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Tips & Tricks

32 Marketing Pros Reveal The Most Effective Ways for Inbound Marketers to Optimize the Customer Acquisition Funnel for Immediate Results

All inbound marketers want to improve their efficiency in gaining customers while achieving instant  – or at least rapid – results. From focusing on one goal to customizing and personalizing content or offering valuable incentives, there are many angles to consider and explore that can quickly boost conversions and ROI.

What are some of the optimal ways to expedite conversions and move prospects through the customer acquisition funnel? What methods have the most successful inbound marketers found most effective in producing quick results? To take a deeper look at the numerous tactics today’s most successful inbound marketers rely on to optimize the customer acquisition funnel when immediate results are a must, we asked a panel of seasoned experts to answer this question:

“What’s the single quickest, easiest way inbound marketers can optimize the customer acquisition funnel today and see immediate results?”

Find out what tactics today’s inbound pros turn to when customer acquisition is the top priority by reading what our experts had to say below.

Meet Our Panel of Pros:

 


01_Dave_GerhardtDave Gerhardt

@davegerhardt

Dave Gerhardt is the Marketing Lead for Drift.com.

“The single quickest, easiest way that inbound marketers can optimize their funnel is by…”

Focusing. Too many marketers have too many goals – content downloads, email subscribers, product signups and more. But the best results come when you simplify and rally around one goal. Simplify the steps in your funnel for the biggest impact. If your focus is new customers, then you need make your funnel that simple. Especially today when information is free – marketing and sales don’t get to play gatekeeper anymore.


03_Nick_BrennanNick Brennan

@watchsocialm

Nick Brennan is the Founder & CEO of Watch Social Media, a social media marketing firm based in Chicago, IL.

“The key to optimizing the customer acquisition funnel for inbound marketers is to…”

Make sure that you have solid content to present to prospects at each stage of the buying process. Plugging a content hole here can create a dramatic change in moving prospects through the funnel. White papers, tip sheets and how-tos are great for creating awareness. Case studies, webinars and demo videos are great for those evaluating your product/ service. And, free trails, coupons and live demos/consultations are best for those close to buying.


04_Beth_CarterBeth Carter

@ClarCreative

Beth Carter is the Chief Strategist at Clariant Creative Agency, an inbound marketing firm that specializes in creating content that customers can’t live without.

“The single easiest and quickest way for inbound marketers to optimize the customer acquisition funnel to see immediate results is through…”

Contextual marketing. With contextual marketing, you personalize the copy that a visitor sees on your website or email based on where that prospect is in the buying process. Data drives this contextual experience – either data that the visitor has explicitly shared with you (for example, by downloading a mid-funnel piece of content) or data that you have implicitly gathered (for example, reading a top-of-funnel blog post). Companies that do this well utilize a broad mix of data to optimize every touchpoint across the funnel journey.

So for instance, a brand new visitor to your website will see your standard home page. The visitor downloads a top-of-funnel offer. The next time the visitor comes to your website, the home page might offer a middle-of-funnel content piece. Next, the visitor is launched into a personalized lead nurturing email workflow. Let’s say the visitor doesn’t engage with the workflow. After a few weeks, you might send a last-ditch email showcasing your all-time most popular content to see if he’s willing to bite – at which point you can now launch on a completely new, contextualized experience.

In short, contextual marketing is not only the best tool to optimize customer acquisition; it was specifically designed for it!


05_Adam_JohnsonAdam Johnson

@quotewizard

Adam Johnson is the Content Manager at QuoteWizard, an insurance comparison website. They leverage content marketing to attract insurance shoppers to compare quotes.

“A quick and easy win we had recently in optimizing our customer acquisition funnel is…”

Deploying Google Tag manager on our site to track scroll, click and form submission events. Events give you data insights into how users are entering your funnel. You can test CTA copy and placement on the page to have optimal entrances.


06_Quincy_SmithQuincy Smith

@youknowquincy

Quincy Smith is the marketing manager at Visiple, a video conferencing platform focused on making remote meetings easier for digital nomads and remote teams. Currently residing in China, he is passionate about entrepreneurship, travel, and IPAs.

