Optimizing B2B Customer Journey with Paid Ads

B2B buyers don’t want to talk to salespeople anymore. Paid B2B ad spend is way down. 

These two converging trends create a window of opportunity to increase sales and market share via B2B paid ads. 

What does optimizing the customer journey with paid ads have to do with these trends?

Two converging trends create a window of opportunity to increase sales and market share via B2B paid ads. Click To Tweet

The first trend is that B2B buyers now prefer a self-serve, DIY approach to buying. Gartner’s 2023 research shows that by 2025, a whopping 80% of B2B sales transactions will occur through online platforms. 

Not only that, 33% of all buyers prefer a sales experience without a seller, with 44% of millennials being the most allergic to interacting with salespeople. 

The second trend is that B2B spending on paid ads has dropped considerably since pre-pandemic levels, and the recovery is uneven. This drop may signal that companies are still grappling with recovery and resetting strategies. Their hesitation means a window of opportunity for proactive fast movers to grab market share.

B2B Customer Journey with Paid Ads

How can you capitalize on these trends? 

One idea is to drive paid traffic to a customer journey optimized for what customers want – frictionless digital interactions, especially on mobile devices. 

A place to start is by optimizing the B2B customer journey with paid ads to capitalize on buyers’ preference for using digital channels. At the same time, competitors in your industry may be waffling on paid ad strategy. 

This post will guide you through the key strategies for using paid ads to optimize your B2B customer journey.

When to Consider Paid Ads for B2B

In the B2B customer journey, timing is everything. Paid ads can be beneficial at various stages and critical touchpoints in the customer journey, but the key is understanding the customer’s journey and their stages—Awareness, Consideration, and Decision— so you can pinpoint when to deploy paid advertising for maximum impact.

Awareness Stage: Getting on the Radar

At the awareness stage, potential customers recognize that they have a problem that needs solving but may not know the available solutions yet. This stage is an excellent time to use paid ads to create brand visibility. 

Examples of content: Blog posts, videos, or infographics can attract prospects and introduce them to your brand.

Consideration Stage: Nurturing Leads

During the consideration stage, prospects actively seek solutions and evaluate options. They are reading reviews, comparing features, and asking their network for opinions. 

Examples of content: Paid ads at this stage can drive traffic to more detailed content like webinars, whitepapers, or case studies that position your product or service as the solution to their problem. 

Remember that you can use retargeting strategies to keep your brand top of mind with prospects at this stage. 

Decision Stage: Encouraging Conversions

At this point, prospects are ready to make a decision. They’ve done their research and are leaning towards a solution. The goal of paid ads here is to get the prospect to take that final step. 

Types of content matter. Paid ads should lead to landing pages with apparent calls to action, leading them to convert—whether purchasing, signing up for a service, or contacting your sales team. Consider running tests with promotions, discounts, or exclusive features to lure them to the close. 

Ongoing Relationship: Upselling and Cross-Selling

Even after a sale, the customer journey is still ongoing. Existing customers can be even more lucrative than new prospects. Target paid ads to upsell or cross-sell additional products or services or introduce new features that benefit the customer to increase the lifetime value and retain customers for the long term.

By understanding when to leverage paid ads at various customer journey stages, B2B companies can make smarter advertising decisions that yield better results. But the buyer stage is only one part of the puzzle. You need to consider segmenting the audience, too. 

Audience Segmentation and Targeting in Paid Ads

Audience segmentation and targeting are crucial for the success of any paid advertising campaign, especially in a B2B context where the decision-making process is often more complex. 

Below is a more in-depth exploration of how to implement these strategies for your paid ads.

Understand Your Audience’s Pain Points and Goals

Before you start any campaign, review your understanding of the audience’s needs, pain points, and objectives. A deep understanding informs your segmentation strategy and helps you tailor your ads to resonate with each group. In a B2B setting, consider variables like industry, company size, and job roles as basic segmentation criteria.

Types of Segmentation in Paid B2B Advertising

Generally speaking, the more specific your segment, the better your ad results. If you haven’t revisited your customer personas in a few months, it’s a good idea to review and optimize them for the persona in the context of the ad campaign. Other things you can consider are: 

  • Firmographic: Business entity characteristics, for example, industry, company size, and revenue
  • Technographic: Technology stacks used by the company
  • Demographic: For example, age, gender, education
  • Geographic: Location-based targeting
  • Psychographic: Interests, opinions, and lifestyle
  • Behavioral: Previous interactions with your website or app or purchasing behavior

Remember that as you test your ads, the successful ads can also be a feedback loop, giving you more accurate information about your personas. 

Tailoring Creative and Messaging

Once you’ve segmented your audience, tailor your ad creative to each group’s unique needs and challenges. For example, a healthcare SaaS company could target hospital administrators with ads focusing on operational efficiency while targeting physicians with messages about patient care and workflow.

A/B Testing B2B Ads for Continuous Refinement

A/B testing allows you to test different versions of your ads to see which performs best for each segment. You can try anything from headlines and calls to action to images and overall layout.

Remarketing and Retargeting Ads in B2B

These strategies involve showing ads to people who have previously interacted with your brand. In B2B, retargeting can be incredibly practical to stay top-of-mind during a long sales cycle.

Implementing Multi-Channel Marketing

Implementing a multi-channel marketing strategy involves deploying your advertising and content across multiple platforms to engage your audience wherever they are. The key to success lies in maintaining a consistent brand message while tailoring the delivery format to suit each channel’s unique characteristics. 

Whether using search engines, social media, or email, the goal is coordinating efforts to provide a seamless customer journey. Leveraging data analytics is crucial; it allows you to monitor performance across channels and refine your approach for better ROI. 

By embracing a multi-channel strategy, B2B businesses can increase touchpoints, enhance customer engagement, and drive more conversions.

Conversion-Driven Landing Pages

Conversion-driven landing pages are the crucial link between your paid ads and the desired action you want the visitor to take, whether signing up for a webinar, purchasing, or contacting sales. These landing pages should offer a seamless experience that aligns with the messaging and visuals of the ads that led the user there. 

Elements like compelling headlines, concise copy, and clear calls to action are essential. Utilizing A/B testing can help you refine these elements for optimal performance. You can also consider dynamic landing pages, where the system uses different landing pages based on a visitor’s journey.

In the B2B context, where sales cycles can be lengthy and complex, a well-crafted landing page can be a powerful lever for business growth, effectively turning prospects into customers.

