Raj C, Author at FunnelEnvy

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So far Raj C has created 38 blog entries.

How SaaS companies should approach pricing pages

Pricing can be controversial in many sectors of the business community, partly due to the general human attitude towards money. According to research by Wells Fargo, 44% of Americans find talking about money more difficult than other serious topics, including politics, religion, and even death. And while it’s easier to talk money in a business context, you’d be surprised how many people are still somewhat sensitive to budget discussions in the B2B realm.

That’s why it can be challenging for startups to address pricing pages properly. Your pricing page is like an online version of a conversation about cost with a sales rep. When done correctly, it can add value to the buyer’s journey and nurture clients toward choosing the most profitable options. Or it could repel prospects if the pricing page poorly conveys value.

Your pricing page is like an online version of a conversation about cost with a sales rep. Click To Tweet

Software pricing can be particularly complex because of its nature. There is no physical product or anything to put in a client’s hand. They don’t receive a box or envelope in the mail. Yet the right business software can be exponentially more valuable than any physical package or equipment.

If you’re a software company or similar startup looking to nail your pricing page, this post will provide some general strategies you can apply to your funnel, no matter what kind of service or product you offer.

Presentation is Key

The way you present different pricing options greatly influences how site visitors perceive your pricing. Consider how a restaurant might have prices on its drive-thru menu or a movie theater would set concession prices. These examples are consumer-based, but the lesson is the same: juxtaposing the cost of your desired option with more and less expensive options can help nudge prospects down the desired path.

Consider the movie theater example. You might be offered a small popcorn for $4.00, medium for $5.75, and large for $6.50. Even if you originally wanted a medium, looking at the relatively small cost difference between the large and medium, you’re more likely to spring for the large.

This hypothetical is just one example: we frequently see strategies involving color, shape, and page placement. Think about the many pricing or subscription pages you’ve viewed over time, and you’ll probably be able to come up with a few ideas or devices that worked exceptionally well.

Another significant concern with the presentation on your pricing page is how you’ll discuss the particular features and benefits mentioned. Typically, this is where software companies might tout their most crucial features or ones that differentiate them from competitors in the field. You may also consider offering a different pricing structure for those companies willing to pay a larger percentage upfront using something like a quarterly payment plan. Remember the old marketing adage here: benefits are more important than features. It’s nice to say what something does, but it’s even better to say what kind of result it will create for the buyer or their organization.

Experiment With CTAs

Calls to action (or CTAs) are vital because they represent the bridge from your pricing page to a prospect converting into a client. You can change many different options here, including these:

Copy. The specific words you use for your CTA can have an impact on how well you’re able to convert page visitors into clients. Use specific action verbs whenever possible, but don’t make them too long.
CTA shapes. The classic option is a rectangular button – you’ve probably seen the type frequently. Some brands might incorporate ovals, squares, or a more uncommon shape to stand out and catch a visitor’s eye.
Colors. The colors you choose for the background, CTA elements, and text will always influence a visitor’s decision to convert. We’ve used color psychology for decades in pricing strategies for all different kinds of companies, both B2B and B2C. For example, blue is associated with trust and safety, while orange is considered aggressive and active.

Make sure that you track pricing page data as you experiment with different CTAs so that it’s clear which ones are moving the needle regarding conversions.

Lean Towards Simplicity

Many software startups provide a relatively complex digital tool for clients, whether because of regulatory concerns or industrial standards. For example, healthcare software companies may have to include an extra layer of security or encryption for HIPAA-related concerns. Manufacturing software providers might need to ensure their clients meet ISO or ANSI standards created for their field.

Even if your software falls into this category, distilling it into the simplest possible terms on your pricing page is meaningful. Whenever possible, have a bias towards fewer options and elements. This idea holds if you want to optimize your existing pricing page or alter your pricing strategy to include a new tier. Whatever new elements you are thinking about adding, be sure they are necessary to add more context to your page visitor or help get them closer to making the best decision for business purposes.

White space is a common design tool startups use in anything from pricing pages to content assets to landing pages. White space can help your pricing page maintain a smooth, clean look and contribute to improved readability – an important element to help visitors learn about your offering and understand why it’s worth the asking price.

Final Thoughts on Pricing Pages

You don’t want to take an “old school” approach to pricing where it’s hard to access or requires a visitor to offer their email address or phone number. Today’s buyer – especially in the B2B software field – is looking for valuable information as quickly as possible.

On the other hand, you don’t want to provide pricing for your product or service immediately on your website before you can add sufficient context. Doing this may be just as off-putting to a visitor as excessively guarding your pricing tiers and strategies.

Instead, your pricing page needs to land somewhere in the middle: you have to offer enough details to give visitors the information they need and allow them to determine whether or not their budget fits your asking price, but not so many details that it causes questions about the worth of what you’re offering.

Finding this balance between informative and simplistic can be tricky if you’ve never created one before. It will take a fair amount of trial and error to determine how exactly to seek this balance for your business, your specific offering, and the kind of people you want as clients.

One of the best ways to help speed up optimizing your pricing page is to seek help from experts who’ve done it before. Our team at FunnelEnvy has years of experience working with clients with all types of pricing pages, from complex tiered subscription models to straightforward lifetime license plans. We can help ensure your pricing page has all the elements needed to maximize conversions without any wasted space. Just fill out this quick form to make sure we are a good fit and learn more about what we offer.

