RE-THINK YOUR FUNNEL MARKETING STRATEGY: THE …€¦ · FIXING YOUR FUNNEL RE-THINK YOUR FUNNEL...

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THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO TACTICS FOR FIXING YOUR FUNNEL

RE-THINK YOUR FUNNEL MARKETING STRATEGY:

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO TACTICS FOR FIXING YOUR FUNNEL

RE-THINK YOUR FUNNEL MARKETING STRATEGY:

A marketing strategy that fits your funnel is crucial in helping your buyers move

forward in their decision process. By creating strategic content and campaigns

for different stages of the buyer’s journey, you are more likely to be the brand of

choice when it comes time for your buyers to make their final decision.

ASSESS AND ADJUST

The first step in determining if there is a problem with your funnel is assessing

your funnel performance. There are three key places you should look for

benchmark data to determine where your business may be lagging:

Industry Benchmarks

Internal Benchmarks

Competitors’ Benchmarks

In this guide, we’ll give you the industry numbers you need to begin the

assessment of your funnel. We will also provide the necessary tactics to help you

boost your performance for full funnel optimization once you determine where

your funnel may be leaking.

BOOST YOUR PERFORMANCE FOR FULL FUNNEL OPTIMIZATION

3 RE-THINK YOUR FUNNEL MARKETING STRATEGY: THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO TACTICS FOR FIXING YOUR FUNNEL

Top of Funnel

Website Visitors ...................................................................................................

Lead Conversion Rate ........................................................................................

Middle of Funnel

MQLs to Opportunities ....................................................................................

Return Visitors ......................................................................................................

Email Marketing ...................................................................................................

Bottom of Funnel

Qualified Opportunity-to-Customer Conversion Rate ..........................

Cost per Customer Acquisition ......................................................................

Top of Funnel

Blog ...........................................................................................................................

High-Value Offer Content .................................................................................

Bridging the Gap in the Funnel: Your Website

A Lead Generator..................................................................................................

A Lead Nurturer ...................................................................................................

Middle of Funnel

Personalization .....................................................................................................

Marketing Automation ......................................................................................

Remarketing ..........................................................................................................

Email Marketing ...................................................................................................

Bottom of Funnel

Sales Enablement ................................................................................................

CRM Integration ...................................................................................................

What’s Inside This Guide?TACTICS

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ASSESSMENT

3


Assessment


Your business’s website acts as your digital hub, promoting and

representing your brand and all of its offerings. As you focus on

generating leads and new business, the number of visitors to your

website represents an important KPI (Key Performance Indicator) for

your marketing strategy.

How do you stack up against your industry peers?

MONTHLY VISITORS BY INDUSTRY

Source: Google Analytics

TOP OF FUNNEL

Website Visitors

Business & Industrial 6,404 6,317

Computers & Electronics 6,618 6,624

Finance 6,785 6,854

Food & Drink 6,335 6,331

Education 6,814 6,726

Science 6,556 6,607

Shopping 6,579 6,623

Travel 6,546 6,536

AVERAGE MEDIAN


To generate leads, you may be running focused campaigns through

channels like Paid Search, Paid Social, or a targeted media placement

campaign. One of the key metrics you’ll be watching is your conversion

rate: the percentage of website visitors who meet your desired goal.Lead Conversion Rate

Professional or Financial Services

Media or Publishing

Other

Education or Healthcare

Software/SaaS

Technology Equipment or Hardware

Manufacturing or Packaged Goods

Travel or Hospitality

Retail or Ecommerce

Non-profit

10%

10%

8%

8%

7%

5%

4%

4%

3%

2%

Source: MarketingSherpa

AVERAGE CONVERSION RATE SITS BETWEEN 5-10%.

How does your campaign compare?


Generating prospects is one thing; converting them to an opportunity is

another. Nurturing your leads who show buying intent—commonly called

marketing-qualified leads (MQLs)—to real opportunities is a crucial

metric at the middle of the funnel.

According to an analysis of hundreds of B2B companies by Salesforce,

the average company converts 13% of its MQLs to opportunities

MIDDLE OF FUNNEL

MQLs to Opportunities

Source: Salesforce

13%AVERAGE COMPANYCONVERTS

OF ITS MQLS TO OPPORTUNITIES


Nurturing potential customers requires bringing them back to your site.

By monitoring your Return Visitor Rate (RVR), you can keep track of

how well your marketing efforts “stick.”

While RVR may vary across industries, many market research firms

recommend staying above 30%.

Return Visitors

Source: MarketingSherpa

30%MARKET RESEARCH FIRMS RECOMMEND STAYING ABOVE

FOR YOUR RETURNVISITOR RATE


Email marketing is arguably one of the most efficient ways to

communicate and nurture leads to convert. To measure the efficacy

of your emails, you’ll want to look primarily at open rates and click-through rates. Compare your performance to your industry peers.

