Hey there listener! What’s up? Welcome back to Traffic Jam! This of course is the podcast show that teaches you how to get more traffic and build a profitable audience online. I am your host as always, James Reynolds, and I am super excited for the awesome show that we have for you today.

Now, I will tell you all about our guest but before that I want to say a quick thank you and give a shout out to Brad from SkilledUp.com and that’s because he left some awesome feedback for the show and also a five-star iTunes rating so thank you to you Brad.

I’d truly appreciate it if you too left a review or a rating for the show, you can let me know what you like least, you can let me know what you like most about Traffic Jam and perhaps who you’d like me to introduce on a future show. Leave your feedback on iTunes or Stitcher and I’d read it out on next week’s episode.

On to this week’s show, we’re joined by Todd Brown from MarketingFunnelAutomation.com who is surprisingly going to be talking to us about marketing funnels. You can download bonus marketing funnels training along with this episode by going to TrafficJamCast.com/56. So head on over now, grab your downloads, and then listen along to the show.

So back to our guest, well Todd Brown was introduced to me by Ryan Levesque and when a funnels guy like Ryan gives endorsement of a fellow funnel marketing specialist as well, I take note. Todd is recognized as one of the foremost authorities at engineering marketing funnels that produce leads and customers often a triple or quadruple value experienced by the competitors. He’s worked alongside internet marketing guys like Rich Scheffren and Jeff Walker who orchestrated multiple six-figure launches within the internet marketing community.

So there you go, that’s a real brief intro, and now over to Todd Brown himself from MarketingFunnelAutomation.com.

James: Hey there listener! Welcome back to the interview section of TrafficJam#56 and joining me right here today is Todd Brown. Todd, how are you doing?

Todd: I am doing great man! Thanks so much for having me.

James: Thanks for coming onboard. So you’ve got this website called sixfigurefunnelformula.com where you show people how to set up their first sales funnel. Let’s start with some of the basics, what exactly is a sales funnel and how do we go about setting one of these things up?

Todd: Despite what is often talked about as a sales funnel, I really just look at a sales funnel as a sequence of communication that a business delivers to a product to a prospect or a customer designed to move the prospect or customer to take a particular action. So typically when we talked about marketing funnel typically we’re talking about the marketing sequence or the marketing activity that go out to prospects designed to turn those prospects in to a first time customer to get them to participate in their first transaction and that’s really all there is to it, what message are you delivering to those prospects? What does that message consist of in terms of the number of steps, in terms of different channels that you’re utilizing with the ultimate aim of moving them to become a customer.

James: Got it! And I guess in that definition, it could be a simple a step as getting someone to make contact, getting someone to subscribe to an email list; it’s just nudging them along a little sequence to move them closer towards being a customer. Would that be right?

Todd: The answer is yes, that is right. I like to look at it from a little bit of higher perspective and ultimately what we’re looking at is we are looking at what is the ultimate goal in any one instance when you’re communicating with a prospect for example and even though there are multiple steps along the way like one of those steps might be filling out a contact form, another step might be picking up the phone and calling your sales department. Those are all kind of steps and stages of a bigger, more overall marketing funnel that’s ultimately designed for an end action. So those are steps in the process of reaching that ultimate goal.

James: Yeah, do you think that’s where some people perhaps get a little bit caught up with this stuff because when you do look at the bigger picture, there are so many moving parts, so many different steps that if I was to look up my own funnel and you were to look up yours and our listener would also delve in to what happens in their own business, there aren’t so many steps that could occur from someone first finding out about the business to actually becoming a customer. Do you think that people get a little bit over awed by this because of just the complexity and the potential size of this thing?

Todd: Absolutely! And I think a lot of that comes from approaching the development of a marketing funnel backwards. A lot of entrepreneurs, a lot chief marketing officers, a lot of just marketers in general looking at what are the different stages that I should have and what are the different things that I can communicate at those different stages and different steps of the funnel and they can really very quickly get overwhelmed by all of that. Whereas the right way to start to build your funnel is really to take a step back and look at your prospects and ask yourself what is it that they need to know to be able to buy? What is it that they need to ultimately believe? And I think it is weird thing because this is one of the most critical elements of building out a funnel and yet this is one of those areas that just gets so overlooked so often. Figure out what your prospects need to believe that the end of your marketing funnel no matter how long or short that funnel is. What do they need to believe so that when you eventually present them with the opportunity to buy, they see it as the absolute best decision for their current situation? And only until you’ve got that and you’ve got clarity on that- what they need to believe so they start to buy. Should you even believe then well, what is the best way to then present my message to accomplish those beliefs and what are the different stages if you will, that are ultimately need to bring this prospect through as I am leading them through those different beliefs?

