47 | AI-Powered Funnels Made Simple: Boost Conversions and Client Acquisitions with Justin Hardy of Hardy Marketing

0:00Hello, and welcome to Leveraging AI, the podcast that shares practical, ethical ways to leverage AI, to improve efficiency, grow your business, and advance your career. This is Isar Maitis, your host, and we are coming towards the end of the year of 2023. ChatGPT has been with us for just over a year, and there's still a lot of people who are struggling on how to use generative AI in their businesses. I literally had an exchange this morning on LinkedIn with a person who said, well, this is all overhyped, and I can't really see how can I use this in my work. And I know that this is a struggle for a lot of people because I consult to businesses that are struggling with how to do this.

0:40And in today's episode, we're going to dive into a very practical aspect of something every business should know how to do, which is to create and improve funnels. Because we all need clients in businesses. And in order to get clients, we need some kind of a funnel. It might not be a digital funnel. It could be a physical funnel where you go and meet people in conferences, and then you follow up with them, and then you set up sales presentations with them, and so on. So funnels is a big part of what we have to do in businesses in order to get clients. And the better we get at it, the more clients and better clients we are going to get.

1:17And hence, it's very, very important to do this right. And it's really critical to do this efficiently. And our guest today, Justin Hardy, is an expert exactly on that. He has been doing marketing for his entire career, very long time. And he's been building funnels for seven or eight years. So he's an expert on funnel building. But in this past year, he has really developed the expertise on how to use generative AI tools in order to make his funnels even more effective. So he's combining his experience, his real-life experience of working with clients and building funnels for them together with the capabilities of generative AI tools in order to make it even more impactful.

2:02And like I said, since this is important for every single business out there, I am really excited to have Justin join us today. Justin, welcome to Leveraging AI. In the next few years, AI technology will change our world dramatically. Whether you are a business executive trying to catapult your business forward, or just somebody who refuses to be left behind and want to advance your career, this is the show for you. I'm your host, Isar Maitis, a serial entrepreneur and an AI enthusiast. You'll hear invaluable practical tips from innovative business leaders, AI practitioners, and some of the brightest AI minds in our world today on how you can leverage AI in ethical ways to advance your career and grow your business.

2:55Thank you so much. I appreciate you inviting me here. And yeah, I'm really excited to talk about funnels and how people can leverage some simple and free AI tools to do a lot of heavy lifting for them. Amazing. This is why we're here. Let's start really with a very high level. So what are funnels? What are the steps when you come to look at this thing, you're working with a new client or you're trying to develop a new funnel, what are the steps you follow in order to even define this project of creating a funnel? Yeah, that's a great question. That's usually where I start with a lot of clients over the last couple of years of building funnels.

3:35So generally, you know, you want a good idea first of where your traffic's coming from. So like you said, it doesn't necessarily have to be online. It could be foot traffic, you know, walking in the door. Or if it's online, it could be, you know, are you sending out emails, are you doing organic posts? And then what's the next stage after that? So coming into the physical business, giving them a call, opting in, are they getting a mailer what's the conversion uh to present an offer to them whether it's a service or product and then how are you following up with them you know if they don't buy right away or further down the road if you want them to buy again let them know about other things that's essentially what a funnel is it's some people will compare it to a customer journey it's not exactly the same as a customer journey because people are broad but funnels really uh yeah the process of them finding out about your product or service all the way through the buying decision and the follow.

4:30And so really from a steps perspective, the first step, and I guess it depends on the company and the specific funnel, but the first step is to really understand who is the target audience, right? Because if you're developing a new funnel, it is likely that is something new happening, right? It's either a new service, a new product, a new company, a new partnership, a new book, like whatever because otherwise you probably already have some kind of a funnel uh that you're doing right exactly uh a huge kind of mistake or error the i sees some clients making not everyone but they'll kind of want to hack someone's funnel or like a very closely model another funnel you know don't copy them but it's okay to model or get inspiration but you really need to do your research very first and spend more time than you probably even think uh you can use the ai tools for that as well.

5:20But really, yeah, understand your ideal target audience. Otherwise, you're not going to know how to attract them and how to convert to the follow-up and thumbs. So it's kind of useless without that. Awesome. So let's really follow your steps. Like when you do the process, and that's really our goal today is to follow the step-by-step process that you do so other people can learn from you and do the same thing. And the stage is yours to take us through the process. Great, yeah. So I prepared a kind of simple presentation just to give us some visual aids. So I'll share my screen. And while Justin is sharing the screen, if you're listening to this as a podcast, we'll obviously tell you what's on the screen.