By Raj C|2023-07-26T04:06:14-07:00August 7th, 2023|Conversion Rate Optimization|0 Comments

Pipeline acceleration: Why it matters and how to get started

When many people hear “pipeline acceleration,” they might initially think it’s strictly a sales term. We typically speak of pipelines as a sales concept. But pipeline acceleration is a critical business area requiring collaboration across departments for success.

From Meta to Google to Coca-Cola, the most successful companies worldwide have a long history of creating disparate teams and putting them together to achieve important goals. In 2012, Google even conducted an internal study codenamed “Project Aristotle” to study the dynamics of groups within a larger company. Some of its most important inventions have come from unexpected teams or individuals working on something outside their main responsibility.

Pipeline acceleration is one of the most important collaborative projects any organization can take on. When done properly, it can help a business achieve its revenue goals more efficiently and help marketing and sales team members work together to create less waste and redundant work.

What is Pipeline Acceleration?

To summarize, pipeline acceleration means moving prospects through the sales funnel more quickly. It’s sometimes called “sales acceleration” or “closing speed,” but the central idea is the same: getting a prospect from a qualified lead to a paying client faster.

As we mentioned above, pipeline acceleration isn’t just something for your sales reps to be thinking about. Research firm Forrester says the intent is to improve lead management “from cold to close,” but also that it “demands full joint and sales and marketing involvement, commitment, alignment and participation from beginning to end.” That means your marketing team has to take ownership of pipeline acceleration, too, even if many elements are ultimately under the domain of the sales team. For example, the sales team is typically the only part of the company that holds direct meetings with prospects, even though many other people may be involved in helping to set the agenda for that meeting or creating assets for the salesperson to use at the meeting.

Should you even bother with pipeline acceleration? Yes – for several reasons.

The Benefits of Pipeline Acceleration

You don’t have to look hard to see the obvious benefits of moving prospects through a sales pipeline more quickly – when you start experiencing greater revenue and more satisfied customers, the advantages make themselves swiftly known!

Beyond the obvious benefits of closing more deals faster, pipeline acceleration also helps create shared goals and outcomes for different team members at your company. Working towards the same goals builds a sense of unity in the organization, even if your team operates on different projects with various tasks.

Pipeline accelerations also create a deeper understanding of your ideal buyer persona. When you have people from diverse backgrounds and job functions looking to help a prospect reach a decision more quickly, it tends to create a deeper, more well-rounded understanding.

Finally, successful pipeline acceleration will increase communication in general among your firm. Since the process requires such a high degree of collaboration between departments and job functions, your team members will develop a natural rapport and working cadence with one another that will be easy to carry over to other projects. Understanding how coworkers collaborate is important for organizations of every size, even a small startup with only a few people.

You might think communication is better at smaller companies, but counterintuitively there are many examples of large organizations communicating better than smaller ones. Bigger companies tend to have more streamlined processes and workflows that can naturally guide a team into successful collaboration.

Understanding how coworkers collaborate is important for organizations of every size, even a small startup with only a few people. Click To Tweet

These are just a few of the many reasons to implement pipeline acceleration. If you’re convinced it’s important but unfamiliar with how to get started, the next section is for you.

Implementing or Developing Your Pipeline Acceleration Program

Like any other initiative, the first step is taking inventory of where you are currently. What steps have your sales and marketing team taken to move prospects down the funnel faster? What about other departments? In this stage, try not to judge progress or worry about where you are. You want to get a sense of previous measures and their results.

If your audit has determined you are fairly early in the process of pipeline acceleration, that’s okay – it just means you may have to start with a more simplistic approach. Consider steps like holding joint meetings between departments, creating a few shared goals, or even producing an activity you can complete together.

If you’re a bit further along your journey to implement pipeline acceleration at your company, consider the tips below:

Create a living set of guidelines shared across the appropriate departments. Doing this is relatively easy nowadays with the several collaborative team platforms available, from Notion to Slack to Sharepoint. This compilation of guidelines and processes can serve as an internal wiki, helping your team document the pipeline acceleration processes but also allowing them to improve their written communication skills.
Pay close attention to metrics before and after implementing various initiatives to help promote pipeline acceleration. The numbers and data you gather should come from the same places so you can understand how it has changed based on the steps you took. This clues you into the results of your pipeline acceleration so you can better understand what is and isn’t working.
It’s about the client first. Much of the advice in this article has been about what to do from an internal perspective. In analyzing these ideas, it can be easy to lose the forest for the trees can be easy. You must always consider your understanding and communication with prospects and clients. All of the pipeline acceleration work you do should focus on learning how to better meet prospects’ needs, thereby getting them to a sales decision more quickly.

Final Thoughts on Pipeline Acceleration for Companies

It’s easy to come across an idea like “pipeline acceleration” and assume that it’s too complicated for your organization to implement or something that you’ll get to eventually but don’t have the time to focus on.

But even if you’re a relatively small company in the earliest stages of your growth journey, closing deals more quickly is critical. It will help your business get closer to meeting tangible business goals and establish a culture of communication and collaboration. That’s a worthy goal to pursue, even if your business is only a handful of people – small companies often lack the formal guidelines around communication and business initiatives that are present at larger organizations.