“To avoid spreading yourself too thin or worse, chasing down things to improve on a hunch, you need to have…”

Goals set up in Google Analytics. Doing this allows you to view your conversion funnel, including where you have leaks or less than desirable conversions. For example, every company has a specific path they prefer their customers to take and it usually goes: landing page – checkout or opt in – convert – thank you. By setting up goals to track each of those pages, Google can display a visual funnel and help you determine which pages need work, allowing you to make more informed decisions on where to focus your efforts.

Goals are easy to set up in Google, and it only takes a few days for the information to populate in Analytics.


07_Jarrett_FleagleJarrett Fleagle

@WebMechanix

Jarrett Fleagle is the Director of Strategy at WebMechanix, a digital marketing agency that specializes in B2B software, technology and consulting.

“Perhaps the single quickest, easiest way to improve your acquisition funnel is to…”

Increase the number of conversions from traffic that’s already coming to your website.

And the easiest way to do that is to identify web form fields with high abandonment rates, and conduct A/B testing to improve their conversion rates.

This is probably as close to the money as it gets, because a successful test can boost conversions literally overnight.

With tools like Hotjar, Optimizely and Google Analytics available the market, it’s become easier than ever to identify abandonment points and run successful A/B tests like these to get results fast.


08_Henry_ButlerHenry Butler

@hp_butler

Henry Butler is a Marketing Consultant at CanIRank. CanIRank is an SEO intelligence software and marketing agency that leverages its technology to help small businesses and startup companies.

“One of the easiest ways to improve your customer acquisition funnel is by…”

Including case studies on your website. Potential clients want evidence that you can do what you say you can. By adding testimonials and specific examples of the results you have delivered, you demonstrate social proof. It’s very likely that if past customers have been satisfied with your product or service, futures customers will be as well.


09_Adam_OLearyAdam O’Leary

@aoleary10

Adam O’Leary is President of Encite International, a Denver-based marketing and advertising agency. He is a graduate of Colorado State University and has experience on both the client and agency side of the marketing world. He sets the strategic direction for all Encite projects, developing integrated marketing campaigns that bring results.

“One of the best ways inbound marketers can improve their customer acquisition funnel is to…”

Produce webinars. Now that might seem daunting, but with all of the webinar tools out there such as Fuze, GoToWebinar and WebinarsOnAir, it isn’t as tough as you would think. The key to a successful webinar, however, is content. The subject matter needs to be something beneficial and valuable to attendees. In addition, if you can incorporate a topic that is currently in the news or prevalent, you can capitalize on its popularity.

So how do you see ROI from a webinar? When attendees sign up for the webinar, they must provide their email address. If they opt-in to receive more content from you, you now know they have an interest in your product or service and thus could have a need for it. So you can further provide them with valuable content while giving them an opportunity to purchase from you. This type of integrated marketing approach attracts more qualified leads to ensure you are spending your marketing dollars on those that are most likely to purchase.


10_Bryan_ClaytonBryan Clayton

@YourGreenPal

Bryan Clayton is CEO of GreenPal, which is best described as Uber for Lawn Care.

“My number one tip for how to improve your inbound acquisition funnel is to…”

Lean heavily on live chat.

I know this may seem like a no-brainer, but you need to go beyond just installing live chat.

Using a live chat software as a service such as intercom.io, you can send outgoing messages in the chat bubble asking your users what they are confused about and if they have any concerns at every single step of the funnel.

Not only will this increase your sales by helping people when they are stuck or confused, but it also will, more importantly, tell you about what your consumers objections are so you can then adjust your interfaces and copy to apply to customer logic and not company logic.

Using customer logic with how you craft your product is essential to increase acquisition conversion rates and nailing your value proposition.


12_Eric_QuanstromEric Quanstrom

@kitedesk

Eric Quanstrom is the CMO for KiteDesk. His focus at KiteDesk is all things marketing – from Awareness to Zealous Fans – each & every element of the marketing mix.

