If Your Agency Ads Aren't Working, Watch This

Hey there everybody. This video is going to be about a few different things. It's going to show a proper lead gen funnel at its basic form. It is going to show you what kind of metrics and KPIs you should be optimizing for. And then it's also going to show you what you should be doing if Those metrics and KPIs are not being hit. So if you don't know who I am, my name is Matthew Larson. I am the creator of the scale. Your agency funnel sold three agencies in the past 12 years and I work with about 550 agency owners per month. This is the funnel that I teach inside my program and I have 12 free trainings in my description where you can download for free if you're interested in that. This is what I teach at a very high level. But in this video today I'm going to go over kind of what a basic funnel looks like in terms of the different parts and the different flows because it's very difficult off that top dock document to see. But this is going to be the most basic funnel that you'll see in any niche, any business, any industry or anything that has to do with you are generating leads to book a call. This could be for you or your client. So I have five points up here that I'm going to talk about and the first one is when we see this and let's go over it, you have your ad and your content. Generally. I put a content to the opt in page in a lead magnet and if they opt in, it goes to a page with a vsl. Then on the VSL they click an apply button which takes them to a form. The form will determine whether they're unqualified or they're qualified. If they're unqualified, they'll go to a page that has a downsell. Maybe that's a course or a program or you have an actual downsell service or maybe it's a webinar or whatever. They are qualified, they'll go book a call and when they book a call they'll be on the thank you page with more information. The sales call will take place and then the follow up will come up. So whether they go into this lead magnet or the form, they're going to go to get a welcome flow which nurtures them. If they book a call, they're going to get a pre call flow which does that. And if they go on the call and they don't buy on the call or with, you know, one minute after they're going to start receiving a follow up flow. The thing that I want to make clear here is that we really need to have the entire thing. Not 50% of this thing, not 75% of this thing, not 90%, not even 99%, not every, not even every single thing except one. Because if we don't, it's kind of like if you had every part of a car except the steering wheel, it's just not even useful anymore. Like what are you gonna do? Just hit on the gas and just go, no, you're not? Of course. And it's the same thing with the most basic funnel. Even if we had absolutely everything except the. Let's just say, let's just say something obvious. Except for the follow up flow, upwards of 90% of people aren't going to buy on the call or shortly after. We are very going to very, very, very going to inhibit the ability of this funnel to do its job. If we have everything but the welcome flow, we're not going to be nurtured enough or not going to get the information they need to make a decision to even book the call. If you don't have a downsell, for example, you know, 90% plus of people in some funnels are going to be disqualified depending on the traffic source. We're going to miss a lot of monetization. And you could do that with any single piece in this funnel. I would estimate that you could set all of this up within 5 to 10 hours of work. And most people have been in business for years and they haven't even done that. You need 100% of this funnel, not 50%, not 75%, not even all of it except one. It's a very, very important thing that we need to understand. The second thing that we need to understand is that there are really only four places that this can go wrong. And when people say you need to fix your funnel, like that is a vague overarching term. But what are the four places that we could even put our attention to, so to speak? They are. We're going to count these as one. But our ad cost is too high or our content's not getting enough clicks. We're gonna put that as one thing and we're just gonna call that the traffic part. The next thing is the VSL and landing page aren't even good enough. So no, nobody starts the form. That's the second place the next is going to be. Not enough people get through this and end up booking a call. That's number three here. And Then the last place is going to be the sales call. And you can kind of say that, okay, maybe not enough people are completing the form when your form's bugged, but we're just going to count that as the same place. We could either have a problem with our ads and our content, we could have a problem with our VSL and page. We could have a problem where not enough people who visit our page are actually booking a call. And then we can have a problem with the actual sales process. So there's not very many places that this could go wrong. So if we're having problems with our ads, you know, our CTR probably just isn't good enough. And that could be the messaging's not great, the script's not great, you, how you deliver it on camera isn't great, the editing's not great. Whatever it could be, right? Our page at the vsl, maybe the headline's whack that it doesn't even make sense. It's not congruent. Maybe the VSL is so boring that not enough people even get through it. Maybe there's not enough proof or it's not clear what you're even offering. Or a mix of the above. Maybe they've gone through the form and maybe the form's too tough, but. Or whatever's happening, but not enough people are booking a call, so that could be a problem too. And then maybe you and or your sales team is just fumbling everything on the call, right? So there's not very many places that it could actually go wrong. And it is a good thing because then we can really dial into what we're trying to do here. So we're going to put the CTR here, we're going to put the application rate or the book a call rate here. Then we're going to have, you know, close rates right here. Like that kind of stuff. That is where it goes wrong. And when we do this, it's kind of freeing because we now we have at least a plan. And the thing that is even more important than this is the idea that you should only care about these metrics and these KPIs. If it's going wrong, it doesn't matter if you have the absolute worst KPIs in the world at every stage of the funnel. If you are hitting your target CPA and you're making sales, it doesn't really matter. Like you could provide. I'm going to provide guidelines in the next step. But if you are getting a good enough cost per acquisition, then you don't change anything in my opinion, because everything we talk about here only exists in the context of troubleshooting. If it's not, there's nothing to troubleshoot. If it ain't broken, we don't fix it. Right, so what are good metrics for each? So basically the things that I really look for are 3% outbound CTR and that's outbound, not just all 3% outbound CTR. That will usually get you a very good click through rate as you scale. This is going to go down because your