← Strategy Hour | Online Marketing for Business Growth
Strategy Hour | Online Marketing for Business Growth
937: Should You Launch Live or Build Automated Funnels? How to Sell Your Digital Product
00:36:10
In this episode, I break down why real-time and automated funnels aren’t competitors—they’re actually the ultimate tag team!
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- [00:00]
Abigail Pumphrey
It is one way, but if it's the only way you're doing it, you will get burnout. Period. End of story. You need other ways that are going to supplement that are going to help drive sales and are going to keep working even when you're not posting.
- [00:21]
Unknown Co-Host
Welcome to the Strategy Hour podcast brought to you by Boss Project. I'm your host Abigail Pumphrey and I'm dedicated to supporting online businesses. I don't believe in one right way to build a business. I'm here to help you build business your way. One that supports not only the life you have, but the life you want. I'm on a personal mission to help you become financially free. I'm taking all the lessons learned as I turned a layoff into a seven figure online business. I'm here to help you prioritize your life every step of the way. Whether you're creating your first digital product, growing an email list, or scaling an already profitable business. Settle in. It's time to talk strategy.
- [01:02]
Abigail Pumphrey
Ever set up a funnel and thought, sweet, I'm done. Only to hear crickets. Or maybe you're stuck in this like never ending cycle of live launching and wondering when you're going to finally get some breathing room. Today we're breaking down why real time and automated funnels aren't competitors, but they're actually the ultimate tag team. This is exactly what I'm teaching inside Next Level Funnels. How specifically you want to balance live launching with evergreen systems so you're not stuck in that constant hustle. But first I want to break it all down and if you're interested in finding out more about Next level funnels, you can go to bossproject.com funnels. The first thing we need to do is establish what is real time marketing or live launching because they're not exactly the same, but there's lots of overlapping components. Real time marketing is all about publishing content in real time, whether that be on social media, blog, podcast, anything that is either scheduled because it's happening at a specific day on a specific time, or it's spontaneously posted. So I think part of the misconception about real time marketing is that it all has to be done in the moment. And that's not necessarily true. It can still be planned, but you are sending it live like you are posting it live and it's what's happening right now. So if you're sending emails and they're going to everyone on your list that would be sending live emails that would be sending in real time. If you're Hosting a live workshop or a training, or participating in some sort of real time event, that would be real time marketing. Now, the difference between real time marketing and live launching is. Live launching is with the intent of selling a specific product or service. Real time marketing is just the ongoing efforts of maintaining your business online. Obviously they both overlap. Live launching is real time marketing in action. Now, it's a necessary part of any business. It's going to help create engagement and connection. It gives you this opportunity to get instant feedback so you can see what's resonating with people and what's not, what's working in today's environment and what isn't. And something that works this month may not work two months from now simply because of how the algorithm favors certain types of content. There's also this huge opportunity to build excitement and urgency around whatever it is that you're doing. Especially if you're selling something with a time clock involved, like you are, quote, unquote, closing the doors on a certain day, or the price is going to go up on a certain day, or a bonus is going to disappear on a certain day. You get to build the anticipation around the thing. Maybe you're launching something for the very first time and that excitement is around the first cohort or the first group of people that are going to get access or people going through beta. It is such an opportunity to be outwardly excited. People want to see your enthusiasm. People want to see you love what you're doing. People want to see you care about the work that you put out into the world. And when you're marketing in real time, you get to showcase the things you're most excited about. You get to showcase the things that make you tick, the things that get you up in the morning, the things that motivate you to keep going in your business, regardless of why people buy from people. And so when you are being yourself and being authentic to the things you're genuinely interested in, helping people with, people can see that. But businesses are busy, I'm busy, you're busy, we're all busy. I think sometimes we romanticize being busy. I like having my life be full, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. But it does cause some issues that make live marketing or real time marketing a bit more challenging. Because when we're in the weeds of it and going through life and trying to maintain this, especially when you're trying to put out content on a fairly regular basis, it can get to the point where it starts to feel a little Bit random, where you're just, like, putting your hand in a hat and, like, pulling out, oh, I should talk about this subject today and then post about it. And not that that's entirely bad. There's plenty of things that you're going to do like that that are going to work, that are going to resonate with people. Sometimes they are the most well received because it's so clear that you cared about them in the moment. And if you're trying to force a subject that you don't feel like talking about that day, people are going to be able to tell. But I don't want it to get to the point that your live marketing just feels completely like you're throwing spaghetti. Like, this is not a guess, this is strategic. And there's an element of testing. Like you've heard on this podcast before, talking about experimental mindset. I recently had an interview with Jess and we talked about why people think of business as, like, this math problem. And it's not at all like that. And we have to hypothesize and test and experiment and tweak, but you're never going to be able to do that unless you have some sort of plan. So the far other end of the spectrum is that people want to do such a good job with their live marketing, they feel like they have to have everything spelled out to the T, like, this is all I'm going to do. I'm going to follow it to the letter of the law, and if I