It’s fair to say this is a bit of a rant, but I am also curious as to other people’s experience of the latest trend in marketing, click funnels. And my question: Are click funnels the MLM of the internet?
Here’s the argument for me; in MLM or multi level marketing I am not disputing that some people find success, and great success especially if they got in on the ground floor. But for every success story the landscape is littered with thousands of people who failed to make a go of it for whatever reason. Click funnels are not so dissimilar, and to be clear I am not referring to the product itself, which I have had a look at and found it’s marketing capabilities to be absolutely solid.
The issue for me is the copy and paste stories taken from a plethora of “webinars” hosted on lead pages that are playing to peoples biggest hopes and their worst fears. The story is always the same and a cookie cutter marketing spiel designed in all honesty to prey on the most basic wants and needs of the average business owner: “more time, more money and less stress”.
Let’s be honest as a business owner I get it, really I do. As Digital Marketing AOK comes up to it’s 5th birthday I understand the grind and I understand the compulsion to look for a short and easy solution, but the truth is that massaging the truth to sell your products or services is not cool. It contributes to a general lack of trust and in the long run you are going to burn your brand – I don’t care how big your fish pond is.
All I am suggesting is tell the truth and not some made up story, with at best a loose base in reality. In my truthful opinion there is a market out there for honesty, for people actually telling their stories and not just the Hollywood highlight reel. This particularly gets up my nose if you are targeting women in business or ‘mumpreneurs’ or whatever other label you ascribe to them. Highly driven, highly motivated women balancing family, business, relationships, and all of the associated guilt around whether they are making the right choices or not both for themselves and their family – and here you are with your hair and make-up done, with professional lighting, promising them it’s all as easy as a 5-step program for a small subscription of X amount of dollars off the back of look how successful you are, and “it’s so easy”, all you need is this magic bullet or this missing link.
Well I am of the opinion that it’s not that easy, and whilst those “business” people employing the specific funnel strategy I am talking about, “the self made millionaire” story of rags to riches, struggle town to easy street, fail to give you some vital information – which is captured best in this video on YouTube which I love:
There isn’t a quick fix – it takes work, strategy, it takes doing the things that are easy to do, and easy not to do. Check out the Slight Edge by Jeff Olsen, it will change your whole perspective on the way you apply yourself in your everyday life and in business.
For the Click Funnel gurus out there currently flooding my Facebook feed with incessant ads to change my life and my business, I have watched a lot of your webinars purely out of curiosity and I get that you are playing a numbers game. I also get that you understand the power of Facebook advertising to reach your target market and to fill the top of the funnel whilst remarketing to those that didn’t convert to the next stage of the funnel.
Any business can employ the same strategy, we help businesses do it all the time, the difference is that we encourage them to be completely honest and transparent when they do it. If you are going to promise people the world on a plate, it is important to tell them that the onus is on them to do the work and that there will be a lot of it to do.
Building pipelines and funnels isn’t quick if it’s going to be sustainable, so before you sign up for the next transformative course that’s dished up to you in your newsfeed, ask yourself: “Am I really prepared to commit the time effort and energy to execute on every single activity that I am shown?”, Because if you’re not, you might as well leave your money in the bank.
Are click funnels the MLM of the internet? I can’t say for certain one way or the other, but like anything they are attracting the good and the bad just like multi level marketing, and in doing so utilising all of the tricks at their disposal including highly targeted Facebook advertising and remarketing.
