The Best SEO Podcast: Unlocking the Unknown Secrets of AI, Search Rankings & Digital Marketing

Building Effective Funnels: Psychology, Economics, and Technology with Alisha Conlin-Hurd

• MatthewBertram.com

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Alisha Conlin-Hurd shares powerful insights on creating effective marketing funnels using psychology, economics, and technology as the foundation for persuasive online marketing.

• Understanding that persuasion differs from manipulation when your product genuinely helps people
• Recognizing the five levels of awareness in marketing and how they affect customer decisions
• Approaching funnels as a series of micro conversions rather than one big knockout punch
• Creating landing pages that function as digital appointment setters with clear offers
• Using qualification systems to filter leads and improve sales conversion rates
• Ensuring your marketing message matches your platform (Facebook vs Google)
• Tracking ROI rather than just ROAS to include agency fees in performance metrics
• Focusing on qualified leads that convert rather than a high volume of unqualified leads
• Using thank you pages strategically to continue engagement rather than ending the conversation
• Avoiding over-complicating funnels with unnecessary steps or excessive technology

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The Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing podcast is a podcast hosted by Internet marketing expert Matthew Bertram. The show provides insights and advice on digital marketing, SEO, and online business. 

Topics covered include keyword research, content optimization, link building, local SEO, and more. The show also features interviews with industry leaders and experts who share their experiences and tips. 

Additionally, Matt shares his own experiences and strategies, as well as his own successes and failures, to help listeners learn from his experiences and apply the same principles to their businesses. The show is designed to help entrepreneurs and business owners become successful online and get the most out of their digital marketing efforts.

Find more great episodes here: https://www.internetmarketingsecretspodcast.com/  

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Speaker 1:

This is the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing, your insider guide to the strategies top marketers use to crush the competition. Ready to unlock your business full potential, let's get started.

Speaker 2:

Howdy. Welcome back to another fun-filled episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I am your host, matt Bertram. I have a special episode for you today. I have Alicia from persuasionexperiencecom on, who has built tons of different kind of funnels, uses psychology to manipulate, not manipulate, influence people to take action and there's a lot of subtle cues that in this noisy world online you have to use to get going. So I want to just really quickly housekeeping. We are going to be changing the name of the podcast shortly. I will be doing a press release about it. I will be pushing out on all channels, but we're going to hard switch it over very shortly.

Speaker 2:

Podcast is growing up very shortly. Podcast is growing up, so I have to grow up with it. No more schlick in every single podcast. For those of you that have been around a long time, I used to be a different person every episode and have a different persona with Chris and I've grown up over the last 10 years. So we're going to change it up. I'm going to be talking to more C-level executives on the marketing side CROs I'm doing a lot of that on the Oil Gas Sales and Marketing Podcast for those of you listening over there. But we will be switching the name over so, when you start to look for it, just giving you a heads up there. So, alicia, thanks for coming on the show.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for having me and congratulations on the evolution of your podcast.

Speaker 2:

You know the unknown secrets of internet marketing. Everybody asked it, asking me today if I'm like selling some kind of like info product and I product and um, I'm not uh, but I should be um, and maybe we'll do uh something with that name because it's it's. It's been around a long time. We we actually recently changed the name of our agency as well. Uh, you know, we've been around 26 years. Uh, we were called E web results, like with the E in front of it, right, remember, everything was was internet. You put the E in front of it, so we had to shorten it and we did the KFC thing. Right, the Kentucky fried chicken to the KFC.

Speaker 2:

We shortened it to EWR digital. So, for those of you listening, we did change that a while ago, but EWR digital if you can't find EWR results. We've been around a long time. We're trying to keep up with modern marketing, which that term is, in itself, right A buzzword that's going to has gone away. I remember when marketing it was like modern marketing, like digital marketing. It's called modern marketing, if you remember that. So no thanks for coming on the show. I would love to just jump into maybe some of the things that you've seen from a psychological standpoint, of those things that you've seen from a psychological standpoint of those triggers, uh, that that work, um, uh, what? Uh. There's been a couple of books that I've read about persuasion that I absolutely love, um and uh, influence and I. It's not pre-fluence, but it's like, um, like, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I, you know, I and I, and I've read a lot of stuff about it, but I would love to hear, uh, like, where your um experience comes in from what you've seen in all the funnels that you've built.

Speaker 1:

Awesome, cool. And I'll touch on what you kind of said at the start, right, um, where you kind of said manipulation and then and then you corrected yourself. But I often call it persuasion, right, and I think even just one psychology thing for all of us marketers is to think, okay, does what I genuinely sell help people?

Speaker 1:

yes, or no, and and if it does, then I think you have a moral and obligal like a moral, like obligation to really get it into as many hands as humanly possible right, which means we need to persuade people, because otherwise, if we think at just like the highest level, otherwise everybody's just working in inertia and if we don't persuade them to take action and like shake them digitally to do something, they're never going to do anything. So that's like I think, just in in ourselves, that's something that we have to flip. It's like okay, I have to go out there and find as many people as I can help every single day. Now, when I think about that at a very high level again, when people are doing their marketing, I think then they forget that on the other side of their landing page or their ad or their seo keywords is a real person yes, absolutely, absolutely A real person.

Speaker 1:

And it's so easy to forget, right, because you're looking at sales numbers, conversion numbers and it's like, okay, on the other side of this is a real human being, and the number one question that is on their mind is so what? Who cares what's in it? For me, right, that's the number one question, and so there's a lot of cool psychological hacks you can do, but really, I actually think that the number one thing that has unlocked my marketing, and whenever I teach it, is have you ever read Breakthrough Advertising?