cannot deviate, also a problem. So we need to be doing both what feels intentional and important to the overall goals of the company, the overall objectives of sales, and honor what our intuition is telling us and pay attention to the actual analytics. What's working, what's actually driving clicks, what's driving sales, what's driving traffic, what's driving interest, what's getting people to have a conversation with you, what is things people are just scrolling right by. Because when you want to do more marketing or you go to turnaround and plan again, so often we think, okay, we're just going to plant, like, we're just going to, like, fit it into these perfect little buckets. I'm going to spend 20% of my time talking about personal stuff and 30% about this product and 30% educating and 30 whatever. Obviously I entered more than 100% at that point, but point being, could we assign buckets or content pillars that you need to be talking to? Sure. And I think when you're just a beginner business owner, that is one of the few ways that helps you start to understand the types of marketing that you need to be putting out into the world so that you know what works, so that you know what sells. After a while you're going to pick up on this. You're going to know and understand the kinds of things you need to be doing on a regular basis and what's not making a difference. I want you to be thinking about your real time marketing, like your stage presence, like you're putting on a play and this is you on stage with the microphone talking to a crowd. You want to be assessing when is the crowd laughing, when is the crowd cheering you on, when is the crowd gasping and when are they falling asleep? That is going to help drive what you do more of, what you do less of, and maybe even a step beyond that. What if we think about your live marketing, you standing on the corner and you doing your bit and you actually attracting the people to you. Like rather than them just walking by, you're actually getting them to stop and a crowd forms and is paying attention. Your live marketing, as much as you may not want it to be, is you standing on a soapbox on the corner and it's a necessary part of what you're doing. The issue is so many people begin to believe that this is the only way to market and it's one tool. It's one tool in your tool belt to be publishing content, emailing your list, putting on events live and in real time. It is one way. But if it's the only way you're doing it, you will get burnout, Period. End of story. You need other ways that are going to supplement that are going to help drive sales and are going to keep working even when you're not posting. Now this is where automated marketing comes into play and where people get so excited. People are like, yeah, let's build a funnel. I am so excited. I, I want this to work. I want it to keep working. I want it to make me sales. I want to make sales in my sleep, like I'm here for it. I get it. I get the sexy draw of it. The thing that people miss is they think it's the production. Like this is to keep the analogy alive. This is the music video, right? Someone could just go press play at any time and you're going to sing and dance and it's going to be all produced and recorded and working. Eh, that may be part of it, but automated marketing is far more like backstage. It's the crew, it's the support team, it's the things that are making it all work. And there's so much that goes on in the world of automated marketing. So much that you don't see. So much that people don't even know is happening and is working for you behind the scenes. But what is it actually like? What is automated marketing? Ultimately, automated marketing are things that are triggered so it's still content. Primarily we're talking about emails that send in a sequence or a workflow or pages that someone sees because they took a specific action. They could be order bumps or upsells to increase revenue without more effort. These could be paid advertising that is putting that live or real time marketing and like putting it out to more people, letting more people see it. This is often things that send themselves that get out into the world because of how someone is moving through yours now. It's an essential piece of the puzzle in my opinion. I think automated marketing is going to make your life so much easier. It's going to keep selling even when you're offline. It's going to warm up leads before you talk to them. It's going to eliminate that constant cycle of manual effort. The problem is that people think if I set up a funnel, if I put together this automated system, that they're done. But automating something that's never been tested is not a good plan. I totally believe in a world where you need to be testing your messaging in a real time environment and then automating what works. I think people also get intimidated by automation and they continue to ignore it as a strategy. Maybe they know it exists, maybe they've heard of a funnel, but they have no idea how to set it up or what that would even look like. And that's forcing them into this endless cycle of launching. Whether that be just posting out your products on a daily basis or more intentional campaigns where you're focused on a particular product for a set period of time. People have this misconception that live marketing is like a flashing neon sign that's doing the work for you show tonight sometimes. I mean maybe paid advertising would be the closest thing to that. But automation is a lot more like the machine selling tickets 24 7. If no one is walking up to the machine, who's it selling tickets to? Nobody. So automated marketing only works if you fill the funnel. It only works if you put traffic in to the funnel. Now how you do that and how you get it all set up, that's a story for another day. But I just want you to know that these two things are different and yet have this incredible opportunity to work in tandem. I don't want your funnels to fail. I don't. I want you to be so successful. I want you to be making money all the time. You getting cha chings all day long or like waking up and opening your notifications and you got paid in the middle of the night. It's a high like no other high. And it's so funny because for years I ran an agency where my income was completely dependent on clients paying invoices. I pitched a project, they would say yes or no. If they said yes, they would put down a deposit and then I wasn't going to get paid the rest until I finished the project. And sometimes the sum of that would be thousands. It would be thousands all at once. But it's a very fleeting moment and there's. There's something, There is something about that. Ding. $29 at a time, $47 at a time, $97 at a time. I think it's really validating and it can feel really good.
