Design a Digital Marketing Funnel that Makes You Money Online
An Interview with Asher Lipstiz, Digital Analyst @ Story Block
Last week, we launched a new series called the Great Humanlytics Experiment. During the experiment, we will take a beginner’s mindset, and reexamine all aspects of digital marketing for Humanlytics — and share our finding, discoveries, and results with you.
But we are not going to do it alone. Along the way, we will invite digital marketing experts and experienced practitioners to help us both understand the field of digital marketing better, and create an effective lead magnet for humanlytics together.
For our first interview, we have with us Asher Liptiz from Story Block Media, an inbound marketing agency based in New Orleans.
Throughout the interview, Asher is going to share with us about his experiences creating “digital funnels”, or “marketing funnels” for his clients, and offer some practical tips on how you can use CRMs to make that process a lot easier.
To me, digital funnel sits at the core of your digital marketing strategy and is perhaps the single most important determinant of whether your strategy achieves success and deliver revenue for your company.
Therefore, I hope my conversation with Asher can provide you all with a good place to start when tackling digital marketing strategy at your company.
Specifically, we are going to cover the following topics:
- What is a digital funnel and why is it important?
- In the ever-shifting marketing world, how can we best use the concept of “the funnel” in our marketing practices (or simply: is the funnel dead?)
- What are some key steps of a funnel?
- How to best identify target audiences or personas for your funnel?
- How to best choose CRMs in your organizations to support the implementation of your funnel?
You can see the full video below on youtube, we have also prepared a transcript for you with key points more neatly organized.
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Transcript
What is a digital funnel and why is it important?
Asher: Very simply, a funnel describes all interactions someone has with your company, starting from the first touch (such as a simple conversation about your company), all the way until the time that they purchase.
Some people may even argue that a funnel goes beyond the first purchase, and extends to experiences such as repeat engagements with your company, and continued purchases in the future.
The reason it is called a funnel is you can plot all interactions you have with your customers into the illustration below, with an ever decreasing number of customers at each stage of the funnel.
For example, the top part of the funnel might be a conversation you have with your friend to learn more about the company, or some advertisements that you see on Facebook or Google. As you imagine, a lot of people will be at that stage of interaction with a company.
Some people may decide to further engage with that company via website blog or email newsletter, which means they are deeper into the funnel.
As a company, you need to come up with strategies to enable the need of those customers by providing content via a constantly updated website blog, or one-on-one interactions.
Eventually, some of those nurtured customers may become customers for your company, and that represents an even smaller number of people at the bottom of the funnel.
The shape of the funnel is sometimes not exactly as you see illustrated above, and very often it is up to debate and differ greatly from company to company.
However, the graph above will give you a general idea of how funnel works in the majority of the companies.
Is the funnel dead? How to use the concept of the “funnel” in the modern marketing world?
Bill: If you are marketing nerds like us, you probably hear a lot of chatters around the street that “the funnel is dead” (I even wrote an article about it).
This notion mostly comes from the 2009 McKenzie Article, in which the author argued that the traditional concept of a “customer funnel” no longer sufficiently describe the complex customer decision path of the modern market.
So, what’s your view on the issue?
Asher: It is indeed true that things in the marketing world is changing really quickly.
For example, no one really knows how bots are going to change our interactions with companies in the next five years as AI improves.
Maybe the future, we’ll be able to have more conversational marketing that sounds more organic and more natural.
All those new developments will change how the marketing funnel looks drastically for many companies. But, does it mean that the funnel is no longer a valid concept? I don’t think so.
The way I like to think about the concept of a “funnel” is that it is a mental model. Being a model, it will never describe the behaviors of your customers with 100% accuracy.
Like every model, the vaguer is, the more useful it is. It is a way to help marketers think about how the behaviors of your customer work, rather than describing, with extreme precision, how your customer purchases and behaves at every single junction.
The problem of funnel currently is more so that companies and marketers are treating the funnel as an exact truth, and it will usually disappoint them because it is not.
Bill: Yeah makes sense. Personally, I am still against the concept of “the funnel”, and I even wrote an article about my opinion. However, gradually, I realized that, in the current world, no one is really using “the funnel” as it was meant to be used when it was first introduced over 100 years ago.
I talked with so many digital marketers and agency owners about “the funnel” they build for their company, and realized that the “funnel” they have for their company is really not a “funnel” in the most traditional sense — where it just simply does not treat your relationship with your customers as an ongoing relationship.
Despite this fact, the term is so ingrained in marketer’s minds, people are still describing this new, more complex customer experience as a “funnel”, even though it is really not. Therefore, it just doesn’t make sense to go against it.
It is like speaking against pizza right? You can’t speak against pizza, it’s not something that you’ll get a very positive reaction from people.
Asher: That’s a good one. I like to think of a funnel like the BCG matrix. While the option it presents to us are very limited in the context of a modern business world, It is honestly still a pretty applicable model.