6:01But if you want, you can always jump to Multiply AI YouTube channel and find it over there. Or obviously short videos of this will be posted on social media as well. But this just helps us when we are looking at this to go through the steps and make sure we are following a process. Yeah, exactly. So trying to have a little fun with it, made it kind of like a Mario pixelated theme, but you can kind of think of a funnel sort of as a video game where there's stages or levels to it, just like there's levels to business. So just have a little fun with it. So what exactly are funnels? I kind of mentioned before, it's them finding out about your product or service, presenting an offer to them, and then following up with that.

6:43and why A-Funnels, like starting with the why, you know, beyond anything is a lot of people just have a website. They'll have a lot of menu options about us, probably like five, six, seven different pages, contact page. And you're giving your customers or potential customers or leads a ton of work to sift through that. There's so many websites coming out every single day. It's not realistic to think they're going to dig through entire websites, especially if they're just finding out about you for the first time, especially if it's a saturated or very competitive market. So what you want is to be able to really focus their attention.

7:18You want to give them one thing. Do you want it? Yes or no. If you want it, you move forward in the funnel. If you don't want it, you leave the page and that's it. There's not all this other information. So as you can see, if you're following on video, Sid Y Funnels, because they crush websites for getting opt-ins. So if you want to build like your email news list or subscriber news list, things like that, they're a lot better at making offers. So you can have a full sales page about, you know, what, say you're selling a supplement. You can say what it is, why it's good, why it's better than others, freaking ask questions, bonuses, things like that, versus just having a website with a product with a little information on it that's going to convert a lot higher.

8:00It's also a lot better worth following up with leads. So with the funnel, you actually capture that contact information, whether it's an email, phone number, and then you're going to be able to, if they don't buy right then, follow up with them with other different offers or valuable content so that you stay top of mind. Websites that are not built for that, they're built for brand awareness and just maybe explaining about the company's story and some things, which is fine. can build social proof, really would recommend almost everyone have this landing page or sales page first before they even have them.

8:33I love this. I want to add kind of like the one word that comes to mind is focus, right? It's very, very focused on achieving a very specific goal. And there might be different goals. It might be just getting the opt-ins. You just want people that you can communicate with that are potential clients. It might be selling something. It might be announcing something. It might be whatever the case may be, but it's very, very focused on something very specific. And that's why it performs better than just a website or a general thing because of that focus. I literally, just a small example from the last 48 hours, one of my clients is launching, we're launching a course together.

9:12So it's a generative AI course for people in the marketing world. Shameless plug. It's my podcast. I can say that. But we started building the landing page and they were building the page as another page of the website, which is fine. But some of the things that navigation pages of the website have is a navigation menu. And it has the chat pop up that says, hey, we're here to help you if you need help. And it has some banners that are on the bottom announcing a new product that they might announce. And you want zero of these things in your funnel. Why? Because you want people to be focused on the one thing that for it you're developing the funnel and everything else is noise.

9:56The thing that takes them to the very interesting article is not relevant in this page because you want them to take a very clear step. The navigation menu is other options you don't want them to have on that particular page. So I'm just painting the picture of everything you said, and I agree with you 100 percent, is focus is the key and eliminate any other noises when you're creating your different funnel steps. it's essential yeah to make an offer online really want to eliminate the noise and the decisions it's like a yes or no decision that's it there shouldn't be any buying questions unanswered on that page so yeah so we'll keep moving um so we went over this a little bit in the beginning but I have a slide on what exactly is a funnel it's kind of a little bit of a formal definition so it's the steps customers go through after becoming aware of a business or service product from the initial awareness of first finding out about it to the moment of buying yes or no and then beyond which is the follow and then a simple way that I think a lot of marketers would understand this is uh the ADA format so that's awareness so how are they finding out about you physical or online the interest um what is what are you offering what are you trying to help with the desire why would they want to do it right now and then the action do they want to buy yes or no.

11:13And I have another visual aid. Probably a lot of people have seen this as literally a funnel, but I'm going to have people coming up here at the top where, you know, maybe they see an organic post or an ad or you have a list that you're sending ads out to. That would just be the awareness. Interest would be, okay, they click on the ad, they click through your website, something like that. Desires, what are you offering? Do you have scarcity or urgency like a deadline and limited inventory, that type of thing, that why do they want it right now? And then action is, you know, what do they want them to do?

