Raj C, Author at FunnelEnvy

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So far Raj C has created 38 blog entries.

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 Raj C|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.

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

Building Your B2B Marketing Tech Stack

Digital marketing is exponentially more powerful today than the techniques used in the early days of the web. Unfortunately, with its expanded capabilities comes more complexity. There are more tools, techniques, and channels available than ever before and that can make it difficult to choose which software to use in the pursuit of your digital marketing goals.

This article outlines a basic framework for addressing this common B2B marketing issue. While we can’t recommend specific software tools universal for all businesses, the principles outlined here should get you well on your way to selecting your own set of software tools – commonly known as a “tech stack.”

Our Approach to B2B Marketing Tech Stacks

We suggest clients and prospects select two different software tools to be the foundation of their marketing: one customer relationship management (CRM) tool, and one marketing automation tool. A CRM acts as a database of information on your past, present, and future customers as well as a communication log. A marketing automation tool allows you to automate specific marketing tasks across different channels, particularly email and social media.

Why these two specific tools? Here’s the breakdown:

Core Element 1 of 2: CRM

The most basic version of a CRM is a digital business address book that also allows you to take notes. But in the last decade or so, CRM technology has come a long way. Today the decision about CRM is less about having one, and more about choosing the best one to integrate properly with the rest of your tech stack.

Today the decision about CRM is less about having one, and more about choosing the best one to integrate properly with the rest of your tech stack. Click To Tweet

Another reason we like CRMs is their importance for sales and marketing. The CRM tool acts as a “home base” for many sales reps. It’s one of the first things they check when their work begins (along with their email) and houses critical data that helps them be successful. In an optimal CRM situation, not only is this data used to help your sales team, but it can also be fed to the marketing department so they can use it to flesh out changes to buyer personas, campaign strategy, etc.

Consider our next core element regarding marketing data: a marketing automation platform.

Core Element 2 of 2: Automation Platform

While your CRM will probably be the home base for the sales team (or whoever is handling sales responsibilities at your company), your marketing automation platform will be the primary tool used by marketing.

At its most fundamental level, a marketing automation platform does exactly what it sounds like: automates your marketing. Typically, it handles tasks that would be impossible or highly arduous for a person to complete manually, including things like:

Sending out emails to an entire subscriber list or segment of a list
Indicating which campaign made a prospect aware of the company
Scoring leads to determine which ones are most likely to become customers
Gathering user data from email and website interactions to determine which elements of your marketing are most successful
Connecting all the other elements of your marketing (including a CRM) into one consistent resource your team can use

A few of the most common marketing automation tools include:

HubSpot, popular for small and medium-sized businesses and known for simple, intuitive user interfaces
Marketo, an automation software platform owned by Adobe that focuses on tracking user experiences and improving cross-channel engagement
Constant Contact, which focuses on engaging with small business clients who are interested in using email and SMS marketing

There are many different options depending on your budget and the kind of functionality you want. On which specific factors should you aim your focus? Here are a few tips to consider as you compare different marketing automations and CRM tools available for your company:

Your current workflow. The way you currently do things might favor selecting one particular automation tool or another. For example, if you’re already a Salesforce user, you’re probably much more likely to use Pardot instead of a similar tool. It’ll provide the least disruption to your current workflow, which saves money in the long run, even if it means selecting the more expensive option in the short term.
Budget. How much can you afford to spend on a new automation tool? Think about areas where you might be able to save money. HubSpot, for example, offers many different pricing options and bundles across its suite of products and services. By tailoring your purchase in this way, you can save money by eliminating services and features you don’t need.
Installation and setup. Essentially – how long does it take to go from purchase to being able to use the platform fully? While you might view this as a temporary concern, it’s still important. What if your sales and marketing teams cannot function at full capacity for weeks or even months while you are integrating new software into the company’s workflow? Decision-makers must determine if this kind of sacrifice is worth making for an automation or CRM platform.
Service and support. Once things are in place and your company can begin using the software, what happens if there is an issue or something stops working? This factor may not be obvious upfront, but it could be worth investing a little more in a higher-end option that provides better support to users.

Finally, remember that most of the major marketing automation platforms available will have their own CRM tool built-in. While it is possible to use separate tools for CRM and marketing automation, make sure they integrate well or it could create more work than necessary.

A Word on Google Analytics

No matter what kind of marketing automation platform or CRM you use, we also recommend incorporating Google Analytics into your stack. It’s one of the most popular and universally compatible tools around, especially for marketers who rely heavily on website-based interactions to generate leads. Most of the major automation platforms will easily be able to understand and integrate data from Google, which provides another valuable source for insights without complicating your current workflow.