James: Yeah, so I guess there are some key things to consider here before starting out for one, and I guess sort of listening to what you are saying Todd, the big one perhaps is really understanding what outcome you want at the end of that process but what are some of the other things that we kind of need to consider before we start putting together any of the architecture- mapping out what messages people are getting at what time and what mechanisms are in play. What are some of those big picture things that we need to consider first?

Todd: Yeah, so we have to start from the very beginning and even before you begin thinking about what should you be communicating in your marketing message, before you even think about any of that, you’ve got to go back to what’s typically referred to as marketplace sophistication and you’ve got to understand what is the sophistication level of your market and all that really means is what are the marketing messages, the promises, the claims, the benefit statements that your prospects have been exposed to and are being exposed to by competitors. What are competitors saying? What are competitors claiming? What are competitors promising? What are competitors saying in terms of how they are going to deliver on those promises to your prospects like how does this service work? What are the mechanisms behind their products and services that ultimately deliver those results? You need to know those things, you need to get an idea of what it is that your competitors are saying and what is it that your prospects are seeing for a couple of very important reasons. For time purposes, I’ll just say that you need to know those things so that you can craft a message that #1 is the appropriate sophistication level for your prospects. Meaning that based on what it is that they’ve seen before and heard before and based on what it is that they have been inundated with, that ultimately determines what it is that they will respond to going forward and like one of the examples that I give with marketplace sophistication is like at one point in time there were no fat burners in the market, there were no pills that people can take to burn fat. And then all of a sudden, some entrepreneur, some company came out with the very first fat burner. Well, the very first fat burner in terms of marketing, all they had to say was take this pill and you’ll lose weight and people flock to it. Today, because of marketplace sophistication, because of competition, because of what other companies have said, and promised and claimed, if we roll that out with a supplement fat burner today making that same claim take this pill and you’ll lose weight, we’d get crushed and we wouldn’t sell anything because the market is at a totally different marketplace sophistication level. So that’s one thing. You’ve got to understand where your prospects are at based on what they have been exposed to. The other reason why we need to know that is because we need to be able to design and craft and engineer a marketing message that is unique, that is different, that is fresh, that is seen as unique in the marketplace and if you don’t know what your competitors have said, promised and claimed, then you’re shooting in the dark, you’re taking a guess at that and so you need to have a marketing message that is unique, different and fresh so in the process it prevents what we call mental opt out meaning that when a company and when a marketer designs a message that is not unique and different and fresh and timely and news worthy, and intellectually and emotionally compelling and all those things wrapped in to one, when prospects are first exposed to that message or exposed to that funnel, whether it is a landing page, whether it is direct mail, whether it is TV or whatever that is, they immediately experience that, Oh, I have heard that before, oh, I have seen that before, oh, I know about that, oh, it’s more of the same. That’s what we call mental opt out. And then their engagement level goes in the toilet and they either bail or ring a bell. So you need to start with that and that’s like in the core of understanding the marketplace as a whole before you start to design your marketing message. Does that make sense?

James: Yeah, that absolutely makes total sense. You’ve got to position yourself away from what everyone else is doing to keep people engaged. You’ve just got to understand sophistication of what people are looking for, right? Using the diet fat burning pill example. If we just claim, hey we’ll help you lose, well everyone’s heard that message a thousand times before. Why are we suddenly going to believe it’s actually going to be different for this pill when it hasn’t been for others? So it makes total sense. And you’ve got a formula for crafting a message around this I think, Todd, where you sort of position the solution to be new and different and you identify the right customer. Can you expand on that a little bit?