Looking to learn more about pipeline acceleration or get some expert help with incorporating it into your business? Our team at FunnelEnvy is ready to help. We’ve got many years of combined experience with funnel optimization, CRO, and other important elements of pipeline acceleration across several industries, from tech to healthcare to manufacturing.

To learn more about working with us and see if we’re a good fit, please fill out this short quiz.

By Raj C|2023-07-13T06:39:58-07:00July 24th, 2023|Conversion Rate Optimization|0 Comments

Tips for connecting product development and marketing

The broader tech and startup world has seen a significant hiring contraction over the last few years. Some of the biggest names in the space (Meta, Google, and Microsoft, for example) eliminated thousands of jobs and cut back on adding new employees. Recent data published by CNBC shows that tech layoffs in 2023 are up 38,487% compared to last year. 2023 is on track to be the worst year for tech layoffs since the Dotcom bubble burst in 2001.

Layoffs and contractions can be challenging, but they can also free companies to create efficiencies and innovations for role responsibilities across the organization.

Layoffs and contractions can be challenging, but they can also free companies to create efficiencies and innovations. Click To Tweet

One result of this situation is the creation of hybrid-type positions that combine roles from several different traditional positions. These positions have been around for many years in some industries, but new ones are being created across various fields all the time.

Business layoffs and contraction certainly aren’t the only reasons for hybrid positions. And not just a single team member who fills multiple roles on your team out of necessity. This particular article focuses on a unique connection: marketing and product development. While these two departments should always be closely connected, in reality, there’s often a lot more distance than there should be.

Whether you’re looking to bring on a hybrid team member, broaden the responsibilities of existing departments, or simply ensure these two parts of your business are more connected, this article will help.

What Are Marketing and Product Development?

Both functions focus on a larger concept: your company’s product or service.

Product marketing refers to getting your brand and its offerings in front of the right people to encourage them to enter your sales funnel. Product development refers to all the people and processes involved in designing, launching, and updating the offering.

They’re both vital to the overall health of your business. You’ll hear arguments from proponents of both sides about how marketing or product development is more important. But you must be effective at both for optimal success in today’s business environment. You can develop an industry-leading, cutting-edge solution – but if you’re not getting it in front of the right people, its success will be limited. On the other hand, if you have a poor-quality product but great marketing, you’ll find customer complaints and frustrations everywhere. As the legendary ad man David Ogilvy once said, “Great marketing only makes a bad product fail faster.”

Connecting Marketing and Product Development in the Business

Now that you understand the two ideas better let’s review some practical strategies for making them work better together.

Clearly Define Roles From the Beginning

When was the last time you sat down and listed the specific duties and roles of team members working in each function? If you’re like most startups, it’s probably been quite a long time. If you want your team to work more effectively together, it’s essential that each team member knows what they should and shouldn’t be doing. One of the most significant sources of friction in the modern workplace is when people feel like they are doing a job someone else should be doing.

Only you can know for sure which particular job roles fall into these two categories, but here are a few common ones to start with:

Marketing Manager
Marketing Analyst
SEO Strategist
Content Marketer
Social Media Manager
Graphic Designer
Product Manager
Backend Developer
Product designer
Go-to Market Manager
Product Development Coordinator

Remember, this applies not just to internal roles but also to members of the team who may be contract or freelance.

Make a Preferred Meeting Cadence

For two teams to work well together, they have to communicate regularly. Luckily, thanks to today’s technology, there are more options than ever before for how that meeting takes place. With the prevalence of agile principles, many companies are implementing “stand-up” meetings – quick check-ins that may only last 15 minutes to provide quick progress updates and highlight any specific sticking points.

We can’t tell you exactly how to have meetings within your business, but we can tell you how to decide: evaluate the people involved. Because your marketing team may have different preferences and requirements than people on the product side, doing this may stir up some challenges. The key is coming to a happy medium that can satisfy (at least partially) both sides’ requirements. Some companies have even been able to go entirely away from meetings, relying on async chat and messenger tools to communicate. Whatever style you choose, be confident it helps the maximum number of people on your team work efficiently.

Define Shared Goals and Data

Even though the product and marketing teams are ultimately working towards similar ends, they may feel distant from people in other departments. This distance often happens because the tools, information, and objectives vary across business functions.

To overcome this obstacle and attain a more cohesive working style, ensure you have at least a few goals shared by those in different functions at the company. These goals should be related to the product and its marketing, but they should also be controllable by both sides. The marketing team can’t do much to influence code sprints, just like the development team may not be able to help your latest social media ad campaign meet your desired numbers.

To set practical cross-disciplinary goals, recall the idea of lagging and leading indicators. You cannot directly change the lagging indicators any more than you can your weight on a scale or quarterly revenue. There’s no way to force more people to buy your product or service. But if you focus on the factors you can control for leading indicators – the time you spend tweaking your offering – you’ll find that the lagging indicators eventually get where you want them to be.

Final Thoughts on Merging Product Development and Marketing

If you’ve never even thought about connecting these two essential functions of your business, the ideas in this article may seem a little overwhelming. And while it’s certainly possible to survive and even grow as a company, if your departments aren’t working cohesively, you’ll eventually find a ceiling on the level of efficiency and size you can achieve.

For best results, you should consciously connect team members across departments or even consider hiring hybrid-type employees, as we described in the intro. Downsizing and layoffs aren’t the main drivers for this kind of cross-disciplinary interaction – instead, it’s intended to achieve maximum internal efficiency and reach as many clients as possible.