Bringing It All Together

Marketing technology can feel complex, but it doesn’t need to be. The best way to cut through all of the noise and complexity in marketing automation and technology is to focus on your specific needs. Before you compare the various options available to meet your CRM and automation needs, a strong understanding of your target audience and how your business intends to market to them will make the search much easier.

Above all, keep things as simple as possible and as close to your current workflow as possible. Make sure to “close the loop” so that all of the different tools and platforms you use for marketing can work together to form a single, reliable set of data that will inform your strategy for attracting more leads and converting more of them to customers.

Want personalized help trying to figure out which of the many marketing software tools is best for your business? Take this quiz to see how FunnelEnvy can help ensure you’re choosing the digital marketing platforms that empower and improve your business.

By Raj C|2022-05-06T08:44:45-07:00May 16th, 2022|B2B|0 Comments

4 Simple Lead Form Optimization Tips

If your marketing campaigns were a military, lead forms would be the infantry. They are on the ground in the fight for more leads and conversions. Lead forms are the “tip of the spear” for a conversion campaign. If your forms aren’t in good shape, you’ll struggle to meet your marketing goals, putting a damper on revenue and constricting company growth.

Some optimization steps are relatively easy to implement if you want to get your forms in better shape. Starting with this low-hanging fruit is a great way to refresh a campaign that was once successful but has stopped performing to its previous level or as a foundation for reviewing a new campaign before it’s finalized for launch.

Here are four easy strategies to improve your lead forms to increase conversions:

Minimize Friction

When you think about friction, you might imagine tires on a rough road or a marble sliding down a chute. In physics, friction is the resistance a surface encounters when moving over another surface. In a lead form, “friction” is anything that stops a user from filling out your form.

How do you minimize friction? Here are a few suggestions from HubSpot, with additional insights about each point:

Remove extra navigation on the page with your form. Having a standard navigation menu makes it too easy for someone to get distracted while they are trying to fill out your lead form. Even if they don’t, why give them the temptation? Most conversion forms have either no navigation menu options or a single link or button that takes users back to the home page or previous form.
Use precise language in your form. It’s a shame to put in all the work required to attract a lead to your website, only for that person to leave your page without converting because you used confusing language that they don’t understand. Make sure all parts of your writing are clear and concise, from the body copy on your website to the form fields themselves. When in doubt, it’s always best to use fewer short words than a longer, more complicated one. You can use an online tool like Hemingway to grade your page’s written content and ensure it’s understandable for the people visiting the site.
Make forms shorter whenever possible. There shouldn’t be a single unnecessary field that prospects need to fill out to complete your form, especially if they complete it to download a resource or schedule an appointment with someone on your team.

There are many other great resources for conversion rate optimization online – check out sites like Shopify and CrazyEgg for more details about optimizing your forms and other conversion elements.

Use Multi-Step Forms

“Wait,” you might be thinking, “I thought I was supposed to keep my forms as short as possible! Doesn’t using multiple steps in a form contradict this idea?” It may seem that way at first glance. However, if you spend enough time marketing online, you’ll understand that some forms must be completed fully – there’s no way of getting around it. A common example in the ecommerce world is a customer information form that includes payment and shipping information. Another example might be setting an appointment to meet with someone on your team. You wouldn’t want the location or timing of the appointment lost because of an error or oversight on your form.

If you spend enough time marketing online, you’ll understand that some forms must be completed fully Click To Tweet

If you must present page visitors with a lengthy form, the best thing to do is break it up into multiple parts so that it doesn’t feel like a massive trudge to get through. Continuing with the example of an ecommerce transaction, you’ll typically see these form pages broken up by the various phases of the transaction: purchase info, shipping info, customer name, address, etc. This split makes it much more bearable to get through instead of having all of these forms presented simultaneously.

Include Social Proof

As you know, people are social animals. We are conditioned to do things others do so we remain members of our tribe. Millions of years ago, expulsion from your tribe due to non-conforming beliefs or actions meant you had to try to survive on your own in the wilderness. Though most of us no longer live in tribes, people still have a natural tendency to trust and value the actions of others.

That’s why social proof is so valuable in modern marketing. Buyers in the B2B space tend to be less swayed by social proof than consumers, but even the most rational, logic-driven purchasers can still be persuaded to purchase if they know others have done the same. It’s particularly beneficial to get testimonials or social proof from people who are respected figures in a field. Placing social proof on your forms is a great technique for quelling those last-minute uncertainties about finishing.

