How should marketers tackle the difficult task of suppressing and improving their marketing funnel? Two marketing leaders recently discussed the topic at a MarTech conference.Free registration required to watch all programs on demand.
Below are some highlights from a conversation between Adam Altmark, senior manager of solutions engineering at security technology company CHEQ, and Alex Schutte, senior director of marketing demand generation at human resources software company Paycor.
What they discovered is that marketers need to understand every aspect of the funnel and be prepared with the data to make decisions. Then, they can use that data to test and improve specific touchpoints and stages of the customer journey. And through it all, staying aligned with sales helps establish a feedback loop for continuous optimization.
Here we will discuss these three key points in more detail.
Understanding and Analyzing the Marketing Funnel
To optimize your marketing funnel, you need a strong understanding of where your customers are engaging with your brand, and you need to look at the data to see how those channels are performing.
For most businesses, this starts with the company homepage, which, as Alex pointed out, should have a steady stream of traffic that can be analyzed with GA4.
Here, he detailed starting with the homepage to identify the “low-hanging fruit” and then working his way up from there to gain a deeper understanding of the events the business wants to optimize going forward.
Optimize your marketing funnel by improving experiences
When you look at your data, you might notice that you have high traffic to a particular touchpoint in your marketing funnel, but low conversion rates. What's the cause? Often, it has to do with the experience your customers encounter when they get there.
Learn more: Optimizing Digital Experiences: Don't Focus on Just One Metric
Companies should take a data-driven approach to improving experiences, which means A/B testing the design of the website or forms customers are interacting with, or A/B testing specific design elements within the overall design. Compare the conversion rate of the old design to the conversion rate of the new design or other desired KPI.
At the top of the funnel, advertising is a key part of demand generation and lead generation. Our team at Paycor looked specifically at the advertising experience across major digital platforms. Here's what we learned and how we improved this experience.
Collaborate with your sales team
To fully optimize your marketing funnel, sales needs to be informed of any changes made in demand generation or other upper-funnel stages, which means aligning marketing and sales with common metrics and regular communication.
At Paycor, this alignment starts at the top, with the SVP of Marketing reporting to the Chief Revenue Officer, who oversees marketing, sales, and revenue operations.
Learn more: Use of generative AI in RevOps surges
Once annual and monthly goals are set, the marketing team signs up for a percentage of the total revenue generated from marketing activities and campaigns. This includes marketing opportunity goals and sales goals that the marketing team aims to achieve each month. Marketing uses lead scoring and other metrics to measure the quality of leads (MQLs). Paycor's marketing team breaks down the metrics by channel and campaign to understand which activities are bringing in high-quality, high-volume leads, and which channels and campaigns need to be optimized.
In addition to all the metrics, Alex also believes in maintaining communication with the sales team through regular meetings. Here he explains how metrics and communication with the sales team help create a “feedback loop” to ensure further optimization and increased revenue.
With the data in hand and goals in mind, marketing and sales can work together to continue optimizing the marketing funnel to make a real impact on the business.
