Optimizing Your Marketing Funnel: From Lead to Revenue

Speaker 1: 00:00 
Hello everybody. Welcome to a new episode of our podcast series. Lately we've been talking about revenue driven marketing and what we can do as marketers to help make the case for, for the revenue that you're generating and how to generate that revenue more effectively. So today what we're talking about is optimizing our marketing funnels and how do we get someone from the top end, right from, from a marketing qualified lead to, to a close sale to revenue. Specifically we want to talk about drop off points in the funnel and weak points and how do we optimize things like that. So to kick this off, let's talk a little bit about where do most businesses lose potential customers in the funnel and then how do they fix that?

Speaker 2: 00:54 
You know, there's of course different fall off points in, in the funnel, but awareness to consideration. You know, maybe they discover the brand, the company, but they're, they arrive at the home page and within the first five seconds they don't know what the company actually does. It's, it's florid marketing messaging or something that wasn't well researched with the target market, doesn't resonate so they abandon or whatever it is, right? Like so messaging clarity, having maybe a compelling CTA or lead magnet or maybe it's the user experience, right? It's the design or UX problem. There's all kinds of things that can prevent people from converting at the, from the awareness to consideration stage, consideration to decision. You know, maybe there, there is a great UX and the messaging is good, but there's no social proof that supports it. No logos, no case studies, you know, something like that. Or you know, maybe they convert but they're, they're not ready to act or buy or call someone or you know, take a meeting. So having a nurture sequence, you know, with marketing automation to address any of their objections or reinforce some of the social proof. And then finally, you know, closer to the decision stage, people that don't book that demo or who abandoned a cart, right. Often it's reduce, it's the Mech Labs conversion heuristic. Like reducing, making sure there's a clear value prop, reducing friction, adding incentive to take action and you know, kind of making all the psychological points like making sure that the user trusts the, the website that they're submitting the form on. Making sure that if they're entering their credit card information, there's the, the, like the security stamp or that the website is running ssl. There are all these things that can inhibit the buying process. So is someone going to hound. Is a sales rep going to hound me after I submit this sales form? Right. Like are you going to sp. You can put a little help text or micro copy in the form so all these things can improve leaks in the funnel.

Speaker 3: 03:24 
Yeah, I think putting a lot of, there's a lot of fixing that goes on and having a very like split test every pixel kind of attitude and then filling those leaks, filling those holes with automation follow up, you know, messaging. So to me it's you're gonna lose people. That's just how it works. But the people that really fix it are the ones that are constantly addressing it and looking for those problems that they go out, they search for problems and then they find solutions. And I think that that's really how they kind of avoid losing as much while knowing they're going to high level.

Speaker 4: 04:07 
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Speaker 1: 04:43 
Yeah. And last note I'd make here is, is do you just do you know your customers well? Right. Do you have really complete buyer Personas? Do you know their pain points? Do you know their aspirations? If you're not, if your messaging is wrong, you're the message. Right. Is not going to land and resonate with your audience. So sometimes it's even just the way you're communicating, the way you're reaching out to leads, are you talking about things that are perceived as valuable to this group of people? And as we've talked about in the last few episodes, if you're not, the data is going to tell you because your marketing is not going to perform well. So if you're losing people in the funnel, specifically in the awareness and interest stage even further below. But like you just might not be talking about what they care about. They might not be perceiving that as valuable and then they're not going to pay attention because why would they do that? So great. Yeah. Moving on. How can businesses help nurture those leads? You know, we get somebody in the top level of this funnel. How do we nurture them from being a marketing qualified lead to being a sales qualified lead to being a sale.

Speaker 2: 05:56 
Ah, so marketing automation to the rescue, right? It. It prevents you from having to do the manual steps of nurturing a lead. Of course, these days marketing automation is quite common. Platforms like HubSpot and such can help you do that. Right. You get a lead, you maybe segment your leads based on certain properties and then you send them targeted messaging that, you know, moves, gives them hopefully helpful information, helps them solve a problem, and then leads to some sort of valuable call to action. Any, Any more insight you want in that, Thomas? Anything else you're looking for?

Speaker 1: 06:43 
Yeah, it's again, what we talked about is, right, is, is making sure you're not skipping steps, making sure you're, you're nurturing them properly. I think there's a common mistake of reaching out to, to leads too early or too quickly and you, you, it, it, right. It doesn't fit, it doesn't land there. So when we're nurturing leads and, and trying to get them towards a sale, you gotta know what part of the, the sales funnel that they're in. Are they even aware of you are if they are, are they just passively interested in, in what you're doing or are they pretty actively interested in what you're doing? So, and again that, that changes the messaging and how you're going to approach them. So yeah, nurturing leads and moving them towards sales, you have to have a process and a system. I think good marketing is, is based on system systems primarily. And if you don't have a system, if this is kind of right, you're taking it as, as it comes, you're going to be missing a lot of people in that funnel who are either ready to talk to your sales team and you're not and, and you're not preparing them to do that and not having the sales team reach out or you're having them reach out way too early and, and they're not ready and that's, that turns them off as well. So there's, there's a balance there. And knowing having that system in place and, and knowing where they are and how to speak to them, the messaging of someone in the awareness stage is going to be very different than conversion and retention and efficacy and stuff like that. So knowing where people are at, having that system in place, to know specifically where people are at, at different parts of the funnel will help you nurture them to the next step. Because otherwise you're skipping steps. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 08:26 
And I guess I would add that, you know, just because you built a nurturing campaign for, for some leads doesn't mean they're gonna convert. Right. Like, right, we see this all only. Yeah, just build, you know, your clients just build, build the, the nurturing campaign and then get more revenue. Okay, well we, we need to test, see what's performing well and adjust and you know, maybe we don't understand the buyer, maybe they click to the website and abandoned because you know, it's, it's complex, it's not as easy and straightforward as, as some people think and it requires that optimization mindset to really get it right.

