← Call Her Creator with Katelyn Rhoades
Call Her Creator with Katelyn Rhoades
161. The Visibility-to-Income Framework: My 3-Step System That Turns Content Into Cash
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This episode is Sponsored by Shopify HomeServe for a travel and Whatnot Shopify Starting a business sounds exciting until you realize you suddenly have to wear every hat. The website, the emails, the marketing, it's a lot. That's why I love Shopify. Less platform, more built in business partner. With hundreds of ready to use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store that actually matches your brand style and HomeServe. Owning a home is amazing until real life happens. A water heater goes out or a plumbing issue shows up at the absolute worst. That's why I love the idea of HomeServe. They offer plans that help protect against covered repairs starting at just 499amonth. And fora Travel Are you the one who always plans the trips, the hotels, the itineraries, all of it? You're basically already a travel advisor. You're just not getting paid for it. With Fora Travel, you can change that and Whatnot. If you love discovering great products without paying full retail, this one's fun. Whatnot is the largest live shopping marketplace in the country, where buyers connect with passionate sellers in real time to score amazing finds and deals. From building your business to protecting your home, to getting paid to travel, to discovering products and deals in a totally new way, these are the tools making life and business easier. Launch with Shopify Sign up for your $1 per month trial at shopify.com CHC protect your home systems at homeserve.com CHC become a fora advisor at foratravel.com CHC and download the Whatnot app today and get free shipping on your first order. Just search Whatnot in the App Store and start scoring amazing deals. You've probably seen the buzz around live shopping lately, but I wanted to understand the hype for myself, so I jumped on Whatnot as a buyer first watched a few live shows and immediately understood why people are spending so much time there. It feels way more interactive than traditional online shopping because you're seeing products in real time, you're able to ask questions, and you're finding deals you genuinely wouldn't get at full retail. And from the business, the growth is wild. Whatnot is the largest live shopping marketplace in the country, and sellers across categories like beauty, fashion, electronics, and more are building serious businesses. I've seen the momentum firsthand. Whatnot has climbed the app store charts and the seller growth numbers are impressive. The number of sellers making over $1 million annually has doubled. If you're a business owner, creator, reseller, or even someone with a side Hustle. This flips the traditional model. Instead of waiting for someone to find your listing, you go live, connect directly with buyers, build community, and create repeat customers. And as a buyer, the savings are real. You almost never pay full price, which honestly makes the whole experience even more fun. Download the Whatnot app today and get free shipping on your first order. Just search w h a t n o t whatnot in the app Store and start scoring amazing deals.
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Hey, everybody. Welcome to Call Her Creator. I am your host, Kaitlyn Rhodes. And you know, whether you're a content creator or entrepreneur or just someone who's ready to monetize on their passion, this is your go to podcast for all the things to turn your social media dreams into a reality. So in today's episode, we're going to be breaking down the basics of social media marketing and talking about your sales funnel. And we're gonna go over what exactly a marketing funnel is. You know, the three stages of a marketing funnel, what kind of content that means for your audience. And then we'll also go over how you can actually convert these people and make more sales. I just think this is such a fundamental part of your overall marketing and sales strategy. This is how you sell stuff, whether you sell a product or a service. And everyone uses a marketing funnel. So I first learned about funnels with HubSpot. HubSpot defines having. In my notes, HubSpot defines a marketing funnel as a series of stages to guide prospects through the customer journey. The funnel helps you plan and measure your efforts to attract, engage and convert prospects through content and other marketing materials like landing pages, ads, social media, all that good stuff. So, you know, marketing funnel is basically funneling people on their buyer's journey. They're there to build awareness, which most, most marketing funnels are based on the ADA model Aida. It's awareness, interest, desire, and then action. But you can simplify this funnel, which is what I do, into three main parts. Obviously, there's the top of the funnel. Let's imagine, close your eyes, we have an upside down triangle right now. Okay? The top of that funnel is the awareness stage. Then as they go down that funnel, there's the consideration stage, and then they get to that bottom of the funnel. That's the conversion stage. So just to break it down a little bit for you before we get too nitty gritty here, top of the funnel is basically where your customer encounters a problem and they're seeking information about it. Okay, so let's just say I own a coffee shop and my coffee machine has stopped working. So I'm now getting on the Internet to kind of see what, what's the problem here, what's going on with my coffee machine. So I'm at the top of the funnel. I'm in the awareness stage. Once I get in there, you know, you start to go down to the middle of the funnel, which is where the consumer has basically figured out what their problem is and they're considering all of their solutions. So my coffee machine's broken. I'm on the Internet kind of searching up what could be wrong with it. Oh, found what? Found out what's wrong with it. So, so now I'm considering my options. I'm doing research to figure out who do I want to use what product, who do I want to buy from. I'm considering all of my options