Consider Form Alternatives

At FunnelEnvy, we appreciate the classic elements of marketing that have worked consistently over the years. But we’re also big believers in looking forward and embracing cutting-edge technology. We suggest considering whether or not you even need to have a form to generate conversions at a sufficient rate. There are a few different options for replacing a form, but the most popular one comes to us thanks to AI and predictive language technology: chatbots.

Chatbots have grown increasingly common over the last decade – you’ve probably seen or interacted with one recently. The premise is that instead of filling out a standardized form, users can get customized assistance for their specific questions or challenges. Although this option isn’t feasible for everyone, some companies might even supplement an automated chatbot with a live customer service agent. But with interactivity and personalization looking like critical pillars of the next generation of marketing, it’s worth considering an automated chat program to replace a form.

According to Forrester, over 40% of American adults believe it’s important for retail companies to offer live chat. And while that statistic may be mostly regarding B2C purchases, the way someone likes to make a purchase in their personal life probably translates to how they prefer to make purchases professionally.

Besides a chatbot, other options for replacing a form might include an interactive calendar or another widget that allows a user to schedule an appointment or call. In many cases, these options are simply a more advanced version of a form – but they’re still worth considering to improve your conversion rate.

Final Thoughts on Form Optimization

You don’t always have to reinvent the wheel to improve your marketing performance. By making the simple adjustments above, you can get more page visitors to fill out your forms and move to the next stage of your funnel, which ultimately drives revenue and growth for the entire business.

If you’d like some input on optimizing your lead forms or any other part of your conversion funnel, fill out this quick questionnaire to learn more about how we might be able to help.

By Raj C|2022-04-20T12:40:33-07:00May 2nd, 2022|Conversion Rate Optimization|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.

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

Beyond SEO: Why Generating Traffic Isn’t Enough

Search engine optimization is a widely-promoted marketing discipline in part because of how impressive it looks to generate traffic increases. For marketing sites that rack up four or even five figures in unique views per month, it can be easy to get caught up in those numbers and focus on meeting certain milestones or a specific month-over-month growth rate.

The problem with having such a strong emphasis on traffic and visitors is it ignores the part of your customer journey that’s equally (if not more) important: converting all those visitors into paying clients. As impressive as it may seem when SEO helps increase monthly views by 50% or allows a page to rack up thousands of additional visits, traffic generation is meaningless unless it leads to a positive increase in revenue.

Understanding Visitor Intent

Ignoring those who accidentally visit your site, are just researching, or have no intention of buying your product or services, every person who lands on your page is at a particular step in their purchasing process. Their current place in the process will govern their intent.

According to McKinsey, there are six specific customer journeys that B2B marketers should be most concerned with: identifying products or services that meet a need, selecting a supplier for an initial purchase, co-developing products with a supplier, dealing with an unexpected event, using and servicing a product, and reordering familiar products or services.

You can break down these individual journeys into sub-steps that take a prospect from start to finish. As you evaluate elements of your website and marketing campaigns, remember to view them through the scope of these steps.

For example, the first part of identifying products or services that meet a need is knowing what’s out there. A B2B company can ensure its brand is identified during this step in several ways, from in-person promotion to search engine optimization based on relevant keywords. The specific methods you use to meet prospects at this point in the journey aren’t as important as addressing the consumer where they are without attempting to push them along the journey faster. Make sure to map your marketing efforts to these steps to maximize results.

Consider Your Conversion Rate

Besides the amount of traffic you generate, you’ll want to consider your conversion rate. While conversion rate is impacted by traffic generation, it’s a separate metric that helps you understand both your marketing efficiency and the quality of your traffic.

HubSpot provides a simple explanation for calculating conversion rate: divide the number of conversions by the total number of visitors, then multiply by 100 for a percentage. If you receive 500 visitors and 25 of them convert, you have a 5% conversion rate.

While conversion rate is impacted by traffic generation, it’s a separate metric that helps you understand both your marketing efficiency and the quality of your traffic. Click To Tweet

How do you go about improving your conversion rate? It varies greatly depending on what you’re selling, but there are a few general places you can start:

Blog. Posts on your site should be informative and well-written. If your blog is a thinly-veiled digital sales pamphlet for your products or services, prospects will catch on quickly and stop reading your posts for objective information and advice.
Forms and buttons. Experiment with different colors, fonts, sizes, etc., until you find one that works best to encourage visitors.
Social proof. This category is broad, so you may want to test several different elements. Consider testimonials, client interviews, security badges, and other indicators that you are a trustworthy vendor.
Facilitating communication. One critical element of marketing for B2B purchasers is a way to get in touch with an actual person from the vendors they’re considering. If the form you’re optimizing is designed for this purpose, remember to let users know they’ll be able to schedule a call or meeting with a real person.