OPEN RATES

Email Marketing

Source: Silverpop, 2016 Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark Study

Bank & Financial Services

Computer Software & Online Services

Corporate Services

Hospitals, Healthcare & Biotech

Insurance

Marketing Agencies & Services

Nonprofits, Associations & Government

Real Estate, Construction & Building Products

Schools & Education

23.3%

20.8%

23.0%

26.1%

27.5%

18.2%

26.4%

25.6%

30.9%

46.5%

39.8%

41.9%

49.4%

50.2%

37.4%

43.1%

41.6%

58.7%

18.7%

17.4%

20.3%

23.3%

24.4%

13.6%

23.8%

23.4%

27.3%

7.8%

7.5%

9.1%

8.1%

10.2%

6.5%

14.4%

13.7%

8.4%

MEANUNIQUE OPEN RATE BY INDUSTRY MEDIAN TOPQUARTILE

BOTTOMQUARTILE


CLICK–THROUGH RATES

Email Marketing

Source: Silverpop, 2016 Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark Study

Bank & Financial Services

Computer Software & Online Services

Corporate Services

Hospitals, Healthcare & Biotech

Insurance

Marketing Agencies & Services

Nonprofits, Associations & Government

Real Estate, Construction & Building Products

Schools & Education

3.2%

2.7%

3.4%

3.5%

3.6%

2.4%

5.3%

3.6%

4.3%

9.4%

8.3%

10.0%

10.2%

10.9%

7.4%

12.3%

8.6%

13.1%

1.4%

1.0%

1.6%

1.6%

1.4%

1.0%

4.0%

2.5%

1.8%

0.1%

0.2%

0.2%

0.2%

0.1%

0.2%

0.7%

0.6%

0.2%

MEANUNIQUE CLICK-THROUGH RATE BY INDUSTRY MEDIAN TOPQUARTILE

BOTTOMQUARTILE


BOTTOM OF FUNNEL

Qualified Opportunity- to-Customer Conversion Rate

As your qualified leads enter the bottom of the funnel, your sales team

should be closing, closing, closing.

But how well are they performing?

A 2014 report by the Aberdeen Group shows that the average sales

team achieves a 29% close-win rate on all qualified opportunities.

Source: Abedeen Group

29%THE AVERAGE SALES TEAM ACHIEVES A

CLOSE-WIN RATE ON ALL QUALIFIED OPPORTUNITIES


Cost per Customer Acquisition

Once you convert an opportunity to a real-life customer, you’ll want to

keep a close eye on the costs spent to acquire that customer. In general,

check your costs at least twice a year and after every big campaign.

While specific costs range too wildly to provide accurate benchmarks,

the general rule of thumb is that the lifetime value (LTV) of your

customers should be at least three times your cost to acquire customers

(CAC).

For example, if your average LTV is $3,000, then your CAC should be

roughly $1,000 or less.

Source: Geckoboard and Klipfolio


Tactics


Top of FunnelFILLING THE FUNNEL

Stop right here if your Top of Funnel Assessment revealed gaps in your

strategy.

For 80% of marketers1, lead generation is the number one goal for 2016.

If you find yourself in that group, then you owe it to yourself to explore

new tactics and new perspectives for expanding your reach and drawing

prospects to your pipeline.

Blog

Even with platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook dominating the

ways in which people consume content, blogs still play a significant role in

your top-of-the-funnel strategy.

As of 2016, 52% of marketers rank blogs as the most critical component

of their content marketing success1. That number shouldn’t surprise you.

Blogs are owned content, meaning all the benefits belong to you—rather

than sharing them with third-party social media sites.

With each post you publish, you’re building search engine equity for your

brand. Google and the like index those pages, rank your site higher, and

provide more opportunities for you to be found by prospects. Your efforts

result in higher quality leads: Organic search engine leads have a 14.6%

close rate when compared to outbound leads of only 1.7%2.

“CLIENT SPOTLIGHT” Horizon Beverage Shares Thought Leadership through

its “Education & Expertise” Blog


High-Value Offer Content

According to Demand Gen, 61% of B2B buyers select vendors who create

content that meet the buyers’ needs at each stage of their decision

process3. Creating high-value offer content is not only crucial to capture

leads at the top of the funnel, it also helps your potential buyers identify

you as a respected brand.

Think about the questions potential prospects are hoping to answer

during these early buying stages. Maybe they’re asking:

What’s new in the market?

What should I do to improve my position and business?

Why are things not working as well as I hoped?

Your job, in turn, is to answer these questions with valuable, research-

driven insights that reflect your brand’s core values. After that, you

simply set up a slick landing page and easy-to-use lead capture form.

Once a user submits, you provide the content. They receive the right

research, and you receive a new prospect.