here. And then as I go down the funnel, I'm assessing my options so that I can make a decision to purchase. And that's when, you know, I'm going to probably compare pricing. Um, if I see a discount somewhere, I'm probably going to use it, use that discount code and go buy your product. So that's kind of how a general idea of how the marketing funnel works and how you need to approach your marketing when it comes to your customer and the buyer's journey that they're on. They are on this little funnel. And, you know, at different times, people can come in at different parts of the funnel. Like, for example, you know, they might come into the middle of your funnel because they've already done their awareness stage and they just found out about you during their consideration stage. So they can come in at any times. But traditionally, generally, they're going to come in at the top and flow down to the bottom. So let's break down these stages of the marketing funnel so that you can fully understand this concept. And what I want you guys to do is, you know, while I'm talking about all of this stuff, think about your service or your product and how it plays its role with this marketing funnel and how you can use it to your advantage, because this is how people should approach their marketing. When we do social media marketing at the agency, you know, on a monthly basis, I tell the girls at the beginning of the month, you know, start at the awareness stage and then bring your buyer down the funnel. So start with awareness type content, give them more consideration type content, and then right hook, as Gary Vee says, hit them with a call to action. So top of the funnel, this is your awareness stage. This is where you are attracting a very broad audience. So you're throwing out a big net. You're just gonna net anybody that needs some awareness of who you are. The whole goal here is brand awareness for you. So this is where people start to become aware of who you are. They might engage with you for the first time here. They might have just found you while scrolling through Pinterest. They might have saw a social media post that you posted. They might not know exactly who you are or what you offer yet. So this stage really has to. You have to keep in mind that you still need to educate them on who you are and what exactly you deliver. So your marketing material here needs to be based around brand awareness. Okay, now you want to think of this part as attracting people to your marketing funnel. You're just attracting them. You're not trying to sell to them right now, right? The top of the funnel. These people don't even know you. It's like taking somebody on a date. You don't want to, you know, kiss them on the first night. You got to kind of get to know them. So think about that. Your buyer needs to get to know you before they make a purchase, more than likely. Now, there are some people out there that obviously will pull the trigger and buy things without really educating themselves on the service or product. But generally speaking, most people are going to do their research first. So that's where the top of the funnel is. So examples of top of the funnel content, what is appropriate when we're, you know, teaching this brand awareness? There's a couple pieces here that I like to post about whenever I'm thinking about the awareness stage. So first is going to be like educational pieces. You know, we're going to explain the concept of the product or the service and then focus on that pain point that the customer has and how you resolve it. Okay, so think about a problem that they might have, for example. I'm just going to use myself as an example. I'm a social media coach. Your problem is that you want to grow on Instagram. So my content right now is more than likely going to be social media posts about Instagram growth hacks or Instagram tips or what even is Instagram, because you don't know a lot about it. So I have to think that you are a newbie in the Instagram marketing realm. So that's how I'm approaching you as my top of funnel. Now, this can also come in as video infographics. I don't know if you guys ever scroll Pinterest, you will see a ton of infographics in there. Infographics are a really good way to kind of share the concept. Give them like a visual and pull them into your product or business as well, or your service business. So infographics, educational videos, social media, all that stuff. Your main goal is just to build awareness. Now, the call to action with this building awareness is not going to be too salesy. Okay. In the case that you have like a lead magnet, maybe you have a free checklist you're going to pull them in with. That's fine. You know, you're not going to gatekeep any of this. So if they want to give you their email in exchange for a checklist or a guide about your service or product, okay, cool. But you're not selling to them right now. Okay? So just think of this stage as a wide cast net on all these people that you're just trying to pull in, engage their interest. Another example of this could be creating a blog post or an Instagram post. And the hook, there would be something like X tips when getting started with whatever it is that you're getting. Think beginner. And then the goal of that blog post or that social media post would just be to educate, bring value, and set yourself up as an expert. So that is the top of the funnel. As we move along on that buyer's journey, we're going to start going down to the middle of the funnel. The middle of the funnel. The goal there is to build interest with your brand and convert some people if possible. But if you don't convert them, it's okay. They're still making their way down that funnel. So potential customers enter the middle of the funnel. Once they know kind of who you are, they've probably engaged with you before. Maybe they've seen a social media post, maybe they've read one of your blog posts. But they kind of have an idea of who you are. They might have even subscribed to your email list. They're following you on social media, probably. Or maybe they've signed up for a webinar. Think of the middle of the funnel as warm leads, because