Pamela SapioIf we asked you to picture a marketing funnel in your head, it would probably look something like this: a series of tiers that narrow in size as they descend from Awareness (at the top) to Interest, Consideration, Intent, Evaluation, and finally, Action. Depending on your business, the end action may be completing a purchase, making a call, or filling out a form.
This is the standard marketing or sales funnel that has been ingrained in our minds from decades of trying to understand and map our consumers’ path to purchase.
It is also just one way of looking at things.
Enter: The Holy Grail of marketing funnels.
Before we begin, this blog mentions the terms Holy Grail, Seven Deadly Sins, and Ten Commandments. These are theological terms that were chosen based on the fact that most people—regardless of their religious or spiritual beliefs—will understand.
That said, let’s dive in.
If you are an eCommerce business looking to build awareness and steer potential customers toward consideration and purchase (i.e., move them through the marketing funnel), you have likely spent some time thinking about how to make people aware of your brand and your offer.
In this video, Kasim lays out a template given to him by Simplero CEO Calvin Corelli—and later aptly named by Amanda Dobson: The Holy Grail of Marketing Funnels.
He begins by explaining that, for those of us who spend a lot of time with Google Ads, we have gotten a little “spoiled” by the bottom of the funnel, which is where paid traffic platforms tend to direct their focus. However, the top of the funnel is becoming more and more important for several reasons:
- Loss of data
- The iOS 14 update
- The deluge of traffic from increased competition
- The fact that it now takes hundreds of “touches” for a potential customer to take action…
…and so on and so forth.
For these reasons and more, going full funnel is a must—but how do we do that?
It starts with the Seven Deadly Sins.
At the top of your funnel will be the Seven Deadly Sins, and these will be related to whatever it is you happen to be marketing. In other words, they will be specific to your business, your industry, and your product or service. And the more niche down you get, explains Kasim, the more effective your messaging is going to be.
Depending on the audience you are trying to capture, your Seven Deadly Sins will likely be a solution to a problem. For example, if you are a chiropractor targeting people who have not yet considered chiropractic care (or who don’t think they need a chiropractor), your Seven Deadly Sins could focus on back pain and the seven reasons why chiropractic care is the better option when compared with things such as invasive surgery and gut-blasting over-the-counter medications.
So, you break it up into exactly seven examples that spotlight those other alternatives, creating seven videos that describe each alternative and position your service as the better solution. “And here’s what’s cool,” says Kasim. “You’re going to start to see what resonates with people.”
In a lot of ways, the Seven Deadly Sins are objections—objections that people would have to you solving their problem. So, you run all seven of the videos, and you know that (statistically speaking) maybe two are going to end up being viable. In other words, they will get the most views and the most attention. Those two “objections” are the most powerful for the audience you are targeting, and they are the two you should focus on.
What goals do the Seven Deadly Sins accomplish?
They accomplish a couple goals, beginning with building awareness—and doing so in a multifaceted way that allows you to build a library of media and create the opportunity to reach different people with different messaging, similar to split testing.
Next is engagement: When you run these videos, what you are doing is waiting for engagement. In other words, you are paying attention to what people respond to, and you don’t move down the funnel until you have identified engagement. Note that some prospects or audiences are going to engage at different points, so you get to decide what “engagement” means for you. For example, it may mean watching the video in its entirety, or just enough of the video to let you know they received the message.
According to Kasim, these are lines of demarcation that you can define within whatever advertising network you are using, but once somebody is fully engaged with a video and you actually have engaged viewers, only then do you move down the funnel.
Next, you will create the Ten Commandments.
Moving down the funnel, we now come to the Ten Commandments.
Remember that the Seven Deadly Sins were the objections, so the Ten Commandments are the things that now attract prospects to your brand, business, product, or service. So, whereas at the top of the funnel you are identifying a problem, in the middle of the funnel you are focusing on consideration or evaluation.
Here, you are telling prospects the things that absolutely have to happen as it relates to your product or service. For example, a Google Ads agency may pinpoint the importance of tracking conversions properly, and that would be the first commandment. And in the second commandment you could talk about the importance of looking at the right metrics in order to truly measure performance, and then so on and so forth for numbers three through 10.
Using this framework, you do the exact same thing you did with the Seven Deadly Sins. So, now you have your Ten Commandments (which means ten videos), and you take the audience that you have been putting your Seven Deadly Sins in front of and show them those videos. Basically, anyone you have determined is engaged now gets dropped into this new sequence of videos, which allows you to further split test among those people.
Why these folks? Because they have already raised their hand (metaphorically) and said ‘Hey, we’re interested in this solution.’ Their awareness has been created, so you are going to move them down to evaluation—and you are going to do the same thing once they are in the evaluation stage.
The Ten Commandments are value based.
You know how they say features tell, benefits sell? Well, with your Ten Commandments videos, you are positioning yourself as a thought leader and further drawing in your audience. In each video, you will highlight a specific benefit—and that benefit leads to features, which are what people pay for.
So, you go from the Seven Deadly Sins, to the Ten Commandments, and then you position your Offer, which is the final tier of the funnel. And, as Kasim says, from there it’s “Easy breezy, lemon squeezy!”
The takeaway
The Holy Grail of Marketing Funnels is so simple because it takes all the pressure off of you, the business owner or marketer. Not only have you created an entire funnel, but all that content is now repurposable for literally anything you can think of: a power page, social posts, a podcast episode, and the list goes on.
You are going to be able to attract the right prospect(s), and those prospects will be really interested in your content, and you will be putting all of that content inside of a framework that actually works. In fact, Kasim calls this the best full-funnel content model he has ever seen in his entire life.
Why is it so great? Because it allows you to map your potential customers’ path to purchase and see what is actually resonating with them so you can create the perfect offer.
Now, go forth and create your Holy Grail of Marketing Funnels!