11:46Whether that's opting in, buying something else, joining a membership, things like that. That's just very simplistic how you, like I said, or how you said, you focus their attention at the top and lead them down a pathway of what do you want them to do? What's the next logical step? Don't give them like three different options. What's the step, you know, do they see? another example you know i work with a lot of fitness and health care so uh say for a clinic i did is get about a free voucher to come in as a new patient they click on that so that's the awareness and the interest they're we're getting their opt-in information and they're calling them or sending them out emails to come in that's the desire and action and then we follow up with them on the back end they come in that splits but um so yeah any any questions i want to make sure that's kind of no i think i think the process is clear cool all right and then how does that look like you know tactically or uh actually like on paper so i like to map out my funnels i'm very visual marketer so um if you use click funnels or any software like this this is kind of what it's going to look like where you're hitting a sales page where you're making an offer order something you may have upsells and downsells you don't always have to have that just an example then They're going to confirm the order and then what's happening after.

13:06They're going to probably get their lead magnet or appointment details or what have you for that business. Maybe following up email, text, calls, whatever makes sense for your goals. But that's how it looks on paper. And then a little bit, I mean, we can get into what exactly does a funnel look like? I have an example from Russell Brunson. He's, of course, like the kings of making funnels. kind of just will go section by section just uh in general terms i have a more in-depth guide that if anyone wants it they can get that goes kind of more into depth of each one and why you want it more examples but we'll just go through that real quick and then i'll show you guys how you can actually uh use chat gpt or other free generative ai copy tools to create the copy pretty much for you so awesome so before before we dive in just to again put people to understand where we are in the process, we are going to discuss a landing page, right?

14:03So once you got people to your website, the page where you want to make an offer to them to do something, like I said, it could be to subscribe, could be to buy, could be to join you at an event, could be whatever the case may be. This is that page and how you create that page in a way that will convert the best way. Exactly. Yep. So an example would be if you saw like a supplement online, you clicked on the ad, and then what is this landing page trying to sell the supplement? So exit here. You can still see my screen right now. Switch over. So like I said, we'll have an example with Russell. Obviously, he's the king of talking about funnels.

14:47There's other people that talk about it. I talk about it. Russell was kind of the first person I learned it from. So he has all the bells and whistles. And obviously not everyone has to use all these elements, but I kind of want to show a full example of what it could really look like as a good sales page. So the first thing you notice is a hero banner, hero section. So that's just this whole thing above the full. So you have your headline here ready to launch your first or next funnel. So you've got the headline, sub headline. Headline is really just a big like attention getter. What's the big promise or what's the big pain point you're trying to solve?

15:19Sub headline just kind of carries that out a little bit more in depth of how are they going to deliver the promise or what's the unique mechanism of how they're actually delivering that. Then you see here he has a VSL video. We don't have to play that, but that just really bottles up the whole sales page into like a 60 or 90 second video for people who prefer that. Some people literally will just take the copy from the page and turn it into a video. You don't always have to have a video. you could just do an image with like what you're offering. It's fine too. And then over here you see the actual opt-in, the action.

15:54So call the action button stands out very easy to see. He's digging into the emotional pain points right here. So we're about this section, social proof bar and audience column. So I want to talk about this for a second on these details. There are really several key things that you said. One, that it's all above the fold, meaning for those of you who are not technical, it's all the stuff you see without having to scroll. So you see the headline, which is the first, okay, this needs to catch people's attention. You see the sub headline, you see the video, and you see the actual offer. Meaning even if you don't do anything, you haven't scrolled, you get a very good idea of what's the value proposition.

16:43and the whole goal of this is to do exactly that, right? You may or may not want to scroll forward. This may be good enough for you if the right information was provided. And the other thing that you mentioned is that it plays to the emotion. So you need to capture people's emotions, either positive or negative, and both are fine. And I know there's pros and cons to each. And I know some people appreciate more scarcity and fear and some people appreciate more excitement and anticipation, but you can mix and match the two or test different things out to see what works better for your audience. But really, if above the fold, you can create people, allow people to understand what is that you're offering and how can it change their life.

17:30And it doesn't have to be dramatic, right? It doesn't have to be, oh, this is like life-changing. But the fact that their life after they do this action is going to be better somehow. They will have more knowledge. They will have better understanding of a topic. They will be able to perform their job better. Like whatever, they'll be able to grow their business. Like whatever the case may be, if you can get them to understand that this is what you're providing, then you've done a good job with that first section above the fold. Exactly, yeah. You should assume that like realistically, Basically, at least a third of people will not scroll past.