again, they kind of already know who you are. So this is your chance to engage with them as a prospective client. This is your time to earn trust with them and help set your brand apart from the others. So your content in the middle of the funnel is a little bit different from the top of the funnel. The content in the middle is going to address specific pain points. Okay, this is, this is typically where a lead magnet will come into play, though again, that sometimes Happens at the top of the funnel too. So you can do either or, but you can promote your lead magnet. At this time, maybe you are offering a discount on some baby clothing and they've already seen you once before. So this is your way to kind of pull them in. They kind of already know who you are. Now you're offering them a discount, so they're, they're considering using you. If you're a coach, maybe you've got a checklist in your stand store and that is your free lead magnet. That's something that you're going to give to them in exchange for their email because again, they kind of already know who you are. So they're probably a little bit more comfortable giving you their email address in exchange for this, you know, valuable offer that you have. Now, when they get a lead magnet, whether that's a discount code or, you know, the checklist, or maybe they unlocked a free webinar or something like that, the goal there is to collect their email or their phone number so that you can get them on some kind of drip campaign. Now, what is a drip campaign? There's two different ways here. So there's email drip campaigns or there's like texting. I know you guys have had texts come in from, you know, maybe a boutique that you visited and shopped at, or maybe you've gotten put on an email list for someone, maybe you opted in on their free checklist for losing weight. And now you're on this email campaign, so you're starting to get a few more emails. The point of a drip email campaign is to push you further down their funnel. They want to educate you, they want to solve problems, they want to nurture you and they want to sell to you. So that is the point of an email drip campaign or a text exchange. It's to get you further down the, the funnel. So real life example here is maybe you offer a free webinar to master some type of skill and then what you're going to do is you're going to promote that webinar on social media. You know, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook. Maybe you're running some ads for people to join this free webinar. All they have to do is give you their email. So you're promoting this one thing, this offer in exchange for emails. And so right now I'm doing this. Actually, we're doing, we just launched a new lead magnet, which is launch your lead magnet like a pro. So we're actually teaching you how to launch a lead magnet. So we're giving this free checklist in exchange for their email. And then once they get on my email campaign, they're going to start getting a few emails in the next couple of weeks. That first is going to educate and nurture them with some valuable information. I'm going to, you know, drive them further down. Having a lead magnet, what that looks like, the benefits, how to do it. And then at the end of the email drip campaign, I'm obviously going to try to push something bigger on them, something of value, something that costs money, so they'll buy from me. So that is the main goal of a lead magnet. And your consideration stage, the middle, these are people, these are warm leads. Okay. Once they keep going down, they're now at the bottom of the funnel. This is where you convert your leads into customers and you hopefully retain them. So the bottom of the funnel, also known as bofu, I forgot to mention, top of the funnel is known as tofu, middle of the funnel is mofu, and bottom of the funnel is bofu. Tofu, mofu and bofu. I love saying that weird word. So the bottom of the funnel, the bofu, is the last place that prospective customers go before they convert. So you've gotten their attention during the attraction awareness stage. You've built trust during the consideration stage, and, and now you've fostered this relationship so that they trust you more, they want to buy from you. So you're going to use this stage, the bottom of the funnel, to convert them. You're going to give them specific reasons why they should choose you over another brand. So a couple of ways to do this. You could again, offer a discount. You could offer a free demo of your product, have somebody come watch and see, you know, what, what your product is all about. You could write a how to guide that eliminates any kind of like, potential of doubts that they have about your product. You could share customer testimonials and reviews to build some kind of trust. Or again, the special discount. Now you have to remember that everyone experiences this funnel differently. So what works for someone might not work for someone else. So just keep that in mind. Um, that's why it's super important to, you know, assess your marketing funnel. I say every 30 days, but it might even be less than that. But you need to be going in there all the time and kind of seeing like, okay, how many leads have we gotten? Is this working? Are we going to run ads with it? What's our cost per click? How much is it costing us? Just to give some real life examples Here too, with the ads. We run a couple of Facebook ads to promote some of our lead magnets, our freebies. We are trying to build trust and awareness. We're trying to cast that wide net. So our targeting is pretty broad because we're trying to just get whoever shows some interest. We want you to click on that ad and get our freebie. Now, the way that I gauge if it's working or not is I'll get in there like on a weekly basis. I know I said 30 days. It's different for everybody. I get in there on a weekly basis because I do marketing for a living. It's my priority. So I get in there on a weekly basis and I look at the cost per click. How much is this costing me? Is it expensive? Is it average? Is it cheap? If it's cheap, that means it's probably performing really, really well. I'll also look at the