Most businesses know digital marketing is the best way to communicate with the modern customer. The average business owner is bombarded with messages about how digital marketing can drive growth. They may have employed basic digital marketing tools like blog posts, social media posts, paid media, and email newsletters with no effect. Many conclude digital marketing is a waste of time. Digital marketing is not a waste of time, but most people who try it waste their time because they do not have a well-optimized funnel.
The number one cause of digital marketing failure is not having a funnel
What is a Funnel?
A funnel describes the steps a member of your target audience takes to become a loyal customer. Marketing is any communication designed to move a member of your target audience from one stage of the funnel to the next. Digital marketing tools like email marketing, search engine optimization, and paid media provide touchpoints to communicate with the target audience at different stages of the funnel.
Tools like email, search engines, and paid ads are "touchpoints" to nudge customers to the stage of the funnel, not the purpose of digital marketing.
You can see an illustration of a generic funnel below.
Different businesses may have different funnels, but the principle remains the same. The funnel represents where the customer is in their customer journey and digital marketing tools are communication methods that are effective at different stages of the funnel. It is useful to not only visualize the funnel but to visualize the customer journey through the funnel.
Design Your Customer Journey
Who are your customers? Before investing time and money on marketing, answer this basic question.
Up to 60% of digital marketing budgets are wasted
It is easy to waste time and money on digital marketing. It is easy to spend hours each week writing blogs that attract visitors who are not interested in your product. It is easy for low-quality ads to drain your bank account. It is easy to clutter your website with irrelevant copy. Understanding your customers prevents these things from happening by allowing you to tailor your message to the appropriate audience.
Customer personas help you design customer journeys. These personas are descriptions of a hypothetical customer or user. To illustrate customer personas imagine a toy company that sells a magic-themed trading card game targeted at 8 - 13 year olds. The following are three possible personas for our marketing communications.
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Wayne The Wizard
Wayne is a 9-year-old boy who watches the show based on the trading card game every Thursday after school. He learned the game exists from his friends at school. He wants a deck so he can play with his friends after school.
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Rebecca The Riveter
Rebecca is a 10-year-old girl with tomboy tendencies. She enjoys playing soccer and other contact sports. She hasn't seen the TV show, but she has played the game using the deck of a boy she met at school. She likes the competitive nature of the game and she wants to enter tournaments to see how far she can go.
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Megan The Mother
Megan is a nurse who has three children under the age of 13. Sometimes her kids ask her to buy them toys. She doesn't have time to research the toys, but she wants to be sure anything she buys is family-friendly.
These personas help us understand marketing messages are personal. This is obvious with direct marketing methods like email, but that fact is often forgotten when using other touchpoints. People generally do not view websites by themselves, they do not have parties to watch advertisements, and they don't allow other people to use their social media accounts. Your goal as a marketer is to put yourself in the shoes of these personas and craft messaging that leads them to understand why your product or service is the best solution for their problem. Look at the example below.
This is one of the many templates you can use to map the customer journey for your business. Please use it to follow along with this tutorial. The template is easy to customize for your own specific needs.
Determine Pain Points In Your Customer Journey
Designing the ideal customer journey is easy, but things aren't that simple in business. The funnel is large on top and small on the bottom for a reason. You won't convert everyone at the top of your funnel into a loyal customer. However, that doesn't mean every customer who leaves the funnel should be ignored. You must ensure that the people who leave the funnel do so due to chance, NOT because you failed to guide them correctly. These unforced errors that cause customers to abandon the journey are called pain points. Designing an effective customer journey is an iterative process where you use solicited and unsolicited data to perfect the journey.
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Solicited Data
Our example toy company has this customer journey. A customer clicks an ad, is directed to the website, subscribes to the newsletter to learn more, makes a purchase, and then recommends the product to a friend. We have imagined potential pain points the customer might experience along the way and have implemented solutions, but are our assumptions accurate? Did we properly identify the customer? Did we accurately identify their concerns? Are we speaking to the appropriate pain points?