Looking for some help attaining this kind of connection at your own firm? Our team at FunnelEnvy can help. We have many years of experience working with companies of all sizes who want their marketing and product development teams to work better together for the good of the overall business. To get started, click here to fill out a short quiz so we can learn more about your specific problems and determine the best way to assist.

By Raj C|2023-06-29T11:18:34-07:00July 10th, 2023|General B2B Funnel Advice|0 Comments

4 Strategies for Upgrading Your Content Marketing in 2023

In the middle of 2023, it’s safe to say content marketing is no longer the innovative, groundbreaking strategy it was ten or even five years ago. According to recent research, nearly 70% of companies plan to increase their content marketing budgets this year.

And while it’s likely too late to win the first-mover advantage in content marketing (unless your industry is very niche or specialized), producing higher-quality content is arguably more lucrative than ever.

That’s because the massive increase in spending and strategy on content marketing has come partially as a response to the jump in buyers consuming content to help them along the buyer’s journey. From blog posts to industry publications and media properties, business buyers in almost every field are using content to help them evaluate options and better understand their needs.

The secret to success for marketers is to focus on the needs of your audience. Too many businesses treat content marketing like an obligation, churning out four blog posts a month because they have to. If you want to make your content better resonate with the right people, start with the steps below.

Too many businesses treat content marketing like an obligation, churning out four blog posts a month because they have to. Click To Tweet

Assess Platform Choices

Most companies that engage with content marketing follow a similar pattern: they choose one or two platforms to create and publish content, then never think about them again. It’s easy to get caught into this day-to-day routine, but it’s vital to continually think about the places your company is leveraging content marketing.

New social media platforms and communication tools release every day. And while not all of them will be worth the time and effort, some might be. For example: when TikTok first launched, many companies doubted whether or not short-form videos featuring lots of music and dancing would be effective for marketing – especially those in B2B industries. But years later, TikTok is a popular place for all kinds of content, from the consumer ads you might expect to advice for CPAs and accounting firms.

We’re not suggesting you add new platforms to your marketing once a month or once a quarter. We recommend you keep an ear to the ground so you know about new media that might fit your content marketing well before your competitors.

Consider the Human Element

We’ve used people, emotions, and other parts of the human experience in marketing for centuries – remember the famous carousel scene from the TV show “Mad Men”? In it, a team of executives from Kodak suggests naming their new slide projector “the wheel” because of its shape. But Don Draper looks deeper to understand that consumers don’t care about the product’s shape; they care about the nostalgia it creates upon viewing old photos.

We often get objections from clients and prospects that sell to other businesses: “Nostalgia is great, but I’m selling software for specialized manufacturers. What does that have to do with humans?” Remember that no matter how dry or industrial your product seems, there’s always a way to connect to humans because they’re the ones ultimately making the buying decision.

One of the best ways to help you incorporate more of a human touch into your content marketing is to interview previous clients and ask them how their situation changed. Your product or service likely had a quantifiable impact on their business, affecting the people working there. Depending on your relationship with the clients you speak with and the nature of the conversation, you could publish the conversation as a case study in audio or video format.

Plan a Pivot Away From Personal Data Marketing

Over the last decade or so, the world of digital advertising has followed a relatively straightforward model. Advertising platforms like Google and Facebook collect data about the people using their platforms, then sell companies on the ability to use that data to maximize profits. While this model raked in billions of dollars in advertising money, it also created an unpleasant situation where companies needed to lean on an intimate knowledge of search and social media users to sell to them more effectively.

In the last three or four years, signs have emerged that this model is starting to disappear. In late 2021, Facebook (now Meta) announced they would no longer offer “sensitive” ad targeting categories like race, health conditions, and specific political ideas. Similarly, in a major iOS update from 2021, Apple required apps to ask permission to track user data, a request many users denied.

The writing is on the wall: in the coming years, third-party personal data collected by advertisers will no longer be the gold mine of advertising it might have been in the early 2010s. If you’ve been relying a lot on advertising data or a similar source, you need to consider how to pivot your strategy away from this resource. User data will always be available, and this shift won’t happen overnight, but it’s still critical to prepare now so you aren’t caught off-guard by something accelerating this trend.

Think About User Intent

One trend in the current era of content marketing is optimizing for user intent. In 2023, there’s so much content out there for almost every industry that the biggest challenge for both B2B and B2C buyers is finding out which kinds of content will help them meet their professional needs. It’s fantastic if your site has a great content library, but it isn’t living up to its potential if you don’t organize it well.

In a recent article for the Content Marketing Institute, strategy chief Robert Rose points out that organizing content by “e-books, white papers, videos, etc.” asks them to choose the kind of experience they want before knowing the topic. Instead of this traditional method of organization that often results in challenges for first-time users, take a deeper approach to your content’s organization and accessibility by grouping it by customer intent.

And if you’re unsure where to start when grouping content by intent, try applying the pillar strategy to content you create for two or three of your most common buyer scenarios – copy them exactly from an existing client, if you need. Start with the buyer’s situation as your pillar foundation, and expand from there.

Last Word on Updating Your Content Marketing Plans

Even in the buttoned-up industrial sector, today’s internet is noisier than ever. Your content marketing strategy of producing a set number of monthly posts is a great start, but it’s not enough to help you reach the top of your field regarding content. To truly reach your intended audience, your content has to focus on their needs and meet them on the platforms they’re already comfortable with.