- [16:53]
Unknown Co-Host
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- [17:35]
Abigail Pumphrey
Have insurance to cover it.
- [17:36]
Unknown Co-Host
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- [18:43]
Abigail Pumphrey
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- [18:45]
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- [19:24]
Abigail Pumphrey
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- [19:25]
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- [19:38]
Abigail Pumphrey
I mean, if we're being honest, it's like a little dopamine hit every single time you get a sale. And so the more sales you get, the more sales you want because it feels good. But the problem is people will think if I just build this evergreen funnel, then I can stop live marketing. And that could not be further from the truth. Without fresh traffic, your funnel is like this is lonely ferris wheel in an empty field. Nobody's there having fun, nobody's there playing. It's honestly a little creepy over there on the side, right? I want your live launching to be fueling what is making your evergreen so successful. I also think it's unrealistic for someone to say I only do live launching because I really need that real time engagement. I need that feedback. And I remember being in that position. I remember thriving on a webinar cycle. We were doing a webinar every two weeks wild. We would promote a webinar for a week, have the webinar be in a sales cycle for a week, that we were promoting webinar for a week. And the cycle would continue again and again and again and again. So every two to three weeks, like clockwork, we were doing another webinar. And by doing it live, if you got that good participation, if you got people butts and seats, as we like to call it, then you could hear people's reactions, people's questions, people resonating with certain things in the chat or Even potentially on screen, depending on how you're running the thing. But the reality is you can't be on all the time. Or even if you're the kind of person who's an extrovert and like, loves the attention and loves being out there, that can still be true. And life will happen. There will be times when you have to walk away, when you have to rely on the systems you've previously built so that you can have some breathing room to prioritize. What's the most important to you. They are the perfect combination. I don't think one's better than the other. I think they're both necessary and they feed into each other. Live, real time marketing is going to bring the energy, the feedback and the traffic, which is so important. And automated marketing is going to capture the momentum, convert sales and scale. You have to know what to automate. So you're going to start with live marketing and use it as your dress rehearsal track. What kind of is resonating, what emails are getting replies, what topics are getting the most signups, and then you're going to automate the best performing elements. Those emails, those webinar replays, those nurture sequences like, need I remind you, even Beyonce rehearses before a big show. So do not skip your live dress rehearsals by putting that content out into the world. If you got to this point and you're like, girl, I was with you the whole time and I already knew I needed to be doing both. I hear you. And I also need you to pause and ask yourself some questions because I need you to know if you have the right balance and this balance is going to change and the season of life you're in the type of offer you're selling, the way you want to be showing up, how much money you want to make, all of that is dependent. Okay, so I'm not going to sit here and say this is exactly how much you need to be doing totally depends on the kind of results you want to get. But I want you to ask yourself, are you running enough live, real time marketing to keep your funnel full? For example, let's say your funnel converts at like a fantastic 8%. I mean, that would be four times industry standard. Okay, your funnel is converting at 8%. Amazing. If you only have 50 people go through the funnel, you're only going to sell four. If you have a hundred people go through the funnel, you have the opportunity to sell 8. If 200 people go through the funnel, you have the opportunity to sell 16. Assuming your conversion rate continues to hold so on and so forth. If you get 1,000 people through their funnel, you'll sell 80, right? How many do you need to sell to hit your income goal and how much traffic would that require for you to make that happen? Back it up. Look at what the numbers are telling you. I think more often than not, when we're frustrated, we think that our issue is the thing we put out into the world. And often we don't have enough traffic, we don't have enough people seeing the work that we're putting out there to realistically even have any way of knowing if it's working. Ask yourself, are you automating what's already working to save time, or are you automating things you haven't tested? Are you relying too much on one method, one platform, one type of content and ignoring the rest? I don't want you putting all of your eggs in one basket. It's not to say that you shouldn't have focus. You can have one channel be your primary channel for visibility, but you best be getting those leads somewhere, converting them to email, converting them to sales. You might be wondering like, how do I balance it in my own business? And it's really easy to not have any idea how someone is balancing in their own business because you only see the live stuff. Like if you go hunting for it, you may stumble upon a funnel, I suppose, and the people who try to reverse funnel hack, not cool. Okay, but you're only technically seeing part of it. Because