Speaker 2:

I've heard about it, but I can't speak to it. Yeah.

Speaker 1:

Very, very good book, and within that book, he talks about these five different levels of awareness, and so, effectively, nobody wakes up one day and wants what you have, especially not us as agency owners. Right, like nobody's. Like gee whiz, I'd love to hire an agency and I've never had a bad experience with them. Right, like everyone comes like with context and trauma, and we have to understand that. So in this book, there's five different stages of awareness. I'm just going to talk about three at the moment, and the first one of those three is problem aware. So they know that they have a problem, but they haven't started thinking about solutions. So, for example, it might be like I have a cough, why do I have a cough? I'm problem aware, right, that's one kind of person that we can talk to. The next, then, is going to be solution aware. Okay, okay, I have a cough, it's because I have pneumonia. Should I go to a doctor? Should I get cough drops, cough syrup, whatever? I'm starting to assess different options. And the third that we can focus on today is product aware. Cool, I have a cough, it's pneumonia, I want to get cough drops, and I'm looking at brand one, brand two, brand three.

Speaker 1:

Now, the thing with this is, and why this is important before we dive into anything else more specific psychologically is that you need to understand what conversation you're entering in the prospect's mind or in the market's mind and so I'll pause my monologue there in a second. But that's like to me one of the most powerful and simplest things. I think we all want to over complicate marketing and start to add in these like recency, biases and the pratfall effect and all this crazy stuff. But really it's just if you can take it back to basics and use your empathy and like truly understand the other person and you can articulate their problems better than they can, you can articulate their dream outcome. That's can you can articulate their dream outcome. That's like the only way you're going to be able to position the business as a vehicle to go from A to B.

Speaker 2:

So the few things that I hear what you're saying that make me think of is, like I've always been taught, sales is professionally helping people buy, right, you're professionally helping people buy something, and it's very hard, at least for me, to sell something I don't believe in, right, you're professionally helping people buy something and it's very hard, at least, for me, to sell something I don't believe in, right, like you've got to know that this is going to help somebody.

Speaker 2:

When you're talking about it and you know, minus all the cool psychology tricks that you can do with ad copy, the thing that's worked best for me is try to, like you said, understand who's on the other side of it and get in that kind of mindset where you're speaking to that person, like where you're having that one-on-one dialogue, like we're having um and and be like, like, like, like you said, get in the prospect's mind or be like the little birdie on the wall of like what they're dealing with is so important, and I think this one-to marketing is is what you're doing on social media.

Speaker 2:

You're trying to have a conversation and then other people are maybe coming into it. The biggest thing that that keyed in what you said of like how people are searching online, which we see this with SEO a lot is the cycles that people are going in keywords when they're searching right and so where are they at in the funnel of what they're looking for. And SEO can be used in addition to other strategies at all levels of the funnel, but you got to understand what you're speaking to and where they're at of, like the acknowledgement of the problem or the solution, and build copy and rankings at each of those levels to get those conversions.

Speaker 1:

So, yeah, exactly, and that helps you to understand their education level, right, like that's all it is. It's like, okay, well, what conversation is going on in their mind? That means how educated are they on what I do and how much handholding needs to be done to move them down. So, for example, with funnels, I think a lot of people think about funnels as these like internet marketer things that Russell Brunson invented that are totally optional, right, but they're not like a funnel To me. You have one by default.

Speaker 1:

It's just all of the touch points someone's going to have with you, and then each of these touch points are a potential revenue leak, right, and so it doesn't matter if it's seo and it's coming through seo traffic or it's coming through paid traffic or it's coming through organic social traffic. The whole part about the traffic is it just gets the click. So your funnel is everything that happens post-click and it's grossly neglected. So then, going back to those stages of awareness, once we understand that, then we can start to think about okay, our funnel is just a series of micro yeses and our offer is just the next yes we want them to take. So our offer is not this big knockout punch, drag you back to my cave and like force you to swipe your credit card to sell right. Each part of our funnel has a point, it has an objective and it's these micro yeses that we need to craft out like an experience to actually move somebody along that journey.

Speaker 2:

No, I love that. One of the biggest things that I've seen with a lot of businesses when we look at it is they're not doing even retargeting. Right, set up retargeting, you get them to your website. I mean, overseas there are issues with privacy and stuff like that, but pixel is targeted as a thing, a thing. But but re, like, you're not going to close the deal.

Speaker 2:

Like you said on the first yes, right, you got to get the micro yeses to get them into it, whether it's an email funnel, text, a downloadable. Like you, you got to build those steps because it might be like a big ass to get them to go from point A to point B. So you specialize in these funnels. Like, what's the first step that you see lacking when you're working with businesses? Or you go to evaluate okay, here is the customer journey, right, because a lot of people don't even know really what their customer journey is. I think it's really important to know who are you targeting, because each target persona is going to have a different customer journey and is going to need different things and have different objections to move through that process. Like, how do you like evaluate that, map it out and what are some of the biggest obstacles or things that are missing when you evaluate new clients? Funnels.

Speaker 1:

And so most people have never mapped out their funnel and it's and it's not that hard. But I do remember the first time I saw a funnel map. It was one of those infusion soft ones and it made my brain like leak out the side of my ear a bit right. I think funnel nerds, including me, have totally over complicated it. Luckily for you and everyone listening, I've done about 600 funnels in 120 niches since then, and so literally the whole way that I think about a funnel is what I said before. It's just those touch points, right, if they do this and then this. So it's just a series of touch points with decision diamonds if yes, if no, and then that's strung together with landing pages and automations. But to keep it really really simple, and especially because I have to use my mouth words to explain funnels without any diagrams, I'm going to keep it extremely simple. We have traffic and that traffic typically is going to land on a landing page.

