In this three-part article we are going to talk about the tools that successful InterNetwork Marketers use to grow their business profitably. But before I introduce the InterNetwork Marketing Success Toolbox, let me first consider a simple yet amazingly powerful concept: the Marketing Funnel.
A funnel is very wide at the top and narrow at the tip. Not everything can come out the bottom all at once. And each funnel has a certain capacity from large to small.
Your marketing funnel works just like a conventional funnel you use at home - the only difference is what you put inside!
Imagine your target market as what can potentially come in through the wide end of a funnel and look at all of your marketing efforts as a journey you take them on through the funnel.
One of the easiest ways to boost your profits is to make it easier for more prospects to begin a relationship with you. Once prospects have experienced your expertise and professionalism, they are more likely to spend money with you. The Marketing Funnel is a visual representation of opportunities you offer prospects to view you as familiar and trusted, a “friend” instead of as a “stranger”. Each level in the funnel represents increased familiarity, commitment, and trust - and increased profit opportunities for you. Fear of making a mistake exceeds desire for change. Fear holds back sales.
The Marketing Funnel is a well known concept in traditional marketing, now lets looks at what happens when you apply it to the world of InterNetwork Marketing: imagine two funnels put side by side with the bottoms next to each other. Do you start to get the picture?
Seth Godin, the author of more than seven books that have been bestsellers around the world, and formerly VP of Direct Marketing at Yahoo! puts it as follows in his latest book Flipping the Funnel:
- Turn “strangers” into “friends”
- Turn “friends” into “customers”
- And then... do the most important job: Turn your “customers” into “salespeople”
The math is compelling. Most of the people in the world are not your customers. They haven’t even heard of you, actually. And while many of these people are not qualified buyers or aren’t interested in buying your product, many of them might be - if they only knew you existed, if they could only be persuaded that your offering is worth paying for.
But how on earth are you going to get them to know about you? We live in the most cluttered marketplace in history. You don’t have enough time or enough advertising budget to get your message to all the people who need to hear it.
Seth defines “friends” as the prospects you’ve earned permission to talk with - even though they haven’t turned into “customers” yet. And your “customers” have been converted from total “strangers” to interested “friends”, and then all the way to dedicated users of your product or service.
The essence of Flipping the Funnel is that for most companies “friends” and “customers” are underused assets… Well, not in network marketing. And this is perhaps why network marketing is increasingly more attractive to even Fortune 500 companies with very large advertising budgets. Simply put, network marketing leverages the single most powerful form of advertising: word-of-mouth. It is about flipping the funnel and turning it into a “megaphone”.