Speaker 1: 09:04 
Yeah. So are there specific strategies we can help conversion rates at different stages of the funnel or what can we do to, to help get people if we know where they're at, what do we do to help get them to that next stage?

Speaker 2: 09:19 
Sure. You know, awareness stage, optimizing for SEO and, and not just, you know, from the point of view of someone who's clicked on a result in the serp, but also the title and the meta tags that you use. Right. You want, you want to stand out from the other results in the SERP from someone who's evaluating various places to click. So SEO, you know, social proof, ad targeting there, you know, all these things you can optimize. Consideration stage, providing more in depth content that helps someone solve a problem or you know, compare two products. You know, something that relates to a pain point that, that they're experiencing. One name for it out there is like, you know, on the SEO side is pain point SEO, thinking how, how we can help someone versus always focusing on the keywords or the, the, the vanity traffic metrics, things like that, testimonials, comparison pages, things like that. So that's consideration decision stage. You know, someone is ready to buy. So making sure the CTAs are not only clear, but maybe more aligned with what the user is trying to do. You know, everyone's got contact us or get a demo. But is that really. Maybe someone wants to read a white paper or do a, an ROI calculation. Maybe white papers are boring for them. It depends on your audience. Right. So making sure you again understand your audience, have the CTAs aligned and the value aligned with, with the user. Simplifying checkouts, you know, putting you know, psychological things. If it like a guarantee that you know that this is gonna work for you or you're not locked into a long term contract, whatever it is. So yeah, all kinds of things you can do.

Speaker 1: 11:31 
Yeah, I think, I think what you said was pretty important there is like they're, the strategies are going to look very different depending on where you're focusing. So awareness strategies to, to convert to interest versus Right. Consideration and conversion or retention to advocacy, it's going to be different. And if you don't have that process mapped out, if you don't have. And I like to do it visually, but if, if you don't have that, like, here's where we're going to break this down. At each, each, each level, at each step, you're going to lose people at those stages because you're, you're not being intentional. So I think intentionality is really broadly the best strategy is just be really intentional about what you're doing at the awareness stage, what you're doing at each, at each level of this funnel to get people down and to map that out pretty well. Yeah, great.

Speaker 2: 12:22 
Zoom out real quick. You know, for some reason, this idea of conversion rate seems difficult for, you know, some, sometimes some marketers, but also the C level, they're like, what. What are you talking about? You need to invest in conversion rate optimization. You've already got a, We've already got a website. The website looks great. What are you talking about? Right. So simplifying this concept and, you know, educating the C level, okay, you, you want someone to buy your product or get that demo or talk to your sales guy. This is all important. And it dramatically affects, you know, the rate at which you get more revenue, essentially. You know, CRO is everything.

Speaker 1: 13:07 
Yeah. And can you put yourself in your audience's shoes? And right. We're not always our own audience. Right. We have to think, put ourselves in the mindset of our audience and go, what's valuable to them? What do they care about? That empathy level is really important there too, is like, all right, if I'm my own audience and I, I'm, you know, trying to speak to, to all these things, what does, what does that look like specifically? That's really helpful way to approach that. So great. So to wrap this up, Zach, how can companies track continuous improvement in their marketing efforts?

Speaker 3: 13:41 
So I think it's gonna be different for a lot of different companies. But something that we've done that I feel really helps is we host a workshop. And whether you want to work with us or you want to do this on your own, you need to have a purpose to your marketing. So before you even talk about improvement, you need to know what you're targeting. So for us, what we've always done is we map out your current funnel. So top to bottom, map everything out. We identify the customer touch points, what interactions are happening at each stage. And then we move into your target audience analysis. We want to make sure that our marketing efforts are targeting them at each one of those stages. Then through that you need to make sure that you do a tech audit and a gap analysis between areas for improvement, recommended solutions, optimizing your infrastructure, whether it's from an automation standpoint, implementing AI, fixing certain parts of it, and then just looking at the people that are handling it right now, some type of assessment on them, identifying what they're doing, the activities they're doing, assessing their roles and responsibilities and then from there, budget. So making sure that the budget allocation is really reviewed and measured across the different channels and different stages. And then finally, you need to develop a KPI framework that goes through this whole thing. So at each stage, for you to actually have continuous improvement, you need to have that initial setup, you need to understand what you're actually measuring against and then have the KPIs for everyone that's involved in your marketing and connecting that with sales and so on. That kind of end to end picture is a workshop you can honestly just do on your own. We've used tools like Miro, we've used other tools like lucidchart. You just map everything out. Like if I'm running paid ads, they go here. And then this is the retargeting and then this is the game portion where, you know, we're selling a product, we're making sure that we're measuring that there's always going to be those, you know, trickle down marketing as well as, you know, gaps that you need to fill. And I think if you want to have continuous improvement, you need to measure all those things first from an end to end operation before you can actually be like, oh, let's fix this, this, this. You should have that initial base point together.

Speaker 1: 16:12 
Yeah, love that. All right, well, thanks guys. This is a great discussion. Tune in next week. We're going to stay on the topic of revenue driven marketing and talk about the marketing and sales alignment, how to address that. So appreciate it, thank you and we'll see you soon.