Speaker 1:

Now most people get really hyper fixated and they need lead magnets and we need to do all these lead magnets. Yes, but why don't we get in-market leads first? Why don't we get people looking for us and remember when I was talking about before in that solution or product aware. So we want to find the people who are actually ready to take that next step with us, and what I specialize in is getting qualified leads booked on a call, so I'm going to skew towards that. So, when we have our landing page and that's one of three main steps in this funnel I'm going to teach the reframe that we have with this landing page is that we think of it as a digital appointment setter.

Speaker 1:

And already, when you stop thinking about it like a page and you start thinking about it like a digital appointment setter, well, now you start to think about what's the message hierarchy, what's the one clear call to action? What is the social proof we need to have on the page? What is the language of the target market? How do we make it feel like it's one to one communication? Because that's literally what marketing is right. It's just salesmanship. Well, it used to be called in print, now it's in code, I guess.

Speaker 1:

And that's that very first step is this landing page, and I'm happy to go deeper. The most important part on the page is the offer Right now. The next part of that is okay. Our digital sales person has educated and it has excited people and someone goes yes, I want to take up this offer. I want to take the next step with you. They click the button Now. What a lot of people are missing to your question before is a qualification and a disqualification, because everybody is obsessed with volume of leads but, we don't want leads, we want buyers, people, we want money in the bank, right.

Speaker 1:

So when a lot of people come to me, they're very frustrated. Usually their volume of leads is low, but their quality of leads is shit part of my australian so it's like very shit. They're very frustrated and we have to send them through this qualification system. So what that looks like is we want to have a series of questions. Now we will usually do this in a multi-step, maybe three to seven questions, right. And all we do is we say to the business owner or to the sales team hey, what makes a qualified lead, what makes a qualified lead? And then you just reverse engineer those questions there, because probably for a lot of people listening, if they're marketers, I can imagine that a big contentious, head-butting point in their business because I've worked with so many would be marketing and sales. Marketing feels like they're getting it Sales whinges, and I can say that because I've been a salesperson before.

Speaker 2:

So, yeah, the other podcast that I co-host on that's all we talk about is how sales and marketing work together and how there is that contention between a marketing qualified lead and a sales qualified lead and really how it should be the same funnel right. And what I have seen personally is, depending on the kind of leads you're putting out, means your, your messaging you're putting out is attracting those kinds of leads. Like it's like if you use the fishing analogy, you're putting out the kind of bait of what you're attracting. Does that make sense? And so, if you're getting the wrong type of leads, something in your messaging or what you're putting out there, your offer or whatever, is off because the wrong kind of people of what defines wrong but like you define as what you're looking for as your ideal prospect or whatever, is not moving forward or they're not moving forward enough. You got to kind of zero in on that, targeting a little bit more to get that. And once you get that, I mean you can get um, through content marketing, through attraction marketing, through persuasion right. You can get those people to take action.

Speaker 2:

Here's the crazy thing too. Um, I've been doing a lot more stuff on, uh, social and, and I need to get hard, hard on YouTube, because everybody's moving to YouTube, right? Like, not as many people are listening to podcasts. I mean, we have a lot of growth in the Asian markets, but not as many people are listening to podcasts like they were Um, or they want to listen to them on YouTube, I guess so, but what I can tell you is I totally, totally forgot what I was going to say. So just keep going and I'll, I'll, I'll think of it in a second.

Speaker 1:

Good, you can take back the talking stick whenever you want and take that over, but effectively with that funnel. Then it's the landing page. It's a digital appointment center. The most important thing is your offer. We have the qualification and the booking system. It's a digital appointment center. The most important thing is your offer. We have the qualification and the booking system. It's a series of form fields. It gets marketing and sales on the same page. It shows we've delivered a qualified lead. We have a calendar booking. You'll usually have like 50 to 80% of people book straight in. That's another big thing that people miss. I'll have clients come to us and be like, yeah, so we get all these leads filling in a form, but we can't get a hold of them. I'm like why don't you give them the option to book in? And they're like ah, I was like yeah, imagine if they were just booking straight into your sales team's calendar.

Speaker 2:

So, alicia, what I've seen with like education businesses or certain kinds of businesses, you've got to get the buyer when they're immediately in that mindset and if you don't, it's hard to get them again. So, like leads for, like Dennis or something like that, they sign up for stuff, maybe on a Facebook funnel or something like that, and then they never show up. They don't even remember they booked. We have to train the sales teams a lot to like you got to call quickly, you got to follow up quickly, especially even like we were running some really heavy Yelp ads for a client and you had the option to book on Yelp Right, and it was, it was awesome, but you had to respond within like two hours or you couldn't get ahold of them.

Speaker 2:

And so what are some things that you can do to catch them? Like I know, like text messages open a lot but, like it, when somebody moves out of that buying phase, it's very hard to get them again until they're back in that buying phase. So how do you speed up the sale? Uh, potentially, or move them further through the process faster, or catch them once they're off, and I'm also seeing a lot of leads that are coming in which I have no idea why this is happening, but like they're like fake leads or something like that, like just people are like putting information in and it's not like they're trying to sell you. Like some people are doing that like where it's like a sales book on appointment or whatever, but they're just like fake people that are booking on something. Maybe it I guess it's competition or I don't know what, what. I've just seen a lot of stuff but I don't see it maybe at the volume that you've seen it with the funnels, and I'm just kind of curious about um that, that first interaction, I guess.