Types of Content to Offer:

1. On-demand Webinars

2. Survey Reports

3. Assessments

4. Research Findings

5. Interactive Tools

1Content Institute’s B2B Content Marketing 2017 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends

2NewsCred 50 Stats You Need to Know About Content Marketing

3Demand Gen 2014 B2B Buyer Behavior Survey


Bridging the Gap in the Funnel: Your Website

A Lead GeneratorYour website still ranks as the top channel for driving leads1. As the digital

store front of your business, your website should educate and attract users

to your brand, provide details around your solutions and offers, and then

prompt those users to connect with you—either via lead capture form,

general email inquiry, or over the phone.

A Lead NurturerBut just because your website has captured the lead doesn’t make its job

complete. Your website should act as a hub of useful content for all stages

of the buyer’s journey to address the needs and pain points as prospects

get more serious about considering your business.

We’ll discuss more about middle-funnel tactics in the next section, but

most of our advice requires an efficient and flexible website made for all

stages of the buyer’s journey. If your website is only set up to capture and

not nurture prospects, your website is only doing half its job.

It may be time for a new strategy and redesigned site.

Before you flip the page to learn how to address weaknesses in the middle

of your sales funnel, let’s discuss the elephant in the room: your website.

Your website is more than a tactic—it’s a platform. And as such, it lives in

this nebulous state in the funnel. It’s not 100% top of funnel, but it’s not

completely middle or bottom either.

In truth, your website’s job changes based on the context of your

prospects’ position in the funnel. When it’s designed right, your website

can adapt on the fly to meet the needs of your users.

1eMarketer The State of Lead Capture in 2016

16


Middle of FunnelTHE SAGGY MIDDLE

Has the middle of your funnel grown a little saggy? As you cast your net

out wider to capture new leads, you risk snagging a few undeveloped

leads. But this is true of most organizations: About 50% of leads

considered qualified by sales are not ready to make a purchase1. They

need to be nurtured.

If that’s the case for you, you’re not alone—66% of marketers rank lead

nurturing as their biggest goal for 20172.

Below we offer a few ideas on how to cinch that saggy middle for a lean

and efficient marketing funnel.

Personalization

Boston Digital’s mantra, when it comes to personalization, is simple:

“Talk to me like you know me.”

At its core, personalization is about segmenting your audience into

personas based on data points, and then serving content that address the

needs of that persona at different stages along the buyer’s journey.

At the middle of the funnel, personalization can be the difference between

a cold, distant lead, who feels your company doesn’t really know them,

and a warm, close lead, who identifies with your brand because you have

demonstrated your understanding of that particular lead’s needs.

Demand Metric reports that 78% of CMOs3 believe personalized content

is “the future of marketing.” CMOs have a right to be optimistic. Strong

personalization strategies and tools result in:4

More conversions

Higher user engagement

Better lead generation

Increased customer lifetime value and loyalty

Yet, only 19% of businesses use it5. The reason? Personalization strategies are hard.

The data needed, the segmenting required, and the content strategy

necessary to bring it all together require a team of strategists who deeply

understand personalization.

READ BOSTON DIGITAL’S

PERSONALIZATION SERIES.


Remarketing

As new leads enter your funnel, a remarketing strategy can help nurture

leads by providing targeted messages based on known profile data and

user behavior. Unlike email nurture campaigns, remarketing enables you

to target users across multiple channels—from Facebook, LinkedIn, and

Twitter to the entirety of the Google Display Network, which accounts

for roughly 90% of Internet users worldwide7.

The goal of a strong nurture program that puts your brand in the

spotlight for potential prospects is to surround them with messaging.

If a user can only access your content through one channel (e.g.,

email), then you’re missing out—something your competitors may take

advantage of.

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation platforms (MAPs) have become an essential tool in

any business’s marketing stack. More than 70% of businesses6 are using

a MAP to automate and streamline marketing tactics, especially when it

comes to nurturing prospects through the middle of the sales funnel.

Marketing automation can help marketing teams:

1. Segment audiences in real time according to profile data and user

behavior

2. Save time by automating repetitive and predictable tasks such as

welcome emails, lead scoring, communications with sales, and more.

3. Create detailed reports across all your marketing channels,

including your website, email, social media, paid media, etc.

4. Warm up cold leads through segmented and personalized email

drips, promoting content and offers to re-engage leads, and trigger

notification thresholds when leads signal they’re ready to talk.

LEARN MORE ABOUT MARKETING

AUTOMATION WITH BOSTON

DIGITAL’S INFOGRAPHIC.

y our A D

REMARKETING


“CLIENT SPOTLIGHT”

Five Start Senior Living Retargets Users Who Have Downloaded an

Ebook to Schedule a Tour of a Community Near Them.

