Marketers talk about creating a funnel to attract, nurture, and convert your leads into clients.
A book is often described as a “top of the funnel” marketing piece: It is low-cost, provides real value, and widely accessible. It creates authority and credibility, which I discuss in other blog posts ad nauseum, so I will spare you. Today.
While a book is a top of the funnel content piece, it should also function as its own complete sales funnel.
How Marketing Funnels Work
A quick overview for the uninitiated.
The marketing funnel maps the customer journey from awareness (the customer notices you) to consideration (they indicate some level of interest) to conversion (they buy) to loyalty (they repurchase, keep subscribing, refer you to others).
The top of the funnel is all about generating awareness of you and your service or product. This involves social media, ads, podcasts—basically you’re standing up and waving your arms. By offering a lead generator (usually something for free or with a low “tripwire” price), you move people into your funnel.
From there you nurture and educate them through things like an onboarding email sequence, informative newsletters, webinars, case studies. This process does one of two things: People either decide they’re not interested in what you have to offer and unsubscribe from your list or they stay with you. Your email sequence (and other efforts) should move them to the next step, where they convert from prospect to buyer.
The fourth step is the loyal customer stage, which means you follow up after the sale and you keep in touch and hey—here’s a concept: You genuinely care about them.
The funnel shape is a metaphor for the process—a lot goes in the top but fewer people go through the entire funnel and come out the bottom. It is actually more like a filtering system. A lot of people might come in at the prospect stage but filter out along the way to the conversion. Which is fine—you don’t want to talk to everyone in the world. A funnel allows people to self-select.
You’re Not Selling What You Think You’re Selling
For most of my clients, the book is not the product being sold. Yes, it can be an income stream, but think of it more as a self-liquidating offer or, if you’re giving the book away, a loss leader. An authority platform-building book can be sold, given away for free, or be a “free with shipping” offer.
But book royalties are not the main goal. The goal of a business book is to establish the author as a competent and credible person, and to position them as the one person who can solve the reader’s problem—whatever it may be.
Too many people start writing a book, establishing their credibility and authority without first thinking about the path they want their reader to take.
Your book should work as a marketing funnel, allowing people to self-select as your clients. You do this by discussing the types of problems you solve and the types of people you work with. If you charge premium prices, you might hint in your book that you do. The same goes with having affordable prices. (And yes, you do this in a subtle and nonspecific way, but mostly subtle.)
Some of the most successful authors don’t sell their books. They give them away, use them as an added bonus when doing appearances, team up with a marketing partner who uses the book as a premium for their clients (the partner covering printing and advertising costs or paying a wholesale price for the book). Making a few dollars a book at a time is not exciting; making a few dollars each on a bulk sale of 2,500 books is more fun. Even more fun is getting paid to reach your target market.
Your Content (and Funnel) Depend on Your Business Model
I like to give people everything they need to know about a subject in a book. If they follow what I tell them in the book or the course, they will get the result they want—depending on their abilities and follow through. That strategy works for my business model. I work with fewer than a dozen clients a year. I don’t need or want huge numbers of people scheduling “discovery” calls with me.
Who is going to hire me then? People with more money than time. People who know their time is better spent running their businesses and generating income than sitting in a chair staring at a computer screen.
But your business model may be different. You might be building an empire or perhaps your product or service has a lower price tag and therefore you need to sell in volume. Your book might talk about the What and the Why, establishing need and painting a vision of how things can be, without actually telling people the How to reach their goal.
Do you know who hires a coach or consultant? Successful people who want to be more successful. Most people can read a book with the full how-to, follow the instructions and get the result they want. Successful people know they can get that result faster by hiring someone who clearly knows the path they need to take. It’s not that they can’t do it on their own; it’s that they are smart enough to know it’s easier with a guide.
Building Your Internal Marketing Funnel
Think of your book as a sales presentation.
A solid presentation will make your prospect think, “They’re talking about me! That’s the problem I’m up against!”
Your book demonstrates how you help people with that set of problems. You do this by educating, explaining that the problem they think they have is not necessarily the real problem (if that’s the case). You give them deep, insider information that showcases your expertise. You present case studies (choosing the subjects carefully to attract the type of client you want to work with) as proof that your guidance works in the real world.
You also give them simple exercises to do that will help them solve part of the problem or a common side issue. Why? The exercises do two things: They demonstrate that you know how to solve their problem and people become more invested in the process when they participate in it.
And it does a very important third thing: It helps them overcome inertia.
It’s very easy to read a book (or an article or watch a video) and think, “Yeah. I need to do that.”
It’s another thing altogether to actually start the doing.
Giving people small exercises to complete as they move through your book starts the process for them. Now they are doing something about their problem. A body in motion tends to stay in motion.
Moving your prospect from reader to doer, even if they are just doing the exercise on their own, pushes them closer to hiring you.
Will it push everyone? Of course not.
But it will push the right prospects in your direction.
You just need to lead them down the path.
If you have written a book for your business and it isn’t working for you, I can fix that. Email me: Barbara@BarbaraGrassey.com
