Not having a good marketing strategy means you’re just throwing your money away. How can you turn things around and begin converting potential leads into life long customers?
Why Your Marketing Isn’t Working
Everyone does marketing, but few get the results they are looking for. Post on social media, create ads, have a website, do SEO… We do all the right things, yet our marketing continues to fall flat. Why? For many, it’s because their marketing lacks an overarching strategy and is instead a collection of piecemeal practices of things we are “supposed” to be doing.
So how does one create an overarching strategy? If it’s as simple as that, why doesn’t everyone do it? Well the answer is that even marketers get lost in the trees and miss the whole forest. We get so engrossed in the tactics that we forget about the strategy.
But for people who didn’t go to school to learn about marketing, how do you even create an effective strategy in the first place?
There are a few key components to a marketing strategy that everyone needs to take into consideration: your product, your target market, and your marketing funnel. For this post, I’ll be focusing on the marketing funnel and how it is the core of the marketing strategy and where most people get lost.
Understanding the Strategy Behind the Marketing Funnel
A marketing funnel is the strategy or process of taking someone who doesn’t know you exist and converting them into a paid client through incremental steps. Some funnels are larger or more direct than others, but it is an important concept to keep in mind for every piece of marketing you do.
An example of a fully developed marketing funnel would be the writing of a blog post or article, with content relevant to your target market, and then sharing it onto your website. Upon completing the article, a popup would ask the reader for their email address in exchange for more information pertaining to the subject of the article. By providing you with their email address, the reader is putting themselves on your mailing list. Now you’ve begun to build a mailing list with potential customers that are engaged and interested in what you do and the content you create. If you send out an email promotion about a new product, they are more likely to open the email because they willingly signed up for updates and information about your business. They think it sounds like a good deal and make a purchase. You’ve successfully converted a potential customer, and it all started with a single article about something tangentially related to the product they purchased.
What would this look like if you missed a step and didn’t take the marketing funnel into consideration? Let’s say we didn’t have the email capture offering them more content that interests them. You would have never grown your mailing list with interested customers and you would have no one to send out offers to.
How about if you posted the content directly to your social media with no call to action or links to pages on your site. Same difference. No going to your website, no entering their email address, no purchase.
Why Does the Content Marketing Funnel Work?
The reason this works is because of the incremental conversions down the marketing funnel. You took someone who didn’t even know you existed and exposed them to your brand through interesting content they were looking for. You earned their email address by writing a good article and providing them with free information. You then created value and offered something that they found worth the price of their email.
The best part of all of this is that the results are easily measurable, so you know what is working and what isn’t. You can look at your website analytics and see how many people looked at your article. If the number of people that read it is low, then you either didn’t Search Engine Optimize the article properly (SEO), or you didn’t share it to the relevant social media platforms that your target customers frequent.
If a lot of people read the article, but no one shared their email address, then it’s possible that your offer at the end of the article simply was not good enough. If you’ve managed to build a large mailing list, but hardly any of them are opening your emails, then it’s possible you’re sending out too many emails (spam) or your subject lines fail to capture their attention. If people open your emails but no one makes any purchases, maybe you aren’t attracting the right people with your articles.
Sometimes the issue may even be technical and people simply aren’t being sent to the right pages. Always test your links and double check your emails before sending them out to customers.
Every step is measurable, which allows you to find the weak link of your marketing funnel. If you weren’t directing people in an organized manner, you wouldn’t be able to measure these things and make adjustments to do a better job. If you can create a funnel that successfully converts people into clients, then all you have to do is spend some advertising money to get more people into the top of your marketing funnel and you will confidently get more sales.
Some marketing funnels can be as short as putting an ad out for one of your products. Things to measure for this funnel could be how many people see the ad per dollar spent, how many people who saw the ad clicked on it, and how many people who clicked on it actually went through with the purchase. This way you can adjust where you are putting the ad, the content of the ad, the offer, and anything else to optimize performance.
Conclusion
Marketing funnels are an extremely important concept for marketers and it is how marketing campaigns are organized. Implementing multiple, strong funnels can greatly increase your sales and create a huge return on investment on your marketing budget.
For more information or to have Star Fox Media help you design your own marketing funnel, visit www.starfox.media or email us at info@starfox.media
