How To Raise Your Marketing Funnel From The Dead

Drip…drip…drip. What’s that sound? Could it be? It’s…it’s leads disappearing out of the funnel! Oh, the horror!

Unfortunately, for marketers still employing diabolically outdated tactics, this funnel nightmare is the harsh reality they live every day. Sure, you may fill the top of your funnel with lots of leads. But if effective tactics aren’t being used to qualify those MQLs, your funnel acts more like a black hole–and your leads disappear, never to be seen again.

As a result of the mysterious twists and turns in the buyer’s journey, and all the scary barriers along the way, prospects can disengage, disconnect, or *gasp* unsubscribe with no way of Frankenstein’ing them back to life.

It’s OK, fearless marketers, this spine-chilling story doesn’t have to end like this. You can improve funnel conversion by identifying what’s causing these leaky holes and patching them back up.

Treat the cause, not the symptom

If Dracula sinks his fangs into your neck, putting a band-aid over it might stop the blood for a while but it won’t stop you from becoming a vampire. You’re better off wearing a garlic garland to avoid being bit in the first place! The same holds true for your marketing funnel.

Rather than waiting your funnel to begin hemorrhaging and then finding short term band-aid solutions, diagnose your main problem areas and think of long term solutions to prevent them from occurring in the first place.

Examine the stages of your marketing funnel that prospects are fall out from and attempt to diagnose the reason(s) why. Only then can you improve the overall health of your marketing strategy and improve funnel conversion.

The light at the end of the funnel

Have no fear heroic marketer, there is hope. The secret to conquering your leaky funnel problems comes down to collecting the right data and looking at the right signals. This is the “garlic garland” that will prevent your funnel from getting leads sucked out of it.

The actual consumption of content, something we call Engaged Intent, tells you everything you need to know about why prospects are or aren’t progressing to the next stage in their journey and allows you to serve the best class of leads to your sales team. It goes beyond the click or the download that offers no crystal ball insight. It tells you things like:

• If a prospect is hungry for your content like a zombie is hungry for brains (mmm brains…)
• What topics the prospect is most interested in learning more about. Like how a mummy might be interested in researching various brands of heavy duty gauze.<
• What stage in the journey your buyer is in
• How open a prospect is to learning more about your company. Are they giving you that glazed over, dead-eye stare, or is their face lit up, full of life?

But wait, there’s more…

By automating your marketing using content consumption data, you can scale demand generation efforts, streamline operations, and tighten alignment with sales.

You can use engagement data to raise your funnel from the dead by improving lead scoring efforts and better understanding how interested prospects are based on how much time they spend on your content.

So, you see? Improving your funnel conversion is nothing to be fearful of. Using the power of engagement data, any lacklustre funnel can have new life breathed into it.

Happy Halloween! From all of us here at PathFactory.