Moving Ahead 

Even with more automation and AI-driven data integration tools, B2B marketing complexity is increasing. Coordinating paid ads, audience segmentation, and conversion-driven landing pages can seem overwhelming.

While it may seem daunting, you don’t have to go it alone. FunnelEnvy can help you set up a system to track and test results at every stage of the customer journey. We work with clients in many industries, from consumer healthcare to industrial equipment. We provide customized assistance to our clients with all elements of their landing page design, from technical aspects like page speed and caching to form fields and CTA design.

Are you interested in finding out more? Just click here to complete a short quiz that we’ve created to help us learn more about your needs and how we may be able to help.

By |2023-11-01T01:47:19-07:00November 13th, 2023|General B2B Funnel Advice|0 Comments

Why Audience Data is Vital to Your B2B Funnel

There’s a famous quote often attributed to John Wanamaker, an early American department store entrepreneur: “Half my advertising budget is wasted – the trouble is, I don’t know which half.” The phrase has become somewhat trite these days, showing up often in PowerPoint presentations given by marketers across the world.

But the saying itself speaks to a problem at the heart of many marketing departments: it’s just tough to know which of your marketing campaigns are successful and which are a waste of time and resources. 160 years after Wanamaker opened his own retail store, in our advanced digital age with AI and automation galore, his words seem to ring more true than ever before.

One of the easiest ways to minimize waste in advertising – or any other part of your marketing budget – is gaining a better understanding of your audience. Knowledge about the people you’re selling to and how you can help them solve their problems has been the holy grail of all kinds of marketing and advertising since the inception of human commerce. 

Today, audience knowledge is arguably more important because of the huge volume of noise prospects face every day in the marketplace. Below, we’re diving into more specifics about why knowing your target audience may be the key to unlocking more success – and ROI – from your marketing.

Reduces Content Costs

As we mentioned in the intro, greater audience knowledge means less money spent on the wrong thing. For marketers today, a significant chunk of their resources go towards creating content. From blog posts to social media updates to email newsletters, companies in all sectors spend lots of time and money on creating content.

But what’s actually in all that content? Is it really helpful, or is it only being produced because there’s a need? Robert Rose, a strategy executive with the Content Marketing Institute, frequently talks about the problematic concept of the content team operating as a “vending machine” – you need a piece of content for a funnel, so you push a button and the staff member, team or contractor produces it. The problem with this approach is it creates a siloed attack where different arms of your marketing campaigns function with different goals.

In an ideal situation, audience data serves as a connecting factor that ties the creators of content in your business to all other areas: including the broader goals of the company. When this happens, there is in turn less money and time wasted creating content that doesn’t resonate with your target audience. 

Improves Brand Reputation

The impact of strong audience knowledge on brand reputation might be most apparent in B2B sales. When your audience operates in a highly technical field that requires specialized knowledge, it’s easier for them to tell if you really know what you’re talking about. This can serve as something of a double-edged sword, however – it also means that if you have authentic knowledge of your audience and their goals, you’ll stand out in your marketplace.

When your audience operates in a highly technical field that requires specialized knowledge, it’s easier for them to tell if you really know what you’re talking about. Click To Tweet

The key here is to stay current by studying and immersing yourself in communities of people like your target customer. Whether it’s a sub-forum on Reddit, a Discord channel, or a social media group, it’s important to take time to understand the newest concerns and discussions among your audience. Ideally, these are communities you already are or were present in at one time. This is a big reason why many of the most successful healthcare services and product companies are created by former doctors, nurses or healthcare office employees. They have first-hand knowledge and experience in a highly specialized field where it’s easy for prospects to pick out impostors.

Guides Direction of Your Business

Great companies respond quickly and effectively to the most important requests of their prospective customers. The idea has been ingrained into the modern business community, particularly since the rise of the Lean Startup model popularized by Eric Ries and others in the startup community. 

But the best companies are able to predict what their customers want in the future. Reaching this level has the potential to put a business in rarefied air reserved for the biggest brands in history: Nike, Microsoft, IBM, etc. Steve Jobs once famously paraphrased Henry Ford, believing that he’d once said: “If I asked my customers what they wanted, they would’ve told me a faster horse.”

Over the years, this quote has been twisted into an argument against customer research. If people wouldn’t have asked for a car or an iPhone, why bother paying attention to their input on your product or service? This interpretation neglects the first part of the quote, where Jobs says “our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do.”

You don’t reach that depth of audience understanding by ignoring relevant data. Just the opposite: the only way you can really predict what your customer wants before they do, like Jobs and Ford, is by so deeply understanding your audience that you begin to think the same way. This level of familiarity can only be attained with an extremely strong grasp of prospect data, and typically takes a long time to achieve.

Final Thoughts on Audience Data for Your Funnel  

The specific methods you use to collect data and learn about your audience will vary depending on the kind of product or service you offer. We’ve covered individual tactics like landing page and form optimization on many other posts here on this blog.

We believe, however, what’s more important than any one tactic or data collection method is adopting a broader philosophy about audience data within your company. The truth is, audience data is important to your B2B funnel and almost every other part of your marketing, from the initial creation of customer avatars right on through to the way you hire and build your team.

As your organization changes and grows, you’ll find that the particular campaigns you deploy may change. Sometimes you’ll focus on high-level content intended to make your prospects think deeply; other times you’ll just be creating a simple demonstration video that shows off one of the key features of your product or service. No matter what particular actions you are taking, they’ll always be more successful with a foundation in audience data. If you can pay close enough attention to what your ideal client wants, what’s stopping them from achieving it, and what they need to be convinced that you can help them in this pursuit, all of your marketing endeavors will flow much more easily.

And if you need a little veteran help to give you a better perspective on how to wrap your head around customer data, FunnelEnvy is here to assist. We have a wide breadth of experience helping businesses of all sizes in all different industries get a better handle on their audience. Whether you’re a brand new startup or a seasoned marketer looking to enter the next phase of growth, we can help fill in some of the natural gaps that may occur as your marketing gets more and more developed. The more things you have going on, the more difficult it is to keep your audience central to your mission.

To start the process, just click here to fill out a quick quiz that will help us learn more about ways we may be able to assist.

By |2023-04-25T09:04:40-07:00May 1st, 2023|General B2B Funnel Advice|0 Comments

How to Make Your Ads Less Expensive

Paid advertising campaigns on one of today’s many prominent digital media channels can be a valuable part of any funnel. One of the key advantages of paid ads (also called PPC) is that they offer quicker access to a larger audience than organic strategies like SEO and referral marketing. In this sense, building a massive audience almost “overnight” is possible, often reducing the time it takes to achieve your KPIs.