impressions, how many people have seen it, the reach, the clicks. I will obviously assess how exactly that is performing so that I can either, you know, fix things if we need to fix some type of copy, if we need to fix something in the lead magnet. But you always want to be assessing how it's working, if it's working, and you know, how you can improve more from that. So to summarize, we've got the Tofu, mofu, and bofu. These are all stages that represent different levels of engagement and intent with your marketing funnel. Now, the content strategies at each stage are basically tailored to the basic needs of your audience, the specific pain point that they are having during their buyer's journey. So if you've not heard what a buyer's journey is, it's as explained. It's like the funnel. They're at the top where they're learning about you, then they're engaging with you, considering you, and then they're deciding if they want to work with you or not. So that all helps them make a purchasing decision. Now, a little bonus here is the loyalty stage. Once you do have someone go down this funnel with you and they've bought from you, it's not over. Your job is not over yet. You have to make them loyal customers that either stay with you or come back to you or tell you to one of their friends or family. So that's where the loyalty stage comes, and that helps you retain the customers. So this could be in the form of a loyalty program. For example, one of my favorite companies, it's called CBD Distillery. I love their gummies for nighttime. And the more that I'M with them. The longer that I keep my membership up, they give me free gifts. Like, every couple months, I'll get like, a free other product of theirs to try. So, like, a loyalty program is a really good idea. I know young living does this too. If you are a member for so long, they'll send you free oils every couple months. So doing some kind of loyalty program is a really good idea. Um, surveys are another way, you know, to make your business better. There's also affiliate programs, which I am all for an affiliate program. And the cool thing with Stan is, as a creator or entrepreneur, if you're just. If you decide to sell something and you want to create an affiliate program, you can totally do that within your stand store. There's no heavy lifting. You basically just make these promo codes and give them to your affiliates. But affiliate programs are really, really nice because that helps people more people spread the word about your product. So I love affiliate programs. And then also during the, you know, loyalty stage, you want to treat your customers and clients as VIPs. You want to nurture them. You want to, you know, think about them every couple weeks, check in on them, see how they're doing, send them an email. Maybe you have them in this private Facebook group, and you drop golden nuggets in there every once in a while just to show that you care about them and that you want them to succeed. So that's kind of how you keep and retain your customers. Now, I kind of want to break this down for you guys as if you were in the beginning stages of marketing your product or service. What exactly I would do if I were starting a funnel. So the first step here is to list out your. Your perfect buyer. You want to nail down who is your target audience. And this was actually talked about in episode one, your buyer's Persona. It's so important to understand exactly who you are selling to. So you need to write down what they look like, what gender, their age, where do they live, do they have, you know, extra income? How much do they make? What do they do for a living? You want to get very nitty gritty about your target audience so you know exactly what their pain points are and what they're struggling with so that you can sell to that, to those pain points. You can create all of your content based on those pain points, even your captions for social media. Once you have your perfect person in mind and there can be a couple of them, just so you know, there's not just one buyer's Persona. Um, I've Worked with a company before, they had like five different buyer's Persona. You know, they had like a middle aged woman who stays at home and does art classes. And then we had Brian who works in the office, yada yada. You know, there was different kind of people. So don't think that it's just one perfect person. There can be like versions of that perfect person. Okay. Once you have that perfect person or persons in mind, you're going to want to map out their customer journey. Where exactly do you want them to start and where do you want them to end up? What, what exactly are you trying to sell? So that's why having your offer in place is extremely important. There are a ton of people out there that will go and make a lead magnet and collect all these leads and then they're like, what do I do with these leads? I don't know what to sell them. I don't have a product. That's not the way to do this. Make sure that you have a product or service in place before you start pulling all these people in. Now don't get me wrong, there are people out there that make waiting lists just to gauge people's interest and they'll get you on the wait list and then they'll offer something later on. That's fine. But if you really want to do this the right way, you need to have your offer in mind if and put it together. So map out their journey. Where do they start, what is their finished product? How are you going to get them to buy this? How are you going to attract them to that? So I would start with your offer first, honestly, and then think about how you can attract people to that offer. The next part of that is designing your actual lead magnet. So again, I have a lead magnet checklist which is going to help you launch your lead magnet in my own stand store. If you guys want to get that, it's free. But what that will do is that will kind of give you a checklist of everything you need to have in place before you actually launch your lead magnet. So I know I said design your lead magnet, but there's a lot that goes into an actual lead magnet. So when you're doing that, I would do some competitors