18:11So exactly. You should have, like, you paid for them to get to the page. Should at least be clear what you want them to do. And then it's kind of up to them whether they're going to leave or not. So, yeah, that's all above the fold. And then going down, there's different ways to show. But this is his social proof section. So he's got, you know, client testimonials right here, what they're saying, with some fairly big names. Another way you see this commonly is, like, trusted by different logos of companies that they work with. or another example he could do is like 500 ,000 entrepreneurs who've worked with, 10 million funnels built, 100 million per month in revenue, whatever.

18:49If you have things that only you can say about awards or social proof or testimonials, you want to put them straight there so that the idea is to kind of, at least for a second, pause their doubt. So a lot of people are going to hit this page and be cynical or not think that it's going to do what it's due. that social proof built that second of trust that they made keeps growing so that's really just the purpose there absolutely i think this is getting more and more important and the reason it's getting more and more important is it's becoming easier and easier to create good looking high attracting offers right anybody can make them now you as we're going to talk shortly like you can do this with ChatGPT or other generative AI tools, including the graphics and so on.

19:35So back in the day, only serious companies could create beautiful graphics and the right tone and the right... Now anybody can do this. And so what really differentiates you from other people is the ability to prove that what you're offering is really doing what you're saying that it's doing. And the best way to do that is to show different kinds of people that have achieved whatever goal you're selling with the method that you are selling. And what you can see here, by the way, those of you listening who can see, there are multiple different kinds of people. So there's an older guy, a younger female, an Asian person and a black guy.

20:15So from an ethnicity perspective, age perspective, sex perspective, you're approaching different people and they have different roles in different companies and from different places around the world. So in four images with a paragraph underneath each and every one of them, you are touching a very large variety in your target audience that might be interested in what you're selling and then you're connecting oh this guy's like me or this gal is like me hence this might work for me as well and that's what this section is trying to create beyond just the social proof yeah yeah honestly the more social proof you have the better of yet to see a page that had like too much and i'm gonna try to keep it as authentic and if possible use you know the full name even better if they have their business or like their funnel business here but um so that people could actually look them up if they wanted to they probably won't but anyways yeah so that's the social proof section we'll keep moving um next one up will be where you want to call out your audience and kind of start to introduce your solution you're not going to go over all of it, but you're going to tease it.

21:23So here we go. Freedom is just one funnel away. So obviously, he's a pretty broad audience and a lot of people know Russell, so he doesn't have to be like, you know, hey, contractors, are you looking to grow your business or something super specific like that? But he's, you know, freedom just funnel away. So he's calling out people that want more freedom in their life, which is typically going to be people who want to start their own business or want to be an entrepreneur online. He doesn't have to say that because I said he's a little bit more known he has a sales letter there's different ways you could just bullet point of like are you uh sick and tired of feeling this way do you want to live like more fulfilling whatever you're offering like moving them away from paying the bad things moving them towards joy and success and status the things that they want you get the point but here he has a little bit of letter you know what does one final way mean for you for everyone's little different job that you hate you're stuck what impact in the world like we were just talking about um let me ask you a few questions.

22:20So this is a little bit more advanced where he's actually gonna have you identify your problems instead of just like listing them. But you don't have to do that. You could just list them out here. Do you want to go to your business, but you have no idea where to start? Feeling stuck? Want a bigger impact? So what I just said, you want to list out those emotional bullet points of what keeps your target customer up at night, what are their biggest issues? Get emotional, explain in detail, you're convinced they need a funnel, but you aren't quite sure what steps you dig and don't be afraid to use too many i mean you can use between five to ten bullet points here but really digging into the emotional pain points here and starting to uh kind of pick their interest okay there's a better way of doing things there's a solution i want to i want to pause you for just one second because this is where i think it starts to get very interesting uh in using ai to figure out these kind of things so maybe we'll jump back and forth in your presentation i just want to tie back to this segment, right?

23:17Because I think people know what their offer is, right? Because they're like, okay, I think that my software, my product, my service, whatever the case may be, is solving this problem. What most people are not good at is explaining the problem in a way that is emotionally convincing to the audience, right? So in the example you gave here, and those of you, again, who are listening to this, there's a checklist, there's actual checkboxes that you can check with different questions of how may this audience feel stuck or unsatisfied or not growing fast enough or whatever the case may be. And you can actually check the boxes, meaning he not only found the right questions, he's actually making you take an action to confirm to yourself that you have a problem, right?

24:14They always say to get to a solution, you have to admit you have the problem. This is literally you admitting that you have this problem, meaning there's a higher likelihood from a psychological perspective, you're going to continue. So I want to ask you to pause with the different components for a second and go to the practical tactical side for a second. If I know what I'm selling, but I don't know how to do this, I don't know how to get to the questions and the pain points that my audience may have that I can draft to solve. How can I use generative AI tools in order to find those, list those, and write them in the most convincing way?