But like every strategy to promote your funnel and company offerings, paid advertising has a downside: cost. Investing in paid placement on social media networks and search engines can get expensive, especially if you aren’t sure about the return you’re getting.

Based on our experiences working with clients incorporating paid advertising campaigns into their funnel, we’ve found a few specific strategies work best for cost reduction.

Tweak Audience Targeting

On most paid advertising platforms – especially social media networks – one of the first things you’ll do is set up a target audience that dictates what kind of people will see your ads. One significant determining factor is often location: some companies running ads will want to restrict them to people in a specific location. For many software and digital services companies, geography is no longer significant in determining their target audience for paid ads.  

However, you can still use geography as a variable as you adjust your audience targeting until you can find an ideal audience set that gets you the results needed for sufficient ROI. Here are a few other ways to adjust your audience targeting:

  • By device. While it’s essential to ensure all elements of your funnel are accessible from any device, it’s sufficient to experiment and see if one particular device works better for generating engagement and visitors.
  • Browsing time. Each PPC platform will allow you to target the time of day or browsing windows slightly differently. You may find it best to break up these metrics into six or 8-hour periods and see which timing works best.
  • Lookalike audience. A lookalike audience is a predictive feature that allows a network to list people who share the same characteristics as another group of people who have already shown interest in your audience. For example, on Facebook, you might use “Fans of the Business Page” as a lookalike audience to draw on for an ad campaign.
For many software and digital services companies, geography is no longer significant in determining their target audience for paid ads. Click To Tweet

Make the Offer Better

Another big element of getting more traffic from each ad campaign – thus lowering overall costs – is the offer; how do you intend to attract people into your funnel? It starts by getting them to click on the ad while browsing the platform on which it appears; an action sometimes referred to as a “clickthrough.” It is an important first step in any paid ad campaign. No matter how well-optimized your audience targeting or how great your ad creative is, you’ll struggle to bring in enough prospects if your offer isn’t as compelling as it should be.

There are many ways to improve your offer, but we’ve found a simple and quick way to upgrade substantially: keep your current offer but expand what you provide. For example, if you offer a 15% discount on an initial package, you may increase that discount to 20%. If you’re offering a 20-minute evaluation, maybe change it to 30 minutes. 

If these adjustments don’t bring about sufficient improvement, you may want to consider completely changing the nature of the offer. In these situations, look to competitors or companies who work in related industries to see the most successful paid advertising offers.

Strengthen the Hook

In this context, the offer’s ” hook ” refers to the ad’s elements that bring in prospects. Usually, this consists of an image, a headline, and a “sub-headline” element that appears at the bottom. There’s also usually a CTA button that entices users to click and take the next step in the ad’s funnel.

Bringing as many prospects into the funnel as possible is crucial to minimize the amount of money you invest in each ad campaign. One way to do this is by improving the elements listed above. Pick an individual component to work on – like the headline – and go through some testing to determine an ideal version. From there, you can open up the testing to other ad creative elements. For example, should your subheadline be a question that piques readers’ curiosity or a bold statement that challenges their beliefs on an important subject? Either could be practical, depending on your specific needs and target audience.

Call in a Specialist as Needed

As is the case with most elements of a digital marketing campaign, sometimes it’s hard to have the right perspective when you are so close to the internal workings of your funnel. You and your team may have strong opinions about what is or isn’t working for your ad campaigns and the rest of your digital efforts, but you may be missing one key piece of perspective that’s hard to find inside your own business.

These are situations in which outside experience can be precious to your marketing efforts. Cost is a big factor here – there’s no point in reducing the amount of money you’re spending on paid ads for your funnel just to replace that spend with money going towards a consultant or expensive agency. And it’s true that in some cases, bringing in an outside party to review your ad campaigns can make things more convoluted and frustrating.

There are two keys here: first, you must seek assistance on a level that makes sense for your business and your budget. As a smaller startup just beginning to experiment with paid ads to bring in revenue, one probably doesn’t need to rush out to lock down a yearlong agreement with a boutique agency with a five-figure monthly retainer. Even a casual “brain-picking” session with a respected mentor or expert in their field can sometimes be enough to shed new light on a problem that helps you take steps towards solving it.

At FunnelEnvy, our team has many collective years of helping clients in all kinds of industries address challenges related to their marketing funnels, whether it involves paid ads, landing page optimization, or making forms more efficient for visitors. We use this background to give each client personalized attention to help them meet their goals. Whether that’s ensuring they spend less on advertising in favor of other methods or optimizing their current expenses to ensure they get as much return as possible from their ad campaigns, we can help.

If you’re interested in learning more about FunnelEnvy and how we work with our clients, click here to fill out a brief quiz that will allow us to learn more about your business and determine if we’d be a good fit to help with your funnel optimization needs.

By |2023-03-23T21:11:47-07:00April 3rd, 2023|Paid Media|0 Comments

Optimizing Your Funnel With Video Content

If you aren’t already taking advantage of the power of video content, you’re missing out on one of the most important channels for any type of marketing – especially B2B. Research shows that video makes for some of the most engaging content. Over 9 in 10 marketers already use video in their funnels to help capture the right audience and serve them relevant, helpful content that allows them to accomplish their business goals. Moreover, nearly the same number of consumers report that watching a brand video has convinced them to buy a product.

At this point, it’s far from groundbreaking to say that video should be a key element of any organization’s marketing funnel. Clients often experience difficulty with the specifics of video content and understanding the optimization process. How exactly should you use video in your funnel? What kinds of videos should you make? And how will you know if your videos are effective?

Clients often experience difficulty with the specifics of video content and understanding the optimization process. Click To Tweet

Though it’s tough to definitively answer these questions for any company without specific knowledge of their campaigns, we can offer some advice based on the trends we’ve seen working with clients to help them wisely incorporate video into their existing strategies. Let’s jump in.

Select the Right Kind of Videos

There are dozens of different kinds of video types and endless variations or tweaks you can put on those types to make them even more unique. Just spend a few minutes on YouTube, and you’ll see exactly how diverse video content can be! 

In a business marketing context, we can generally group videos into one of three buckets:

  • Quick snippets are meant to explain one specific concept or express a single idea. Software companies often create these using a screenshare that shows off a particular feature.
  • Medium-length videos are longer and go more in-depth on a broader area. These videos are anywhere from five to 20 minutes in length. For example, one type of feature video could be a medical research company showing off different parts of its facility.
  • Feature videos are anything longer than about 20 minutes. These are often pre-recorded speeches or conference sessions shared with the audience.

