109: Landing Page Sales Funnels for Consumer Products

Product Startup
109: Landing Page Sales Funnels for Consumer Products
With Marco Torres, CEO of Marketing Boost

00:00 | Kevin Mako (KM): Hello product innovators. Today, we learn from an internet marketer with over a billion dollars in online sales how to use landing page sales funnels to sell your invention direct to end buyers.

00:15 | Voice-over: You’re listening to the Product Startup podcast. The show that helps bring your product idea to life, by chatting with successful inventors, product developers, manufacturers, and hardware industry professionals. Our goal here is to get to the bottom of what makes a product successful, from initial idea to getting your product on store shelves. We’re taking you step by step to build a functional product and scale your product business. Hosted by Kevin Mako, one of North America’s leading experts on hardware development for small product businesses. Now, on to the show.

00:50 | KM: Welcome back everyone. Today, I’m very excited to introduce Marco Torres to the show. Marco has been selling online for clients for 25 years and has sold over a billion dollars through direct consumer internet marketing.

01:02 | KM: He has 75,000 followers on his two Facebook groups dedicated to online selling and affiliate marketing, and is the owner of Marketing Boost, a company that helps thousands of clients with free upsell coupons to their customers.

01:14 | KM: Today, Marco’s going to share some valuable knowledge on how inventors, startups, and small manufacturers can use a single landing page sales funnel to launch a new invention product or are to scale or improve in existing product’s online sales, and some tips and tricks along the way to optimize conversions.

01:29 | KM: Now, on to the episode. Hey Marco, welcome to the show. 

01:32 | Marco Torres (MT): Hey Kevin. Hi. Thank you for having me.

01:35 | KM: I’m excited to talk to you today about marketing directly to end consumers for new products that are launching on websites and, especially to have you on the show to talk about it.

01:43 | KM: You have been in the internet marketing space for 25 years. That was before the big internet companies we know today were even a thing before the word internet marketing was even a buzzword.

01:52 | MT: Exactly. No, I actually was a spammer before they called it spam. I was doing 100 million emails a month back in the late nineties when everybody had their AOL account and they all loved their AOL and loved getting an email back then.

02:10 | MT: Everybody got that little sound effect going you’ve got mail and they loved it back. They paid their 19.99 a month so they could get on the internet and find stuff via email because there wasn’t a Google there were SGs back then, I think it was.

02:25 | KM: Yeah, I was a real early adopter. So I remember those days. I remember the dial-up days. So it was amazing that you were pioneering some of the commercial sides of things.

02:34 | KM: So I want to bring it forward to talking about sales funnels and talking about landing pages because that’s really important around the subject of selling your product on your website directly to a customer.

02:44 | KM: Whether you’re a new hardware startup and you’re planning to eventually sell directly to consumers online or whether you’re an existing brand and an existing company that manufactures something and you’re looking to increase your market sales today’s conversation is really key.

02:58 | KM: Because we’re talking about what is on the page to actually convert that customer from being interested in your product to actually pressing the buy button and whipping out their credit card to actually purchase that.

03:09 | KM: So first and foremost, just start with defining what is a landing page and what is a sales funnel and how do those terms interact?

03:16 | MT: Sure. No, thank you. We’re all familiar with what used to be called websites. So you build a website for a product and the big def to me, the defining factor between what is a website and what is a landing page or a/sales funnel, which is like the new keyword referring to landing pages as sales funnels.

03:35 | MT: Because you don’t want them just to land there. You want to bring them in through your sales funnel to hit your landing page. And then continue down a sales process whereas they come in from a prospect, they land on the page and they’re seeing sexy looking graphics and great copy. 

03:51 | MT: And calls to actions that continue to take them down that funnel and reading. And you’ve got to have a good copy that’s going to keep them engaged, keep them reading about the product, what it does, how it works, what the benefits and features are, and how those relate to my need or my problem.