Again, these are a few recommendations based on the general principles of B2B marketing. You should adapt and apply them in a way that makes sense for your specific brand and the audience for which you’ve designed it.

Segment Your Site Effectively

Once you’ve spent some time analyzing visitor intent, you can start to work on addressing the top needs of the most relevant traffic that visits your website.

In a B2B purchasing context, one of the things prospects will seek most is education. This is particularly true for newer clients who may not have been through several purchasing cycles like industry veterans. One of the most common ways companies provide relevant education to prospects is through consistent blog updates, where they can share news and developments that matter to buyers. This can also be accomplished through a longer-form medium, like reports, white papers, ebooks, etc.

Product demos and tests are other considerations – especially for software companies. Before committing a significant amount of their budget to a tool or application, buyers will want to see what it looks like while in use – possibly even use it themselves.

The desire for a test run in the world of SaaS startups facilitated the creation of the “freemium” pricing model. Users are given free access to a limited version of the tool or product, eventually encouraging them to move to a paid plan. B2B freemium models are typically more complex and dynamic – they might involve multiple meetings or presentations and test runs.

For best results, treat these segments like any other conversion element on your website and consistently work on optimizing them. Do prospects seem more receptive to learning from short-form blog posts on your site or longer white papers emailed to them directly? When people accessing your page are looking to connect with someone, is it better to list the phone number or create a pop-in window that allows users to click to schedule a call?

These are the kinds of questions you need to ask constantly instead of solely focusing on attracting traffic that may or may not be interested in your offering.

Final Thoughts on Traffic vs. Conversions

Nothing written here is intended to minimize the importance of generating traffic for successful B2B marketing optimization. Without visitors on your site, you’ll struggle to meet your marketing and sales targets, even if you have a finely-tuned digital experience that helps your prospects deal with all their relevant issues and concerns.

Focusing on traffic and SEO only becomes a problem when it takes away from other crucial parts of your marketing plan. Ignoring everything that happens after someone lands on your site will decrease your conversion rate in the long run. Even if you generate more traffic with this approach, it’ll likely be little more than a vanity metric if your site doesn’t help visitors meet their goals.

As a provider of services or products for other businesses, failing to improve your conversion rate by optimizing your on-site experience can lead to severe problems meeting growth and revenue targets. If you’re looking for help from a team of conversion rate optimization specialists with experience making funnels more efficient and improving marketing efforts, fill out this brief questionnaire so we can learn more about how best to serve your needs.

By Raj C|2022-03-22T12:59:15-07:00April 4th, 2022|Conversion Rate Optimization|0 Comments

Getting the Most Out of Paid Media Spend in 2022

For marketers looking to reach a specific audience quickly, few methods can achieve results like paid advertising. By the year 2023, video ad spending on social networks in the U.S. is projected to surpass $28 billion, according to HootSuite. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are considered supremely valuable by corporate marketers looking to quickly get in front of the right people – even if they haven’t addressed that audience previously. Paid ads have also been a boon for small local businesses, targeting their campaigns only within a given geographic region.

However, marketers have seen the price of ads on major social platforms – particularly Facebook and Instagram – increase in recent years. Part of this is a result of the pandemic of 2020, which caused an initial reduction in paid media prices due to reduced spending that later corrected after advertisers realized the new importance of digital reach. Additional pressure on Facebook ads has come as a result of high-profile moves by Apple to restrict tracking and cookies on its devices, a shift popular with many consumers but problematic for advertisers and their networks. Executives at Meta said Apple’s privacy changes alone could cost the company $10 billion in revenue.

The increased competitiveness in the world of paid ads is why it’s more important than ever before to maximize return on ad spend (ROAS). We’ll cover some tips to optimize your paid media lead generation campaigns in this post.

Evaluate the Conversion Experience First

When looking to improve the performance of their paid ads, many marketers make the mistake of bringing in more leads. But in many cases, a higher quantity of traffic doesn’t always translate to a higher quantity of leads. Even if it does, that doesn’t always mean the leads will be of good quality.

