#Conversion #ConversionFunnel #Marketing
Conversion funnels drive website revenue growth by guiding your prospects in their buyer’s journey from a stranger to a visitor to a lead and ultimately to a customer.
Regardless of whether your company consummates sales 100% online or generates opportunities for your sales team, conversion funnel marketing becomes a significant part of your growth engine in a digitally transformed world.
In this article, we’ll look at how you can improve the marketing results you get from your conversion funnels.
Optimizing Your Conversion Funnel Strategy
To build and optimize a conversion funnel at a high level, focus on three dimensions:
Who is the buyer persona this conversion funnel is built for? (And what insight/research do I already know about this persona?)
Where is this persona in their buyer’s journey? (early/awareness, middle/consideration, or late/decision)
What’s the conversion goal? (what meaningful business goal does this conversion funnel help with?)
Defining Conversion Funnel Marketing and Its Importance to Your Company’s Success
In a high-value B2B technology context, where there’s a considered sales process and buying decision with multiple stakeholders, conversion funnel marketing is all about exchanging value between an anonymous website visitor (initial conversion) or known lead (reconversion) a business with a conversion goal.
In a digitally transformed world where so much of the buyer’s journey is happening before people are open to speaking with a salesperson, conversion funnels educate and build trust with prospects.
When thinking about funnel stages, keep the following frameworks in mind:
The Inbound Methodology – how to attract, engage, and delight
The Buyer’s Journey – the active research process someone goes on in between being a stranger and completing a purchase: Awareness (of a problem or goal), Consideration (comparing different options), and Decision (interested in looking at actual products and services)
Jobs to Be Done – what is the prospect trying to accomplish? What is the prospect actually “hiring” to do a specific job?
Improve Your Conversion Funnels
A conversion funnel is only as good as the value it’s offering.
In long-sales cycle B2B marketing, you must attract prospects as early as possible in their buyer’s journey.
Optimize your conversion funnel around using content and context to help your ideal prospects accelerate themselves through their buyer’s journey.
Also, think about how you can impact what comes in front of the conversion funnel (traffic generation) and what happens after the conversion funnel (for B2B, marketing/sales handoff, and sales/marketing alignment).
Depending on your company size and market, conversion rate optimization (CRO) experts that are truly full-funnel in their approach can provide so much more value than someone just working on a single piece of the funnel.
Avoiding the Biggest Mistake in Conversion Funnel Marketing
The biggest mistake by far and away with conversion funnels is allowing the egos and personal opinions of non-marketers to contaminate your conversion funnel experiments.
”In God we trust. All others must bring data.” (W. Edwards Deming)
Although the HIPPO (highest paid person in the organization) is often very effective at manipulating junior marketers into adapting their worldviews, hunches and opinions need to be validated.
And the company culture needs to see value in those experiments for conversion funnel marketing to truly benefit revenue growth.
What’s your favorite way to improve your marketing results from conversion funnels? Let me know in the comments below.
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