04:10 | MT: How does your product solve my problem? And as I continue to read down the sales funnel, you continue to scroll down and little by little sell me on your product and service. You’ll need to add things like testimonials throughout the process, a verbal sales pitch.

04:31 | MT: I need to bring you in. I need to grab your attention. Then I need to overcome the objections before you gave them to me because we’re not in a two-way conversation where you start telling me what your fear factors are about my product.

04:44 | MT: So I’ve got to assume, or I need to know my client to figure out what are they going to think as a negative that I need to overcome during the sales process until we can get further down in there and start showing those calls to action.

04:57 | MT: Take action now. Buy one now. Buy two. Start adding the incentives as I like to refer to it as adding value versus discounting so you’re not competing over price with similar products and competitors.

05:09 | KM: That’s a great overview. I appreciate that, top to bottom. Let’s break down each section because it’s important. First and foremost, we’re starting with the concept that this is one page. You may have multiple pages on your website, but the point is the customer’s clicking from somewhere and they’re landing on this page.

05:25 | KM: And it is one long page of information that essentially starts them at the top of the sales funnel. And as they read down, the page is more and more convincing. At some point, either in the middle, in the end, they’re going to place a purchase on it.

05:40 | KM: How you structure this page, and what you’re doing to this page is really important. It’s incredible. I’ve seen a lot of these pages built for a lot of hardware customers and a lot of hardware products, especially new products that are getting some market.

05:51 | KM: And it’s amazing when you look at the concept of a landing page or sales funnel how many things are actually missing from a sales funnel page, basic things.

05:58 | KM: Whereas if you have those things, at least in their basic format, it substantially increases the probability of that customer converting, which means you’re making more sales per dollar spent on ad spent to actually get that customer there. Let’s start at the top of the funnel.

06:12 | KM: First of all, can you explain a bit about what these sections are and why they’re so important? And why you’re kind of starting in a funnel process from the big picture at the top of the page down to very narrow, specific solutions at the bottom of the page to convert them to sell?

06:26 | MT: Sure. And for starters, we want to make sure we understand that the sales funnel means it is not going to have a bunch of navigation buttons like a website. So you’re not giving them options to about us, click here to see other similar products.

06:44 | MT: You’re just going to eliminate all the other places that they might click away to that would distract them from going and reading and continuing down that sales funnel. So right out the gate there’s no navigation other than whatever the call to action is, which is to buy today.

07:00 | MT: So then as you go down you’re creative. You need the graphics to go with it, the copy. You need to have some way to put some credibility into what your product is. Have you written press releases about it? Can you claim as seen on Forbes Inc., Fox business?

07:22 | MT: Can you get press releases going so that you can claim that you’ve been featured on credible sites somewhere in the world. Somewhere, especially that relates to your product or service.

07:35 | MT: Then, of course, you’re going to get into each section I refer to if you want to make it stand out with graphics and copy about each benefit and feature, and then down to the next one. So as I scroll down, I’m seeing another benefit, another feature, another reason why I need it, it’s selling me on why I need it.

07:56 | MT: It can’t look like a technical book. It needs to be for the consumer. If you’re going for the consumer, if that’s the goal here, the B2C is not selling a lot of features, but selling benefits.

08:08 | MT: So as we’re going through here we are describing a feature. But somebody has to be a copywriter who’s making it tell exactly how it solves my problem, not what this widget was made from. It’s got titanium and platinum, who cares? What does it do for me?

08:26 | MT: So the product, sometimes techy guys can get really carried away describing their product with all the technical stuff. But the consumer is rarely interested in that. So I would recommend maybe saving that for a separate section in itself when it comes to the details, the tech details.

08:44 | MT: But mainly each section is going to be referring to the benefits to the consumer as you go along with graphics and images and credibility. You’re going to be overcoming those objections that we talked about as you rolled through.

08:58 | MT: So we’re going to be talking about covering FAQs, commonly asked questions. We’re going to have a section for testimonials.

