Optimizing Your Funnel For Volume Or Conversions

You either need more volume or more conversions. Or maybe you need both.

Let's talk about which to focus on and how to get it.

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Transcript

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This is the Marketing Director Daily, and I'm Tim Parkin. Let's talk about optimizing your funnel because you have two choices. You can optimize for volume or you can optimize for conversions. And you can't do both of these at the same time. And it's really important to one, always be optimizing your funnel, and two, to be very clear and intentional about are you optimizing for volume or for conversions? It's really important to always be optimizing your funnel. You're spending a lot of money and time and effort to get people into your funnel and to push them through your funnel. And if you're not optimizing the funnel, then all of those efforts and investments will be wasted. Plus, if you're not optimizing the funnel, you're not making things go faster. It's not just about getting people through your funnel, it's about speeding up the time it takes them to get through the funnel. So you can get results and get insights faster. If you don't optimize your funnel, or if you're not careful about how you optimize your funnel, you can end up tweaking and proving the wrong things. What I mean by that is if you get a lot of traffic that doesn't convert, people that don't book a demo, and you get more of that traffic, that's not helpful. In addition, you can often spend so much time and effort and money optimizing the wrong part of your funnel that then you don't have any money, time, or energy left to optimize the right part of the funnel. But when you get this right, you can have a funnel that is smooth and seamless, that gets the right people in the top of it and gets the right people through the bottom of it. And the goal is not necessarily to get as many people into your funnel as possible. It's to get them through the funnel as quick and efficiently as possible. Then we can worry about how do we get the right people and how do we get more of them into your funnel. The goal is never to get as many people as possible into your funnel. And most marketers get this completely wrong. You don't want volume first, you want conversions first. Then we can worry about volume. Once we have people going through your funnel quickly and efficiently and converting and doing the things you want them to do, then we can turn up the volume. Then we can add more people to the funnel. So let's talk about what this looks like and how to do it. If you imagine your funnel and the stages of your funnel as five different boxes going from left to right across the screen here, then there are five stages usually. And I'll give you general terms here, but adapt this for your specific funnel. In the beginning, you have awareness. First, people have to be aware that you actually exist. They have to see an ad or a social post or hear about you. Then they may choose to click and visit your website or your landing page. Maybe they'll check out your profile on social media, but they're clicking, they're visiting something, a property that you have, that you own. Next, as they explore, they might raise their hand and opt in to download something, to receive something, to watch something. They're giving you permission and giving you their email address, their name, and maybe some other details, but they're saying, I want to hear from you. Then they move to the next stage, which is nurture, which is where you continue to communicate with them, to warm them up, and to hopefully get them to convert. And that leads to the final stage, which is conversion, where they do something, the thing you want them to do, whether it's a make a purchase or book a demo, whatever it is, they've converted. So those are the five stages. And if you want to optimize for volume, if you want more people flowing through the funnel, then we want to start at the beginning of the funnel and work our way left to right. But if you want more conversions, we want to start at the end of the funnel and work our way backwards. So you optimize for volume left to right, you optimize for conversions right to left. And this is a key difference because if you're not careful, you'll default where most marketers do, which is left to right, optimizing for volume. You'll start by looking at your awareness and thinking that you need more awareness, that you need more visits and more clicks. When in reality, the people who are aware and who are visiting aren't getting through the funnel. They aren't doing the things you want them to do. So getting more people who don't convert to your website, to your landing pages to opt in is not going to be helpful. You need people who are the right people who take action with you. And once you figure out that piece, then you can optimize the beginning of the funnel to get more of them coming through. But if you have a leaky funnel or if you have a brick wall somewhere in your funnel, we need to fix that first so we can get people all the way to the end quickly and efficiently. Then we can worry about turning the dial up and increasing the volume. So here's how to think about this. If you look at the stages of your funnel, again, from left to right or right to left, map out those stages and get the data. Pull the numbers, look at your conversion rates from one step to the next and find the bottleneck. And again, you want to start closest to revenue at the end and work backwards if you want conversions, which I think you do. And in that case, you want to find the bottleneck. Is it that people on your email list aren't raising their hand and asking to book a demo? We need to investigate that first and figure out what would really motivate those people. What do they need to hear or see or do in order to convert, in order to take action? What opportunities do we need to put in front of them? What do we need to give them to get the right response? That may be the weak part in your funnel. Or it might be you have a lot of people who come to your site, who visit your pages, who spend time and click through, but they never opt in. And that may be the bottleneck. And in that case, we need to figure out why are people not opting in? Does the form have too many fields? In some cases, I've seen the form is completely broken and we don't even realize it. But this is why we need to work backwards when you optimize your funnel and not spend too much time and too much effort on getting more awareness, on getting more traffic. The thing is, it's really easy and it's kind of fun to get more awareness, to watch the vanity metrics go up and to get more visits to our website and our landing pages, etc. But that's not where the real work comes in. The meaningful work, the impactful work, is optimizing the bottom of the funnel, those key final stages. Think about it. These users have gone through your whole funnel from the beginning all the way almost to the end. They've made a commitment of their time, of their attention, and they're ready to take action with you if you can just unlock that final piece. And this is why it's so important to identify the bottleneck in your funnel and to focus on fixing it first. Then and only then should you focus on increasing the volume and getting more people into your funnel. If you've never done this, here's a really easy way to start. Make a list of five columns on a piece of paper that are the stages of your funnel and map out what are those actions, what are the key things that people do in each of those stages. Again, first they become aware of you, they see an ad, perhaps, then they visit your landing page, then they opt in for something, etc. Map out those five stages. And generally they look like this: awareness, engagement, lead, nurture, conversion, or opportunity, something like that. Use conceptual stages here and work with your team or by yourself to map out what those are and then rank yourself high, medium, or low for each of these stages. Do you have enough awareness? Do you have enough engagement? Are you getting enough people to become leads and opt in? Where are you with each of these stages? Is it high? Is it medium? Is it low? Even better if you can actually pull the numbers and see how much awareness are we getting? How many users are coming to our landing page? How many leads are we getting from this form on the landing page, et cetera? So use big picture, high, medium, low, or pull the actual numbers even better and look at those. And then work from the right to the left and see which of those is the lowest. Which of those could you improve that would have a dramatic effect on your results? Because if you make an improvement to something at the end of the funnel here, the change is dramatic because all those people from the beginning now will convert better. And this is why it's so important, not only mathematically, but pragmatically, to work backwards, to optimize your funnel for conversions first and then to focus on volume. Most marketers do the opposite. We start with volume and then we wonder why we're not getting conversions. We have to change this mindset, and you have to begin with the end in mind. You can have all the volume you want and all the conversions you need. You just can't have them both at the same time. Focus on conversions first, and then getting the volume you need becomes a lot easier.