“The single quickest, easiest way inbound marketers can optimize the customer acquisition funnel today is to…”

Tie marketing-to-sales handoffs tightly together. The metric to watch is MQL-to-Opportunity conversion rate (How many marketing qualified leads are turning into sales opportunities?).

As a VC-backed startup (latest fundraise), we’ve found the single most effective way to streamline marketing processes is/was to tie marketing-to-sales handoffs tightly together, or basically to marry our inbound efforts directly with our sales cycle.

This meant building out lead routing, notifications, and a choreographed series of touches (both automated and human) off of our website. We saved ourselves countless headaches from a Who Does What? and a Follow-up, Follow-through standpoint by automating many of these ToDos.

Maybe most important, though, is an improved customer experience for those learning about our brand. I can’t stress enough the benefits of having a standardized, automated approach for each visitor, and then each subsequent expression of interest in our software, while at the same time enabling customers to interact directly with the HUMANS on our team. It’s a direct line to both opportunity creation and, thus, revenues.

Speaking of efficiency, we’ve also ramped our staff in the marketing and sales departments and have been able to onboard people effectively, as we plug them into the corresponding automated process in our approach.

Most people think of automating lead management (and lead generation) AFTER achieving some sort of critical mass. This is exactly backward, in my opinion. The most core marketing processes to think through are the most basic ones – what kind of experience can you create for a would-be buyer???

You should think through how anyone interested in what you sell/offer as if you were already at scale, as it’s a problem that becomes exponentially worse as you grow. High-growth firms develop sophisticated approaches to lead generation early. Since EVERY lead has a cost attached, whether you choose to acknowledge those costs or not (most are hidden), you’d be wise to concentrate efforts here first.


13_Jason_StewartJason Stewart

@jstewart_1

Jason Stewart is the Vice President, Strategic Content, for ANNUITAS. He has more than 15 years’ experience in B2B marketing at both private and public companies. Jason has been named one of marketing automation’s key influencers in Marketo’s Definitive Guide to Marketing Automation, and was one of the inaugural nominees for the Content Marketing Institute Awards. He has also won DemandGen Report’s Social Impact “Killer Content” award in 2013 and a gold medal for content in the 2014 MarCom Awards.

“There are no ‘quick fixes’ — but something that could have an immediate impact on lead generation could be…”

An evaluation of the forms that are put in front of content and an overhaul of lead scoring to give a more weighted value to pieces that are more indicative of a prospect being further in the buying cycle. Shorten the forms on the high-level, educational and thought-leadership spectrum by removing required fields (like phone number) to increase conversions while lowering the lead-scoring point value for those top-of-the-funnel content offers, and then cross-sell other content in your fulfillment emails. These pieces shouldn’t be worth the same number of points in a lead score due to the fact that interest in the high-level topics do not single out a buying interest, but if a  prospect is consuming a higher volume of them through strategic recommendations you could push leads through the funnel faster. Conversely, increase the point value for pieces that are more indicative of later-stage buying interest (such as case studies or product and service-focused white papers) to pass higher-value qualified leads to sales faster, since prospects wouldn’t be interested in that content unless they were further along in their journey.


14_Jennie_HolmesJennie Holmes

@JenSolution

Jennie Holmes runs Generate Solutions, which is a digital marketing agency that focuses on strategy for SMEs. She specializes in social media strategy and using data to power smart decisions for her clients so that they achieve excellent ROI on their marketing campaigns.

“What’s the single quickest, easiest way inbound marketers can optimize the customer acquisition funnel today and see immediate results?…”

Setting up analytics to drive higher conversion. Setting up analytics to track performance will guide you to the best 80/20 strategy for your customer acquisition. Whatever analytics platform you are using, look at what content is driving the most traffic to your site. Then look at the exit rate from that content. This is your number one focus. You want to start using that piece of content as a conversion point to optimize your funnel. This might be including a link to download a relevant resource to the topic on that page, which would convert your unknown traffic to known or it might be including a live chat module or that page, or adding a plug-in that recommends further reading material from your website. Focus on the top performing 20% of your website and use this to drive 80% of your customer acquisition. You also know now what content resonates best with your audience, so you can create more on that subject and promote this content more heavily through social media.