09:07 | MT: So ideally before you launch a product to the consumer, you’ve given them away at least to people, or you’ve had beta users so that you can have written reviews, or maybe even video reviews from clients. I strongly recommend video reviews.

09:22 | MT: Most people won’t even watch all the video reviews or maybe not even one of them, but just showing that you’ve got three or four real clients who have a video testimonial about your product is part of the proof because you can’t really fake a video testimonial like you can a written one.

09:39 | MT: I can write anything and put a picture of anybody on it for a written testimonial, but a video one is harder to do. What else? And then if you can throw in incentives we’ll get to what I do there.

09:54 | MT: But psychology has proven that rather than a discount people prefer value add products or services included with a call to action versus a discount. So if you’re in a niche that’s very competitive, we’re all competing against somebody.

10:10 | MT: So more than likely whatever you invented, the product you’re launching, there are similar products out there. And so, when you get into a price war then everybody’s racing to the bottom and there’s no profit left.

10:19 | MT: So we recommend, I always teach my clients to add value, whether it be a buy one get one, it works a heck of a lot better than even 50% off. Although that might be depending upon how you price it, you might be able to do that.

10:37 | MT: But instead of coming up with a 10% discount, add products, add service, give 90 days support free versus a price discount. Again, it obviously depends on everybody’s product or service.

10:52 | MT: But the other thing is to stand apart from everyone else’s, we’ll get into that later in the conversation is to use third-party incentives that you can actually include with the purchase, which is what my company provides.

11:05 | KM: That is great. A lot of little tips in there as well. It’s something that’s really worth noting in terms of the different pieces, the different sections of your funnel, and what elements you’re using to do two things. One is selling.

11:19 | KM: And I love how you mentioned it Marco, to make sure that you’re not selling features; make sure you’re selling benefits to the customer. It’s a different way of writing your copy, where you’re telling them what benefit they’re going to derive from your product, as opposed to the feature it has.

11:33 | KM: The feature gets them the benefit, but a lot of writers, especially when you’re an inventor or a hardware startup, you’re focusing too much on the actual bits and pieces and not focusing on what the customer is really looking for at the end of the day. What do they really want?

11:50 | KM: And we’ve talked about this a bunch on the show before about selling the value or the benefits, not the features. And that’s critically important because the beauty of it is, and I like how you mentioned it Marco as well, and it’s particularly powerful around hardware products is you can always have another section that breaks down the details.

12:06 | KM: If somebody wants technical information they can dig into it more. They can go to a different section on your website, or they can click for details on the specs. Or they could just take a look at your design.

12:15 | KM: And if you’ve designed a beautiful product and you’ve done a great job of engineering it that’s going to come out in features if they really need that to sell. But the reality is when you’ve got the testimonials and all that sort of stuff there you’re selling that value to the end customer in terms of what they are going to get at the end of it.

12:31 | KM: How is it going to make them happy? How is it going to make them feel? How is it going to improve their life? So that’s one side. Now the other side of it is objections. And I really like how you brought that up as well.

12:40 | KM: Because the first thing you’re doing at the top of the funnel is generally selling the benefit that they’re going to achieve. And then they’re going to get critical. Somewhere around the middle of the page they’re going to say, okay, but do I believe them?

12:51 | KM: And that’s where you’ve brought in those sections Marc that you’ve mentioned are very important, the video testimonials. Looking at the product holistically from any sort of reviews or external things you had as seen on or whatever else.

13:03 | KM: The beauty of physical hardware products is that you have some amazing imagery to show. So you mentioned it a few times Marco there, make sure that you’ve got a great copy, but also have pictures in each section to really visually describe what they’re getting in terms of benefits.

13:18 | KM: Well, as a hardware company, if you’ve designed a great product, you have all kinds of renderings. You have prototypes. You have the product being tested in different areas. You have the product going into production. All these things validate the proof that you’re the real deal.