research and see what, what are other people offering as a freebie, what kind of value are they bringing? And just make sure you do your research there. Don't just think you know what's their issue. You should be able to find what their pain points are from that buyer's Persona. But if you need Even more help, you can go do competitive research there. So you've listed out your perfect buyer, you've got your buyer's journey, you've designed your lead magnet. Now you need to design a landing page for that lead magnet. So when people are interested in grabbing your checklist, where do they go to get it? So there's two options here. One, again, I told you guys, Stan actually has a little lead magnet capture form for their store. So if you don't have a website with a landing page, you can totally just use that. What that will do is it will ask for their email and name and then you're able to send the lead magnet to them automatically. Stan does it all for you. If you have a website, I do recommend putting together a landing page. Landing pages are a way to push those specific people to one spot, educate them on what you're about to give them, and kind of sell to them a little bit more. So for example, my landing page right now for that lead magnet checklist is something around the lines of launch your lead magnet without stress, grab my free checklist to make sure you do everything right, something like that. So it's just a way for you to educate them one more time about what you're selling. Kind of sell to them. And it looks good too, because then you can show off what the lead magnet actually looks like. So landing page is really great to have in mind. Once you have that in line, then you can start your marketing for it. Um, I would do a ton of social media marketing around your lead magnet. And you know, that can be on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, all the things. Pinterest. Pinterest is a really good website, by the way, to drive traffic to your website. It's actually one of the biggest referral traffic drivers is Pinterest. So creating an account over there is really smart for any kind of business product, businesses for certain, because it's really based on pictures. Um, but we as a service provider, we do some Pinterest marketing and it performs pretty well. We've actually pushed a lot of people to different lead magnets of ours from Pinterest. So that is a really good place to start marketing your lead magnet. Um, and then like I said, you know, using your other channels obviously too. You can also do a dedicated email campaign where maybe you know, you line out like a seven day campaign and like day one is you are giving them their freebie. Day two is you are educating them a little bit more. Day three, you're providing a little bit more resources. Day four, you are giving them an offer discount code and saying that it expires in the next 48 hours. So you see how you kind of just like attracted them but then you like made them want to make a purchase now timely. So that's how you start marketing your, your content. And then the other part of this is actually looking at the performance of it. Analytics are your best friend when it comes to this stuff that's going to tell you if it's performing well. This is actually a really good time for you guys to get into Google Analytics. If you have a website, Google Analytics is totally free. You will just go in there and create an account and then you will give them the URL to your website and Google will actually start indexing your website, crawling all of the pages so that when people do search for a certain something, Google can serve your website to them. Now Google's really good at being able to track like your most popular pages that people are visiting. So you can kind of see if your landing page is performing well. You can see if your blog posts are performing well. Again, blogging is a really good way for that. Top of funnel too. Top and middle really, because they're not only going to be learning about you, but you're also going to be like engaging them. They're going to be considering you during blogging. So that could be either or. But blogging is a really good way to do that and a really good way to measure that through Google Analytics. And then there's also something called heat maps. Now this is typically you have to pay for heat maps, but what this does is it will basically like analyze your entire website and show you where people are clicking the most. So the heat map will show you when someone lands on your website. It will show you where they go first and what's like the most popular part of your website. It's really, really cool. That's something to look into as well if you have the budget for it. The biggest thing about this marketing funnel is that you are not so much being too salesy and pushing, you know, sales down your customer's throats, but you're more so attracting them to your product or service. We live in a world of self service where, you know, we do the research, we have the phones at our fingertips, so we're always on there, you know, researching, educating ourselves so that we can make a very educated buying decision as well. So keep that in mind when you are thinking about this funnel, that people aren't dumb. They're going to do their research. So you just need to be there to meet them at the time of each point of their buyer's journey, whether that's during their awareness stage, where they're just getting aware of who you are, they're just, you know, being introduced to who you are. Or the consideration stage, where they're considering their different options. Or the conversion stage, where they're ready to buy and they just need you to give them a little nudge, like a special discount or something like that. Um, but you just have to meet them where they're at in their buyer's journey. If you liked this episode today, please let me know. Send me a DM over on Instagram, Call Her Creator and I would love for you to send this episode to a friend and leave me a five star review if you enjoyed it. And with that, I will see you guys next week with a new episode of Call Her Creator. Thank you.