Todd: Well, I think there is a couple of things that you can do but for time purposes, let me share one and I think it is the most valuable that any marketer can learn and it’s this idea of one more step before you begin crafting the actual message, you have to recognize that marketing and selling are two totally different activities. Selling is when you talk about the product, when you talk about the product’s features, when you talk about the price point, the product’s guarantee, etc. Marketing is when you talk about the prospect and when you talk about the prospect’s situation, their needs, their wants and the best solution for their needs. Obviously, kind of marketing 101 says that the job of marketing is to make selling superfluous. I think that’s a quote from Peter Drakker, the job of marketing is to make it so that selling is unnecessary where after you do your marketing, presenting the product and you’re saying here it is, here’s your opportunity to get it. if you’ve done your marketing job, your prospects, they have a much higher level of desire for your product even before you talk about it. In order to do that, there is an idea, some concept that you are presenting to the prospect that your whole marketing message gets wrapped under. It’s really what I would call, there is an idea right behind your marketing message and that idea needs to be intellectually compelling, meaning it needs to be on a pure logical level, it needs to be intriguing. But also it needs to be compelling on an emotional level, and it needs to be new, unique, and different. That’s what we call the big idea. I first learned that from my good friend and mentor, Michael Masterson, or that’s really his pen name, Mark Fort is his name. and it’s like the days of simply being able to make bigger and bigger promises in your marketing, to scream the loudest promise, make the biggest claim, the biggest benefit in your marketplace, those days are long gone because less and less people believe those claims today, they’re not as credible. You can’t simply go into a marketplace and scream, louder benefits or more benefits than your competitors and so in order to get the market’s attention, you’ve got to start by building your market’s message on a unique, big, compelling idea, an idea that is arresting, an idea that makes everybody feel like huh, I have never heard that before! That’s logically and intellectually interesting! On an emotional level, I can see the benefit, I can see the payoff of me even engaging with this message, and remember, what we are talking about here is that the idea behind your marketing, not the idea behind your product, not the idea behind why you should buy the product, or why you should become the customer, but the idea behind the marketing message. Behind the marketing message is a message, remember about your message about their situation, about their obstacle, about their problem, about what they need, about their solution and so on, and so you’ve really got to look for again, what is big ideas based on an idea including its new, its unique, its fresh, its timely, its newsworthy, its immediately understandable. In other words, immediately grasped by the prospect. It’s intellectually compelling, it’s emotionally compelling, and it’s based on one single idea and of course inherent in that is a big, compelling, audacious promise inherent in that idea. Does that make sense?

James: Yup, absolutely! I’m loving this, I am just letting you free roll because it’s such good stuff Todd so yeah, absolutely following along. What do we do next? We’ve got a big idea, we’ve got a concept on which to base our marketing around, there are some mechanics to this, there are some steps that we may need to move people through. Where do we go next?

Todd: Yeah, so next is when you really design your marketing message and when you actually craft the message. Like at this point you’ve got an understanding of the marketplace sophistication, you understand what they have been exposed to, you understand kind of what’s going to move them and what’s not going to move them. You’ve kind of engineered or developed a marketing idea for that funnel that’s arresting, that’s startling and shocking and now it’s time to design your message. So what do you say to move prospects from being prospects to customers? That’s when we go back to what is it that prospects need to believe by. And for time purposes, the best example or metaphor that I can share with this particular part or step in the process of developing your marketing funnel is here’s where you’ve got to think like a prosecutor, you’ve got to think like a prosecuting attorney where there is a defendant, they are presenting their case, the prosecutor is presenting their case to the jury in an attempt to let’s say find this defendant guilty of a particular crime. Well, just like a prosecutor knows that there are certain critical things that the jury needs to believe and there is kind of a sequence to the things that they need to believe if ultimately at the end, by the time that prosecutor rests his case, he knows that there are certain things that that jury needs to believe and so that prosecutor then begins to present each of the facts, the prosecutor makes a series of statements and claims in sequence building a case and getting the jury to believe what it is that they want them to believe, ultimately leading them to the belief that yes this person is guilty, right? And so just like a prosecutor does it is basically a series of claims and benefit statements followed by a preponderance of truth, that’s what you as a marketer, that’s what you as a CMO or a business owner need to have happen in your marketing funnel. Remember that the essence of most marketing, even inadequate marketing, are a bunch of claims like you need this if you want to get thin or you take this pill and it prevents the absorption of fat or you do this and you’ll grow bigger tomatoes. All of those statements which are typical statements that you find in a marketing or sales piece or advertisement, those are all claims and one of the biggest mistakes that marketers and entrepreneurs is thinking that the market is just going to believe what it is that you say because you said it and you said it with conviction. The reality is that they are doubting everything you say because they are on guard because they know that you are ultimately trying to sell them on something and it is a defense mechanism for prospects. They are looking for reasons to doubt you, they are looking for cracks in your armor, they are looking for excuses not to feel guilty if they don’t buy so the reality is that a healthier and more productive way to look at this is they don’t believe a darn thing that you say until you prove it to them so when you make any kind of claim in your marketing, or should I say, any kind of claim you make in your marketing, you need to prove it, you need to offer proof. Literally a dozen different proof points that you can use and you should use throughout your marketing. But that’s really your whole marketing message becomes. It’s like plain proof benefit statement all the way through until you have kind of established in your head what the prospect needs so that when you do then present your offer, right ultimately when you present in to the Segway sales portion of your “marketing funnel” they’re then ecstatic because you just convinced them that they need a particular solution and now you are offering them a way to get that solution, right? So they are “sold” on everything that you got them to buy in to during the marketing portion and so now when you offer your product, you’re thrilled.