Are you interested in expert advice on improving your content marketing plan or developing a new one? Our team at FunnelEnvy is ready to help. Just click here to fill out a short quiz so we can learn more about how we might be able to help take your content game – and other elements of your digital marketing – to the next level.

By Raj C|2023-06-14T07:58:04-07:00June 26th, 2023|Conversion Rate Optimization|0 Comments

The best landing page design tests to boost conversions

With many elements of your marketing and funnels, there’s a degree of guesswork involved. Even companies who’ve been in their industry for many years and have deep knowledge of their audiences have to rely on their predictions based on the trends they’ve observed in the past.

But when it comes to designing your landing page, there’s a rare path to certainty: testing different options with real traffic to see which page visitors prefer. You might never be 100% accurate at giving every visitor what they’re looking for on your landing page, but with different tests on page elements, you can likely please most users.

The accuracy of your testing will determine how helpful your landing page data is for achieving business goals. Below are some of our favorite tests that will help you improve your landing page with quantifiable data. Our focus is on the specific elements of the page, and which style of test you want to use.

Headlines

By their nature, headlines are typically one of the first page elements that draw a visitor’s eye. That’s why ensuring your headlines are effective is essential for any industry-targeting audience. The famous advertising executive David Ogilvy said: “When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.” He was talking about newspapers and flyers, but the principle still holds on modern landing pages decades later.

A good headline should always do the following:

Use action words related to the benefit of your product or service, not its features. For example, if you offer a software platform for manufacturing companies, your headline might use attention-grabbing verbs like “simplify,” “streamline,” and “organize.”
Incorporate jargon without overdoing it. Using the words and phrases that professionals in your audience understand is particularly important for B2B landing pages. These buyers are more discerning about the technical abilities of their vendors.
Address the visitor directly. Another key to good writing from the advertising world: the best copy speaks directly to the reader as an individual. This applies to your landing page headlines as well.

Form Field Labels

Most landing pages use at least one form for conversion, whether signing up for a newsletter or scheduling a demo with a sales representative. But to persuade people that it’s worth filling out the form and converting, they must first understand what the form means.

We recognize that form fields aren’t traditionally considered part of a page’s design – sometimes, they aren’t even part of the page, depending on the software stack you’re using. Many marketers simply fill out the form fields as an afterthought.

The problem with this approach is it neglects one of the most critical conversion elements on your landing page. Different people have different ways of recognizing the same things. No matter how well you know your audience, you’ll never be able to predict precisely what they think about a form title or a label. That’s why it’s critical to test as many of your form labels as possible, from the title of the broader form to the labels on each field.

No matter how well you know your audience, you’ll never be able to predict precisely what they think about a form title or a label. Click To Tweet

Calls-to-action (CTAs)

The CTAs on your page are the last element before a page visitor becomes a conversion. Although your landing page has many vital components, the CTA element is arguably the most crucial leverage point to improve conversions. Even if the rest of your page is well-optimized for conversions and technically sound, a poorly-designed CTA will throw people off and significantly restrict your results.

There’s a massive array of different types of CTA designs, but these are three of the most popular:

Colored shape. This is typically a diamond, rectangle, or oval in a color that stands out on the page – often a bright color like red, orange, or light blue. Within the shape, you’ll see a simple text-based CTA like “Book your meeting” or “Download the guide.”
Plain text. Plain text CTAs are simple calls to action embedded directly in the text. Some marketers will add a paragraph of text at the end of the page, while others will simply include it as a line at the end. A word or phrase in the text will sometimes be hyperlinked to allow the user to submit the form or convert in another way.
Image. An image-based CTA is excellent because it allows the most flexibility and customization, which means it has the best chance of standing out on the page and grabbing attention. Conversely, an image-based CTA also provides more technical risks than other kinds – not all platforms and browsing devices load images well, especially if they are large and complex.

Which kind of CTA design is best for your landing page? It’s impossible to offer a one-size-fits-all recommendation. Each landing page has its own layout and design theme that a CTA should fit into (while also standing apart). Also, remember to consider your audience. Are you trying to provide a product or service for a more buttoned-up industry like law or accounting? Or does your audience have a more laid-back vibe like the hospitality or travel industry? These factors should all weigh into your CTA decision – and the nice thing about them is they are all so distinct that it’s relatively easy to perform a test to decide which ones are most effective.

Our Final Thoughts on the Landing Page

As is the case with many of the suggestions we provide on different topics related to funnels and conversion rate optimization, the advice given in this article should be viewed only as a starting point. Everything we’ve discussed is based on what has worked best for companies we’ve worked with during our many years of experience – you may find that another idea you have for landing page design works better or that something suggested here doesn’t move the needle as you’d hoped.

And that’s completely fine! The key to success is backing up everything you do with testing and data. Without any empirical evidence to support your landing page design decisions, it’s impossible to know whether or not they are the right choices.

But if you’re relatively new on this journey or recently started using a much different landing page, you might be struggling to find answers for design optimization. This is where our expert team at FunnelEnvy can assist. We have experience working with companies in various industries – from consumer healthcare to industrial equipment. Our focus has been helping them build a better-converting landing page in each instance. We can meet you where you are and provide customized assistance with all elements of your 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 Raj C|2023-06-01T03:07:35-07:00June 12th, 2023|Analytics, A/B Testing|0 Comments

How will Google Analytics 4 affect your funnel?