24:54Yeah, it's a really good question. I actually did a workshop a couple of weeks ago on how to do that research part. But so if anyone wanted to know, you can just get in contact with me. I'll send you that video. But essentially, that's where the research really comes into play. Like you should be looking. There's the manual research. So that's just finding forms, groups, influencers in that category and seeing that same problem, how they're talking about it. You know, how your potential customers are talking about it and use their exact words. Don't like assume just because maybe that's how you feel about your solution.

25:30actually use their words, find that. And then AI tools, I like a tool called Craftful. It's a free tool. You can literally just scrape customer feedback. So if you have my business reviews, if you have emails with people replying, if you have like Zendesk or a customer service inbox, you can literally just copy and paste that into it or read all of that and I'll bullet point, like what are people saying? What's their sentiment? What are the biggest challenges? What do they want to see different? I love that tool. I use that almost all the time when I'm going to do a campaign. But there's other tools similar like that you could find, but I would really recommend that one.

26:07That's the idea. You want to, you know, what are their pain points? How are they talking about it in their exact language? And then if you've done your research, it should be fairly easy to use my prompt. Just almost fill this in like section by section, like you're building Legos or something like that. So I want to touch on two things here because I think they're very important. And then I think we want to go to the prompt because it's connected directly to this. But before we go to the prompt, the key in making AI successful is a mix of human traditional work and AI, which is just what Justin described, right?

26:44You're saying, okay, you need to do your regular research. You need to understand who's your target audience is, which, by the way, you can use AI to help guide you through that as well. If you're just getting started, if you haven't had a company for five years and you're not sure who your target audience is, you can use AI and prompt it to help you narrow down the questions, the kind of audience and so on. But once you have that, now you can start using AI or if you have data, you can use AI to go through the data. I don't know Craftful. I've never used it, but I work with my clients just using ChatGPT.

27:15just take all your customer reviews, put them in one doc, upload them to, and then you can ask it whatever questions and you can find themes and you can find similarities and you can find core positive things and negative things that people are saying about you and so on. And through those, through the conversation and the chat, you can now start to pinpoint what are the main points that they have issues with or that you're solving for them. And from that, come up with the language. But yes, I think the tools are important. There's better tools for specific things, but I think the concepts are more important and the ability to use it in the initial research phase and then with your own data and then in using that data in order to make educated decisions on what should be in the content is, I think, very, very important.

28:10Let's go to the prompt and see how you actually use that. Yeah, definitely. I mean, just to finish where we were at was, because the prompt, I broke it out into each of these sections. So if you understand these sections, you'll understand the prompt. So introducing the solution, then really most people will be used to this as showing benefits and features as usually icons of what's different or what's better about your solution. Introduce your expertise. So if you're a coach or if you're a business, why, again, you're the better choice. And then just real quick, I show people what a full stack offer looks like.

28:49And that's really the rest of it. So full stack offers, this. So everything you'll get, instead of just saying you're going to get a 30-day coaching program or something, he's bringing out every little single aspect or feature of that into a list, showing the value, and then giving you a money-back guarantee key on why you want to do that today. And again, the idea here in stacking is A, to make it look like more. So you're not just buying the thing, you're buying 20 things, even though they are under that umbrella of the thing you're buying. And you can do that with almost anything. But the second reason is to compare that to other stuff, right?

29:30So now you really have the other companies selling me one thing, they're selling me 20 things for the same amount of money. The 20 things must be worth more. And in this particular case, it's even telling you what each and every one of the line items is, right? So line one is$1 ,000. Line two is$1 ,000. Line three is$300 and so on. And you're selling it for a lot less. This is not new, right? If you go back to late night ads, infomercials, oh but wait there's more you also get blah blah blah right two more silver spoons with your dishes that you just like whatever the case may be but it's the same exact idea right it's that feeling that you're actually buying more stuff for less money is a way to get people to say oh yeah this is definitely worth it which is what you're trying to do here and also uh you really want to take out any guesswork for people so he even has a visual of exactly what that's going to look like and because a lot of products are digital now these 3d renders kind of bridge that gap because people like physical so it makes it seem like a physical thing you could touch and besides that you want to eliminate anyone saying well what exactly is included like you just got to read the list and has everything there's you don't have to get on chat and ask like but what is what is the 30 days of coaching he could even go more in depth and say learn you know every day you're going to learn this, this, and this, like, if you wanted to blow it out more, the value, that's a little bit more direct responsey.