James: It seems to me a lot of what is underlying this is this whole element of trust right? And I guess that’s probably a stage which we’re at at the evolution of marketing where we have gone through this phase of people hyping up claims and making this huge offers and the market becoming blind to it all. The companies that seem to be doing well in the sales funnels so well are the ones that are inherently trustful where people go through them and not only do they believe their claims to be true but they trust the company or the person behind them. Would you say that’s the case?

Todd: Yeah, I definitely think there is a level of trust that is always needed and that’s why without getting too deep in to a different topic, but that’s why the backend, meaning all the marketing that a company does with existing clients – that is why the backend is infinitely easier and it is really why the backend is where all of the profit comes from in business and that is because there is a trust level there, right? The most difficult transaction to generate is that first transaction because there is no trust, there is no relationship and so it is why on the front end which is all the marketing that you do with prospects, in an attempt to convert them in to happy new paying customers, it’s why you’ve got to present certain elements in your marketing funnel to gain their trust, right? Because look, you know, on the backend you know you’ve gained their trust by delivering what you promised to them in their original purchase which is why it is so essential then bring on what it is that you promised to them in their original purchase. So it is why it is so essential that on every transaction but especially on the front end transaction, the very first transaction that you have with a brand new customer that you over deliver value, that you exceed their expectations because the ongoing trust that you have or lose with them is going to be dependent on the experience that they have with whatever it is that they just purchased. But when you are talking about a prospect they don’t have the luxury of and so all of the trust or experience that they can feel with you is derived from marketing and there’s certain aspects of that that are potentially beyond your control. You know what the marketplace said, what’s said about you in social media but there is also a tremendous amount that is directly within your control that can be engineered and strategically used in your marketing like establishing credibility. There is lots of different things that you can do to establish credibility. There’s demonstrating track record, and then of course there is a preponderance of truth. And look, when you demonstrate credibility, let’s say we came out with, again let’s go back to that supplement example, we can establish credibility by talking about the formulation, our supplement was designed by a team of MDs and we could list out who they are, their credentials, their experience, X number of them are published authors, they are professors at prestigious universities then of course we can show track record. We can show that out of the X thousand of the people that have used the supplement X pounds have been lost in the first month, week, year, etc. and then when we make a variety of different claims throughout our marketing, like meaning we are talking about the efficiency of the ingredients in the supplement and we are saying that the most powerful ingredient for fat burning is whatever, then we can offer studies that back that up, we can show excerpts from trade journals. And so all of those things taken together are what help us to establish trust in the minds of the prospect and again get them to believe what it is that we are saying. And I will finish with this, you know, that in marketing, it is one thing to tell the truth, it is another thing to be believable. And so, just because something is true doesn’t mean that it is believable. And so the most important thing is that when you say something, your prospects believe what it is that you are saying and so that is why proof is such an incredibly vital part of any marketing campaign. It’s why Gary, one of the most successful living copywriters to this day talks about at the foundation of every million dollar plus campaign there is an extraordinary amount of proof. My buddy Jeff Walker with product launch formula talks about no proof, no launch. It’s about why the biggest direct response publishing companies like agora, their campaigns are just laden with proof point after proof point after proof point. Because it turns a claim in to a fact, it turns a prospect to believe, their trust level goes up, and prospects who believe and trust are a lot more likely to buy.

James: Totally! Well let’s get close to finishing up on a couple of things. The first thing I want to ask you about is conversions and of course when it comes to any aspect of conversion, testing is critical but I’m guessing with the sales funnel which has many, many moving parts to it, there are going to be some aspects that are more critical to test than others. What would they be Todd if we sort of zero in on those?

