The marketing funnel is a constant tug of war. No matter what type of business you are involved in, it is ever changing with the interests of your audience, the trends of your industry, and the delivery of your company’s message.
As a sales manager or marketing manager, you need to be able to constantly take in data and make minor tweaks to campaigns that play different roles in your marketing funnel in order to maximize your ROI.
But how can you take in data and make the right decisions without micromanaging and over analyzing?
This is one of the greatest problems that marketing managers face, and in order to solve it, you need to understand and apply a few basic principles to your various marketing efforts.
We created this guide to help you get the most out of each stage of your marketing funnel, while still putting in a healthy amount of effort while saving time and resources for other ventures.
4 Steps to Improve Your Marketing Funnel
On the surface, a lot of these tips seem very simple, but if you begin to unravel your own marketing funnel, you will begin to see places where you can apply these principles to drastically improve efficiency. The idea is to make these steps an integral part of your funnel in order to foster constant growth and improvement.
1. Create A Well Defined Strategy
Okay, this sounds obvious, right? But you would be shocked just how many organizations lack a truly comprehensive strategy to their sales funnel.
In order to understand your customer and their journey, you should ask questions like:
- What are their pain points?
- What are their problems with similar solutions?
- How is our solution different?
- What questions will they have about our offering?
- What objections will we have to combat to make a sale?
- What education do they need to get the most out of our offering?
- What are some incentives to get them to share their experience?
This is just the beginning. Each of these questions should be answered before diving even deeper into the most important factors; your customer profiles and your buyer’s journey.
Before ever starting your marketing funnel, you want to have well-defined information about your customer, such as:
- Demographics
- Income
- Job Title
- Problems
- Concerns
- Etc…
Once you have 3-5 defined buyer personas, you should then begin thinking about their buyer’s journey from start to finish:
- How will you get their attention?
- What questions and concerns will they have?
- What will you need to show them in order to get them to buy?
- How long should the journey take?
- Where does your customer hang out?
- What do they find reputable?
- What grabs their attention?
- Etc…
Only once you have all of this information laid out can you truly say you have a defined strategy and understanding of your customer, and move towards improving that strategy over time. Otherwise, you are proverbially, “peeing in the wind”.
2. Continuously Collect Data
Once you have all of this laid out and have started your campaigns, you want to begin monitoring key KPI’s in each area of the marketing process. You should always keep an eye on things like:
- Click-through rate
- Open Rate
- Unsubscribes
- Subscribes
- Conversion rate
- Closing rate (phone calls)
- Contact rate
- Retargets
This will give you an idea of just how effective your campaigns are in terms of making a positive ROI. Also, it will help you to identify parts of your funnel that are struggling.
Perhaps you have a very low open rate on emails, or a low click-through rate on your ads. This suggests you may need to work on the top of your funnel.
Or perhaps, you have a hard time closing deals once you get people on the phone. This may suggest that the bottom of your funnel could use some work.
The most important thing here is to remember that any one piece of data is meaningless without more to go with it. In other words, don’t jump at everything all at once, give it time to play out and learn from it. Try to make connections that are beyond surface level to gain insights into your audience and your own campaigns. This will help you make far better decisions in the long run.
3. Test, Test, Test
When you do finally have enough data to make hypotheses about your audience and your own campaigns and then assess what changes need to be made, don’t just assume that the solution you have come up with is better than what you have now - this is a great way to run in circles and never make real progress.
Instead, you should try to find a few solutions, then test them against what you have. Chances are, if you did the research right behind your strategy, then you are not far off from where you need to be in order to improve your campaigns. Instead, you may just need to tweak a few simple things to make for a better, clearer delivery that addresses your audience.
Prior to making any permanent changes in your marketing funnel, be sure to back test them and collect data on the results in order to measure their effectiveness. Lots of platforms will allow you to test two campaigns against each other to collect data.
4. Upsell & Downsell
This is one of the areas that most marketing funnels completely break down. What a lot of companies are now starting to realize is that when people buy once, they are in what is called a “buying mood”. If you can manage to suggest other relevant products and services to them while they are in this state, they are far more likely to buy.
Just how much more likely to buy you ask? Well, recent studies have shown that existing customers have a 60-70% chance of purchasing again if satisfied.
So, when you make a sale, and the person is still on the line, you need to execute. On top of that, people who said no may think more highly of your brand and be more likely to purchase in the future if you hit them with a down-sell, or even a bit of free information for their time and consideration.
Marketing Funnel Maximization - Final Takes
Improving your marketing funnel is a constant effort. It never ends. But that doesn’t mean it has to be a grueling task that is mostly a guessing game. Instead, leverage the power of a process that is defined by data, and driven by improvement.
If you apply these steps in your day to day operations and build your own processes around them, your team will always achieve success.
Thank you for reading from the entire Digital Market Media team!