Email Marketing

Perhaps one of the most reliable channels for communicating with

prospects, email marketing continues to drive success by connecting

with leads through targeted messaging. For today’s marketers, 91%

believe email7 is their most important channel for communicating and

distributing content to their contacts.

Why? Because email is truly a personalized communication channel.

While social media channels offer key insights into their users in general,

email provides instant access to the individual. Through advanced

segmentation, marketers can target users at the individual level if need

be.

Moreover, email is a reflection of trust. A lead offers his or her email

address to your business for a reason—to access content, to use a

tool, or to sample a product. Regardless of the reason, an implicit pact

is made between buyer and brand, and the messages you send are

reflective of the trust you’ve earned. Your messages are therefore more

likely to be clicked and read, to be shared, and to result in purchases8.

When done correctly, remarketing as a means of lead nurturing can be

just as targeted and personalized as email marketing. You can build

highly segmented lists and send specific messaging to users across the

web depending on your goals and the user’s known data.

1Gleanster Measuring the Impact of Lead Nurturing on the Sales Pipeline2Content Institute B2B Content Marketing 2017 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends 3Demand Metric Content Marketing Infographic4eMarketer September 2016 Personalization Roundup5Forbes The Key To Personalization Is Data6Aberdeen Group State of Marketing Automation 2014: Processes that Produce7WordStream 10 Remarketing Facts to Make You Rethink Your Entire PPC Strategy

8Campaign Monitor 70 email marketing stats every marketer should know


Bottom of FunnelPERFECTING THE SHORT GAME

In golf, you can have the best drive of your life, but you’ll still end up with

a double bogey if you can’t putt the ball. The same is true in sales.

No matter how well your lead generation programs attract a new

audience, or how efficient your lead nurturing strategy warms those cold

leads, if you’re not prepared at the bottom of the funnel, you’ll still lose

the sale.

In this final section, let’s cover the key tactics for perfecting your short

game and closing the deal.

Sales Enablement

First, let’s start with a definition, as sales enablement is often considered

different things to different people.

“Sales enablement is the strategic process to equip all client-facing employees with the tools, knowledge, and content to create valuable conversations with customer stakeholders while improving the return on investment.”

With this definition in mind, you probably guessed correctly that sales

enablement is something you should consider at all stages of the

buyer’s/sales journey—not just here at the bottom.

But more often than not, most companies discover a flaw in their system

when it comes down to closing the deal. Usually, after a lost deal, the

team will perform a post-mortem and try to figure out what killed it, and

it’s at that point in the conversation that you’ll wish you had a strong

sales enablement strategy.


To do it right, your sales enablement strategy must include:

1. An integration of CRM, marketing automation, and sales

enablement platforms

2. Buyer/customer persona playbooks used across the organization—

not just with sales

3. Content mapped across the buyer’s journey and each persona

4. Accessible content across all devices—no matter where you are

5. Measuring success through attribution

CRM Integration

If your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system is just a tool

for storing customer information and is not integrated into your website,

you’re doing yourself an injustice.

A disparate setup means:

Your CRM data is never fully up-to-date

You waste precious time exporting data from the site and into your

CRM

You have to worry about human error affecting your data

You miss out on the automated tools that keep you abreast of all

pertinent lead information

True integration doesn’t just mean connecting your web forms to your

CRM database. With a well-integrated system, your sales team can:

Segment leads based on known data

Grade and prioritize leads

Nurture leads and monitor results

Reach out to leads instantly with no delays

Optimize Your Funnel

Aligning your funnel marketing strategy with your buyer’s journey will

help ensure leads continue to flow unimpeded from awareness through

decision. Address their needs through your funnel marketing strategy,

and make their choice an easy one.

Want to discuss your current funnel

marketing strategy and ways to improve it?

Contact (617) 241-7977

About Boston DigitalWe are Boston DigitalWe’re a tribe of tech and marketing fanatics helping brands find their Digital Mojo. We’re driven by untapped insights, high-tech experiences, and outcome-driven design to crush your marketing goals.

What is Digital Mojo?Digital Mojo is that special something that sets your brand apart. It’s the lens that all experiences, content and creative are developed through, ultimately connecting your brand to the people who need it most.

Our BeliefYour website is indistinguishable from your brand identity. It lives at the foundation of your digital ecosystem, so it’s the center of our attention. Digital excellence starts with a world-class website and catches fire with brilliant digital marketing.

For more information or to schedule a FREE consultation

Call (617) 241-7977 or visit bostondigital.com

SOME OF OUR CLIENTS

529 Main Street, Suite 212 | Charlestown, MA 02129 | BostonDigital.com

RE-THINK YOUR FUNNEL MARKETING STRATEGY: THE …€¦ · FIXING YOUR FUNNEL RE-THINK YOUR FUNNEL...

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