Todd: Yeah, that’s a great question. the right answer to that is that you identify what is the constraint in the funnel and then you test that constraint and so the easiest way to understand what I mean by constraint is picture your funnel like a chain with different links and in every chain there is a constraint in the funnel and then you test that constraint. And so the easiest way to understand by constraint is picture your funnel like a chain with different links and on every chain there is one weakest link and the strength of the chain is dependent on the strength of the weakest link. It doesn’t matter if you strengthen all the other links, the chain will only be as strong as that weakest link and if you want to improve the strength of the chain, you have to improve the chain of the weakest link. That’s the same way that we optimize our funnel and determine what needs to be tested. We look at the different metrics related to how the funnel is performing and the different metrics are dependent on the steps in the funnel and what type of funnel you are using but you look at the different metrics in the funnel and you identify based on those metrics, not opinion, not guess, but based on numbers, objective numbers, you identify the constraint, we are going to find the weakest link then you go to work testing that weak link until you can find what is going to strengthen it and so in your funnel, the stage or step in your funnel that needs to be tested could be vastly different from the stage inside a funnel that needs to be tested and optimized because it all goes back in to. So for like a typical example where you’ve got an opt in page you’d be requesting the contact information and then you might look at what is the opt in rate meaning what’s the percentage of people that hit on it compared to the percentage of people that give you their contact information and if you allow people to buy right in to your website, what is the conversion rate of the people that then buy. What’s the percentage of people that abandon their cart because that is the number that most marketers don’t even think about that its usually through the roof and it’s looking as though the performance of the different stages of the marketing funnel identifying the weakest one, the one that if you strengthened it would have the biggest impact on the performance of the funnel and that’s the one you go to work and test everything.

James: Got it! Well you mentioned opinions and assumptions and I guess as marketers we try not too many but invariably we do from time to time. What have been some of the most surprising test results that you’ve ever seen?

Todd: What I think is that I think the reality is when it comes to testing, when it comes to your marketing, when it comes to your decisions on what changes you should make, you never ever want to go on opinion or assumptions because I have made. I said if I was a betting man I was going to bet that this page is going to win and I have lost more of those internal bets or bets with my team over here than I care to admit because sometimes the reality is that people are not rational. We like to think of ourselves as rational involved creatures but the reality is that the overwhelming majority of decisions that people make are not based on rational thinking and logic and they are based on deeper, more emotional drivers and emotional triggers and so certain things that we think logically would work oftentimes don’t and so when it comes to your marketing, one of the worst things that you can do is implement a change without at least tracking it, if not testing it against a prior version because many more times I have been in situations where we made the change and the change that I made, whether it be adding audio to a page, or adding a video, or taking the video away, it’s suppressed response. Whether it’s suppressed opt in rate or sales, its suppressed so it’s like a price point. For most marketers, they are simply guessing at what is the best price point. They have no idea and they’ll make a change and they won’t track it. they don’t know if they are making less money and that is the beauty of direct response marketing. In direct response marketing where you’re asking for a specific question and you can see whether they are taking that action or not, you can hold every single thing accountable. And so there is no reason whatsoever to do anything based on opinion because really to answer your question there is no rhyme or reason to the test results that I have seen stuff work in one funnel for one product with one appeal and that thing that worked really well got crushed in a different funnel. The same audience, you’ve got to track and test different things before you make a decision about the different things that you are going to make, what additions you are going to put in, what things you are going to take out etc. and let the numbers drive what it is that you do.

James: Yeah exactly! Well let’s I think appropriately wrap things up on that point, there were plenty of directions that interview could go and I think we hardly touched the surface. I think to be fair to you Todd and also to be fair with our listeners, we should direct them off somewhere to dive deeper in to the topic a little bit more so where should we send our listeners off to as a result of listening to this?

Todd: I think there are two places they can go, the first is as you mentioned earlier, sixfigurefunnelformula.com. There is a four-part video series there that is better than some paid training programs. Well worth your time to go through. You can go through it at your own pace. The other site is our main website and that’s just at marketingfunnelautomation.com. if you want to read, we’ve put up a bunch of posts and videos and audios which you can find at marketingfunnelautomation.com/blog and go there, read a bunch of articles and posts and we dive deep in to a lot of these areas and have fun.

James: Cool stuff! Well to you the listener, if you haven’t managed to take note of those two places they will of course be show notes for episode#56 which you get to by going to TrafficJamCast.com/56 so head on over there you’ll find all of those resources and more. So all that remains is for me to thank you for coming on, it’s been an absolute blast and enjoy the rest of your day.

Todd: Thank you so much it’s been my pleasure.

So there you go that was Todd Brown from MarketingFunnelAutomation.com. Thank you for listening in to episode#56. We will be back with another episode next week where we’ll be turning our attention to blog traffic so keep an ear out for that show. Remember to get the bonus train that comes along with this episode. Head on over to TrafficJamCast.com/56 where you can also get your hands on a full transcript of the show, special episode artwork, and a host of other goodies as well. So as not to miss next week’s show, remember to subscribe via iTunes or Stitcher radio and the links to do that are TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes and TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher. And whilst you’re there, you can leave a review for the show as well, that would be really appreciated.

We end this week’s show with a traffic jam with Todd Brown’s chosen track and it’s called Keep Your Head Up by Andy Gramma, so enjoy the track, I’ll see you here next week.