Again, these categories aren’t perfect, and you can probably come up with endless video types. Don’t get caught up in the specific traits of one type or another – instead, use them as a springboard to think about which type of video may be best for your business. As you go through the process of creating, promoting, and analyzing your video content, be sure to sort them by type so you can get more data on the effectiveness of each kind.

Let Your Prospects See Themselves

Think about some of the best movies, books, or television shows you’ve consumed over the last few years. For many people, the stories in these mediums are much more effective when they feel a connection to the characters in them. That could mean their job, geographic location, family status, etc.

The best marketers have figured out that this concept doesn’t just apply at the box office or the bookstore – it also works in a B2B marketing funnel. Whether you’re planning to create half-hour explainer videos with multiple scenes and people speaking, or you simply want to run a 45-second screenshare showing a single feature, do what you can to ensure your prospects connect with something. You could use language they recognize, name a process they frequently use in their business, or something completely different.

A case study or testimonial-style video is the best video to achieve this connection. Just be aware that many viewers are naturally skeptical of testimonial videos, so you should strive to include an authentic, balanced evaluation of your company and its offering. 

Connect Performance, Budget, and Analytics

Even after you’ve decided on a particular type of video to use, planned its production, and included it in the right channels, your job is still unfinished. The time after you’ve placed your videos into your funnel and published them on social media, your newsletter, etc., is one of the most critical periods for determining the overall success of your video efforts.

That’s because this is when you can get honest feedback from prospects about how effective your videos are at helping you achieve business goals. This feedback comes in the form of data – views, conversions, form abandonments, meetings booked, and so on. Ideally, you can compare this data with a preexisting, deep data set. 

Once you’ve analyzed the numbers and determined which kinds of videos are performing best for you, double down on them by redirecting more of your budget toward making them. Unless you have a specific reason, there’s no point continuing to spend money on content that doesn’t maximize the return.

An easy way to think of video is a virtuous cycle with three parts: budget, analytics, and performance. The cycle starts when you invest marketing dollars into creating a video (budget), continues when you dive into the numbers and metrics behind the video (analytics), and finishes with an ultimate evaluation of the video’s effectiveness in helping you achieve business goals (performance).

From there, the cycle starts over with the budgetary phase. As each part of the cycle becomes more and more optimized, it carries over to the other parts of the video cycle, helping them improve. 

Final Thoughts on How to Optimize a Funnel With Video

In 2023, it’s essential to get beyond just “doing video” and into optimizing your video for maximum funnel success. Barriers for video have dropped so much that you should already be incorporating them into your funnels.

To reach the next level of success with video, you need to know which types of videos your prospects respond to, how to include a hook that connects them to the content of the video, and what steps are necessary to iterate on videos to attain continued success. After all – you probably already spend time analyzing other elements of your conversion rate, so why not devote some of the same attention to the specific performance of your video?

While it’s possible to handle all of these steps within your organization, many companies find it easier to get them taken care of with the help of an outside specialist. A well-qualified B2B marketing expert will be able to give you a broader, more strategic perspective on the way you incorporate video into your funnel. They’ll assist you in identifying which kinds of videos to produce and how to track their metrics so that you end up getting the most out of the investment you make into a video for your funnel.

FunnelEnvy has helped many clients in various industries attain greater efficiency with video production and a better grasp of whether or not their content is moving the needle. To learn more about our pricing and determine if we are a good match for your needs, click here to complete a short questionnaire.

By |2023-02-27T12:23:28-08:00March 6th, 2023|General B2B Funnel Advice|0 Comments

How to Incorporate UX Principles into B2B Funnels

There’s something of a paradox happening in many business marketing circles today: everyone wants to ensure their funnels are well-optimized for the user experience, but relatively few marketers can tell you what user experience (UX) actually means!

The truth is, there’s a good reason for this paradox: UX is a huge umbrella term that can encompass several different things to many other groups and individuals. This article will focus on some of the UX concepts most relevant to B2B marketing funnels. The key to successfully incorporating these ideas is thinking about how they may apply to your funnels and marketing campaigns.

Let’s dive in.

Incorporate as Much Feedback as Possible

According to their definition, The Norman Nielsen Group says user experience “encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.” The key term there is “user.” Some misguided or inexperienced marketers might believe they can optimize their user experience without input from their prospects. This approach simply isn’t possible if you want to maximize the improvement of your funnel UX.

For the best results, remember the idea of a specific audience and diverse methodology. In other words, you should have a highly detailed target persona already mapped out before you seek feedback from anyone – otherwise, you’re just wasting everyone’s time. Be as specific as possible about the kind of people you want to take UX information from because this data will ultimately shape your product or service’s development.

Once you’ve settled on a specific type of audience, do your best to offer them several methods of providing input on your funnel and other marketing elements. In an ideal situation, you can build intimate relationships with prospects by creating a community centered around their characteristics and business objectives. Think about what HubSpot did to grow its Inbound.org community, a forum for marketers to share experiences and tactics for the inbound methodology. At its peak, the site was bringing in over 300,000 visitors per month.

Consider building a community within your customer group, even if it’s on a smaller scale. In the era of remote work, plenty of tools are available to bring people together, including Slack and Discord. You can use a more traditional forum-based system for your community – whatever fits best into your operating methods and your customers’ preferred ways of learning about potential business solutions.

Consider building a community within your customer group, even if it’s on a smaller scale. Click To Tweet

Think About Your Microcopy

Adobe defines “microcopy” as “tiny tidbits of copy found on websites, applications, and products.” You probably run into dozens of examples of microcopy every day – think about form fields, button text, disclaimers at the bottom of a page, headlines on popular articles, etc. Even the captions on your images can technically be considered microcopy.

These items may seem pretty small individually, but taken together, they can have a severe impact on the perception of your funnel by users. We already know headlines are important, given statistics indicating that an average user only reads about 20% of the content on any given website. You can find similar studies on the importance of key microcopy within your funnel, such as the call to action found on a button at the end of a form.

While your specific approach may vary depending on the type of microcopy you’re looking to optimize, generally speaking, it’s wise to eliminate as much as possible: the shorter, the better. Most of your prospects don’t have time for unclear or lengthy instructions. Be concise and direct with your microcopy.