For most B2B marketers, Google Analytics (GA) is a foundational part of their stack. Google’s long-running web analytics platform emphasizes universal compatibility, meaning it often serves as the connective tissue between different elements and software applications you use in your marketing. Most business and marketing tools incorporate Google Analytics. With the continued implementation of Google Analytics 4, the platform has leaped forward in critical areas.

Announced in late 2020, Google Analytics 4 is one of the most significant upgrades the platform has seen since its launch over 15 years ago. You might have already migrated your data to this new version, but if you haven’t, the deadline is coming up quickly. On July 1, 2023, Universal Analytics properties used by older versions of GA will stop processing new data. Depending on your settings, Google may automatically create a new instance of your old profile into the new GA4 platform. If possible, try to get ahead of this deadline and migrate your profiles before Google does it for you.

This article will help you understand some of the most important new features in Google Analytics 4, how they differ from previous versions, and how this could impact how you use GA throughout your funnels.

What Are the Biggest Changes in Google Analytics 4?

The overall mission of GA hasn’t changed: it’s designed to help website owners and marketers better understand the way visitors interact with digital properties. Google has changed the way that its platform understands and measures these interactions in a few key ways:

More flexible events. The system for gathering data (or “hits,” as Google calls it) is much broader in GA4. It’s derived from the Firebase Analytics platform, which Google developed for mobile devices and apps. In the updated version, you can set custom events based on almost any action or event you want instead of limiting yourself to Google’s predetermined event categories.
Support for apps and other websites. The new version of Google Analytics can track user data on external apps and social media platforms. It’s especially beneficial to apps built with Firebase SDK, Google’s suite of app development tools and platforms to help developers and engineers streamline products.
New visual dashboard. Google has streamlined the main GA dashboard’s interface and visual aesthetic, offering a more concise set of options and a cleaner main page. There are fewer options on the left-hand navigation menu and a less boxy design. Google has also implemented a tab-based navigation system that many users will find more intuitive.

New Reporting Tools

As most experienced marketers know, the data you gather is only valuable if you can measure and understand it. This is typically done by taking it from the platform on which it was collected and contextualizing it into a report or similar document. Google Analytics always had powerful reporting tools, but GA4 ups the ante by adding a few new features.

Besides the new cross-platform reporting tools mentioned above, GA4 offers more sophisticated attribution models than the last version. That means deeper insights into where leads come from and which sources provide the most qualified prospects. Better attribution can lead to better marketing and less wasteful spending on channels that don’t produce the same results.

Google Analytics always had powerful reporting tools, but GA4 ups the ante by adding a few new features. Click To Tweet

Finally, Google’s upgraded platform also incorporates machine learning, the fundamental principle behind the vast artificial intelligence trend that seems to be sweeping every industry. This can be used for predictive recommendations about optimizing your site or app and protection from spam or bots that may be generating a high level of suspicious traffic. Machine learning can also track the habits and patterns of specific users and help you develop protocols for serving preferred content to the groups that want to see them.

These tools are great for both business administrators and marketers responsible for explaining their work results to clients. Better reporting means more efficient use of the data you create and access in Google Analytics.

Cross-Platform Support

Google understands that the internet is a much different place than it was in the late-2000s when Google Analytics first rose to prominence. Today’s web is fragmented – people use several different apps or social media networks to find what they’re after, whether information, entertainment, or connection with others.

That’s why one of the key hallmarks of GA4 is expanding the places where Google lets you track user data. With GA4, you can gather data from Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to help you measure significant trends and patterns related to your business and its presence on third-party websites. You can imagine how helpful it might be to include social media data and information about your funnel’s different websites.

Compatibility with social media is also powerful because of GA4’s attribution technology. You can attribute leads from specific social media networks, which can be used to tweak your campaign and investment. You can also include GA4 attribution as a component of a larger lead-scoring formula to grade new opportunities across the company.

Best of all, if you’re already using a tool for attribution – perhaps a CRM like Salesforce or a marketing automation platform like HubSpot – you can still connect your Google Analytics account to the most popular types of lead tracking and marketing analytics software.

Final Thoughts on How Google Analytics 4 Impacts Your Funnels

Most marketers who have been on the job for a considerable time have some experience working with Google Analytics or at least have worked alongside others who know the platform well. For the better part of two decades, it’s been a pivotal arrow in the quiver of marketers and website administrators looking to get a sense of where their traffic is coming from, how people interact with their pages, and what the ideal prospect looks like.

With their new update that will sunset older versions this upcoming July 1, Google has widened the scope of data available to users and increased the number of ways to measure user interactions on their websites. From a business perspective, these updates will lead to marketers and businesses getting an even firmer grasp of their ideal clients, letting them develop more customized solutions that address their most pressing problems.

You may still have time before the deadline, but it’s always better to be prepared well. If you haven’t already made the jump and are looking for help converting your Universal Analytics account to Google Analytics 4, want to set up a new campaign, or are simply struggling to gain meaningful business insights from Google Analytics or any other platform for gathering data about user interactions with your web presence, we may be able to help.

The team at FunnelEnvy has many years of collective experience working with consumer and business software companies across all kinds of industries, from healthcare to real estate. To find out more about whether or not we can help and get additional details about our pricing, fill out this short quiz.