Before you dump more ad money into reaching a wider audience, consider the elements of the conversion experience at every step of the campaign. This includes:

Form fields
Button design and placement
Form and button copy
Multimedia elements
Social proof

Even the smallest tweak might have an unexpectedly large impact on your conversion rate. Remember to perform proper A/B testing on each of these elements so that you can use accurate and relevant data to understand what your audience wants.

Before you dump more ad money into reaching a wider audience, consider the elements of the conversion experience at every step of the campaign. Click To Tweet

Use Closed-Loop Analytics

Another common mistake we see made by marketers is evaluating prospects’ actions in a vacuum. They think only about how someone engages with one specific set of social media or video advertisements. The problem with this approach is it ignores all of the other behaviors in different parts of their customer journey. This data is ripe to be used in the creation of more effective marketing. Gaining a full picture of prospect behavior is especially important in the B2B space, where buyers have many different agendas and priorities to consider as they evaluate purchasing options.

To avoid this shallow view of the prospect, it’s important to “close the loop” with your marketing. That means you should integrate all the tools you use in your marketing to share data – even if they aren’t directly involved in the campaign where this data is being applied.

We believe Google Analytics is one of the most powerful tools for digital marketing because of its universal nature. It may not be as sophisticated as newer tools, but it’s compatible with so many different kinds of marketing tech that it can be a valuable foundation for your stack. It’s also reliable – there’s no concern about the company folding overnight and leaving clients high and dry.

For best results, consider going beyond just linking Google Analytics to your marketing tools and connecting everything you possibly can, from your eCommerce platforms to your CRM, your website CMS, and other tools. It won’t be possible to integrate everything, but the more data you can share, the better you’ll be able to calibrate paid media and other marketing campaigns.

Remember, closing the loop isn’t always just about data. Bringing together your sales and marketing teams to compare notes on what does and doesn’t work is a great way to ensure that your company’s approach to business development isn’t being harmed by the “silo” effect – where different departments don’t communicate. The collective efforts of sales and marketing teams looking to improve the selling process are sometimes referred to as sales enablement. For more on sales enablement, check out this helpful guide from HubSpot.

Test Ad Creative

One of the final considerations for maximizing your paid media spend is ad creative. We typically advise our clients to consider other elements of their campaigns first, especially if the creative in question has been successful in the past. But if you’ve looked elsewhere and felt that the ad could use a refresh, changing its visual elements and text may be a wise choice.

The ad’s creative elements are particularly easy to evaluate through A/B testing. It’s relatively simple to break down the ad into different components, change each one, and see which one offers the most impact. The typical elements of a paid ad include a main image, some ad copy, a headline, and a call-to-action button. Check out the below example from Shopify:

In this example, elements you might evaluate through A/B testing include the text (currently describing Google algorithm updates), the button CTA, the image, and the title next to the button. Isolating each of these elements could help you determine which version works the best. Until you’ve run experiments on each different part of the ad, it’s impossible to tell what needs to be improved and what should stay the same for optimal performance. You may not need to perform testing this extensively for every ad in your campaign, but it can help troubleshoot those that fail to perform or see performance levels drop off significantly.

Final Thoughts on Optimizing Paid Media in 2022

One of the big challenges of paid advertising for B2B companies is the nature of the transaction. Business purchases tend to be larger, more complex, and take more time to evaluate than a consumer buying something for personal use at home. B2B buyers often don’t have sole authority the way consumers do, and many are naturally suspicious of companies that use traditional sales tactics or ad campaigns with promises that seem too good to be true.

That doesn’t mean paid ad campaigns can’t be effective for B2B marketers, though. You can still attract people to your brand by promoting informative content assets or other tools that provide actual value to your audience. The advertising landscape is more competitive than ever before, which is why it’s vital to maximize the dollars invested into paid placements. By fine-tuning your conversion experience, sharing data, and thoroughly A/B testing, you can give your business a much better chance at using paid media to bring in leads that will drive the continued growth of the organization.

By Raj C|2022-03-09T10:26:47-08:00March 21st, 2022|Analytics|0 Comments

Using Content in Your B2B Funnel

In 2022, the importance of content in B2B marketing is well-understood. According to HubSpot’s 2021 edition of their annual marketing report, over 80% of B2B marketers actively use content marketing in their strategy.

Understanding that content works isn’t typically the big challenge for B2B marketers. The challenging part is creating the right content and serving it to prospects at the right stage in their customer journey. Many well-meaning marketers have been unsuccessful with their content marketing efforts simply because they failed to calibrate their efforts towards the right audience properly.