Review Your Funnel for Unnecessary Elements

As marketers, there tends to be an obsession with adding the next “thing” that will make your stack even better. In describing his 1980 Los Angeles Lakers team that failed to defend its championship, the legendary coach and executive Pat Riley coined the term “disease of more.” Each player wanted more accolades, money, and playing time, to the point where it started harming the collective team.

Thinking about this in a marketing context, we see parallels to software, email scripts, video courses, new form options, etc. There are lots of shiny “widgets” we can add or tweak with the idea that it will improve our funnel. In reality, several of these add-ons may not be necessary to make prospects convert. Some of them may even negatively impact your funnel’s conversion rate.  

One of the best things you can do to optimize your funnel’s UX is to go through the entire thing (start to finish) and see if you can identify unnecessary things. Do your best to put yourself in the shoes of a prospect, trying not to think of it as a marketer. Think about forms, text, images, menu items, footers, headers – anything and everything should be considered. The fewer elements you have on the page, the more likely it will push visitors to the result you desire.

Even with this mental exercise, fully adopting your prospect’s mindset may be challenging. It may be better to ask a trusted customer or outside consultant to give you accurate insights. 

Test Constantly and Seek Outside Perspective

Whether you incorporate these or other tactics to improve user experience, it’s important to remember the fundamental tenet of conversion rate optimization (CRO): always test your changes. Collecting data that shows the performance of a new strategy or idea in your funnel builds a concrete foundation from which you can understand what’s working and what isn’t. UX ideas can change quickly, but data will ground your funnel in the specific concepts that get results.

We also suggest that you seek perspective beyond yourself and, if possible, beyond your entire organization. As much as you can try to embody the mindset of your ideal prospect, you’ll never fully be able to get there simply because you aren’t that person. Even if you are a doctor-turned-marketer offering a product or service to the same kind of doctors, you still have the mental experience of developing and selling that offering, which colors your judgment and beliefs.

The best way to overcome this challenge is to get outside help with your UX optimization. Even if you don’t have the means (or desire) to hire an outside contractor to help you, there are options to get an external opinion. You might consider reaching out to a loyal customer, as well as some newer customers, for help evaluating the current elements in your funnel and any ideas you are thinking about implementing.

Of course, working with a group of experts with years of collective experience working on UX improvements for clients can also be helpful. We’ve helped startups and software companies in several industries increase their conversion rates by making their funnels more user-friendly and accessible so that prospects only see what they need.

If you’re interested in getting some UX assistance from the FunnelEnvy team, click here to fill out a short questionnaire, learn more about our pricing and determine if we’d be a good fit to work together.

By |2023-01-25T21:39:06-08:00February 6th, 2023|Conversion Rate Optimization|0 Comments

The 3 Most Important UX Considerations in Your Funnel

Now that the digital marketing space is maturing, the focus is increasingly on the finer details of digital experiences. Most marketers already recognize the importance of major pillars like email, social media, and web design. Plenty of different software and service options are available to help organizations in need.

Success on a broad level in channels like email marketing and social media is still vital, but they’ve become the minimum barrier to entry for top-quality B2B marketing. In 2023 and beyond, the best marketers will not only be nailing the larger elements of their funnels but also understand how to give prospects a desirable experience through the less obvious aspects of their campaigns.

We call them less obvious because, individually, it may not seem like the details that comprise user experience (UX) considerations will have that big of an impact on the success of a funnel. But when combined, these factors can determine whether a prospect has a positive or negative overall experience with your funnel, which in turn impacts their decision to do business with you.

Below, we’ll talk about three crucial UX elements of your funnel that you might have overlooked and give tips on addressing them in your campaigns.

Progress Bars and Indicators

In today’s world of increasingly crunched deadlines, dwindling attention spans, and bite-sized content, your prospects’ time is likely stretched thinner than ever before. That’s why it’s important to show appreciation for every second they give your marketing by explaining how much time it’s going to take for them to get through each part of your form.

Research shows that using progress bars can make people more willing to devote time to a form or wait for a page to load. Of course, you shouldn’t make users wait long for elements on your page (we’ll get to that in the next section), but there’s always going to be some level of load time. Similarly, it will always take some time for a prospect to give you the information needed to advance the sales cycle. The best you can do is make that time as painless as possible.  

Of course, the B2B world can be a little different. When it comes to complex sales cycles or those in industries with many regulations, most prospects understand that it’ll take some time to get through their buying journey. On a macro level, B2B transactions generally take longer than B2C. While you can use that to your advantage by requesting more information at an earlier stage in the buying process, never take for granted the time prospects’ are willing to invest in your funnel. Progress bars, page numbers, and completion time estimates are all helpful tools for this area.

It will always take some time for a prospect to give you the information needed to advance the sales cycle. The best you can do is make that time as painless as possible. Click To Tweet

Page Speed and Responsiveness

We’ve paired these ideas together because they are both ultimately technical requirements for your website and its funnel elements. Your site needs to load quickly enough to stop people from getting impatient and leaving. It also needs to load properly on each device a prospect could use to visit your funnel. Both concepts have been critical in B2B marketing for quite some time, yet we still come across plenty of organizations leaving a lot to be desired with how their page appears to users.

Page speed is vital for the UX of your funnel, in part because of the short attention spans of modern web users. According to Google, the chance a user will bounce increases by 32% after a page’s load time reaches 3 seconds. You don’t want your funnel to stick out like a sore thumb when a user has been browsing other fast-loading pages, a situation we, unfortunately, encounter with clients in industries like healthcare and manufacturing.

As for responsiveness, there’s a straightforward standard your funnel elements should live up to; they must be viewable and equally usable on any device. Page visitors shouldn’t have any issue navigating your funnel site, whether using a keyboard, stylus, or their fingers on a touchscreen. Remember to frequently test different versions and sizes of your funnel as part of your efforts to optimize conversions.

Content Quality and Tone

This final area is more abstract, but it might be the most important. “Content” doesn’t simply mean the writing on your forms, landing pages, or other funnel elements. It’s an all-encompassing term that combines those elements with their design, multimedia, and the trade-off you’re looking for users to make (typically filling out a form for some kind of asset).

Take a step back and simplify your campaign to its essentials: what are you offering? Is it compelling enough for prospects to give you what you’re seeking from them? A law firm’s office manager may be willing to provide their name and email address for an eBook but may not want to provide their physical address, phone number, or other personal details. On the other hand, if you’re working on some kind of funnel further along the pipeline, like an appointment or consultation request, prospects may be more willing to give you that type of information.

