Building a Marketing Funnel: How to Simplify & Scale

Speaker 1: 00:06 
Welcome back to a new episode of our podcast series. This month, the next few episodes we're going to be talking about simplifying the marketing funnel. So today specifically we're talking about building a marketing funnel and, and how to simplify and scale this. A lot of, a lot of organizations, a lot of groups out there tend to overcomplicate their marketing funnel. This can lead to a lot of waste of time, waste of money, waste of just energy and yeah, it could be pretty frustrating experience. So we want to dive in and talk about simplifying and scaling our marketing funnels. The first question we're going to address when we dive into this is how do we remove complexity when we're building a high, when we want to perform, build that high performing funnel. So what does it look like to remove complexity from a marketing funnel? I don't know about you guys, but the, the, the most common issue I've seen here with, with groups and marketing funnels is that they, they launch too. There's too many going on and none of them work particularly well. If, if one doesn't work, they, they launch to another. They, they switch to another one. They, they're trying to build too many funnels instead of focusing on one that works. So don't build too many funnels. Develop one good funnel that generates business for you and then add more. If you launch one funnel and it's not working, fix that one funnel, right? If it's a download, if it's a webinar, whatever it looks like, build one and make it really effective. Nail that system, that process down and then, and then apply that. Otherwise, instead of scattershot, creating like six or seven ebooks and downloadables and quizzes and webinars and all these different things, I'd say simplify, focus on one and make it work. Another, another thing to, to focus on. There is just one channel. Pick a channel to focus on. A lot of people, when I say channel, I mean like social media channel. A lot of, a lot of groups will post stuff on Facebook and Instagram and X or Twitter on LinkedIn. They're spread thin and they don't do any of, they do a lot of them a little bit, but they don't do any of them particularly well. So if you're going to pick a platform to focus on, if you're in B2B, that's probably LinkedIn. If you're trying to get in front of right age groups, younger might be more on TikTok. People who read and are a little bit more Readers might be on X or Twitter. Know where your audience goes and focus on that. Master that one channel instead of juggling five at once. I'd recommend being specific there. One other thing I saw there too is just is testing ruthlessly. So data is king in marketing, especially digital marketing. Your data is going to tell you whether or not this is working. So run experiments, run two versions of an ad. Right. Double down on what's working. Ditch the rest quickly. Any other thoughts, any other thoughts you guys have when it comes to simplifying and scaling in terms of removing that complexity?

Speaker 2: 03:04 
Well, the thought that comes to my mind is where, you know, where does that come from? What, what's the core issue or, you know, the locus of chaos that, that causes marketing teams to try so many things and then, you know, not focus. It's more of a question than an answer or an input.

Speaker 1: 03:27 
Yeah.

Speaker 2: 03:27 
Any ideas?

Speaker 1: 03:30 
Go ahead.

Speaker 2: 03:31 
Oh, just wondering if you have any ideas on that.

Speaker 1: 03:35 
Yeah, I think you're just, you're chasing the, the next thing. I think it's, it's always like, oh, the next one will work, the next one will work. Instead of like, no, there's, there's a, there's something broken in this process when you do address it. A new download isn't going to necessarily fix if, if your process is broken. So yeah, I think it's tempting to just, it's new things are fun and interesting and engaging, but pick again. Pick one and nail it down and do it really well and then scale from there would be my suggestion. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 04:06 
And I, you know, I can from my own viewpoint or, you know, I get what it's like to have lots of ideas. Right. I'm a CEO, so making sure you have a filter in place for whoever the ideas person is. Right. Like try we should do this ebook. We should do that, you know, this and that. You need to have some sort of a solid project manager, some prioritization system to take that ideas person and put guardrails in place to make sure that we are prioritizing and focusing. So sometimes it's almost a product of the team structure, I would say.