One way to find out is to ask our customers. If you have customers who have already completed the journey, you can always use surveys to ask them how they built a relationship with your brand. How did they hear about you? What made them make the final decision? Would they recommend the product to a friend? How old are they? Tools like Qualtrics, Sprig, and Mailchimp make building surveys a breeze.
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Unsolicited Data
Survey data is extremely valuable, but it is also incomplete. It doesn't describe the full experience of the customer journey. Overreliance on survey data is an example of survivorship bias.
Humans tend to make decisions based on information that is readily available to them. In WWII this caused statisticians to make a serious mistake. The Air Force needed to add armor to their bombers to reduce losses. The statisticians collected data on the areas of the bombers that sustained the most damage and advised extra armor to be added to those areas. It was pointed out that the armor needed to be added to the places where there was no damage because the planes hit in those areas never made it back.
We make a similar mistake when we update our customer journey based on customers who completed our funnel. To truly understand our funnel, we need the perspective of customers who failed to complete it. We generally cannot survey them, but tools like Google Analytics, KissMetrics, and Heap help you track users through the customer journey whether they complete the journey or not.
These tools work by tracking the sources of your traffic and the actions visitors take on your website. You can track actions that are important to your customer journey using these tools. What percentage of your website visitors will visit another page? What percentage of your website visitors will sign up for your newsletter? What percentage of users who signed up for the newsletter will make a purchase? Answering these questions helps us find the holes in our funnel. Once we find the holes we can plug them.
Plug The Holes In Your Funnel
We mentioned it is estimated that 60% of digital marketing budgets are wasted earlier in this post. This can be due to poor targeting, which we can address by creating specific customer personas. However, the biggest reason for marketing waste is low conversion rates. That is why conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the most cost-effective way to grow your business.
In marketing conversions are actions customers take that move them along the funnel. Conversions are the actions that your analytics tools are set up to track. It is easy to make adjustments based on the solicited data. You can make the recommended changes to your website and see improvements from customers with similar backgrounds, but what about the unsolicited data. How can we improve the experience of customers we cannot survey?
The answer is A/B Testing. Digital marketing is powerful because it allows you to measure and manage the performance of your marketing communications objectively and A/B Testing unlocks its true power.
A/B Testing compares two versions of a website, email, or advertisement to see which version performs better. Showing random visitors alternative versions of your website allows you to make data-backed decisions instead of guessing. If you want to improve your conversion metrics you can systematically make hypotheses, run experiments, and compare results. A rigorous A/B testing strategy allows businesses to do the following.
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Find Unsolicited Pain Points
Where are the visitors we can't survey dropping out of our funnel and why? A/B Testing allows you to experiment until you find the problem. Is your copy too confusing? Is it hard to find the subscription form? You'll be able to drastically improve the experience of your website visitors and increase conversions through well-crafted experiments.
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Increase Marketing ROI
Regardless of what marketing agencies may tell you, increasing website traffic is expensive whether you pay with time or money. A/B Testing increases the value of your existing traffic, boosting sales without increasing marketing spend. If you do decide to invest a significant amount of money in paid media, A/B Testing
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Reduce Bounce Rate
Most people leave websites after viewing one page because they decide that the information on the website isn't useful. This is called bouncing and it penalizes you in search engine results. Through A/B Testing you can see if your bounce rate is high due to content quality or difficulty navigating to different pages.
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Minimize Risk
Your website is the circulatory system of your business. If you change your website and the new version performs poorly you can lose a significant amount of money. A/B testing allows you to see the results of potential changes before you implement them reducing the risk to your business.
Once you have a funnel, you are ready to seriously begin your digital marketing journey. Digital marketing is complicated and it is understandable if you struggle to do it by yourself. If you need help the team at Growth Cowboys would be glad to learn about your business needs. Please contact us us with any questions and a team member will respond to your request within 1 - 3 business days.