Speaker 1:

And so part of that is, I'll call it like show up, show up rates, like maybe that's like how to get show up, show up, how to get like you've got the lead, how to contact them, and it's true. Basically, what you're saying is delay is death of the sale. Right, like once we have that momentum, then we need to try and keep it, and so the third part that I'll share in a second will help with that. In terms of the calendar, it's particularly good for b2b, because we're used to doing calendars in our B2B lives and in B2C we can see more of a decrease. Basically, what needs to happen is that the sales team needs to be calling within five minutes of the person filling in the form, whether they book in or not. So what will happen is, in the funnels we create, someone will fill in a form, a certain percent will book in the calendar, doesn't matter.

Speaker 1:

The sales team should call both, either's like hey, matt, I saw that you filled in the form but you couldn't find a like a spot to book. Can I book you in blah, blah, blah? Or it's hey, matt, I saw you just booked in a call, just wanted to touch base and say hello, I actually just had a sales call or like a strategy session cancel. Would you like to go now and then calling up with that because you want to keep that momentum while they're hot? So that's one of the many ways I can share. What do you think of that?

Speaker 2:

You know, one of the big things that I've seen with funnels and I have a buddy. I need to get on the podcast as well. That's just awesome at funnels he has a whole call center right. Like, if you're doing funnels right, it seems like you need to bolt in that that follow-up piece. Maybe it's internal, maybe it's virtual, but having somebody that can follow up quickly, that can field calls, that can manage the process. Because if you're running a lot of ads, you're going to get a lot of interest and you got to manage that that whole process a lot of interest and you got to manage that that whole process. And I feel like a lot of people think marketing can do the job of sales. Does that make sense? Like like they just think that you can run ads and just magically people are going to buy.

Speaker 2:

Um, and maybe some businesses, you can do that. But if you talk about higher ticket items, there's usually a level of you know you go offline, you go back online, like you look at some things, you're making decisions. You're not just going to pull the trigger out of the gate. Either you're pulled the trigger out of the gate immediately or like it's 30 days plus is what I've seen. It's one or the other. There's not a lot of people in the middle. I mean, have you seen that? Do you think that there's a heavy need for the outreach component or the sales component or the appointment center piece? I don't know exactly how to state it properly.

Speaker 1:

Yes, number one. This is why it comes back to why it's important to understand what stage of level of awareness they're in so you can create the right offer. That's the right next micro step. Basically, if you're having an issue with leads not answering or leads not showing up, we have to think why? Why one like, why not? Because they were like they, they did take some action. So like why not? Oftentimes it's time based we've lost that momentum now and something some cat on the internet has got their attention and now it's all over. But most oftentimes it's because the offer is weak, there's no value, there's no anticipation, there's no excitement. So like why? Why would they show up and why would they want to talk to you? You haven't built any value and you haven't built any authority and you haven't built any frame, and I totally agree with you.

Speaker 1:

Um, I think a lot of businesses rely on marketing to solve a bad business and to solve a poor sales process. Right like, they think marketing's a magic pill. Marketing is a magnifying glass and if you have or it's like rocket fuel, right like, if you have a really good business and I come and pour rocket fuel on it, it'll go off. But if it's a dumpster fire and I come and do my marketing. It'll just amplify those issues. That's all that will happen. So, coming back to like the landing page, then we have this qualification and this booking and then to help with actually converting the lead and getting in contact with them, do you need an appointment setter? It depends.

Speaker 1:

A lot of the time, the funnels that we build make appointment setters unnecessary, and that's either because now AI chatbots, are so advanced appointment setters should be very worried, or because we're getting them directly booked in and then the closer, like most closers, will have time to call. But it can depend on the business and the volume of the leads as well.

Speaker 2:

So, with all the AI stuff, I'm testing out all kinds of stuff right, and they're getting me on call, so I'm the one, I'm the prospect, like going through the process and it's. It's actually good to see what's happening and I'm actually disappointed because I think I'm going to talk to somebody for a demo and someone's like qualifying my business and they're asking me like 10 questions and I'm like I just want a demo, like they should just actually have it on the web.

Speaker 2:

Like remember the 1-800 numbers used to call 1-800 number, you don't have to talk to salesperson, you can just like listen to it. I was like they should give me the option to like just, if you want to see a demo, watch this link. And if you want to talk to somebody, here you go. But they're getting me on the phone. I'm anticipating getting to see this tool. And then they're asking me like 20 questions and they're like okay, well, we'll set you up down the road. And I'm like I don't think that this step is necessary to to to your point and it's just, it's really interesting to see, see all these different fronts. And I did think about what you said. You were talking about momentum and I've been really studying psychology a lot and I know I'm taking this off script back to psychology, but I wanted to add this in this is what I remembered On Facebook, on all these different platforms, you know how, like a big influencer that has earned that authority or that credibility, I guess, has posted just something like a statement, a quote, and then, like it gets thousands of likes and views.

Speaker 2:

Right, and I was like, why? Why is that happening? And why do like, if people are posting stuff on Facebook, no one engages? And it's what you said. You said momentum like people want to jump on the bandwagon and get on that momentum, okay, and they feel like people haven't.

Speaker 2:

Uh, I guess you know, they're, they're, they're bandwagoning on the authority or whatever the visibility like that's like like the new strategy. But did you know, only 1% of people or maybe it's two, one or 2% of people on Facebook actually even engage with a post like common and like. And so I just finished this book. Hold on here For those of you on YouTube which I'm not really on I just finished this book and this was a Russell Brunson, a recommended book. I went to one of his conferences recently how to unlock your subconscious mind through the science and middle analysis by a couple of people with the last name Benedict, and it was like it was a really good book. It was old school, you know. He reads like books that were like written 50 years ago but still rings true. It's kind of like getting back to the source, but I just thought that was like super interesting and everything we're doing to bring it back to what we're talking about has a component of psychology.