The tone of your funnel content is also important for the user’s experience. Part of this is human nature – people inherently want to like and trust others they meet who are similar to themselves. However, when it comes to B2B transactions, buyers are responsible for ensuring they’re working with vendors with a sufficient understanding of their field. Writing is, of course, a big element of your tone. Other factors can include:

  • The clothes worn by people in video content
  • The colors in your funnel’s design
  • Fonts and typefaces used in parts of your funnel
  • The use of industry-specific jargon

In many cases, prospects don’t expect vendors to have the same depth of knowledge about a field – an accounting firm purchasing business software probably won’t expect the developer to be able to audit their books, for example – but they do expect them to be familiar with critical elements of the industry and how they work. Even if it’s communicated subtly, showing prospects your understanding of their needs can go a long way in improving your funnel. 

Where to Start With UX Considerations in Your Funnel

Each of these three areas of UX is relatively involved and could require its own campaigns to address. There are many other UX factors, some of which might even be more important to address in your funnel than the ones listed here. Knowing this, how do you decide where to begin with optimizing your funnel? 

There’s only one answer: experiment, analyze the data, iterate, and repeat the cycle. It’s easy to guess what will be the most effective way to improve the UX of your marketing elements. But with actual data – conversion rates, heat maps, bounce rates, and ROI – you can see which parts of your funnel need fixing.

Looking for assistance running these tests, or simply want to get a few more sets of (expert) eyes on your funnel UX optimization? Our team at FunnelEnvy is ready to jump in and help. Just click this link and fill out a short questionnaire to learn more about our pricing and how we can ensure your prospects have a better experience with your marketing elements in 2023 and beyond.

By |2023-01-11T21:26:15-08:00January 23rd, 2023|A/B Testing, Analytics|0 Comments

5 Mistakes in Your Inbound Funnel

For years, author and human biohacker Tim Ferriss (of “The 4-Hour Work Week” fame) has touted the benefits of creating a “Not-To-Do” list. He reasons that we sometimes fill our time with things that might feel important at the moment but don’t help us achieve our broader goals. As Ferriss succinctly puts it: “What you don’t do determines what you can do.”

The same idea can apply to your inbound marketing funnel. Like people, B2B marketing funnels are extremely complex, and each is slightly different. However, based on experience, there are common mistakes to avoid if you want your funnels to run as smoothly as possible. 

Not Knowing Your Numbers

For your funnel to work optimally, you need to understand all your metrics, from the most basic numbers like clicks and views to more complex concepts like pipeline velocity. Both types can be just as important, depending on the situation and the kind of funnel you’re running. To get the best understanding of your marketing, you should have a good mix of both.

Another thing to remember about your numbers is that it’s not enough just to know them: you have to be able to identify patterns and use those patterns to make changes to the funnel. It isn’t a primary school situation where you have to memorize facts just to regurgitate them for a test. You have to link metrics to changes to your campaigns, even if they seem small.

You have to link metrics to changes to your campaigns, even if they seem small. Click To Tweet

Treating All Prospects in Your Funnel the Same

In a regular conversation, any competent digital marketer should be able to explain to you how prospects in their funnel differ from one another when they are in different stages of the buying journey. It’s a fundamental concept behind all of the best marketing funnels globally, especially in the digital realm.

Unfortunately, building, testing, and optimizing a marketing funnel to maximize results is more complex than having a basic conversation. When you add these complexities to the mix, marketers (particularly inexperienced ones) can sometimes lose their grounding in the buyer’s journey and focus on the immediate channel.

Doing this is common when companies engage in content marketing. This discipline isn’t laser-focused on converting a visitor into a customer or prospect the way others might be. With content marketing – typically in the form of blogging, organic social media, podcasting, or lectures – the aim is more to educate the reader on how to solve a problem. This goal is especially true in B2B. Enterprise software used for healthcare and legal businesses, for example, typically have a relatively long sales cycle with lots of factors and smaller sub-decisions along the way. 

We see too many marketers approach their efforts to create elements of their marketing funnel in a way that doesn’t respect the differences between prospects at different stages. The difference can be subtle – it’s as nuanced as assuming that someone knows about a specific problem in their business or has already set a budget for how much they can spend on a specific solution. Refreshing your buyer persona may prove beneficial in fixing this issue.

Not Measuring the Right Funnel Elements

You’ll often hear traffic and other social media metrics, including likes and followers, derisively referred to as “vanity metrics” by some marketers. As the term implies, these metrics might look good on a PowerPoint slide during a monthly meeting, but they do little to help the business achieve any actual goals. While there is a debate over which metrics should be considered vanity and which are effective measures of profitable activity, it’s on you as a marketer to determine which is which.

Solving this challenge often comes down to carefully examining your core marketing goals. Are they tied to revenue, a certain percentage of product growth, or something else? Make sure there is a straight line between the marketing metrics you are tracking and how they impact these goals.

If you are tracking several vanity metrics, you don’t have to stop doing that completely. HubSpot provides an excellent list of vanity metrics and some alternative numbers to track. For example, instead of looking at blog post views, they suggest considering the post’s bounce rate (the number of users who leave your website without taking any action).

Trying to Do Everything on Your Own

Like many endeavors in our personal lives, from learning an instrument to getting in better shape, it’s much easier to make a marketing funnel successful when you have some outside perspective. There are many different ways to do this – your specific methods will depend on what your company sells and the kinds of clients you want. 

Here are a few common examples that tend to be successful in our experience:

  • User testing. Running experiments with people who are already customers or prospects of your company is a great way to evaluate your marketing funnel from the other side of the table, so to speak. The caveat here is you need to ensure you test the right users – typically the people closest to your ideal buyer persona – and a large enough sample size to ensure that your tests can give you sufficient data.
  • Hiring a consultant. This approach usually involves paying a firm or individual consultant to evaluate your marketing funnel. They will observe you and your marketing team for a certain period, ask you some questions about your operations, and provide a final report that usually includes actionable recommendations to make your campaigns more successful.
  • Outsourcing. Whereas a consultant simply observes and provides their evaluation and recommendations, outsourcing is when you bring on another firm to do the work involved in building and maintaining marketing funnels. The degree to which you can successfully outsource your marketing activities and the specific ones you decide to outsource may vary depending on the funnels you use. Hiring a creative specialist, for example, gives you an outside eye into your campaigns that might help you spice up a design or piece of content in a way that resonates with your target audience.

