Marketing Funnels Aren’t Like Real Ones. Understand Why and Improve Your ROI
We’re all familiar with the concept of a marketing funnel. This is the progressively narrowing group of individuals or businesses that move from awareness of your offer to becoming qualified leads and customers.
But marketing funnels aren’t like real funnels. With a real funnel you pour a homogenous liquid in the top and it flows out of the neck at a steady and predictable rate.
Your ‘potential’ market isn’t homogenous. In fact, 90% of it isn’t, strictly speaking, a market at all. Most aren’t actively looking to buy or aren’t persuadable should they become aware of your product, service or solution.
For a small business, this is important. You don’t have the resources to target the whole market with mass marketing. You can’t afford the wastage of trying to catch everyone in your funnel. You also don’t need to. The number of qualified leads you need each month will be a tiny fraction of your theoretical mass market.
Your Active Market
So question one is how you focus on the active market and attract better quality prospects into the top of your funnel? Two words here: value and relevance.
Position yourself as a solution provider. Potential customers are in the market for a reason. They will be researching what they need or the answer to their problem online.
Offer tangible answers to the most important questions your target prospects are asking. That way you’ll be one of the ‘early engagers.’ You’ll be three times more likely to win a contract than those that join the conversation when the decision is already more than 50% made.
Digital marketing brings efficiency and the ability to target. But the ‘digital’ element is mainly tools. Two things are needed to make buzz: a clearly expressed value proposition defined by your prospects’ real needs; and a process. The first part is what you achieve through the value, relevance (and quality) of your marketing content.
ACTIVE DEMAND 7-STEP FRAMEWORK
Process-Driven ROI
And ‘process’? Well there’s one other essential way that your sales funnel isn’t like a real funnel – you can’t rely on gravity to do the work. You need to offer different and richer marketing content at each stage to keep the flow moving. And you need a rigorous method to track and score your leads before you can confidently hand them over to the sales team and know that they’ll be grateful.
Marketing ROI becomes completely trackable when you build the right process. You will achieve a better ROI when you go deeper into what the active market really wants, rather than trying to maximise reach through superficial engagement and counting impressions.
The quantity and quality of actionable leads that emerge from your funnel very much depends on what you feed in at the top.
If you are interested in finding out more, please get in touch at andyp@accessperformance.co.uk or call on 01823 429 339.