Speaker 1: 04:46 
Yeah, yeah. So what. And going off of that, how do we spot signs that our current marketing funnel is too complicated? Are there, are there warning signs? You, what does that look like? What I've seen in this area is if, if your marketing funnel is too complicated or, or not optimized first and, and most obvious, you're just, you're not going to be converting many people. Right. You're, you're Going to have low conversion rates. Right? Probably too many hoops to jump through. It's, it's complicated. Maybe the messaging's not on point, but not enough time and attention and focus has been applied and you're losing people in that funnel. Very low conversion rates. The other one is time suck. Right? You're spending hours and hours tweaking little things that don't really move the needle. All right. Are we doing AB testing on button colors or are we getting a little over complicated and spending time on things that do not make an impact? And then lastly, sign that I've seen that things might be a little bit too complicated. Is the same is, is or similar to time suck if there's stagnant growth. Right. Our revenue is flatlining despite we're getting more traffic. So the complexity of what we're doing might be choking out our ability to scale. If we're getting new, new business and new clients, but we're spending all these hours and time and focus growing, it's going to hurt our revenue.

Speaker 3: 06:11 
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Speaker 1: 06:48 
So yeah, any you guys have any other thoughts on signs that could pop up when you're, when your marketing funnel is too complicated?

Speaker 4: 06:53 
I think when you feel like you're continuing to have more and more meetings that aren't leaving with a really solid understanding of what you need to optimize. It gets to the point where nothing's really being tested and like kind of more like a weekly cadence. I think when you're first starting out there should be a lot of pivots and then as things get more and more dialed in then you should only be focusing on high level decisions. So I think if you're consistently feeling like you're in week one, then it's definitely something you gotta fix. Um, and that's why KPIs I think are the most important thing. Um, something you mentioned earlier was focusing on one channel. I think if you set those KPIs almost like a scorecard that you bring up, people can run off that and then as things get further and further along, to me there's less of that kind of like week one, week two mindset, you know that you're going to make a small change, but you should have something where if you, you know, added, let's say it's a paid channel, you added 500 bucks to it, you should know exactly at that point to a very high percentage the leads are going to come in the ones that are going to convert from it. So if your meetings to optimize your marketing funnels aren't progressing, then you should definitely look at that. And it's not just going to be data at that point. Kind of like what Seth mentioned as well. It's personnel as well. So that's where it becomes kind of like this whole kind of a growth process.

Speaker 1: 08:28 
Yeah, yeah. So when we're diving into, when we're taking that 30,000 foot view on the marketing funnel, Marketing sales funnel, how do we identify which, which stage of the funnel we need to improve on? Awareness, interest, decision, action, retention, right? Where, where do we need to dive in there? And what I suggest is first and foremost, check the bottleneck. Use the data that you have available. Use Google Analytics, use social media analytics, right? Are you getting impressions? Are you getting followers? Are you getting what, what are your email? What does your CRM look like? Are you getting good open rates, Are you getting good click rates? The data will tell you where people are falling out in your, in your funnel and you can use that to make adjustments. So if you're not getting in front of enough people, you got to focus on awareness, right? If you're not closing enough deals, might be something in consideration, interest. All right, so identify the bottleneck is first and foremost. Another one is just match your goal, what is your goal? And that your goal should be somewhat based on your bottleneck as well. But if you need more leads, maybe you need to scale awareness and interest. And so ads, thought, leadership, content, stuff like that. If you need more, right. If you need more like closed sales, sales decision action is where you need to improve. So better offers, more compelling case studies, an offer sheet that breaks down your pricing really simply. Right. Where are we? Match your goal. So identify the bottleneck, Identify your goal and work towards that. And then lastly here, ask your consumers, ask your customers, where did they find you? What was interesting to them? Why did they choose you over somebody else? I've worked with a lot of companies where I will interview my client's client, right? So if I'm running marketing for a group, I'll say, can I talk to your clients that you have that you're on good standing with? And ask them a handful of questions. Why did you choose this group? What made them stand out when you were right? How did you first find them? There is really, really good information you can gain from your customers that you might be surprised on. You might think they're coming from social media and they're coming from an event or vice versa. Asking your customers can really help clarify that. All right. Well, thank you, everybody. That's it for today. Talking about simplifying and scaling our marketing funnels. Stay tuned for the next episode. We are going to dive into account based funnel marketing and building marketing funnel through that. So thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. Make sure to subscribe and like our channel and we'll see you soon.