In this article, we’ll talk more about the importance of aligning content with your customer journey and some general tips on getting started.

Understanding User Intent Throughout the Funnel

The best thing you can do to make content successful is to make it helpful. And before you can create useful content, you have to know what kind of help site visitors are trying to find. There’s a massive difference between what might help someone who is still trying to pinpoint their exact needs and what might help someone ready to buy and shopping around for the best price.

Typically, B2B marketing content can be divided into three categories: top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, and bottom of the funnel.

Prospects at the top of the funnel may not even be aware they have an issue. They may or may not be actively shopping for a solution to some kind of challenge in their workplace. Sharing knowledge and education is key here – a hard sell will turn off prospects at the top of the funnel since they may not even be ready to start shopping for the kind of solution you offer.

In the middle of the funnel, people are aware of an issue and are researching potential remedies but may not have settled on one particular solution. They’ve learned a bit about their challenge but still need more information. However, they are ready to start absorbing information about a solution they might purchase – whether that’s a piece of software, a service, or another type of product that fits their needs. Content still shouldn’t be overly sales-y, but it can start to point users toward a product or service that can help. One example of helpful mid-funnel content is comparing different solutions to explain features and differences.

At the bottom of the funnel, prospects are well-educated and have a strong understanding of the problems they are facing. They might even have some experience making a similar kind of purchase in the past. In this stage, the most significant concerns are regarding price and logistics – how much will they be paying, and how will the payments work? How will the installation of the product or software work? If your content can ease these logistical concerns, it will be valuable to those reading it. This kind of content is typically highly targeted to fit buyers’ needs at this stage of the journey.

What Kind of Content Should You Create?

Another more sophisticated question marketers ask about their content marketing campaigns is the ideal content they should create. There are a few classic examples in today’s B2B content marketing era:

Blog posts you’d regularly publish on your company website. These typically cover a handful of topics that people at the company know best, often tied into the business offering.
Explainer videos you publish on YouTube or a company’s website or blog. These are great for helping to break down advanced concepts into more digestible pieces.
Infographics combine text and graphic education in a slick visual package. They’re great for social media and are easily shareable. These factors make them great for when buyers need to send information to others within their company or share to their own feeds.

These are just a few common kinds of content. Others include podcasts, interviews, emails, and white papers. What kind is ideal for your business? There’s no right or wrong answer. The best way to find out is to create a few different types and run experiments to see which ones resonate the best with your audience. Speaking of experiments…

Support Iteration of Content Plans with Data

It’s easy to plan your content in a vacuum and make assumptions about what will work best. This is especially true of seasoned veterans of a specific industry who have spent years or even decades addressing customers’ needs. However, this strategy is often a recipe for content that doesn’t resonate with your target audience.

It may take longer, but changing one variable per experiment is the only way to truly zero in on your best type of content. Click To Tweet

A much better way to approach planning, creating, and distributing your marketing content is through testing and experimentation. If you’re starting from scratch, create three or four types of content covering different topics and see which one performs best.

Remember, the key here is to change one variable at a time to understand which factors drive results. It may take longer, but changing one variable per experiment is the only way to truly zero in on your best type of content.

Always Optimize for Value

At the end of the day, B2B marketing comes down to the amount of value you can provide for the people consuming your content and may be interested in your offer. This isn’t always the same as B2C marketing, where you can use techniques that play to people’s emotions and human desires. B2B content marketing needs to have a sharp focus on helping people achieve their professional goals.

But to do that, you must first understand those goals. In other words: if you want to master content, you first need to become a master of your target audience’s desires. Meeting these desires is the overarching goal of everything you do: every piece of content, social media post created, and email sent out to your list should be with the intent of adding value and helping your audience overcome challenges.

It’s not enough to simply produce content and push it out, hoping it will work with the desired effects. You must take the time to study the results, think about what they mean, and then work on adjusting your content plan based on your interpretation of that data. Increasing your pace of production might help, but it might also lead to a lot of spinning wheels and wasted effort by your content team.

Instead of blindly reaching around to hit what works for your audience, take a more calculated B2B content marketing approach. Match your content to user intent based on where they are in the funnel, take time to understand what they want from content and pay close attention to your analytics. Use that data to determine which kinds of content you should expand on and which kinds you may want to scrap.

If you need help with conversion rate optimization (CRO) or any other part of your B2B funnel, fill out this quick form to see how we can best help you optimize your marketing.

By Raj C|2022-02-23T09:56:43-08:00March 7th, 2022|The Funnel|0 Comments

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