audience is going to go to a wider and wider amount of people that are less and less ideal, so to speak. And that's natural. But when you're sending a hundred, 200, 500, maybe even up to a thousand per day, which most agencies, it's kind of going to be the max for them. 3% outbound CTR is an example of really good messaging. Your ad, the next is 70% or more of people who hit the landing page, start the form. That's a very good thing too because that ensures congruency and you're just, you know, that is an example of your messaging and your ad resonated. Your landing page is congruent and the messaging resonated. And now we have, are hitting the target, right? Target audience going through the form. The next is a very, very strong ad campaign gets about 10% of people who click on the page to book a call. So we're going to do a 10% call booked rate. So if we have a thousand people hitting the page, a hundred calls would indicate we have a very, very strong funnel going on here. And anything below that probably could be increased. Then the final thing, when we're talking about outbound ad traffic, a 20% close rate is going to be what we're probably going to aim for. You hear a lot of people say that they're going to have, you know, oh, I have a 50% close rate, 70% close rate. First off, I would say it's probably not true. But if it is true, that means their pricing is way, way, way, way too low. When you're doing this. Anytime you have let's say a 30% close rate or more, you're almost going to want to increase your price by 25, 50, even a hundred percent. Because we don't want, we're going to make a lot more money by getting a lot of people for a much higher price at a, even if it's a 20% close rate than we will at a 50% close rate at half or a quarter of the price. You really want your close rate to not really be more than 20% because that means you can increase your price. And when you have increased price, you're going to get more revenue for basically less clients. You're going to get way more profit for less clients. That means you're going to have to hire less people, less fulfillment, less closers, less managers, have less software, all that other costs, and it really, really is going to lead to a more profitable and scalable agency. A lot of the advice here about metrics and stuff are usually in the context of info products. And that's fine. Those are like if you're running this funnel, you should watch and you should buy info courses and direct response courses and watch YouTubers and read books about it because these direct response marketer types are the best in the world at that. You probably wouldn't take their advice for anything else. But in the context of building a funnel for sure. But what a lot of those people kind of fail to take into account is when you're running an agency or a service business specifically and not an info product, you can't just scale it endlessly like okay, well we should just five times spend. That is going to destroy your entire agency. There's no way your team can do it. So we want to scale up slower, try to hit some of these metrics in a more sustainable way to where we can onboard new team members, onboard new closers over time, kind of a continuous perpetual process. And then slowly increase our ad spend, 10% per week, 20%, who knows? And just keep going up more like a gradual curve instead of okay, I can increase my ad spend. Like this just doesn't really work that way in service based businesses and anything that's not selling air like affiliate info product, that kind of stuff. So those are good metrics for each. If these are underperforming. Like there could be a few things here with the this it's mostly going to be the ad creative, but that could be a few things that could be the messaging is whack. If the messaging is right, maybe the copy's whack. Maybe you're just made the worst VSL ever and you have the charisma of a goldfish or something like that. You need to take speech lessons, for example, maybe the editing's whack. You know, who knows, Those are some places that you might look to improve if you're page with their VSL is getting too low. Percent of people starting the form could be a few things maybe Your headline's bad. That's where I would start. Your VSL is bad. When I say bad vsl, not enough people. Maybe even starting it, you could have a thumbnail or not many people are going past like the first few seconds. You could either do an executive summary at the start or you could have a better hook and draw them in better. Maybe your page is not clear as what your offer even is and they didn't read your vsl. You have a section there. Maybe you don't have enough proof. Maybe your design just looks like the sketchiest thing anyone's ever saw. Could be a lot of these things for your call booked rate. Maybe your form's too tough and not enough people get through the form. Maybe your form is you don't have enough calendar availability. Maybe you know, there could be a lot of this stuff and then the close rate and the sales call, you know, that could be. Maybe you didn't prime them enough for the call. Maybe you're not running retargeting ads to show them what they need to know. Maybe your show rate's not good enough and you need to have reminders. Maybe you're just fumbling the introduction of the call and setting a bad first impression. Maybe you're not clear about what you offer. Maybe you don't close them or overcome objections properly or even after the call's over you don't follow up effectively or enough or at all. There's very only a few places that you could really mess this up and or there's only a few places you could improve but there's tons of subcategories and sub improvements in the overall buckets. And it's very, very important that when you're doing this you narrow in to like maybe a lot of these could be messed up, but there's always going to be one place that's more messed up than the others. So maybe your ads are the most messed up and you spend a month fixing them and now they get a great cost per click. They're targeting the right person, your pixels conditioning. Okay, now maybe you're call booked rate is the problem now and then we're going to go focus on that. So it's kind of one perpetual game of whack a mole. What's the biggest problem right now? Let's fix that. Then something else becomes the next biggest problem and then you just keep going over and over and over. When you're doing an agency or service based business, you want to do this in a sustainable way. You don't just want to 10x your ad spend and destroy your entire company. But at the same time, you still want to put a lot of time, attention, effort in this, because if you can crack this, it's going to lead to a better quality of life. You can let clients turn if they're not profitable or not good enough for you. Who cares? You can get a limited amount of new ones. You can just disqualify people who you can tell are going to be annoying to deal with right on the call. You can do a lot of stuff when you know for a fact you can get as many clients as you want because your ad funnel is perfect. So I hope this video shows you where you need to focus on, and I hope it was valuable and I'll see you in the next one.