Driving leads—and ultimately, sales—is one of the major objectives for every startup marketing team. But that’s easier said than done.
Developing a consistent flow of new prospects can be a challenge. To build a thriving pipeline, it’s time to prioritize your marketing funnels. Creating a marketing funnel is key to understanding your customer journey and making it as seamless as possible to get more customers to convert.
Why Do You Need a Marketing Funnel?
Marketing funnels are a must-have for early-stage startups and, when done early, can accelerate leads through the funnel at a much faster rate. Having a fully built-out funnel makes it possible to assess your performance in a strategic way, allowing you to work smarter and grow faster in several different ways.
Properly Track Leads and Attribution
Establishing a marketing funnel early on is an integral part of accurately measuring the effectiveness of every startup’s marketing efforts. Instead of just throwing money randomly at marketing, implementing a full-funnel allows you to measure your ROI and understand what’s working—and what’s not—so you can be more efficient in the long run. You’ll be able to determine:
Which marketing efforts have the most impact and generate the most interest
Which marketing efforts convert the most leads to sales
Better Understand the Buyer Journey
Implementing a funnel also allows you to get a clearer understanding of your buyer journey from the very beginning. You can see how potential buyers engage with your brand from their first interaction through the final sale. It also allows you to determine how long it takes someone to move from the top to the bottom of the funnel, so you can project how marketing will impact your business over time.
Accurately Adjust Marketing spend
You want to put dollars behind activities that actually work—but you can’t do that if you don’t have a full funnel in place. Creating clear top, middle, and bottom-of-the-funnel efforts will help you adjust your spend, set your own benchmarks, test, and improve.
Create a Marketing and Sales Machine
The relationship between marketing and sales is pivotal to success; an effective marketing funnel provides your sales team with transparency into the pipeline to help them be more effective. You can also share your learnings and clearly show them the user journey, ensuring that by the time a marketing-qualified lead gets to your sellers, they’re armed with the information they need to close the deal.
Stages of the Marketing Funnel
Understanding each stage of the funnel—and what leads are looking for in each—will make it easier to craft a startup marketing strategy that effectively moves them from one stage to the next.
Top of the Funnel: Awareness
At the top of the marketing funnel, your audience is in a learning phase. And to help them, you’ll want to share educational content. Videos and articles shared across channels like social media, blogs, and email marketing allow your prospects to self-educate. A few things to consider:
At this stage, avoid trying to directly solve their problem with your product—because they don’t yet understand the problem fully, they’re not in a place to be searching for specific answers.
You also shouldn’t reach out more than once per day. Selling yourself too hard and too fast can be off-putting and ineffective.
Middle of the Funnel: Consideration
At this point in the sales funnel, your audience understands their pain point and has started to look for a solution. Instead of only serving content that frames the problem, you can also begin presenting them with the solution. At this point, it’s an opportunity to evaluate which marketing channels to leverage. Email nurture campaigns and paid media retargeting are often effective in the middle of the funnel because they give you an opportunity to provide warm leads with more information about your products and services. Videos, long-form blog posts, eBooks, guides, and case studies can be shared across social channels and landing pages to help you continue to move these leads through the funnel.
Bottom of the Funnel: Purchase
The last stage of the marketing funnel is the point of conversion. By now, you’ve narrowed down your audience and have qualified leads that are ready to buy your product or service. They’ve shown interest and are likely comparing your products to your competitors before making a final decision.
This is your opportunity to showcase your product; what it does, how it works, and its primary benefits. You can also highlight how your product is different from your competitors to set yourself apart. Product demo videos, product comparisons, and free trials can all have an impact at the bottom of the funnel and encourage prospects to convert. You can also up your outreach at this stage to up to three times per day to encourage action. The bottom of the funnel is also a great time to engage the sales team for some direct outreach.
Measuring the Marketing Funnel
Once your funnel is built, it’s important to measure the performance and identify opportunities to improve and optimize. But where do you start?
Look at Industry Averages
Evaluating the benchmarks in your industry will give you a proper baseline. Look at your peers to determine their performance. If you’re looking for your industry benchmarks, here are a few good places to start:
While industry averages give you a starting point, nothing beats your own data. You should always measure and iterate against your own benchmarks, too. Collect at least 2-4 weeks of data before making any big changes—anything sooner doesn’t give you an accurate sense of what’s working vs. what’s not. If you can, waiting longer than 4 weeks will give you an even clearer picture.