15_Chloe_ThomasChloe Thomas

@eComMasterPlan

Chloe is author of the bestselling Customer Manipulation: How to Influence Your Customers to Buy More & Why an Ethical Approach Will Always Win! She’s also host of the eCommerce MasterPlan Podcast and an international keynote speaker.

“The single quickest, easiest way inbound marketers can optimize the customer acquisition funnel today and see immediate results is to…”

Put a popup on your website. A pop up to ask for the visitor’s email will have an immediate impact on increasing how many people go into your welcome and sales funnels. On my site, adding a very simple ‘get this ebook for free’ popup increased sign ups from 0.5% of site visitors to 5% of site visitors.


16_Zaki_UsmanZaki Usman

@zaki_usman

An engineer and the founder of an emerging cloud-based marketing app that handles big data analysis, Zaki Usman is the CEO of Pagezii Marketing.

“The key to inbound marketing is…”

Presenting valuable content to the visitor that is as customized as possible. The greater you target the content to the business needs of the visitor, the better your conversion rate will be. Most of the common Content Management Systems used to build websites can be easily customized with little development to offer a variety of customized paths.

For example, only offer downloadable assets that perfectly match the user’s intent from a Google search or end blog articles with a Call-to-Action that perfectly matches the content of the article. By following these tactics, you’re likely to experience higher conversions and add more contacts to the top of the funnel.


17_Hilary_HamblinHilary Hamblin

@admomentum

As CEO and Founder of Momentum Consulting, Hilary Hamblin led the company to become a HubSpot Partner in 2015. She earned her Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism from Mississippi University for Women and started her career as the executive director for her local Chamber of Commerce. During this time, she was able to make a huge impact on her community. Hilary went on to found Momentum Consulting out of a desire to help local businesses make advertising work.

“Getting the right customers into the funnel makes all the difference…”

We’ve identified two ways to increase the changes of getting the right customers into the funnel. First is to write articles directed at your persona. Sometimes this feels like you are pigeon-holing yourself by not reaching out to a broader market. Having content geared directly toward you persona sets you up to take advantage of the second step in improving your funnel: getting your message to the right audience. Using the same landing pages and content we’ve been using, we were able to double our website traffic and increase leads by 200% by getting the message to the right audience. In our case, we found a very active Facebook group targeted to our audience. Other businesses use LinkedIn groups, Reddit and other message boards depending on where their audience may be active online. The key is finding where your persona is already interacting, build a relationship and share links to your website sparingly as appropriate.


18_Brock_MurrayBrock Murray

@seopluscanada

Brock Murray is the Co-Founder/COO of  seoplus+, an international digital marketing agency providing SEO, PPC, social media marketing, content marketing, and web design/development services to clients around the world in a variety of verticals.

“One of the simplest and most fundamental ways to improve your inbound marketing funnel is…”

Optimizing your site for speed. Even if you have developed the perfect funnel strategy, if your site takes too long to load, people are not going to stay around to wait, which results in lost opportunities. There are a variety of alterations you can make to your site to improve load speed, however chief among them are disabling bloated plug-ins, compressing images and minimizing code.Optimizing your site for a faster loading speed (ideally under one second) will prove an immediate improvement in your results.


19_Alexander_RuggieAlexander Ruggie

@911Restoration

Alexander Ruggie is the Public Relations Director for 911 Restoration, a home rejuvenation company specializing in recovery after water damage, sewage backup, mold contamination, fire incidents, and disasters of all kinds.

“The single quickest, easiest way inbound marketers can optimize the customer acquisition funnel today and see immediate results is…”

We do all of our marketing online, and we have tried everything and anything in pursuit of our company goals. This has given us the knowledge about what works, what doesn’t and what works the fastest.

We’ve found that the best way to optimize inbound marketing efforts is through consistent NAP. NAP stands for NAME, ADDRESS, PHONE NUMBER, and it can make or break an online business. Ensuring that the NAP is consistent throughout the entirety of the site, and on external sites that list the business will have an immediate impact on users ability to find the company in question.