By Raj C|2023-05-22T08:32:12-07:00May 29th, 2023|Analytics|0 Comments

The 4 Top CRO Tips For 2023

It may have taken a couple of decades to perfect the modern internet, but nowadays, technology is getting more advanced by the day. Recently, we’ve been hearing a lot about how AI and blockchain will revolutionize how we do business. It’s critical to stay current on these developments as they relate to your business.

But at the same time, many of the strategies doled out on how to respond to advancing technology look surprisingly similar to “the old way.” Often, tech just asks us to use existing principles of sales, marketing, and business with a new platform or tool.

In this article, we’re diving into four ways to think about conversion rate optimization (CRO) given everything we know about how technology is advancing this year – and beyond.

Revisit Your SEO Practices

We don’t always associate search engine optimization (SEO) with conversion rate optimization. The premise of SEO is getting new traffic to your site, after all. Smart marketers know they should consider user intent long before someone even lands on their page.

Smart marketers know they should consider user intent long before someone even lands on their page. Click To Tweet

That’s because the more people who get to your page, the better – as long as they have the right intentions. Having good enough SEO to attract visitors who aren’t interested in your offering might produce some good vanity metrics but ultimately won’t help you drive business goals. To rectify this issue, you need to consider SEO to attract the right traffic.

You can assess the way you incorporate keywords on different kinds of pages to see if it still makes sense for your intended audience. Don’t forget to examine your fundamental keyword strategy, too. Since most SEO success often comes from going for longtail keywords, if your target audience has changed, your longtail keywords may also change.

Audit the Forms in Your Funnel

Form optimization is a long, dynamic subject matter that could fill up its own blog post (or a whole series). But the foundation of it is the same as it’s always been: go through all appropriate forms and make sure there are no obstacles, distractions, or errors that arise. Ideally, you can break this down into two parts: first, audit your forms internally from a technical perspective, making sure they work with the right software and functions in your business – like a CRM or marketing automation tool.

The second part of the audit is about your users’ perspective. If possible, try to get a person outside your internal marketing team, preferably a prospective customer or someone with similar characteristics. You’ll typically get more cooperation with this form testing when you offer to compensate participants, even if it’s a simple thing like a small discount or virtual gift card.

Here are a few questions to keep in mind as you go through the testing process:

Are people completing your forms in the amount of time you expected?
Is relevant information on form pages easy enough to find?
Are any parts of the form unclear or confusing?
Does the form’s language resonate with users?

Test Load Times and Technical Elements

Load time is a significant factor in getting people to visit your site and convincing them to convert. According to statistics by Google, an increase in load time from 1 second to 5 seconds can increase a page’s bounce rate by 90%. If a critical page of your funnel is loading slowly, it can hinder your marketing efforts.

There are plenty of tools available that can help marketers improve load speed and related technical slowdowns. Google’s PageSpeed test is a good starting point – based on your results there, you’ll either want to develop a plan to cut down on elements slowing down your page or ensure protocols are in place to keep the page loading at optimal speed.

Depending on the nature of the technical challenges you’re running into, you may require outside help. Certain changes to your domain settings may need to be handled by your hosting provider, while more advanced changes to the site itself could require specialized help from a developer.

Diversify Funnel Media Types

Are you using only long-form content and headers on every page throughout your funnel? Does your main landing page use the same video you’ve had for years? Unless your forms and funnel elements are already converting at a very high level, it’s always valuable to improve your content by diversifying its delivery. While prospects in certain industries may be more predisposed to specific kinds of content, no rule says you can’t switch it up.

Video content is becoming increasingly popular in many industries, particularly with the rise in popularity of platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels. There are also infographics, audio presentations, photos, etc. You might even want to consider the presentation of your content with elements like parallax scrolling and carousels. Even if you aren’t drastically changing the information you include when you make these adjustments, you’ll find it could still add a significant bump to your conversion rate – especially on pages and funnel elements that may have been struggling previously.

As you look to add new kinds of media to your mix, remember that you’ll need to track everything in some way. If you’re adding a new kind of video, for example, be sure you have the right software tools to track important metrics and incorporate them into the rest of your analytics.

Last Thoughts on CRO for 2023 and Beyond

The tools we use to conduct business have come a long way from the pen, paper, and snail mail days. Startups can access a wealth of information about people they’ve never met or interacted with. Technology is capable of helping a company achieve some truly inspiring things today.

Yet despite all the advancements, many of the fundamentals about selling remain strong; possibly even strongerr than in the pre-internet days. When you receive messages, emails, and notifications at every turn, the fundamentals stand out as even more important now. The core tenet of conversion rate optimization is getting more people to raise their hands and signify interest in your product or service. To do that, you need to attract more of the right people, remove technical blocks that prevent them from converting, and experiment with different types of content that can better educate them on why they need your offering.

Looking for some help implementing these or other CRO tips into your existing marketing campaigns? At FunnelEnvy, our optimization specialists have spent years studying what it takes to get people interested in our clients’ products and services. We’ll bring an objective eye to your digital marketing efforts while using our decades of combined experience to help you overcome any challenges you may be facing.

To get started, just click here to fill out a short quiz that will help us learn more about your organization and how we may be able to help you meet your marketing goals.