what you don't realize is if you are only moving through the funnel in a certain way, you may be missing half of what also could be happening if you had moved through the funnel differently. For example, like if you interacted with an email and clicked, you may get a different email the next time than the person who didn't. I absolutely still live launch 100%. I still have daily real time marketing that I am doing. It keeps the energy high. It gets me excited to share my new ideas. I can do campaign based promotion where I really get to focus on the thing I'm putting out into the world. And my automated funnels are there for long term sustainable sales. Someone can come in days, months, even a year or more later and experience the same or similar experience to what someone did live and still convert without me hand holding them. I'm also driving consistent traffic from my real time marketing from the things I'm doing on social, but also through SEO. SEO is huge for us. Over 50% of our traffic is from search. We're talking hundreds of Thousands of visits a year from search because people found our content, because we made it searchable. We also elevate what's performed via paid ads. And with paid ads, while we are driving direct to sale, the primary mechanism paid ads are serving is traffic. So if we can get, for example, 1,000 people to click to a page from social, we may be able to get 5,000 by amplifying the same effort with paid ads. Now, I had someone recently in my community share a sales page and they're like, I'm confused. It's not converting and I'm running paid ads to it and I'm getting clicks. And that is exactly where I hesitate because can that work? Yes. I'm not saying you can't turn on an ad to something you've never sold before and get sales. You can, but it's going to be very hard to diagnose what is or isn't working. Versus if you go out and do a live launch and send traffic to your sales page, you're going to be able to get feedback from people you actually know and are interacting with or building a relationship with actively and be able to make adjustments before you go about automating it. I've told this story before, but I think it's worth bringing up again. I've previously done a live launch that went well, that got sales, that had so many questions, so many. I. I've never experienced a launch where so many people were confused. Cause I wasn't confused. I knew what was happening and I didn't get it. I was like, what do you mean you don't get it? Like, baffled. And I could have waited and done the same launch again before I automated it, but instead I just was really listening, really paying attention to the specific questions that people had. And I altered my funnel based on their feedback and I between 2 and 4x my conversions. I don't think your business has to always be live, always be on. I do think having some elements that are live and are on makes you look real, makes you look like a human. How many times have you seen an ad and then you like click to their page and they haven't posted in like six months. And you're like, that's weird. You're right, it is weird. So most people aren't going to buy from that person if they notice that. And so that live component is only going to help your automated stuff work more, convert better. Because if that person is fully automated and relying fully on outside advertising, could it work? Could they make sales? Yes. But could they make two or four or ten times as much if they were hybridizing the way they approached it, most definitely. I'm confident. I think it's really easy to get caught up in how do I strike the balance? What does that even look like? Like, how do I take an offer, put it out into the world, how do I know what's working, how do I automate that? And then how do I consistently send traffic to it? I get it. I get why it's confusing, which is why I built next level funnels. I didn't know or understand this for a very long period of time. I thought people were just getting automated emails and it was as simple as that. And it's not. That is a piece of the puzzle. But the most effective funnels have so many more nuances to them and I want to walk you through the process step by step. So if you're interested in finding out more or seeing what it looks like to build a funnel that's going to keep working for you so you don't have to rely on this endless amount of manual effort, go to bossproject.comfunnels for more details. But I am super curious. I want to know if you prefer live marketing or automation, so send me a DM over on Instagram. You can head to Boss Project on Instagram Abigail says is linked in the bio. I want to hear from you. What do you love or not love about both of them? Where are you confused on either one? I'd love to continue to create more content around these subjects so that we can continue to support support you in building the business that fuels your dreams.
- [33:38]
Unknown Co-Host
Hey, a few quick favors before you leave. I'd love if you'd share today's episode, send it to a friend who needs to hear it and post on social. You can show us where you're listening from, your favorite takeaway or why someone else should listen. Be sure to tag me at Abigail says and Boss Project so we can share it. Okay. Second favor to get podcast updates and all the behind the scenes news from Boss Project. I'd love if you'd join my VIP list. Just head to bossproject.com signup to make sure I have all your contact details. Really love this show. It would mean so much to me if you'd leave a rating and review. It not only helps more listeners find the show, but allows us to bring on quality sponsors so we can keep bringing you this valuable content for free. Thanks so much for listening.
- [34:22]
Abigail Pumphrey
Until next time.