20_Sumit_BansalSumit Bansal

@TrumpExcel

Sumit Bansal is the founder of Trump Excel, an online platform to train people in Excel Spreadsheets. An MBA in finance, Sumit has been awarded the prestigious Excel MVP award by Microsoft for his contributions in sharing his Excel knowledge and helping people. He has trained hundreds of people through his online Excel courses.

“The work of an inbound marketer starts when…”

Potential customers visit your website. The single quickest way to optimize the customer acquisition funnel is to segment the leads based on their interest. Not all leads are equal. For example, if you’re a company that provides training of MS office products, you can get people who may want to learn MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Access. Based on their interest, you need to segment these leads so that you can place them in the right funnel. You can further segment them based on their skill level (basic, intermediate, advanced). Once you have these leads in the right funnel, you can pitch relevant offerings or pass it on to the sales team (if you have one) to further nurture these leads and close a sale.


21_Gene_CaballeroGene Caballero

@YourGreenPal

Gene Caballero is co-founder of GreenPal, which has been described as Uber for lawn care.

“One of the most effective ways to optimize the customer acquisition funnel is through…”

Word of mouth. It’s not only one of the best tactics to get motivated traffic to your site, but it also really helps with your inbound marketing.

We send dog bones out to our homeowners with pets along with a thank-you card. Not only is this very cheap, but it lets our customers know that we are listening and that we care. We follow up with an email asking if they received the gift along with links to our Yelp, Google+, and Facebook pages.


22_Derric_HaynieDerric Haynie

@SixPeppers

Derric Haynie is the Head of Growth for Rebrandly. He helps entrepreneurs build customer-centric businesses.

“Without a doubt, the best fastest way to optimize a funnel is to…”

Start running re-targeting ads. Re-targeting ads are ads that are served to people that have visited your website. See, it turns out most people don’t convert on the first visit. From one of my own sites, I’ve seen a 1% conversion rate from the first visit, but a 15% conversion rate from 2+.

What does this mean?

It means getting people back to your site should be your top priority. Even more than getting people to your site. Let me say that again, while we all want to increase traffic to our sites, that traffic is useless if it doesn’t return. Getting people back to the site is more valuable than getting them to the site the first time.

Why is that?

3 reasons:

  • They’ve already started to build a relationship with your brand.
  • They’ve already raised their hand and said they were interested in something you said or did (whatever got them there the first time).
  • They haven’t said no to your offer yet. They’ve only said, Oh look cat meme’s (or in other words they got distracted last time).

Google Display Network and Facebook Ads are the two places to start. Get started now! What are you waiting for?


23_David_HoosDavid Hoos

@davidhoos

David Hoos leads marketing for The Good, trusted conversion rate experts who help deliver higher revenues and happier customers. The Good has advised many brands including Nike, Xerox, and Adobe on how to drive sales and ensure proper revenue realization from their e-commerce and lead conversion efforts.

“The single quickest, easiest way inbound marketers can optimize the customer acquisition funnel is to…”

Improve the copy on their highest traffic landing page to something that speaks more deeply to the emotional needs of the target audience. For example, if you’re in the clothing business, you should gear your copy toward the personal identity needs that your customers have.


24_Andrew_ChocoAndrew Choco

@fourchoco

Andrew Choco is the VP of Marketing at Directive Consulting. They are a Google, Bing, Moz, & Unbounce partner serving mid-enterprise level firms.

Andrew is a creative marketing enthusiast always looking for new ways to hack growth, specifically across social media platforms. He was recently published on Vendasta and is a consistent contributor to the Directive Consulting blog.

“One of the best ways we optimize our customer acquisition funnel is by…”

Creating ads across different platforms that match the warmth of where that lead is at. If someone is searching for Best SEO Agency we know that they’re in the process of looking for an outsourced SEO agency and we can hit them with our landing page highlighting our SEO services. However, for ads run across social media, users aren’t yet in the buying process, and so we’ll hit them with more informational blog posts. The warmth of the lead based on the keywords their searching for, or pages they’re viewing help us know where they’re at in the buyers journey, and we can tailor ad copy and images to fit the warmth of that lead.