Conclusion

While it may not seem as glamorous of an approach as spending weeks crafting a perfect plan that you can triumphantly present to your boss or client, avoiding mistakes can sometimes be more prudent to find success with your marketing funnel. As we explained in the beginning, knowing what not to do can sometimes help clear the way for you to understand what you should be doing. In a marketing technology landscape more saturated than ever before with different tactics, platforms, and tools, simplification can be a huge ally in pursuing a successful funnel.

If you’re looking for some outside assistance with your inbound marketing, FunnelEnvy could be the right solution for you. Our team has many years of experience helping marketers with every step of their funnel creation, from devising a strategy to executing it and then reviewing the results to determine what worked and didn’t. Click here to complete a short quiz and learn more about our services.

By |2022-06-02T04:20:07-07:00June 13th, 2022|The Funnel|0 Comments

How to Structure a Successful Landing Page Within a Customer Journey

There’s a lot of discourse about landing pages in the modern B2B marketing world. Everyone has their preferred styles and templates for a landing page, a site designed specifically to push visitors towards a single action.

But a lot of advice today regarding landing pages ignores an essential element of success with landing pages: understanding the customer’s intent and the customer journey. Your landing page needs to be well-crafted, but it also needs to speak to the customer where they are in their journey. In an ideal scenario, your landing page can drive conversions while also providing tangible value to help visitors meet their goals and overcome their challenges.

In other words, two landing pages can be constructed in dramatically different ways and still achieve good results. This article will provide a few tips on how to factor in your customer’s journey as you work to build your landing page.

Consider Intent

Understanding what your customer wants from your page requires you consider what comes before and after. Generally, if they are later in the journey, they need less information; earlier in the journey will likely require more enticing details. Consider the differences between a new prospect who has recently learned about your brand and a previous customer familiar with your offerings. Each has different concerns and objectives, so they’ll likely need slightly different approaches to move them through the sales funnel.

You should construct your landing pages with this idea in mind. A landing page attempting to drive sign-ups to a newsletter will look different from a landing page made to complete a sale or encourage prospects to book an appointment with a sales rep.

Intent also means staying mindful of what your customers need from you. When a prospect shows interest, some marketers make the mistake of overwhelming them. They bombard them with information requests or hoops to jump through, hoping to maximize the amount of data they can gather. After all, the more data you collect, the better you can serve both the individual and future clients like them, right?

The problem with this philosophy is that it ignores the individual prospect’s needs. Asking for too much time or information without providing sufficient value in return is an invitation for prospects to drop out of your funnel before they convert.

Provide Proof in the Right Context

How can prospects be sure you’ll provide what you say you will? Even if you do, how do they know it’ll give their desired results? These two questions are top of mind for people who haven’t done business with you before. Your landing pages are important for answering these two questions, leading to a sale or conversion. 

Think about things you could include on your page to make new prospects more confident in you. A few common examples include:

  • Video reviews are powerful because people are inherently programmed to want to respond to seeing other people speaking. Watching a person talk about the benefits of a product or service has more impact than just reading it as text.
  • Testimonials can be text-based but, as mentioned above, are best in video format. A testimonial should also include measurable data about how your offering improved the customer’s business or results.
     
  • Statistics and/or research can be important in certain fields of B2B marketing. Still, there’s a caveat: make sure it comes from a reputable source, ideally a trustworthy external organization like a university or research firm. If you plan to present your own statistics, be ready to back them up – most prospects will be inherently suspicious of data published by a company about its own offerings.

You should always calibrate the user and where they are in your marketing funnel to the specific elements of proof included on your landing page.

Find Ways to Add Extra Value

Most people are used to the idea of a landing page as a place where they complete a form to receive something in exchange. It’s one of the new standards we’ve developed after years of browsing the web and shopping online.

But what if a user reading your landing page could get more than just an opportunity to convert with a form? Your landing page could also offer them something in return. Even small efforts go a long way; try offering possible solutions for their challenges.

This compilation from the Search Engine Journal offers some great examples of this idea in practice. Check out example 8 from Persistent Systems – notice how the page includes a call-to-action button for conversion in addition to statistics, benefits, and testimonials from previous clients.

Asana’s signup page offers another great example. It’s clear that creating your account is the main focus: the page is largely blank white space, with a simple one-form field and sign-up box centered in the middle. However, you notice off to the right a list of features included with a free trial of Asana, including unlimited storage, tasks, and projects. 

Landing page journey

(Asana)

Doing this provides a great example of giving users a bit of additional value on your landing page without interrupting their journey, reducing the chance they will convert. Balancing the elements on your landing page to provide enough information to be helpful without overwhelming visitors is down to trial and error. It will take some time and experimentation to find a happy medium, and you’ll want to keep an eye on the data to make necessary tweaks that keep the page performing at an acceptable level.

Conclusion: Treat Each Page Individually

As marketers, we sometimes fall into thinking we can construct every page in the same way, as long as we address the same audience and offer the same kinds of products and services. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case for any page in your funnel, particularly landing pages.

Everyone understands the basic elements of a landing page – some form, a description of the offer, and a confirmation page, so users know they’ve completed the form successfully. Fewer marketers recognize that landing pages can be a great place to nurture prospects and customers further, as long as you do so properly.

You can get more benefits than you might have previously thought from your landing pages by staying mindful of what page visitors want. Help them increase trust in your brand and its offerings by providing additional details that can reduce their professional struggles. Don’t forget to rigorously test the changes you make so that your updates and landing page structure have the data to support them – rather than conjecture.

Looking for help optimizing your landing pages and placing them within the broader context of your marketing funnel? FunnelEnvy can help. Our team has years of experience helping all types of B2B startups and tech companies that want to tighten up their marketing funnels, improve conversions, and ultimately drive more revenue from their current investment in digital marketing.

Fill out this short quiz to learn more about our pricing and schedule a time to meet with someone from the team.

By |2022-05-18T04:20:00-07:00May 30th, 2022|The Funnel|0 Comments

Know Your Numbers: The Top Metrics for B2B Inbound Marketing

Numbers are key in any kind of marketing. While some people may want to operate their campaigns using a preferred method or channel, only actual data can show whether or not decisions are successful. 

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of confusion among marketers today about what numbers are the most important to track. The huge expansion of the marketing technology sphere over the last decade has led to the creation of all kinds of statistics that may or may not be relevant to your business.

A handful of metrics should matter most for B2B marketers, though. The data you generate from tracking the below numbers will provide the most insight into your marketing efforts and how well they’re performing.

