Comment from More Gym Members: How Digital Funnels are transforming the online landscape

Automated digital funnels allow anyone to leverage themselves from rags to riches, but ease of access makes the market more competitive and fuller of junk. A well-made funnel with strong propositions ‘traps’ prospects inside the funnel and chases them around the internet until they buy.

Unlike the old days of unresourceful mass-media marketing, now, even the most risk adverse and under-funded people can start a business and grow it rapidly using hyper-targeted digital funnels.

Some Definitions

First we need to define a few things. A ‘customer journey’ is the experience your customers or clients, in this case I will say clients, are driven through as they go from completely oblivious of your existence, to lifelong loyal client.

A ‘Value ladder’ is this customer journey strategically choreographed so the prospect goes from giving you no money, to giving you the maximum amount of money the maximum number of times with repeat purchases of higher priced items.

A ‘Digital marketing funnel’ is therefore this process systemised and implemented through digital mediums, and usually largely automated. This can be used to sell a physical product, a service, or a digital deliverable of some kind. The highly automated one tends to be a digital product like an online course, so I’ll use that as my reference.

Trapped inside a digital funnel

There’s an infinite number of ways to build a digital funnel but a common strong omnipresent one involves Facebook, Instagram, Google and emails. I’ll use my own as an example.

I want to speak with Gym Owners looking to get more clients and build a profitable fitness empire. First I create a landing page with my first offer to get their email, take them to another page educating them on the topic and showing my worth, then prompt them to schedule a call.

All I need to do is go to Facebook, write an ad which will appeal to my target before leading them to my landing page, and launch. Facebook allows me to target people interested in specific things like fitness and business, so there’s a strong chance these people may be gym owners.

Those who see my ad and match the criteria click on it and are taken through the first step of my funnel. While most people don’t schedule a call straight away it doesn’t matter because now I’ve trapped them.

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Ever wondered how to become so omnipresent your prospect has no option but to listen to you message, learn to trust you, and ultimately buy?

With Facebook and Google’s tracking pixel installed on my landing page and their email collected, I can now retarget those specific users taking them through a long customer journey up my value ladder.

This is truly powerful because I can now appear in banner ads on other websites around the internet, everywhere on their Facebook and Instagram, I’ll be in the ads which target them on YouTube (as it’s owned by Google), and I’ll be emailing them. With value adding content, case studies, testimonials and offers constantly hitting them, there really is no escaping me.

Scaling up

Once a business’s funnel starts to make a profit, the almost instant cashflow from digital sales allows them to reinvest everything back into driving more sales, rapidly turning $100 into $1000 into $100,000 and onwards.

With a strong understanding of digital funnels, the successful business owner will continue to improve the conversion efficiency of their funnel and overall profits, while also increasing the Life Time Value (LTV) per client.

Build it out well enough and everything from first touchpoint, first sale, upsell, and future sales can be largely automated with Facebook's retargeting and an email sequence, as long as the operator can keep the Facebook ads effectively feeding people in through the funnel.

The effect

On the consumer side of internet experience people end up trapped inside ‘micro-worlds’ which are directed by the omni-present marketing of digital funnels. The sheer effectiveness and constant repeat of these marketers has an outstanding effect in influencing the way the user thinks and the actions they take, assuming that because the company is ‘everywhere’ it must be ‘right’.

The issue with the ease of entry, like I said at the start, is the spread of rubbish. Businesses run with bad ethics and inability to deliver on promises are extremely common in the online landscape - Having nothing to lose (unlike a physical business) attracts a lot of cowboys!

Thankfully the genuinely valuable and well-run businesses survive and rise to the top above the market’s noise. With this digital omnipresence a genuine company with true value has a profound opportunity to influence people. Like all power, this comes with great responsibility.

Riley Stewart is an entrepreneur and the founder of www.moregymmembers.com