Digital Marketing Funnels

A funnel is a consumer-focused marketing model (Wikipedia). Because its Consumer-focused, the marketing model must meet your customer. It's not a secret — they're online: more than 2 Billion people shop online, and about 80 percent of the consumers buy online before heading to the store.

Companies do everything they can to empower their digital presence: build websites that offer their goods and services; post advertisements on several social media; promote online to be found in search engines like google; write articles, posts, and diverse content to attract users; and this was just the tip of the iceberg.

Building and maintaining excellent digital funnels was never an easy mission, but I feel like it's just getting worse over time. Many "must be" places like Youtube, Instagram, Tik Tok, Twitter, Linkedin, and more. And you always have to be relevant, engaging, and topical. Thus, digital marketers change their funnels daily: budgets, copywriting, content, ads, target audience, and the list go on and on. It is almost impossible for marketers to see the complete picture.

Although companies' funnels are different (obviously —because they have different customers!), the process of creating and designing them can be very similar. Every time I had to build a funnel or been asked to help, I tried to follow a few simple principles.

Know Your Audience

Many marketers and business owners believe they know their customers perfectly. Leave the complacency aside: put time and effort into learning about your customers regularly. Suppose you didn't spend a significant amount of time trying to engage similar audiences to the same product or service within the same industry. In that case, you don't know your target audience well enough.

To get to know your target audience, you have to learn it obsessively.

Knowing the persona(s) 's characteristics (Age, Position, Location, etc.) is a must, and never miss a chance to speak with them. Learn from your colleagues (mostly success&sales teams) about the customers' needs. They have high friction with the same personas you try to characterize. Don't forget to check how the competitors' designed their funnels and read about the industry benchmarks and trends. Market research is essential.

Set Goals Choose Key Metrics

“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there” (Lewis Carroll)

Where you're going -> the goals. The road -> the metrics.

The goals must be feasible, measurable, and have a well-defined timeframe. An important notice: having more customers or generating more significant revenue are not goals but an ongoing desire of every business owner I know.

An excellent marketing division is aligned with the company's business needs and strategy. Each goal must support the company's business needs. And otherwise, there is no point in achieving the goal. An early-stage SaaS startup has entirely different goals and metrics than JP Morgan or Netflix.

These two goals are phrased poorly:

• "Grow the company's revenue significantly" is a strong word but not measurable (or anyone can measure the way they see it). To ensure the desired outcome is accepted and finetuned, you have to be more specific (for instance: "Grow the company's revenue by 10% by the end of the next quarter").

• "Optimize the marketing channels" — what channels should be optimized? Also, what exactly should we optimize? If you wish for a more efficient user acquisition system, you should rephrase the goal: "Decrease user acquisition cost to 100$ by the end of this year".

Want to "Decrease customer acquisition cost to 100$ by the end of the year"? The cost of acquiring customers differs from one marketing channel to another. To get the actual Customer Acquisition Cost, we must measure the CAC of every channel we use and normalize it to one general CAC. That's where your key metrics come into play.

Key metrics are crucial for the team's success, so regularly looking at and analyzing them can significantly impact your performance. Finding problems and holes in the company funnels is vital for the company's operations and performance. As long as you'll share the key metrics numbers with the company management and your team, you'll have a more fruitful discussion with your peers.

Remember, metrics' purpose is to help you reach your goals. If the goal changes or you find the metric redundant — don't spend your time. Change & Adapt.

Data-Driven Decisions

Here is another sentence (I read at least a million of those) that says data is everything. Now back to reality: please, do not underestimate the power of using data. Making decisions in 2021 without the supporting data is absurd and, in some cases, even irresponsible.

No matter how smart or experienced you and your team are, we all make mistakes. Even if you feel you've seen it before or did the same thing, remember that a perfect solution to an old problem won't necessarily solve a new one. Do not get me wrong: I don't encourage you to work like a robot. It would be best if you didn't ignore your thoughts and feelings, and the creative animal inside you is still irreplaceable.

The use of data will approve or dismiss your ideas and hypothesis, taking your best ideas forward and dropping the bad ones. People lie. The data doesn't.

Communicate with The Sales Team

Same old story: the marketing team delivers excellent, high-quality, state-of-the-art prospects, while at the same time (with the same leads), the sales team gets weak, not responsive, and irrelevant. How is it possible? Well, it isn't.

When you zoom out to try and see the big picture, the prospects mean nothing to the organization unless the sales team successfully converts them. Creating an impact for your company requires a great synergy with your sales team, and sales and Marketing rely on each other.

A few techniques I've implemented over the years: review the leads and score them together; align the sales team with the marketing content and PPC strategy; know the sales pitch and make sure it's correlated with your messaging; listen to sales calls and product demos.

Remember that designing a funnel model is more like a process rather than a task or a one-time job. There are plenty of factors to consider, it's hard to predict your changes' effects, and trial and error will become your new best friends.

“Iteration is Perfection. You’re going to put things into the world that aren’t perfect. That’s when you iterate” (Miki Agrawal)