Create Conversion Goals
Creating conversion goals for each stage of the marketing funnel will help you optimize the experience at every stage, and eventually, lead to a higher overall conversion rate.
At the top of the funnel, you’ll want to optimize for high-volume metrics including:
Website traffic
Bounce rate
Brand recall
Email opens
Ad clicks
These metrics help you understand if your product is resonating with the audience. If they’re not performing, ask yourself if you’re solving their problem enough to capture their attention. If the answer is yes, it may be a matter of tweaking your messaging or creative ways to stand out from the crowd.
In the middle of the funnel, you’ll measure metrics that indicate of your offer is resonating, including:
Qualified leads
Free trial signups
Add to carts
Sales pipeline
These help you understand if your audience understands and appreciates your value proposition enough to want to learn more.
At the bottom of the funnel or the point of conversion, you’ll want to measure closed deals including:
New ARR
Purchases
Paid upgrades
Assessing these metrics will give you a sense of how many of your total leads are ultimately converting.
How to Fix Marketing Funnel Leaks
Identifying issues throughout the stages of your marketing funnel will help you move leads through the funnel more effectively, and ultimately, drive added value for your business.
Top of the Funnel
Common problems at the top of the funnel include low website traffic or high bounce rates. If your metrics aren’t measuring up, ask yourself:
How can I keep users on my website?
Can I make improvements to SEO?
Why aren’t people clicking on my ads and posts?
Low performance may mean that you’ve misidentified your target audience. Adjust your messaging and creative or consider additional customer research to find the best possible fit.
Middle of the Funnel
In the middle of the funnel, issues with traffic quality and messaging are the biggest concerns. These often manifest as high cart abandonment rates and low visit-to-lead conversion rates. To address these issues, ask yourself:
Is the messaging on my product pages compelling?
How is the quality of my traffic?
Low performance in these areas often means that people are interested, but something about the product or offer isn’t resonating. Try tweaking your welcome offer or experimenting with new messaging.
Bottom of the Funnel
At the bottom of the funnel, low purchase rates and low lead-to-pipeline conversions mean that your leads aren’t crossing the finish line. Ask yourself:
Am I driving quality leads?
Is my offer and pricing compelling?
To improve your performance, consider experimenting with your pricing model or different promotional offers. It may also mean there’s a bottleneck in your sales process that needs to be evaluated to ensure marketing-qualified leads convert into customers.
Tips & Tricks to Optimize Your Marketing Funnel
Now that you understand every stage of the sales funnel, use these insights to make it as effective as possible.
Create Effective Lead Magnets
Using lead magnets can help you create a cohesive experience from the moment a lead enters your marketing funnel. Assets like quizzes, eBooks, and whitepapers give them the information they need to evaluate the problem—while also positioning you as a solution. Be sure to create a seamless user journey to accompany your lead magnet. From the landing page to the follow-up emails to the sales call, everything should work together to move them through the funnel.
Make Sure Your Offer Resonates
Finding an offer that speaks to your target audience is a must. Try testing a few different offers to find the best one for your business. Whether that’s a month free, extra features, or additional training, the ways you can entice your audience to convert are nearly endless.
Don’t Skip the Nurture
The middle of the funnel is often overlooked but is arguably the most important phase. Once you capture someone’s attention at the top of the funnel, you need to nurture them to keep them interested. It takes, on average, six to eight touches before a lead converts. Use the middle of the funnel as an opportunity to educate and engage your leads to position yourself as the solution to their pain points.
Implement Proper Systems
Before you get your funnel up and running, be sure you have the infrastructure to support it. Many times, businesses hit the ground running without any mechanisms for tracking in the back end. Onboard a CRM and marketing automation system, like Hubspot, that will help you get the data you need to understand how you’re performing.
Getting Started
Using what you’ve learned, it’s time to start mapping out your own funnel and iterating to see what works for you. Set up your systems, collect a few weeks’ worth of data, and start mapping your customer journey. You’ll be able to identify any leaks in your funnel and streamline the process to make it as easy as possible for leads to get from Point A to Point B.
Soon, you’ll have a marketing engine that’s up and running. But if you’re still unsure where to start, don’t worry—we can help.