13:30 | KM: And then you’re going to seal it at the end when okay, they’ve been convinced on the benefit. Now, towards the middle, they believe that the proof is there. And at the end, you’re going to drive it home with these extra incentives and benefits and all that sort of stuff.

13:43 | MT: And by the way, that call to action should be essentially in every section. So as you’re going down if I’m convinced and I’m ready to go ahead and click that buy button I shouldn’t have to look for it. So as I’m scrolling down the page and I just finished reading some reviews, right underneath the reviews, hey, boom!

14:02 | MT: Buy one, get one now. Avoid the word buy. Well, you’re a copywriter; you should always look to get some help from a professional copywriter. But typically, instead of saying buy, you want to refer to get one now. Nobody really likes to buy stuff, but we all love spending money.

14:22 | MT: We all want to go out and we do love buying stuff, but we don’t want to be told to buy it. So you’ve got to use the right keywords, get one now, save money now, solve this problem now, whatever it might be. And then that call to action literally in every section along the way.

14:39 | MT: And then you as you get down, this page can go on indefinitely because you’ll know your client. And if they are the techies, after you’ve done the whole sales part of it you can get into FAQs, you can get into technical specs. And again, that section can still have another call to action.

14:56 | MT: So each of these sections, depending upon your product may require making your clients for that type of hardware may really be into the technical stuff. But at the end of the day, typically we’re selling the hole, not the drill. I walk into Home Depot. I need a new drill.

15:13 | MT: I’m trying to solve the problem of I need to drill some holes today to finish building a chair or this or the other. So my problem is I’ve got holes I need to drill. I don’t care what kind of drill it is. But when I get there, now I need some fancy packaging and everything else and a brand I recognize or whatever. 

15:32 | MT: And now some of the specs will matter. But depending upon your consumer, they’re like, oh, I need triple this and all this other stuff. But the first grab is the product on the right section of the shelves properly? Does it stand out? Is it right? Is your design good? Right?

15:50 | MT: But now it gets into, again we’re selling a hole, not the drill. And now we have to figure out why does this drill solve my problem? And why do I want to go ahead and spend more money on this drill than the other? Now it’s the benefits, it’s going to last me longer.

16:03 | MT: It’s going to hold up to heavy use. It’s going to hold up to being left out in the rain. I don’t know. What are the benefits to me that decide this drill is going to drill better holes than the next one?

16:17 | KM: The interesting thing about so much of this web data these days too, is you can start to hone in over time to see how far people are moving down the page before they actually buy your product, or are they leaving at a certain point on your page?

16:30 | KM: So the nice thing about these modular designs of a sales funnel landing page or sales page is that this data can give you very key insights on each of your sections. Say, okay, this section is doing well and guiding people further down the page or converting them to a sale.

16:46 | KM: Or this section is doing poorly, people don’t like it and they’re leaving when they get to this section. Maybe you need to reorder the sections, maybe you need to rewrite them, or maybe you need to add different content or whatever it might be.

16:56 | KM: But I even think about services like Hotjar, which can actually show you heat mapping of precisely where people are moving the mouse down your page. What words are they highlighting? Where are they clicking? Where are they spending some time?

17:07 | KM: And you could start to gauge, especially as this grows, and you get more people landing on these pages, you can get more data about what’s working and what’s not working.

17:16 | KM: And applying these principles to your page, which brings us back to your tip about making sure that you have calls to action all the way down that landing page to make sure that when they are ready they click there and off you go.

17:29 | MT: Yeah. And AB testing. AB testing refers to you might build two or three of the same sales funnel with different keywords, different stuff, maybe in different sections, depending upon how you lay out that copy and images.

17:49 | MT: But be careful with AB testing, you want to make small changes along the way so that you really know what the differences are. But what you definitely want to do is to send some traffic to one page and some to another, and with different calls to action verbiage, whether it’s buy now or get one now or what have you.