Speaker 2:

Uh, like you said, hey, the offer might not have been strong enough to get them to take action. It got them interested, but the momentum stopped. It did. They didn't follow through or there wasn't enough for them on the other side to keep going Like where?

Speaker 2:

So let's go, I guess, to leaky funnels, right, like you've heard that term a lot and I think that it doesn't get enough credit. Like you have a funnel, like, fix the broken funnel, don't go just build another one and throw the baby out with the bathwater and that's a noun we use here in the US, but not all the time, but that's what I see. And my business partner sells a bunch of supplements, okay, and we do a bunch of supplement stuff and he goes to all these affiliate conferences and we talked to a lot of these people. And a break even funnel Now we're not talking B2B, but like a break even funnel, uh, or a self liquidating funnel where you can spend the ads and keep them going for free and then your offer upsells. Is that something that that is standard? Or is that something that might just be standard? And affiliate marketing? Or like how standard in affiliate marketing? Or like how are you seeing that? And like how do you identify a broken funnel? Like analytic wise, and then what are you doing to fix that? I guess?

Speaker 1:

Yes, so with a self liquidating funnel you can do them technically in lead generation and you could be running so, for example, for my agency. In the future I would plan to maybe do a self-liquidating funnel on landing page templates. Right, and I might sell the landing page templates for nine dollars, whatever that like, with an upsell that covers the cost to acquire a customer. But then where most people forget is that the money like cool, you can break even self-liquidating, but you need to have ascension.

Speaker 1:

It's like russell brunson 101, or like j abraham dan kennedy 101, right, it's like what is the high ticket in the back end? And so when we're doing our lead generation with our clients that's what I was talking about before like let's just find those in-market leads, let's clear the room on that, and then self-liquidating is just is just going to be going after somebody that's further back in their journey and you can do that because then you bring them onto your list, your earned media, and you take them also your owned media, and you take them off of like earned or paid media and you can bring them in and then in terms of leaky buckets in the funnel, that's just every touch point, right? So, going back to that like basic funnel that I was outlining before, the landing page, the qualification system, and then one part was the thank you page, and with the thank you page, what you never want to do is say thank you, right, because this is another touch to do is say thank you right, because this is another touch point in our funnel where we can pre-swave them and educate them and get them to show up. So usually what you want to do is congratulate them Like congratulations, matt, you're one step closer to achieving the dream outcome. Tell them the next steps. Here's what happens next Go to your inbox, find this email, confirm this calendar link, whatever and then you want to get them to take the next action, because whenever they've just done an action is the best time to get them to do another action, and one of the biggest things I would usually get them to do is to start consuming testimonials, right, testimonial videos, while you've got them doing stuff watching that.

Speaker 1:

So that's another touch point. And then there's automations, but basically with your funnel, once you map out these touch points, when you talk about leaky buckets, the next logical thing we might talk about is cro right, conversion rate optimization, because that's the whole thing. You'd find the leak. You find like you want to identify the right part of the funnel that has the leak and then you start the implementation process to stop it losing you money.

Speaker 2:

I love that. I think you have some great case studies and I would love to maybe share some of the industries you work in, maybe some of the case studies, so people can understand. And you talked about testimonials, right, like what you've been able to do for some of these companies and how that's transformed their business. Because I think that at least people I talk to today that get on our calendar have like we briefly touched on before a lot of past experience that they bring into of working with another agency, of what they think works, what they think doesn't. You know, I'm getting a lot of questions of like, can you handle our business? Because I guess a lot of agencies well, there's a lot of need out there for what we do work with the client, get involved in a process and then they become a number, right. Or I've even seen some agencies that have like even see people in the local area have like 80 something accounts on the paid ad side to the account manager and it's like you can't even manage, like there's no way an account manager or a PPC manager could manage that many accounts effectively, right, and so then they're just managing based on metrics. Like it's really about, I think, building that process, setting up those automations, like personalizing it, leveraging all the tools that we have available today to have a great funnel and after that funnel starts working, that funnel's an asset and it works and it's not the human component of managing.

Speaker 2:

And I love what you said about the marketing of like basically putting up the shingle. People are going to find out really quickly if you're good or not, and I look at people's marketing and it helps me to decide how good their process is. Right, um, uh, and I know a lot of businesses don't do don't drink their own Kool-Aid as much, right, but but I, I think that, um, it's almost like a business card. And, uh, you have some great case studies on your site. Uh, persuasion experiencecom. Uh, I would love for you to just kind of share some of the experiences that might rhyme with what other people might be dealing with today.

Speaker 1:

Awesome, and so predominantly what we deal with or what we specialize in at our agency is paid ads right, but profitably scaling paid ads and seeing an actual ROI, and so there's some things, and I'll talk about those case studies in a second, but there's a couple of things that are important here. Number one is tracking ROI and not ROAS. So return on investment and not return on ad spend. Why? Because ROI includes the agency's fee. So these are just.

Speaker 1:

I've been working in agencies for 10 years, so anyone that's like a bit unsure about their agency, I'll give you a couple of hints. That's one thing. The other thing is we make sure that we're not optimizing just for CPL and volume of leads, so not just for cost per lead. Why? Because cost per lead does not affect the P&L, the profit and loss. So what we're actually tracking down to is what ads turn into a buyer or, if they have a longer lead to sales cycle, a qualified lead, because then you feed that data back into the ad platform and tell the ad platform to find more of those.

