In the digital age, consumers have more platforms to spend their time and energy on. On average, Americans spend four and a half hours on their mobile devices each day, oftentimes just browsing the web. The web has given businesses the data they need to be more efficient with their marketing funnels. As marketers, optimizing your company’s funnel will allow you to target people where they’re already looking: the internet.
End-to-end optimization
End-to-end optimization refers to analyzing every single step of your funnel process to ensure as many people as possible go through each stage of your funnel with your end goal in mind.
Building awareness for your brand is the first step. When it comes to building your brand for digital marketing you’ll need to figure out who you want to be by creating an online persona. Since you can’t meet your customers face-to-face, you will need to build customer trust through your online platform. Show them your company’s personality.
The two best ways to build trust with your customers through your persona will be to engage with them through social media and email marketing (more on that later), and to create a blog that you regularly post with valuable information and personal stories. Blogs are the most effective way for generating awareness for leads.
You will also need to research who your primary demographics are. For instance, if you know your company typically targets women between the ages of 18 and 34, then you want to go engage your users with the right social media channels that match your demographic.
You can hyper-target individuals based on gender, date of birth and interests to make sure your ads are only seen by people who are likely to make a purchase. For an older demographic, you may want to consider a more straightforward email marketing campaign. But bear in mind you still want to be an educator and be aware of the risks that exist with emails.
Seeing an ad doesn’t ensure a purchase. You want to do everything in your power to make your ads are as enticing as possible. From there, you need to optimize your website, product pages, and purchase screens so that the entire experience is as painless as possible.
If you do end-to-end optimization right, you could have a customer who will return to your site again and again.
The Consumer Journey
Keeping track of the consumer journey will help you figure out what works and what doesn’t.
Digital marketing gives you access to data like never before. There are numerous marketing channels you have available for your marketing campaign including newsletters, social media, a blog, and your website to name a few. It will be easier than ever to identify trends and take action.
With Google Analytics, you can trace the consumer journey from beginning to end. These tools allow you to see when people log onto a certain URL and when they click. Therefore, you’re able to see how far people get along in their buying process before they click away.
This starts with the initial awareness stage. Facebook makes it incredibly easy to track how well your targeted ads do. You can see how many total clicks you receive in addition to how many of those initial clicks led to a purchase.
Since tracking is now so much simpler than it was in the past, many businesses have moved away from using cookies for their marketing strategies.
But that’s only one stage. What happens when you notice a sizable number of people get all the way to the final stage when an item is in their basket, but they don’t click the “purchase” button?
Optimizing a Marketing Funnel
One way to further build trust is to get people to sign up for your email list. Getting someone to buy once is great, building an actual relationship so the customer continues coming back is what matters.
There should be some part of your funnel where consumers can enter their email address. Several of the most popular email marketing services actually automate your marketing funnels through scheduling and sending each email in a sequence.
Consider increasing spending toward the best performing audience strategies. Perhaps you have ads running on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. You may be seeing more hits on Instagram than Facebook. Therefore, it would work in your best interest to divert more funds there.
Finally, if you’re not seeing the kind of conversions you want, then make sure to examine the CTAs you have on your website. Customers need a next step. Whether you want people to schedule an appointment or start a free trial, you need to include clear, easy-to-click links throughout your website, guiding the consumer through every stage of the funnel.
Proof’s new product, Experiences is a tool that allows you to personalize your website for your specific audiences. You’ll be able to dynamically change all your CTAs without using code based on the parameters you set within the app. Adding a tool, like Experiences, to your marketing stack could be a great way to enhance your digital marketing strategy and give you an edge over your competitors.
By optimizing every stage of the process, you should see greater success. With the advent of the internet and social media, there are more platforms than ever before to reach an audience, and you’ll want to start taking advantage of those opportunities.