25_Danielle_FordDanielle Ford

@DanielleFordLV

Danielle Ford is a Creative Video Marketing Strategist & thought leader for Danielle Ford, Inc. She shows entrepreneurs how to take their businesses live, reach thousands and make millions.

By helping these world-changing individuals expand their influence online, Danielle enables them to make the impact they’re meant to make.

“Hands down, the easiest and quickest way to optimize conversions is by…”

Tapping into a new lead’s entire social network. That sounds like the impossible dream, right? Wrong! There is a gold mine in the opt-in funnel and most marketers are skipping right past it.

It’s the Thank You page.

When a new lead or customer hits your Thank You page, they are at their highest peak of excitement. They’re ready to dive into their free gift or new purchase and this is the prime time to ask them to share with their friends.

It can be as simple as adding social media buttons and asking them to share. Or you can go a step further and add a free gift or bonus that unlocks once they’ve shared the opt-in page. This is especially effective if you’ve paid to acquire that lead because you’ll ultimately only be paying a fraction of that cost, by multiplying your conversion rate through the Thank You page.


26_Tamas_TorokTamas Torok

@torok_tomi

Tamas Torok helps bloggers decrease user acquisition costs by creating super detailed, step-by-step guides on content promotion and social media on his blog Momentum.

“I think the only way to achieve quick results in customer acquisition is to…”

Simply visualize the funnel and see how the users convert in each stage. With the conversion rates you can see the bottlenecks in the process, showing you the part(s) need to be fixed as soon as possible.

Since every customer acquisition process is different, this is the only way to identify room for improvement.

Some tactics I would try:

  • Reducing registration form fields
  • Eliminating distractions from the landing page (links pointing to other pages)
  • Asking or not asking for credit card details right after registration

27_Marc_McDermottMarc McDermott

@marc_mcdermott

Marc McDermott is the owner of Clickstream Marketing. He currently manages, promotes, and markets various websites, including his own entrepreneurial endeavors. When Marc is not working, he enjoys being in the outdoors, hiking, fishing, camping, etc. He also has an intense passion for soccer, both as a player and avid supporter of Manchester United.

“My advice for companies that want to optimize their customer acquisition funnel quickly and easily is to…”

Focus on providing value to the customer up front in a tangible form. Whatever industry you’re in, there’s something you have that can instantly make a potential customer do something easier/faster/better. Provide them with that value and you’ll quickly learn about the theory of reciprocity. Stop selling; start giving.


28_Scott_FrederickScott Frederick

@LogisticsPlus

Scott Frederick is the Vice President of Marketing for Logistics Plus Inc., a leading worldwide provider of transportation, logistics and supply chain solutions.

“The best way for inbound marketers to improve their customer acquisition efforts is to…”

Provide a good incentive for a prospective customer to respond. That means providing a meaningful and relevant ‘offer.’ This could be in the form of a case study, a white paper, a promotion, or even a giveaway. This is not always the easiest approach, but it will be the most effective. Once you have a good offer in place, the next step is to find an audience for your offer. If you’ve built up a solid social media following, you could use Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn to communicate your offer. If you have a blog, you could write a blog post using the keywords that someone might search to find your topic or offer. E-newsletters, news releases, email blasts, and online advertising are other ways to communicate your offer in order to fill your sales funnel, but it must always start with a good offer or incentive.


29_Steven_MacdonaldSteven Macdonald

@StevenMacd0nald

Steven Macdonald is an online marketer at SuperOffice and is based in Tallinn, Estonia.

“The fastest way to optimize the customer acquisition funnel is to…”

Set up branded Google AdWords campaigns.

A branded Google AdWords campaign is a campaign based on the keywords people search for relating to your brand name. For example, at SuperOffice we have created a branded campaign that targets the following keywords:  SuperOffice, SuperOffice.com, SuperOffice website, Super Office and SuperOffice CRM. All of this traffic is directed to our product pages, which includes links to free trial sign up.

