Here are five affordable sales funnel strategies to boost performance without burning through your budget or stalling your marketing engine.
1. Be Consistent with Your Social
Despite rumors of its death, social content remains influential word-of-mouth. Those likes, comments, and shares continues to gain visibility and mindshare. High-quality, relevant content is essential to building your platforms, but so is consistency. A regular content cadence keeps your business in front of the constant churn of content, so your audience doesn’t forget you and your relevance.
But timing isn’t the only measure of consistency. You also need to consider the platform. Different platforms offer different experiences. Your content should be tailored to fit (read: be consistent with the experience). For example, video content performs well on TikTok and Instagram, while long-form, thought leadership fits in among the LinkedIn crowd. Don’t forget about design consistency, either. While you may post different content to different platforms, you need to keep certain design elements, like logo placement and color palette, the same to present a cohesive brand.
2. Optimize Your Landing Pages with Personalization
Your landing pages are your first—and sometimes your only—chance to convert visitors. They should be clean, precise and action-oriented with a strong CTA and clear value proposition. They should also be personalized. A recent study from Deloitte found that 80% of consumers prefer brands that offer personalized experiences, and 50% reported spending more money on those brands.
How do you turn something as broad and one-size-fits-most as a landing page into something personal and intimate? By using dynamic copy.
Dynamic copy is a function that accounts for visitor preferences, such as search terms or sources, and adjusts the landing page text accordingly. It can range from something as simple as incorporating a user’s search term into the copy to altering the entire product offering to speak to a specific pain point. Dynamic copy lets you turn one landing page into dozens of variations without lifting a finger.
3. Get to Know Your Campaigns with Incremental Testing
As marketing campaigns grow increasingly complex, it’s hard to discern what elements really drove the conversion. Was it the imagery? Was it the copy? Was it the follow-up email after downloading an asset? Sure, you want your campaign to be successful overall, but knowing what parts did the heavy lifting will help you build better campaigns in the future.
To conduct an incremental test, select an element of a campaign you want to test and segment your audience into control and exposed groups. Keep the demographics of these groups as balanced as possible to ensure non-biased results. Your exposed group will receive the campaign with the element you’re testing, while the control group will not. Any conversions above or below the rate of the control group represent the “incremental impact” or “lift” of the tested element. A report from Forrester found that companies who implement this tactic saw up to a 30% increase in ROI.
4. Repurpose Content as Lead Magnets
It’s no secret that customer data is the magic ingredient to a successful marketing strategy. Fortunately, you don’t have to spend thousands on a paid list. Most people, 74% according to The Trade Desk, are happy to give it to you, so long as they get something in return. And that’s where lead magnets enter.
Lead magnets are made of high-value content like eBooks and industry reports that enable you to target high-potential customers by offering something relevant in exchange for a few personal details.
Creating that content might sound like extra work but consider different formats that offer you flexibility and range of uses for that mountain of data that allows you to repurpose content for multiple applications like infographics, industry briefs, eblasts and more.
5. Realign Your Teams Under a Full-Funnel Strategy
Not all sales funnel strategies are forward-facing. There are plenty of behind-the-scenes things you can do, too. Adopting a full-funnel marketing strategy is one of them.
Under this strategy, funnel efforts are not treated as separate entities but as parts of a greater whole: the customer journey. It emphasizes looking at how all the parts of the funnel fit together to accomplish a common goal: conversion. By uniting teams under well-defined goals with universal KPIs, sales and marketing teams can improve collaboration and efficiency while presenting customers with a consistent, seamless journey from discovery to sale.
It’s not the platforms and the price tag that make a high-performing sales funnel; it’s the right strategies. With consistent, customer-centric messaging, smart resource allocation, data-driven testing, and a fully aligned team, you are not only optimizing your sales funnel’s performance but also improving your customer experience.