What are the key steps of a digital funnel?
Asher: Since it differs so much across companies, I am going to paint very broad strokes here.
In general, for almost every single company, the primary use of a funnel is to have visitors convert to leads or sales.
To achieve that purpose, at the very top, you should consider people coming onto your site. This is really the first interaction that you own and can measure very carefully.
From that interaction, they will start engaging with the content of your website, or your blog post, and you need to make sure those contents are ready for them when they visit you.
Then, after they come in and become engaged users of your website, there almost always need to be a nurturing process and a qualifying process.
There are multiple ways to manage this nurturing and qualification process, and here is where all the fancy terms such as “product qualified lead”, and “conversion qualified lead”comes in.
Forgo all the jargons, no matter how you choose to qualify your leads, whether it’s by persona or by attribution source, or by channel or using a lead scoring system, you really need to make sure to that there is a process in place to do so.
Finally, at the very bottom of a funnel is the close. And this could be anywhere from an e-commerce shopping cart to years-and-years-long sale cycles. You can improve this ultimate conversion rate by repeatedly A/B testing your entire process.
Almost all of the funnels follow this framework to some degree — it is all about getting a lot of data about different potential prospects and customers and narrow it down to the ones that can bring revenue to your company.
Honestly, I think the most exciting part of digital marketing is that inbound marketing is really everything. To me, anything activities ranging from buying ice cream to going on a date with somebody are all inbound marketing.
When you go to ice cream you’re like, ‘oh I saw that ice cream place for a while, it looks pretty interesting, I hear someone talk about it, I really want ice cream right now, oh let’s go check out this ice cream place’, you’re looking at it, you’re like alright I’m going to buy ice cream, like that’s honestly a full funnel right there.
It’s the same with going on a date, all the dates that you go on are just big qualification processes for yourself.
Imagine a person on a dating app like Tinder just swiping right on every single profile — it is equivalent to them saying “okay I am going to get everyone through the funnel for now, and we will get sales to qualify further down the road.”
How to best identify target audiences or personas for your funnel?
Bill: This is a very interesting analogy because you can also segment people based on their personas, and send different messages based on what segment they are in your persona book.
Asher: Having seen a lot of personas of companies, I would say that people are doing a better job qualifying on Tinder profiles than they are for company personas.
I have seen so many companies just mechanically assigning a persona to a new customer they are not sure about. That’s not very useful — and if that happens to you, your personas are really just not that good and do not accurately describe who you are serving.
Bill: I see that a lot as well! One problem when people trying to build personas is that they build persona for a specific person, instead of for the need or wants of that specific person. You can build a persona for “selling sally”. But this persona is not really going to be helpful unless you are able to truly answer the questions such as “what are the needs of selling sally? What immediate pain point does she have on her daily job?”
Asher: Persona, just like any tools, can be misused. I have once seen a small company with 20 personas. What is the point of that? You might as well just serve everyone that comes into your door.
Here is a great graphic to illustrate this point: not every product needs a persona — as long as you have a clear definition of the need that you are meeting in the mind of your customers.
Bill: One thing I discovered about business frameworks is that people tend to lose its original meaning and purpose. Persona is a very good way of describing the needs and wants of your target audience, but people are using it so mechanically that it starts to lose its point.
In many cases, the age of your persona is important for consumer products because people of different ages have different needs. But for some cases, you simply don’t need the age if it is not a defining element of your target audience.
At the end of the day, all of those frameworks are designed to help you understand your customer’s needs and wants, so don’t lose sight of that.
How to best choose CRMs in your organizations to support the implementation of your funnel?
Asher: In recent years, CRMs has become a lot more specialized, with one for each different industry and need.
Therefore, my answer here is that there’s no CRM that’s perfect for every use case. Especially if you’re in some small industries.
Therefore, my first tip is to find the CRM that is specifically tailored to your industry or needs and just go with that.
Asher: For general usage, I love HubSpot, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only good one out there since it is fairly pricey for small businesses.
In my opinion, Agile CRM is a good product for a lot of startups to look into. It has a ton of great functionalities and excellent personalization, and it is fairly popular.
When picking the CRM for you, there are a few areas I would consider before making a final decision.
First, I think the ability to personalize in a natural way is important. I have seen many companies just choose the CRM with the shiniest feature and biggest brand name — and they always regret their decisions because it’s not what they really need at their company.
Second, some analytics and segmentation features are always necessary. The CRM should be able to export data seamlessly to other platforms such as Tableau or Google Data studio so you can put your data on a dashboard easily — this will be increasingly important as your company becomes larger and larger.
The third to consider is ecosystem compatibility. You have to choose a system that is compatible with all other systems in your company’s technology stack. Otherwise, you will run into a situation in which your IT department is using Markato, your Sales department is using Pardot, and your marketing department is using Hubspot — that is just messy.