18:08 | MT: And test all that stuff and see what your audience responds to. And then if you, yeah, I forgot my train of thought there. But AB testing is hugely important in enhancing and optimizing that sales funnel.

18:27 | KM: Now with the funnel that you’re building, let’s say you get it to a point where you’re pretty comfortable with it, you’re noticing some conversions, it’s working. You mentioned something before this call about affiliate marketing.

18:39 | KM: Just talk a bit about that, about how you can leverage a landing page like this to get more eyeballs on it by using other people essentially to sell your product, to get traffic directed to your landing page.

18:51 | MT: Yeah. I’m glad you reminded me of that. Affiliate marketing has been a key asset to what I’ve done for decades, really for the companies and products and services that I’ve marketed for myself or my clients, as I operate somewhat at an agency level. 

19:12 | MT: One of my Facebook groups for example is called Marketing Boost Affiliates, where I’ve got 54,000 affiliates in that Facebook group alone. And what affiliates are essentially are all entrepreneurs all over the world who want to sell products without building their own.

19:30 | MT: They want a good product or service that they can sell, that they can make a commission on, and that’s what they’re looking for. And there are affiliate networks like Commission Junction, Clickbait, and many others.

19:46 | MT: Once you’ve got an idea of your product acquisition cost, you did your marketing. And you know it’s costing me $50 to acquire a customer to buy my $300 product. So you know that if it’s costing you $70 to get a deal you’re no longer making the money you need to make.

20:07 | MT: So the affiliates can come in, and you can say, look, if you know your budget is $50, you might put it on the affiliate network out there for $25, $30, $40, and see if the affiliates might be better at marketers than you are and let them go to battle with it.

20:24 | MT: And you may have to make it where you pay all the way up to what you’re willing to pay. Or you might be able to get it into the affiliate world for less than it was costing yourself.

20:35 | MT: So now you’ve increased your margins, and you’ve got an army of salespeople, a network of entrepreneurs who know how to market on the internet to their audiences, with their traffic, with their websites.

20:49 | MT: They’re essentially publishers quite often, they’ve got the traffic, and they need different products to be published on there that they’re willing to put on there without charging you advertising fees and only get paid when someone clicks from their link over to your sales funnel and buys. 

21:04 | MT: And then it’s affiliate tracking software you’ll need to plug into your sales funnel page, but then that’s going to track the sale where it came from, what commissions are due. And it’s either due or paid directly to the affiliate company like Commission Junction, and then they pay the end user or affiliate.

21:21 | MT: Or you can build your direct affiliate network, little by little, and they’re working directly with you, they’re selling your product, and you’re the one paying them the commissions directly.

21:31 | MT: Affiliate marketing can be huge for different products and services without even having to figure out how to market it, that’s what they do. And that’s what they do for your product and others. So there is a big opportunity there with affiliate marketing.

21:47 | KM: Affiliate marketing is a great option for new hardware innovations as well because you have to think of it from the perspective of these influencers. They are looking for new, interesting, and clever products that maybe are difficult to find, or people don’t know much about.

22:04 | KM: Because they want to be the innovators to present it to their audience, say, hey, look, I found this great new thing, and thank me for it.

22:10 | KM: And that is what’s so amazing about people who are on this podcast right now, pretty much everybody on this podcast is either developing or selling or in some part of the way of a new hardware invention, something physical.

22:22 | KM: Those are precisely the things that these individuals, these influencers, like you said, they’re essentially micro publishers looking for, and they get paid for it. Because when they are able to direct somebody to your site, they get a cut.

22:36 | KM: And the more interesting and clever and unique that the product is the more money they’re going to make. So the cool thing about influencers as well that I’ve seen is because their global marketplace is so big now you can almost certainly find dozens, if not hundreds of influencers, very specifically within your product niche.

22:55 | KM: They are in your industry, your vertical, whatever you want to call it, or are very highly related to the product that you are looking to sell.