The benefits of running a branded campaign is that they are low cost/high converting campaigns, you can customize the ad texts that appear in the Google search results, and you get to make use of Google AdWords ad extensions, such as sitelinks, location and call extensions.


30_Trevor_NichollsTrevor Nicholls

@klood_com

Trevor Nicholls is the Head of Inbound Marketing at Klood Digital. Trevor’s role within Klood is to drive the Inbound Marketing efforts of the agency as well as to advise on the inbound strategies for the clients. Trevor is a HubSpot expert, certified in all aspects of the platform and methodology, and is one of a handful of people that have been selected to be HubSpot accredited trainers.

“How can inbound marketers optimize the customer acquisition funnel?…”

The inbound marketing philosophy is designed to take a consumer from being a visitor all the way to becoming a customer, but trying to identify one simple optimization fix is no easy task.

The inbound journey involves four stages: Attract, Convert, Close, and Delight, and each of these must be working in harmony to ensure you’re not losing money along the way.

All too often, people focus all of their energy on the attract stage without considering the whole customer journey. This includes knowing who you’re trying to attract and what follow-ups are needed to push these consumers further down the funnel.

When we talk about optimizing the funnel, what we essentially mean is locating the holes and plugging them. We can’t just keep pouring leads into the top without analyzing and monitoring each stage of the process – we need to find where people are dropping out!

Identify your buyer personas

When it comes to the attract and convert stages of the inbound marketing strategy, you need to make sure you fully understand exactly who it is you wish to attract. This comes from identifying your buyers’ personas. What are their goals, challenges, identifying characteristics and, most importantly, what challenges can you help them solve?

Make sure you’re creating downloadable content offers that are targeted at these various challenges. You’ll want to create a whitepaper or eBook for each of the following stages:

  • Awareness – the consumers know they have a problem, but don’t understand what it is;
  • Consideration – the consumer has identified the problem but does not yet know the solution;
  • Decision – following research, choosing which solution is right for them.

Support content offers with blog posts

Once you have your content offers, you should also create a suite of blog posts that promote those eBooks. These posts should solve problems related to the broader topic addressed in the eBook, and include calls-to-action to download them. This makes sure that any visitors to your blog aren’t missing the eBooks that might be less prominent on your website.

Identify a user’s position within the journey

Once you’ve captured their details you need to make sure that you have a system in place that identifies where in the buyer’s journey that person is. Are they just conducting early research, or are they ready to speak to one of your sales team, for example.

You should be able to identify where in the process they are by which eBook they’re downloading. If they’ve accessed the Awareness stage content offer (they have a problem but aren’t sure what it is) then it is unlikely they are ready to hear about your products or services. In this case, it may be that adding them to your email subscriber list is the best strategy here.

Optimize your sales process

You also need to to make sure that your sales process is optimized. Your sales team will be wasting their time if they’re dealing with leads that simply aren’t ready to buy, or never will be. With this in mind, you need to enact some sort of quality scoring or qualification criteria before passing a lead to your sales team. For the leads that don’t qualify, you should continue to nurture them with quality content to guide them further along the buyer’s journey.

Remember to ‘delight’ your customers too

However, once someone converts and becomes a customer, you shouldn’t just forget about them. This is where the ‘Delight’ stage of the journey comes into play.

You want to give them a reason to come back again and again. Exactly how you do this will depend on the nature of your business, and could involve providing more quality informative content, entertaining content or discount codes.

Ultimately, there is no magic bullet when it comes to optimizing your customer acquisition funnel. No single thing can guarantee results, but rather you need the whole process working in harmony to ensure it is well optimized and with as few ‘leaks’ as possible. Identify a very clear and precise picture of your company’s buyer’s journey and analyse every stage to monitor conversion rates, identify issues and put in place strategies in order to improve conversion.