Speaker 1:

And what I see a lot of people getting wrong on their ads when they come from other agencies is the agency like yeah, look how many leads we're getting. You Like we're so awesome and it's a $6 CPL and the client's like, yeah, but they don't turn into sales, like they're crap and so going into, maybe the first case study I can share. This is for a client. Um, they work in in the ndi space, ndis space in australia, so we work a lot of us and australian based clients. But basically what this client does with the ndis it's a disability support program and it helps kids to find PTs across Australia and get matched with a PT so they can keep their health and fitness up. And now when that client came to us, they were originally using lead form ads on Facebook, which I hate with all of my heart and I think are the worst things ever invented. I've got a video on YouTube.

Speaker 2:

No, I want you to, I want you to fully vent on that one. I would love to go a little bit. Do we have a few hours?

Speaker 1:

yeah, um so so, basically, with instant forms, lead formats, whatever you want to call them, you will get a larger volume of leads. But that's not the game we're playing, right, we're trying to get qualified leads that turn into buyers, and so with that, because there is no friction, you'll just get a flood of shitty leads who might take up your count, like your sales calendars time, and never show up to the call. When they do talk to you, they have no idea who you are or what you're talking about, and that's like what we're trying to avoid, right. So with this client, we implemented that system I was talking to you about before a long form landing page like the longest you've probably ever seen, because it's a digital sales person. We're not going to limit the amount of text because some designers complaining about there's too much text to design for right, like that's not it. Strong offer, long copy. We have a qualification system and we have a good thank you page with the automations.

Speaker 1:

Now, funnily enough, we did not decrease that client cpl. We slightly increased it, but who cares? Because we're tracking through to roi and we dramatically increased the roi. Now, another thing with that client was and this is why it's important to like actually understand lead generation and sales. Is that because we're also tracking lead to sales time? So they lead to sales time because they used to be uneducated prospects, right, because the marketing wasn't doing any of the education. So that means that it was taking 30 days to close a client for them. With our system it was taking two days. Two days, so a slightly higher cpl, which most businesses would freak out about. That. That's because they're not painting a full picture so that's, that's one, one example.

Speaker 1:

And then, obviously, like we could like profit, and then, because we built the economics with the scale, we could profitably scale those ads. So most people who come to us maybe they haven't started ads, but most of them are capping out they can't figure out how to actually scale their ads and it's because they're missing this post-click experience. Maybe they're usually not testing enough ads as well, like nowhere near enough, but this post-click experience is not dialed in. So that's one case study. Before I launch into my next rampage, I'll pause there in case you want to.

Speaker 2:

No, I love it. Keep going. This is great.

Speaker 1:

Keep going there, in case you know, I love it. Like, keep going, this is great, keep going. Okay, that's one. What's another one? Um, another one is for a hair transplant doctor.

Speaker 1:

Um, again, this was facebook ads and another agency was running their ads and so when they came to us like yeah, all of the metrics, like we did decrease cpl, we did scale their account, like all of that good stuff, obviously you can go read it, but I just want to teach people what I think is the most valuable takeaways, because when I looked at this account back when I was doing the sales, I could tell straight away it wouldn't be working. And it just goes back to what I was talking about earlier. Why? Because they were on a cold platform going out with ads that said, hey, get a hair transplant for $10,000 or whatever it is. Now, why doesn't that work? Because the people on Facebook are not product aware. They don't know they need a hair transplant yet, right. What they do know is that they're starting to lose their hair and it's embarrassing and they hate it and they want to figure out how to regain a natural looking head of hair. That's the words of the target market. So it just doesn't make sense on facebook to go out and try and get that, and what the client was experiencing was crappy leads who don't show up and don't close yeah, no shit, because they're not ready for that yet. It wasn't the right next micro step.

Speaker 1:

So instead, what we did is we launched an offer, and it was something around like save my hair consultation and treatment plan. Why? Because the purpose, like everything, has a purpose. The purpose of the sales call, the sales process, was to diagnose and prescribe, and so what that meant was he could actually show them yeah, here's your problems, here's what you need. Blah, blah, blah. Now, not everybody actually needed a hair transplant. Some people could do medication and like laser and different things, whatever right, and so it actually gave him more of an opportunity to increase our increase our number of different types of customers as well, instead of just trying to shoot fish in the barrel. Whereas on Google ads we would not run that offer, we run a direct to hair transplant offer.

Speaker 2:

So you have different landing pages, like where you run like a VSL, like from the Facebook, to kind of bring them up to the point that they realize that the solution is the hair transplant, and then on the ads, people are already searching for it so you can like skip a step or like what did the funnel look like?

Speaker 1:

I guess, exactly exactly what I said earlier. And this client is beautiful on camera. Not every client is great on camera, so don't put them on camera. And we use a lot of AI avatars now, but this client is great on camera, and especially because he's a doctor, so it's like you want to build that authority.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:

Video ads. Long-form landing page. Strong offer build strong authority follows our system in terms of the hierarchy of messaging. Multi-step questions, like maybe five, seven questions. Multi-step questions, a form, a calendar booking, his team call because this is medical, medical, you got to call straight away. On ghl. You can do a forced I think it's called like a forced outbound, like whisper call or something. So if I fill in my details then my admin front desk can get a whisper call to connect me to that lead. That's very important to do. And then the sales process. So that was, that was literally. That was literally it.

Speaker 2:

So, but did you? I guess what I'm asking is on the AdWords campaign, were you running that to the same landing page? A different landing page, different landing page, yeah, and then were you were just trying to close them from Facebook. On the long form sales letter, you weren't moving them to the next page. So like those were separate funnels for different stages, it wasn't like one big funnel and they fed into it.