Qualified Leads

A qualified lead is someone vetted as a valid potential customer. Generally speaking, there are two levels of leads generated by marketing activity:

  • Marketing qualified leads (MQLs) are prospective customers who have shown some interest in your online marketing. Here, the most common examples include someone signing up for your email newsletter or filling out a form to download a longer lead magnet such as an eBook or white paper.
  • Sales qualified leads (SQLs) are the next step beyond an MQL. An SQL is vetted by someone on either the marketing or sales team as a legitimate prospect that is able to purchase what your company is offering. For example, a lead who has exchanged a few emails with someone at your company might be qualified to move from an MQL to an SQL.

To qualify leads, you can refer back to the classic BANT framework: Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline. If you’re using the BANT formula to qualify a lead, make sure you apply it to the specific person with whom you’re dealing. Just because the company you’re talking to has a need for your offering and can afford it doesn’t mean your contact has the authority to seal the deal.

If you’re using the BANT formula to qualify a lead, make sure you apply it to the specific person with whom you’re dealing. Click To Tweet

Pipeline Size

The size of your pipeline is defined as the number of active deals you have going on at any given time, in any stage of the sales process – from the newest leads to that one major deal your team has been working on for weeks. Your pipeline size is a dollar amount that adds up the total value of all the potential business you might be able to win in the short and mid-term future. Don’t forget to include existing clients that make repeat purchases every month or quarter – though it’s important not to rely too heavily on this type of business.

Knowing your pipeline size can help for a few reasons. First, it enables you to understand whether or not you’re doing enough marketing. A too-small pipeline could indicate that the marketing you’re creating isn’t compelling enough to generate interest in your product or service. How big should your pipeline be? You will hear anecdotal advice and rules of thumb ranging anywhere from 1.5 to 5 times your sales targets. The truth is that your pipeline goals will vary dramatically depending on what you’re selling. It’s impossible to create a one-size-fits-all ratio – instead, you should experiment and see what pipeline size to sales ratio strikes the best balance between growth and overwhelm for your team. 

Another helpful pipeline-related metric to track is your pipeline velocity. To calculate your pipeline velocity, multiply your number of deals by average deal size by win percentage, then divide the resulting number by the number of days in your sales cycle.

Metrics for marketing

Source: HubSpot

Your sales pipeline velocity tells you how many deals you are closing and how much revenue is moving through the pipeline each day. A higher velocity is obviously better. If your velocity isn’t where you want it, consider the factors slowing down deals from closing.

Meetings Set

Meetings are an essential part of sales metrics because they represent a significant transition point in the customer journey. To use an analogy from the dating world: it’s like going from having someone’s phone number and exchanging a few texts or phone calls to meeting up with them in real life. Things may or may not work out, but taking that step represents a level of commitment that doesn’t happen with everyone.

Meetings help you understand how often your people are getting in front of qualified customers. Tracking your meetings to leads ratio can help you identify the quality of your leads. If you’re getting lots of engagement with your marketing materials but aren’t setting that many meetings, it could be an issue with the kind of people you’re attracting. On the other hand, if you’re scheduling several meetings, but they aren’t resulting in closed business, it may be a good time to revisit some of your sales processes or refresh your team on best practices.

Customer Acquisition Cost

Customer acquisition cost (or CAC) is a relatively simple metric, but it can reveal a lot about your sales and marketing processes. To calculate your CAC, simply divide the total amount of money spent on all marketing activities by the number of clients generated. For a simple example, if your annual marketing budget is $100,000 and you were able to bring in 200 new customers from that marketing, your CAC is $500. 

Once you’ve determined your CAC, an easy way to evaluate the efficiency of your marketing is to compare it to your average customer lifetime value (LTV). Without knowing your LTV, it’s challenging to understand whether or not your CAC is where you want it. Continuing the example above: if an average customer will spend $1,250 with the company, a $500 CAC is excellent. That means you’re getting back roughly $2.50 in revenue for every $1 spent acquiring a customer.

On the other hand, say your LTV is only $250. Then, you have a problem because you’re spending $1 to bring $0.50 worth of business. Again, this is a straightforward example with round numbers for easy calculation. Still, these numbers will help you understand how to apply your CAC within the broader context of your marketing operations.    

Conclusion: Only Trust the [Right] Numbers

One thing we aren’t lacking in digital marketing is beliefs on how things should be done. It’s easy to sit around and theorize or talk about what we think might work for B2B marketing.

But the reality is that metrics are the only way to know which ideas are genuinely effective and which are just nice theories to talk about in meetings. Every company will have a slightly different perspective on where their numbers should be and what they should be looking for as they review marketing data. When it comes to metrics, remember to pick the right numbers to track and follow them consistently to gain a comprehensive picture of your marketing and its effectiveness.

Do you need some help filtering through all the marketing data you have to identify what matters? Or maybe you aren’t even sure where to start collecting data and want guidance from a specialist. Fill out this short quiz to learn more about how the conversion rate optimization experts at FunnelEnvy may be able to help.

By |2022-04-05T04:19:03-07:00April 18th, 2022|Analytics|0 Comments

The Reason Your B2B Website is No Longer Effective

The 1907 Quakers from the University of Pennsylvania were the juggernauts of college football. Heading into a home field matchup with the Carlisle Indians they had not only won, but dominated their previous seven games by a combined score of 189-10.

Their October home game on Franklin field against Carlisle wasn’t expected to be much different. Although the Indians were also undefeated, they were a group of unheralded, undersized players that the 22,800 fans in attendance didn’t give much of a chance against their mighty Quakers.

So what happened? Carlisle demolished Penn 26-6. The most notable play of the game was fullback Pete Hauer’s 40 yard perfect spiral pass that sports historians would later call one of the “three or four signal moments in the evolution of football” and “the sporting equivalent of the Wright brothers taking off at Kitty Hawk.”

These historians attribute Carlisle’s stunning upset that Saturday to Carlisle coach Pop Warner’s exploitation of a rule change that was adopted a couple of years earlier. In order to curb the surging violence in football schools adopted a number of rules changes, most notably legalizing the forward pass.

Warner decisively capitalized on this rule change, confusing the Quakers with long passes and new formations. Penn was playing by the old rules, and caught completely unprepared for the new era of football that they had the misfortune of writing into history that day.

(more…)

By |2018-10-20T21:47:07-07:00March 7th, 2018|The Funnel, Strategy, SaaS, B2B, Uncategorized|0 Comments
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