31_Victor_ClarkeVictor Clarke

@clarke_inc

Victor Clarke’s company, Clarke, Inc., has successfully transitioned its business operation away from a dedicated offset printing company using the tools and techniques presented in this post. Today Clarke, Inc. works with businesses that do not have a dedicated marketing staff to manage their communications and redeploy them. This includes print and digital communications or some combination of both. Clarke, Inc.’s philosophy is to help its clients “Be Better and Do More.”

“Inbound marketers can improve the customer acquisition funnel by…”

Here are some tips to optimize your acquisition funnel for immediate results:

1. Provide Helpful Content

Provide marketing content that helps the buyer by focusing on their areas of interest, rather than your background or how great you think your company is. Initially their interest will be to solve a small problem, something they don’t need to hire your company to solve. But when your content gives them a viable solution, and they apply it, they start to see your company as a resource. This positions your business as top-of-preference and not just top-of-mind when your services or products are truly needed.

2. Tailor Your Information to the Stages of the Buyer’s Journey

It’s important to give the prospective buyer the correct type of information relative to their position in the funnel. For example, a prospect might still be trying to figure out how big or important their problem or challenge is. They aren’t going to make any buying decisions until they know the scope of the situation and have some criteria in place for making a choice. Trying to sell anything to a person in this stage is a complete waste of time, and they won’t appreciate the pressure.

A piece of marketing content such as a checklist or a simple diagnostic tool can help them walk through the issue in a thorough manner so they understand what they are really up against. Then they are ready to enter the decision-making phase of their buying journey armed with the information needed to make value-based choices. And guess what, when that information was sourced from your website, it makes your company look like a really good option.

3. Get Up Close and Personal

You should do everything possible to ensure your prospect’s experience with your company is a positive one. Do this by making your marketing personal.

Personal means that emails come from real people in your company, not just the “info” email address. It can also mean they are connected on social media to people in your company, not just following the company page.

Most importantly it means your help-based marketing content really addresses their needs and it’s delivered in a timely manner. This shows your business puts the prospect’s interests ahead of it’s own.


32_Sam_MalikSam Malik

@DrFelixPharmacy

Sam Malik is a Digital Marketer at DrFelix. He likes to read and write about the psychology behind viral marketing.

“The single quickest, easiest way inbound marketers can optimize the customer acquisition funnel today and see immediate results is…”

I would recommend one of the easiest and quickest ways to do this is to drive traffic to your landing page, and test the page for optimization. I follow the AARRR model for our B2C start-up and gained immediate results from inbound marketing campaigns along with using tools like Unbounce and Segment.io. The AARRR model stands for Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue and Referral.


33_Someshwar_ChiduralaSomeshwar Chidurala

@TechOrchestrate

Someshwar Chidurala is a Digital Marketing Analyst for Orchestrate Technologies, LLC, a US based business process management organization with headquarters in Dallas, Texas.

“How can inbound marketers improve customer acquisition funnel?…”

There are various factors that affect the customer acquisition funnel while using Inbound marketing methodology. However, the most vital of them is the data. Organizations and marketers can collect interesting data as part of their regular communication with their existing customers. If it’s a new business, organizations can secure the services of various SaaS providers to obtain the data. It can then be converted to derive meaningful insights, which can go a long way in optimizing the conversion funnel. Apart from utilizing these insights to reduce the blockages that prevent the customers from signing up for their services, marketers can also strategically use them to build trust. This can motivate the potential customers to try out novel offerings while improving the conversion ratio.


34_Daniel_VacziDaniel Vaczi

@AdhereCreative

Daniel Vaczi is a serial entrepreneur with a track record of success building companies from the ground up. For the past five years, he has led business development for Adhere Creative. In his free time, he enjoys consuming the finest red meat and brown liquor Texas can provide.

“The single quickest, easiest way inbound marketers can optimize the customer acquisition funnel today and see immediate results is through…”

Focus is the key to quick marketing success. Many companies have multiple buyer personas in unrelated industries they would like to attract. Human nature has us eager to market to them all at once, but this spreads your marketing thin and drains limited resources. Pour all of your marketing efforts into select buyer personas or even hone it down to a specific industry vertical. This focus will have you gaining traction and seeing results much faster.