By Raj C|2023-05-03T22:23:27-07:00May 15th, 2023|Conversion Rate Optimization|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 Raj C|2023-04-25T09:04:40-07:00May 1st, 2023|General B2B Funnel Advice|0 Comments

The 4 Most Important Landing Page Elements

We’ve devoted several posts on this blog to discussions of landing pages and their importance within the broader context of your digital marketing. It’s no exaggeration to say that a landing page can make or break your funnel. Even if other elements are well-optimized and you have a great offer that adds value for prospects, a bad landing page can significantly constrain your results.

Too often, we think about landing pages in the abstract. They’re mentioned in passing as if every marketer should know how to construct a landing page by instinct.

Unfortunately, real-world funnels aren’t that simple. Like any complex system, a landing page is only as good as its parts. The specific things you put on a landing page can vary based on the offer, your industry, and the people you want to attract. However, we’ve found that every landing page needs the below four elements in one form or another. Remember to view these tips in the context of your specific funnel and target audience.

Concise, Usable Forms

During many B2B funnel transactions, you will need to collect data from the user to take them further down the funnel. These efforts can be limited or stifled by forms that are difficult to use or unclear to the audience. Ideally, users shouldn’t need to think about forms; they should blend seamlessly into the broader landing page experience.

What exactly makes a good form? HubSpot has created a helpful list of tips, including:

Single-column design: According to design research, it’s easier for the eye to follow and progress through one column of text and fields. It can also feel overwhelming to be presented with two columns full of text and form fields.
Go from easy to hard: Putting a few simple questions at the front of a longer form will help reinforce the feeling of progress. Doing this makes visitors less likely to bounce while filling out your form, since they’ll feel they’ve already made tangible steps to finishing.
Validate entries immediately: If someone provides an invalid response to a form field – like an email address with no domain – make sure the form alerts them directly. They should not need to wait until they try to submit the form to notice and then work backward through it to identify the error.

Succinct Copy

We’ve all met someone who loves nothing more than talking about themselves. Every topic concerns what’s happening in the person’s life with little care for those around them.

No one wants to hear you wax poetic on a landing page: they simply want to know how your offer is relevant to them and what they stand to gain. Click To Tweet

The digital marketing equivalent of this is a landing page with tons of elaborate sentences and flowery phrasing about the greatness of a product or service. No one wants to hear you wax poetic on a landing page: they simply want to know how your offer is relevant to them and what they stand to gain.

That’s not to say long-form landing pages don’t work. Many B2B and B2C marketers have found success with longer, narrative-style landing pages, especially when selling a relatively new product or dealing with an audience that needs plenty of information before making a business decision.

But there’s a clear distinction between a long-form landing page and a page with too much text. Long-term testing will help you pinpoint an exact balance, but in the short term, you can reach out to trusted clients or colleagues to get quick feedback about your landing page copy. You can also use helpful online tools like the Hemingway App to see if you can make your writing more straightforward.

Social Proof

The power of social proof is well-documented and based on a simple psychological principle: people place a lot of weight on the words and experiences of others like them. Seeing that another person had a positive experience can go a long way toward convincing a prospect that your offering is right for them.

Like other parts of a landing page, the specific way you present social proof depends on the nature of the funnel and your audience. Some might like to see a talking-head-style video of a client like them speaking firsthand about how great their experience was. Others may want to look at hard data, like an ROI experienced by your previous clients.

Two quick tips for social proof: don’t go overboard. Many people are suspicious of things they see on pages designed to get them to buy or commit to something. Even if it’s true, an over-the-top client testimonial may appear inauthentic. Second, remember to offer external validation of the people you include on your testimonial page. A social profile or company website link can help visitors believe in what you’re showing.

A Multimedia Element

In 2023, “multimedia” can be defined in several ways. It could be a video, chart, graphic, animation, or even a lovely photograph depending on the specific nature of your offering and the people visiting the page. Multimedia is essential as a way to break up text on your page. It’s also valuable for visitors who may be using a mobile device or tablet and can’t spend a lot of time reading and processing text on a page.

Videos are popular for a landing page because they are easy to produce – all you need is a phone – and engaging for visitors on any device. According to marketing expert Neil Patel, it’s helpful to incorporate the video in the design of the rest of your page and track the video’s analytics closely to see how often it’s being viewed and for how long.

Final Thoughts on Key Landing Page Elements

It’s easy to conceptualize theories about landing pages and discuss ideas about what may or may not work. But for marketers who want to maximize their results, the only way to know what will lead to success is by trying and measuring different options to see which resonates most with your audience.

And remember: changes to your landing page elements or overarching strategy shouldn’t be static items you address whenever you get the time. It’s important to stay committed to frequent assessments of the success of your entire funnel, including landing page elements. By including concise copy, highly usable forms, social proof, and multimedia, you’ll be well on your way to constructing a successful funnel that drives your desired business results.

Looking for a hand with these four items or any other parts of building a landing page? Our team of specialists can help. We have many years of history assisting clients in different industries with their landing page needs. Whether you want a partner who can work with you to build a plan from the ground up or you’d simply like another set of eyes on the various components of your landing page, FunnelEnvy is ready to assist. Click here to fill out a short quiz to learn more about how we can help.

By Raj C|2023-04-05T19:53:14-07:00April 17th, 2023|Landing Pages|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 Raj C|2023-03-23T21:11:47-07:00April 3rd, 2023|Paid Media|0 Comments

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