23:03 | KM: Those people are very interested in a new product because it’s in their space and it’s to their audience which is how they build their credibility and how their audience appreciates the work they do in finding these new products.

23:16 | KM: So that’s why as a new hardware startup, look at this as one of your many options to sell a product. We’ve talked about a lot of different options on the show from wholesale, direct to retail, crowdfunding, and many others. 

23:27 | KM: This, with affiliate marketing, I mean a very good, well-designed landing page or sales funnel is another arsenal in your toolbox that you can use to sell more products or to launch a new product.

23:39 | MT: Exactly. And the software to do it, right now technology is so powerful. The technology to launch, to have your affiliate program where you’re direct with your affiliates, you’re not paying a third party company like Commission Junction.

23:56 | MT: When you do that you’ve got to have a higher margin because let’s say you’re paying them a 40% commission, they’re paying their people 30%. But if you built yours directly to your affiliates you can pay them a little bit more and make sure that they’re focusing on your product versus somebody else’s.

24:14 | MT: So affiliate marketing is great. Of course, social media get it out there everywhere else when it comes to marketing. I don’t know how much time we have left. How are we doing on time here?

24:24 | KM: Well we’re pretty much coming to an end. So something I wanted to ask you before we wrapped up is a big part of the work that your company does is something you mentioned towards the tail end of these sales funnels is offering extra incentives, offering something beyond.

24:37 | KM: Rather than offering a discount, offer them additional value. Explain a bit about that and how your company works around that.

24:44 | MT: Sure. My company’s marketingboost.com and we provide complimentary hotel stays, in 125 destinations around the world we offer complimentary hotel stays. Then we offer hotel savings cards in $100 increments, 100, 200, 300, 500.

25:01 | MT: And so, for example, one of my clients he’s selling a GPS device, he sells it to put it in your car. And what they do is they use our product to add value with the bonus. So if you buy one product, one of his GPS devices, great, you bought it for however much it was.

25:20 | MT: If you buy two of them, he throws in a complimentary hotel stay in Las Vegas, if you buy two or more. So that’s an example of how you can add value without discounting and increase the sale because he only offered the complimentary trip when they bought a minimum of two of his devices or more.

25:40 | MT: So he’s bumping up the revenue for himself without discounting and generating at least two or more sales of each of the product versus one. So our product, we be make it easy and affordable.

25:48 | MT: It’s only $37 a month to be a member of Marketing Boost and have access to unlimited restaurant vouchers that we provide as complimentary restaurant vouchers, hotel savings cards, or complimentary trips.

26:01 | MT: Go to marketingboost.com, and you can join the Facebook group and start seeing how thousands of other owners around the world use incentives to grow their business without discounting. That’s a little bit of that. I’ll throw in there that we do the white label glove service. We do build sales funnels for our clients.

26:20 | MT: We provide the entire technology for follow-up, for email, for text messaging, for voice broadcasting to follow-up with prospects that have filled out a form, they were interested in your product, for example. So anyway, we’re here to help.

26:33 | MT: If you join our Facebook group, that’s one way that you can just reach out to me personally and solicit advice on how to launch your product. And we’ll share with you what we can, and hopefully, we can help you.

26:45 | KM: That’s great. I really appreciate all of that. And of course, as always, I’ll put all the links in the show notes below. Marco thanks a lot for your advice today and for being on the show.

26:52 | MT: Thank you.

26:53 | Voice-over: Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Product Startup podcast. The show that teaches you what it really takes to bring your product to market and turn it into a big success. This podcast series is brought to you by MAKO Design + Invent, the original and leading firm in North America to provide global caliber end-to-end physical consumer product development to startups, inventors, and small product business clients. If you’re looking for product development help on your invention, head over to makodesign.com. That’s M-A-K-O design.com, for a free consultation from one of MAKO Design’s, four design studios from coast to coast. Thanks for listening and see you next time.