Fill Your Funnel With Monthly Conversion Initiatives

Whether you’re a solopreneur, a CEO with a large in-house team or at any other stage of your journey…

…keeping track of all of the moving parts can be incredibly overwhelming.

I’m details-obsessed by nature and I STILL struggle if I don’t have a specific and action-focused to-do list, each and every day.

In each of my career iterations – first as a television producer, then as a vice president for a fast-growing company and now as a fractional CMO and CRO who runs her own business – I have always found that an editorial calendar is helpful.

When it comes to driving leads and sales, I go a step further – I like to set one MAIN monthly event, around which all smaller initiatives are based.

This certainly does not mean that the event is the only thing you do each month – you still have to run day-to-day business operations, of course! But centering your lead generation and sales growth around one specific event empowers you to stay accountable – not a single month can go by without you thinking about your pipeline – and also creates a predictable and scalable method for getting new leads onto your list, and a dedicated plan or funnel through which you’ll introduce them to your product, service or offer.

So, what kind of events am I talking about? I’m going to list a few examples, but truly…the “event” is whatever fits YOUR business model and attracts YOUR audience. The specifics aren’t nearly as important as your commitment to the plan, and to marketing the event so that you hit your goals.

Quick housekeeping note – I have another episode of this podcast published, and it’s all about setting monthly revenue goals and then looking at the numbers every day and filling the gap. The same approach works for leads. If your goal is to generate 500 new leads a month, tracking your leads every day is really helpful…you’ll know at any given point in the month whether you’re on pace to meet your goal, or if you need to adjust and do some creative marketing in order to HIT that goal.

OK, back to conversion events. Here are a few of the most common and from my perspective, the most effective:

  1. Webinars and trainings
  2. Lead magnets and downloadable resources
  3. Quizzes
  4. Email courses
  5. Free trial or micro-commitments

I use and love all five of these methods – both for my own business AND when I build marketing plans for clients. But they are ONLY as effective as the work that is done to drive people TO those initiatives.

So yes, as passionate as I am about THE THING, I urge you to worry the least about THE THING and more about how you will market THE THING and hit your goals.

The levers that you can move when generating leads and interest for any event are urgency, scarcity and frequency. Urgency – sign up NOW because time is running out. Scarcity – sign up NOW because spots are almost gone. Frequency is not a message point like the first two, but it does require you to post, post often, post consistently AND to remember that only a small percentage of your audience sees any given post, on any given day.

I do want to stress one thing, though. When a client is first embracing the monthly conversion event strategy, I like to ask them to do something that does have time-sensitivity, like a webinar or a training, or a micro-commitment offer, and I recommend that you do the same. That type of event happens on a specific date and at a specific time, so it forces you to market it. 

Lead magnets, quizzes, email courses are not time-sensitive, or at least not usually. So, they have the benefit of being evergreen and something you can use over and over again. But that also means that you yourself may not have the same urgency to stick to the plan of marketing THE THING all month long.

So, even with evergreen lead generation projects, I find that it’s best to make that the all-team focus for the month. A majority of social media posts, ads, energy, etc. should be pointed toward hitting X number of new leads for that particular thing. If someone downloads something else, or joins the list another way, that’s great! But the single focus benefits your audience, too, because they won’t be pulled in a million directions by you.

Now, what happens after someone joins the initiative? You move out of TOFU and into MOFU and BOFU. If you haven’t listened to my in-depth discussion of these parts of the funnel, be sure to check out the episode all about this. A quick recap: TOFU is top of the funnel, MOFU is middle of the funnel and BOFU is bottom of the funnel.

The benefit of creating these monthly conversion events and incorporating them into the editorial calendar is that you can optimize and deliver the highest quality content in each of the three areas, because it’s getting the most time and attention from everyone on the team. At the end of the month, you can evaluate: Did we get new leads? Did we properly nurture them and educate them about us? And did we convert them into the final sale or offer?

If so, great! Celebrate and start again next month. If not, decide what could be improved for next time: did you get a lot of leads but no conversions? Did you convert well but had a small list of leads to work with? Or something else?

Tweak the piece that needs a revamp and then month after month, embrace these incremental improvements.

At the end of 6 months, I think you’ll find yourself to be in a much better position, with a lot less stress.