Speaker 1:

Is, I guess, what I'm asking Two different, two different funnels, but the sales mechanism for both is a is a is a consultation with the clinic, right? So in like different landing pages, slightly some of the same information, but predominantly the above the fold before you start to scroll, especially on Google ads. It's such a blessing on Google ads and SEO because you understand the searcher intent, like, whereas on Facebook ads you've got to try and figure it out a little bit more and you can put the keywords in and stuff. So, different landing pages, same booking system.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, all going to the book. All going to the book. The call Right and okay.

Speaker 1:

Got it Exactly Okay.

Speaker 2:

Very cool, very cool. I like, I like that that's good funnel yeah.

Speaker 1:

Anything else.

Speaker 2:

I want more funnels. I love this. I want to. I think we're adding value to people. I think there's a lot of people listening that. I think that they think funnels are too complex Right.

Speaker 2:

And I would actually love to hear from you just to be to to have fun. I can share one that I'm struggling with right now because but complex funnels, right, like, the simpler you can get, the less of the process. Now I've seen with forms, okay, I've seen literally I don't know what the data is. I think it's like almost like 10%. Every time you ask an additional field, like even if it's like first name and then last name, you lose a number of people that are going to fill that out. I've seen that exact correlation with adding those fields. So if you're trying to get that really highly qualified lead, you add those to kind of self filter out or have people self filter out what they're doing.

Speaker 2:

I'm dealing with this crazy funnel where, like I know it's, I've heard that it's possible but I personally don't know how to do it Track a UTMB code from an ad to a page that then pushes them to another website. Like I'm losing the UTMB tracking from that website to the next website and then from that website they're uh, self-selecting on that website and then it goes into come some kind of backend database. So there's like three steps to this funnel and so I had to get all the different stakeholders. This was like yesterday I had to get all the stakeholders on the call and I was like, can we like skip this step? But if we skip that step, can we get a page like when you're running a franchise, stuff, right? So I'm like, can we get a page that we can control and put some pixels on this page with the, the national vendor, and and they're like, oh well, we got to ask somebody for permission to do that.

Speaker 2:

And then I'm like, can we replicate this page and like push the values through, because they're like we're going to build out all these other pages of how there's and it's. I'm like, how are we going to track, like you know, the like the lifetime value of this customer or like if their customer even closed, like that's what we're like trying to get to. And so I love the fact that, like you're simplifying it, but I think people try to get too complex and it always, for me, it's like how can we simplify this? How can we like streamline the process? How can we get the data down to where we're looking at fewer data points and then you can slowly add stuff but, don't don't start with like something crazy.

Speaker 2:

And I think people are trying to build funnels that are trying to, you know, watch a Russell Brunson thing or whatever, and they're trying to build it out of the gate like a massive InfoSoft right, like whatever funnel with all the different hookups. And I know you do go high level too. I would love for you to speak to that. I think there's a lot of people.

Speaker 2:

I think that's pretty hot right now and it for a while it was very hard because the the the information on how to use it there wasn't like good manuals and stuff. Like I think people have come a long way and there's people you can follow, and then you know there's even agencies out there that like help you do that. But like go high level in the beginning, if you didn't know how to build a funnel and you didn't know like a little bit of programming, like good luck. You know what I mean. I would love for you to kind of speak to what you've done with go high level and maybe just share for fun what's like the most complex funnel you ever worked on and I would love to like just hear that and then we can. I know we're getting close to time to wrap up, but I would just love to hear that just for fun.

Speaker 1:

Yes, okay, awesome. And to build on your point, it's just start minimum viable, right, because you don't know. You don't know until you get the data data. Just keep it minimum viable with every funnel and it's. It's so funny you brought that up. I just did a talk in um san diego at, if you know, like michael stelzner, his social media marketing world and this was like the whole flavor flave of the presentation was about over complicating your funnel.

Speaker 1:

And then, like you learn something here and you read a tallard brown book and and you read a Russell Brunson book, and you read this and you read that, and then you like Frankenstein, this awful funnel creature that you can no longer control, right, like that's what we're all doing, and I've done it so many times where I like like have to facepalm myself every time because I've just overcomplicated this funnel and it's like just keep it minimum viable. And so that's the first part. The second part, um, as you said about go high level, yes, so our story with go high level was we were originally using well, I've used like every landing page builder, right, like I've seen some shit I've been traumatized.

Speaker 1:

I've had some trauma and we were using Unbounce and one day we got an email from Unbounce saying, hey, your price is going to go up from hundreds of dollars a month to thousands of dollars a month. And I don't know who had the smart idea at Unbounce on pricing. But we were like, see you later, I don't't think so, and so we had a couple of other agency owners showing us what they were doing inside of go high level. So number one, it was price. I think we pay like 300 bucks a month as an agency and I think for non-agencies like 97 a month, number one.

Speaker 1:

Number two was we had this huge tech stack right, calendly, um, calendly, like you know, active campaign, whatever, all of these different like tech stacks that we had to log in and log out to, and so just the productivity and the efficiency wastage of my team. I can't remember the stats, but I think it's like I can't remember it's 32 hours or 32 days a year or something freaking crazy per person by like losing like an hour a day by all of this like productivity wastage, right, and I was like, well, that seems like something as a ceo I should care about. So that's another thing and then all of the pricing slashed on that. Um, so it's like an all-in-one tool and also the thing like as like an alternative maybe being click funnels. I just think, aesthetically, click funnels always has that you can tell like it's got a click funnel it's a fun.

