode. I work with this, especially with my six figure entrepreneurs. If you have built a business, you're in that six figure range. Even if you're close, like if you're close, we work on this. We really figure out where is your funnel leaking so that everything is working at the right level organically, so then you're ready to scale and you're ready to grow and really increase your revenue. The other thing that we want to talk about is just what type of traffic and what do you add when, so I always focus on SEO first because organic traffic is. It's not the easiest to get, but it is the least expense, and it is people who are looking for our products. So it is the traffic that is the most likely to convert, which is very important. So we lay the strategy in the foundation with SEO first, creating content that we know people are searching for, optimizing it so it can be found in Google, and found in chat, GPT, AI search, et cetera. We bring those people into the world. And then we make sure, like I said, you've got that opt-in, we've optimized it, we've got the right people joining the list. That's how we can go from, I'm creating content, but nobody's finding it. To, I'm creating content, I'm getting traffic, but I'm not getting leads. Now we fix that problem, then we fix the, but I'm getting leads, but I'm not making sales. Well, that's a third problem. That's our nurture or our conversion sequence. And so we look at that part of the funnel as well to figure out what exactly. It is that we need, you can do social media if you want. You know, I really don't focus on social media marketing because for me, it doesn't lead to the ROI that I want. I get more benefit out of my blog and my podcast, um, than I do social media. And so I just don't do it anymore because honestly, it's exhausting the amount of work that they want you to put into creating content for social media. I'm just not interested in and I know how to do it. I have a degree in broadcast journalism. Like I went to school for that. I went to school because I wanted to be a news reporter. I was going to be a news anchor. Um, I know how to talk on camera. I know how to do all of it. I know how to edit and I don't wanna put that kind of work into creating little content snippets for the business. So I don't, if you enjoy that and you wanna do it, absolutely do it. Once you know that everything is working. Organically, that's when you start doing ads. Ads are going to be a whole other beast and they do take time to figure out, and it will cost you probably at least$5,000 in my experience before you really figure out the right audience, the right messaging, the right everything. So having your engine working organically first will make it a big difference for you. So. What we wanna look at is what's the first step? Where are you at today? Now, if you're sitting here and you're listening to this and you're like, Rachel, I had no idea there were this many parts of it, or I've put a funnel together, but I don't really understand it, and I really want your help. I want to help you. Okay. I do work with just a handful of clients, one-on-one, and I do this type consulting working with you, teaching you what each step is, looking at it and saying, okay, this is working, this is not, here's what I think You need to adjust first. Then we look at the next step and we go through, and it can be as simple as. We need to change this email. Oh my gosh, you don't have a click here. You know, this is really hard to read. This doesn't quite make sense. I don't know that your ideal customer understands this. I really do go through with you step by step to make sure that by the end of our time that we're working together, you are a much more confident marketer. You understand your numbers, you understand your sales funnel. And you are ready to go and be able to do this for your business and you can start making a lot more money once you understand where the leaks are in your funnel. And uh, I love helping you with that. So if you're curious about that you're interested, send me an email, reply back to one of my emails, DM me on Instagram. Like I said, I have one opening right now for a new client, so if you are curious and you'd like to work one-on-one, it's. 90 days. So we worked together for the first three months initial period at$6,000. So 2000 a month or 6,000 paid up front. You and I worked together for three months, and if you want to continue and renew, you can do that. I have an opening right now because I have one client who is taking a brief pause and so I have room to bring somebody else in. Uh, right now if you're interested. So reach out. If you'd like that spot. I'd love to help you with this. Alright, you have a great day and I will see you back here next week. Bye for now.