How to optimize your demand generation funnel

by Mauricio Romero Mauricio Romero | Nov 26, 2020 12:55:49 AM

Move the needle and optimize your marketing funnel in 7 stepsThere are some specific tactics to move the needle when your marketing funnel is not performing as it should. Depending on the source you can take specific actions that will improve your demand generation strategy. Learn how to boost your incoming leads.

In a previous article i talked about the key performance indicators you should understand to see the whole structure of your marketing funnel. Section the funnel in parts and optimize each step will make the day to day tactics of your strategy.

Through experience we have learned how to improve the results of each stage of the funnel. If you want to move the needle you need to:

  • Repeat what works
  • Increase the activity
  • Make A/B tests
  • Modify one variable at a time
  • Measure results

The beauty of the digital era is that you can change a variable and through analytics you can evaluate its performance and modify as many times as you want in short periods of time at a really low cost.

This kind of optimization was not possible on a traditional media. Imagine to optimize a printed add in a newspaper. It would cost lots of money, time and effort. Now you have the possibility to do it almost on the go.

Here are the main activities that will move the needle:

1 Reach

You want to spread your message to the right people. If you do your homework and choose a good message and the right traffic source or media you are in the right path.

What you could do to improve this tactic and reach more people is to increase the activity. That means to increase the repetition of your message, the number of channels and the period of time of a campaign.

Unfortunately this also means an increase of your budget. So it is a little bit of a wallet game. But mainly this is how you optimize the reach.

2 Attract

If you want more people to get to your website you need to increase the number of pages you have with helpful information for your ideal customers. This is a tactic that involves answering all and every one of the questions your clients has asked you. Each question becomes a single page with the answer.

If you can you should post once a day. This is a lot but you can increase a website traffic in more than 30% to 50% increase per month if you do this. At least you should post 3 new and unique articles by week. To understand this better read our article on how Google helps you with demand generation strategies.

3 Convert

You want to stablish a way to comunícate to your visitors. At least you need a name and an email. This is the only way to generate a good client data base that you will be able to nurture.

This is why in physical stores are the members program. They ask you if you want to leave your data and receive a discount or special offers. In the digital era what you offer is content.

This has a process. Yo make an offer that is displayed in a button or call to action. You clic on the button to redeem your offer and you will get to a landing page. In this landing page you will have a reminder of the benefits of the offer and a form. This form will ask you for your data, name, email and what ever is important to understand what is the intention of the visit or what the lead wants to achieve with the visit.

Then you’ll receive an email with a link to download your offer. As you can see it has some steps and you can optimize each one separately.

4 Offer

To pretend that a person who just discover your website is ready to buy is almost as pretend to ask someone to marry you after the first date. It won’t happen. So you need to make this small conversion through a good offer.

What should be the offer? To most of the people a discount pops in to their mind when we say offer. It is an option but if you are not ready to buy because you don’t know the product or company, you don’t know if the solution is the one that can solve your problem and mostly because you still don’t trust the company or website.

So offer them valuable information about how you can help them solve their problem or issue. Most people will trade their data for this valuable information. If you are very generous you will succeed really easy. So start by making good offers and make an appealing message. It should be short. Remember it has to live in a button or call to action.

Then start to make A/B test with variations on the message and wait that the analytics tells you which one performs better. The average click through rate should be around 4%.

5 CTA

A call to action should have a good graphic design. So you have to variables to play with. Color (Graphic design) and position. There are no rules because every person have different taste when it comes to aesthetics.

What I recommend is make the design stand out. It could be something very simple as choosing a contrast color of the overall page design.

Play whit the position of the CTA around your page. At the beginning, middle, bottom and why not repeat it. It is a trial and error through testing and measuring the results.

6 Landing pages

If you made it so far you have don a great job, but a landing page is where most people abandon the process. The major reason could be that when you ask them their data you over do it. You asked the person some really sensible information that they are not willing to give to a stranger.

So at the beginning try just to ask them for some basic information. Afterwards in you nurturing campaign you will be able to ask them more about them. Imagen you are dating some one. It takes time and effort to go deeper.

This is the main part of a landing page you need to optimize. You have 2 more variables, the copy or message and the navigation options on the page.

For the message try to make variations on how you comunícate the benefits of your offer.

For the navigation options, take them all off the page. Don’t give the option to the visitor to get distracted and navigate to other parts of your website. This is why we recommend to disappear the navigation menu and any other link to other pages.

The standard conversion rate of a landing page is between 8% to 12%.

7 Nurturing

This is the most difficult part of the strategy. Remember people just showed up a little bit of interest and are not ready to buy. You need to remember through your campaign that you exist, your solution is the right one and build trust.

You can do this through several interactions with your leads in a period of time that can go from 2 weeks to 6 months. It depends on your creativity and the regular buying cycle time period of your solution.

You start with email campaigns because they are not really invasive if you send valuable information, unless you do this you can become SPAM. Then you can do some social media interactions and try to start a conversation with your lead. And at the end try to do human to human interactions with your sales people and get to the phone.

Why a phone call is not effective at the beginning? Because cold calls are the same as inviting a stranger into your house, you reject them. But if you know the person through a series of interactions the chances you will let them go through are better.

If you make a good nurturing and help your leads advance in their decision process the sales close rate should be between 7% to 50%. Every sales process is different and in the digital world your conversion rate will be very similar to the one you have in your regular sales process.

We can help you understand more about how to measure and get results from your marketing funnel through our experience in doing great strategies.

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