Speaker 2:

It's a funnel, like you know. You're in a funnel now, right, like you know, you're in a funnel, yeah and it just looks, just looks click funnily and there's nothing wrong with it.

Speaker 1:

There's people making freaking millions and millions and millions and dollars. They work, but for the brands we work with they can't look like internet marketers know what I mean. So it's like we had to be able to to get that going and so, yeah, that's kind of our journey with Go High Level. And then it's somewhat simple like you create these snapshots and my team's going to listen to this and they're going to like ha ha, leisha doesn't do the tech set up. So I've got to say my team's infinitely smarter than me and they get in and do all of this. But I know that the customer support on Go high level is next level. Probably, maybe at the start, maybe it wasn't, but my team literally are getting on calls with them all of the time. Yeah, they've come a long way.

Speaker 2:

Problems and stuff with them and they've come a very, very long way. Yeah, no, I think that I was running into with ClickFunnels. With clients. There's basically like with bigger clients. They look at different metrics of what they can use in their tech stack and I don't know if this is the case right now, because we're not using ClickFunnels currently, but it hadn't been updated in like two or three years.

Speaker 2:

Like the software and from a security standpoint, a lot of clients were like no, no, no, and you're right, like there was like a lot more moving gifts and you feel like you're in a funnel and I think people see that now. I think there was an air of novelty to it in the beginning and I feel like, yeah, like the internet's evolved and the brands have evolved and go high level is kind of taken over as the market leader and in that space, and that's what I see everybody using today and and I I think that their, their, their tech supports come a ton, they come a long way. Okay, so I know we're getting close to time here. I wanted to ask you and you might've already shared it, but like in kind of a short format could you share with me what you feel one of the biggest unknown secrets of internet marketing is Good question.

Speaker 1:

I think that it's not that it's unknown, it's lost, right, and I think that people are trying to over complicate marketing and they're always trying to find this shiny new hack, and I think ai and technology is a huge part of this.

Speaker 1:

But the way that I think about hiring marketers or marketing skill set or marketing is this equation psychology plus economics times technology, right, technology is a multiplier and so 1000 times zero is still zero. And I think if you're a marketer and you want to truly become world craft like, world class and the best at your craft, you should be learning psychology and understanding how humans think, because that hasn't changed for hundreds of years and it won't change for hundreds more, whereas these tech platforms, the media, whatever, like it changes all of the time, right, but a mastery like a true mastery, like I'm talking old school david ogilvy, gary halbert, like true mastery of of the human brain and and how we tick. So I don't think it's like unknown, I just think it's fast forgotten for these shiny AI tools and tactics. But yeah, they kind of accelerate everything else.

Speaker 2:

No, I love that and that's what I feel too. I go back to the book that I just finished reading, literally last night. I try to get those old school like uh, um, advertising and marketing books, like direct selling, like some of these really old books, because I feel like today people have taken that concept and then they've, like incorporated into what they're saying and they've maybe changed it or, let's not say, watered it down, but it's been replicated so many times that you're playing the game of telephone and you're losing like the core sense. So every time I go back, I mean people are still people and you just need to go back to what are the things that make people tick and understand. There's, like you said at the beginning of the podcast, there's some human on the other side reading it and you have to remember that process.

Speaker 2:

And the first thing that I even show clients, I'm like have you gone through your own funnel? Have you gone through your own funnel? And like it's shocking to me how many people are spending all kinds of money and they've never really gone through it as a customer themselves and you can fix a ton of problems and so, um, so yeah, simplify, simplify, simplify, um. How do people get in touch with you if they want to hear more? I uh, I would love to get a link also to your talk at social media marketing world. I know there's a bunch of my buddies there and I couldn't make it. I, I, I have young kids and I can only go to so many conferences. I'm going to another SEO conference in like two weeks, cause just everything's moving so fast. I'll probably be there, but I would. I think you shared a ton of great stuff, so what's the best place for people to find you? I know you said you're uh, really big on youtube as well, so oh, I'm not really big.

Speaker 1:

I do okay, um, but I everything, everything. Everything is on my youtube. So under alicia conlon heard easy name to spell. You guys just sounded out, um, I'm sure it'll go into the show notes, but I like more of those case studies. Like I just give it all away for free.

Speaker 1:

I'm very, very passionate about keeping them the magic alive in marketing and and and helping people and and I really love teaching and showing people and, if anybody is interested in starting with, go high level. I am an affiliate with them. So if you want to sign up through my link, I don't get. I get paid some money whatever. No, no extra to you. However, because I'm very passionate about giving the best offer out there as part of signing up through that link. I don't get. I get paid some money whatever. No, no extra to you. However, because I'm very passionate about giving the best offer out there as part of signing up through that link. We do have three of our built landing page templates in there, like fully built, ready to go. You can just like fill them in and build them. So if anybody wants that and they actually want to try, go high level, because I think it's a freaking awesome platform. Just go to gohighlevelcom forward, slash alicia hyphen, conlon hyphen heard, and you can grab my my templates in there in a 30-day trial awesome.

Speaker 2:

Well, alicia, great having you on. What time is it over there? It looks like it's dark, um, so I know you're on the other side of the world yeah, so I live in bali, in indones, indonesia, and now it is 12.04 am. Thank you so much for coming on.

Speaker 1:

Hopefully, my brain wasn't a potato.

Speaker 2:

It was a great conversation. I enjoyed it. I'm sure everybody enjoyed it as well. So thank you so much for coming on. Until the next time, I am Matt Bertram. Bye-bye for now, bye-bye, bye-bye, bye-bye, bye-bye, bye-.

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Matt Bertram

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