I’m a big fan of the buyer journey. It’s one of the most powerful marketing tools available. I’m also a big funnel geek and spend a lot of time counting leads and tweaking conversion rates. The buyer journey and the funnel are essentially the same idea – mapping the process a prospective buyer takes before becoming a customer. Understand how sales happen, and you can scale your business. Otherwise, you are merely hoping, which is not a strategy. Despite the power (not to mention the stress … [Read more...]
Working Forwards and Backwards: The Two Important Mindsets for Marketers
Really effective marketers have mastered two modes of thinking – forwards and backwards. Following in the footsteps of your buyer is thinking forwards. Deriving your overall marketing goals from your revenue targets is thinking backwards. I’ve found that most marketers are not especially good at either because they spend their days spinning their wheels slogging through piles of marketing tasks. Decent marketers may have a forwards or backwards mindset. Great marketers do both. As I sat … [Read more...]
Startup Essentials #8: Lead Nurturing and Progressive Profiling
Leads are the lifeblood of a startup. One common mistake made by startup marketing teams is ignoring leads that are not ready to pass to sales. These leads need to be nurtured – helped along – until they are ready. If you ignore them, you have wasted the money you spent to acquire them in the first place, and paying yet again for brand new leads that may or may not be more qualified. And as you nurture your leads, you can learn more about them, using what’s known as progressive profiling. – … [Read more...]
Startup MarketingEssentials: #5 How to Build a Funnel Model
How many leads do you need, exactly? Don’t know? It all starts with the funnel model. If you are in a startup and your product is ready to sell, you need to model your sales process to understand how much to invest in your sales team and marketing budget. The model also acts as a set of guideposts that will let you know if you are on track to hit your numbers. Learn how to reverse calculate from your revenue target back up through the funnel to visitors on your website. – TM To effectively … [Read more...]
Marketingspeak: Who Coined the Term ‘Funnel’?
The funnel is a shorthand term for describing the route by which prospective customers, or prospects, become customers. The visualization of the process looks like a funnel. A larger number of prospects go in the top and are reduced to a smaller number of customers who come out the bottom. Marketers use the term every day, but who came up with the funnel visualization in the first place? Interestingly, the idea for the funnel visualization was a refinement of a previous visualization, also … [Read more...]
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