To be successful in using marketing information it’s important to have a plan in place from the start.
Starting automating random task without a plan might let you jump into the action right away but you won’t reap the same rewards as you would from a comprehensive strategy describe in functional analysis, that’s why you need an analysis of how you’re going to deploy your marketing information tool even within the platform Zoho one.
In our functional analysis process of your Zoho Marketinghub, we sit down with you to craft a marketing automation plan that illustrates the journey of your funnel. By having the right design, it will get you more results from your investment in your marketing strategy in long run and you’ll be able to measure it that much easier.
Set measurable goals
The key to setting useful goals is to specify because the more narrow the focus of a goal is the easier it is to measure your progress towards achieving it. For example, it could mean :
- Increasing the visitor to your website;
- Increasing the number of followers on social media;
- Increasing the number of emails in your leads database from a campaign;
These goals are specific and measurable, as you pick one of those goals you can :
- Determine how much you want to increase those numbers in percentage;
- Choose a key performance indicator to track your progress KPI;
- Establish a time frame in which you’d like to hit this goal;
Using marketing information to support your goals
Let’s say that your ultimate goal is to get more people to use your product or services, your more immediate goal is to grow your list of email contacts by X %. Because email marketing is a very high impact, a webform for e-mail automation from marketing automation to grow your list and moving those subscribers through a sales funnel is a good way to boost your sales.
Is a simple way to grow your list using marketing automation is to offer a useful download on your website in exchange for an email. For example, a shoe repair business could offer a guide showing people how to take better care of their boots, this may seem counterintuitive, after all, it would reduce the number of boots needing repairs. The idea is to offer something of genuine value, which then increases the trust for your brand. You can set up an automated email to deliver the how-to guide while creating a workflow that adds the email address to your subscriber. To do all of this you need to have a firm understanding of your marketing funnel.
What does your marketing funnel look like
A marketing or sales funnel is an overview of a public target from non-customer to a customer. It let you see every step of the journey from initial awareness, to the evaluation of a sale. Giving this bird eye view can help you spot the points of the journey where you’re losing potential customers, after that you can create goals aimed at catching those leaks.
Before you begin to analyze the customer journey you should have created a customer persona. Those will help you understand who your customer is and where are their needs. The information gather can help you to target prospects at different points of your marketing funnel.
A typical marketing funnel
The specific stages of a marketing funnel vary from business to business, which is one reason to use marketing automation tools that lets you customize your lead stages, the most common stages are:
- Awareness
- Interest
- Evaluation
- Commitment
- Sale
Awareness is when a lead has learned about your products or services whether from their friend or family, colleagues, or someone else at this point you are looking for the interest in how it can solve their problems. This is often referred to as the top of the funnel the point, where the funnel is the widest. A large number of people may hear about your products and services, but less will be intrested to take actions where the funnel becomes narrow or as people move down to it.
Interest this is when the lead moves from being aware of the products and services, through realizing that it might have something for them. This might happen because they’ve learn more about your products/services, or because they find themselves with a problem that your product or services can solve.
Evaluation is when the leads begin to compare you to your competitors while deciding whether to use your products/services, this point is often referred to as the middle of the funnel.
Commitment is when the leads have decided to go with your brand, but they have not yet made the purchase yet, they might be waiting to get the budget, waiting on approval from a manager or 3rd party, or maybe they don’t quite need the products/service is just yet as they were researching it in advance.
A sale is when a lead has actually spent money on your products\services. They’ve reached the bottom of the funnel and come out to the other side as your client. Typical marketing activities that are focused on moving people from the commitment stage to the sale stage are referred to as bottom of funnel tactics.
Creating goals based upon your marketing funnel
You can take a look at your reports and identify any parts of the funnel where you’re losing leads.
Let’s say your customers are moving through the top of the funnel easily enough following you on social media and subscribing to your newsletter but they never convert into sales, now you know to focus on middle to bottom-funnel activities.
Your goal could be to increase by X %, to accomplish this measurable goal you know you’re going to have to get creative and find ways to convince middle of the funnel leads to cross the finish line.
Tie it back to online marketing
You can create a workflow that sends to abandoned carts email to remind them of their interest in your product\services after all the if they got as far as putting items in a cart, they’re definitely interested. It may be as simple as catching them on another day when they’re in the mood after they have received approval for their budget.
Different types of communication often work well with the different channels
As customers move on the funnel, communication gets more intimate or personal.
Email conversation, in person or over the phone, via social media or live chat, there’s even sometimes SMS that are especially well suited for the bottom of the funnel. That doesn’t mean they can’t be used for people in the middle of the funnel, but they fit in well closer to the end of the funnel conversation.
Similarly, advertising and social media are often top-of-the-funnel activities but can be used for middle or bottom-of-the-funnel marketing.
1 to 1 conversation and social media are an example of more personal social media activities. Another example is a lead who opens a specific email about a sale or visits the product page of your website and is shown a targeted advertising campaign related to a specific product or service of your company. If they browsed through the for example dog harness section of your site for example, you might show them Facebook ads for dog harness and leashes or ads about the sale you’re running and your product for dog owners specifically.
Would keep kpi your tracking for Each goal?
KPI stands for key performance indicators KP I’s lead Hugh measure the success or failure of your gold once you’ve define ago you need to choose the metrics you used to get the file your progress towards it. This could be an overall number, a percentage, Or any other forms of measurement. You did choose a keep young that lets you track the rise or fall of those numbers or percentages to relate it to the attainment of your goals.
Track more than 1 KPI for the full picture
Measure more than one KPI to see how different factors affect your overall goal.
Here’s an example as a fishing supply business you want to increase sales for the year by 15%. In addition to tracking the number of overall sales, you might also want to track website traffic, social media conversions, and your click-through rate to gain a better understanding of how that factor may or may not contribute to your overall sales number.
This will help you to know what are the factors that are tied to your overall sales number. For when you start out you may expect your overall sales to increase when people visit your website from a Facebook ad. By tracking overall sales in conversion rates for ad campaigns you can discover withered that’s true or not. If you’re also tracking click-through rates and conversions for promotional emails, you could learn that an increase in sales actually came from them. After that, you’ll have a better idea of where to cut and where to you perform well to focus your time money, and energy to increase your sales.
There’s no exact science when it comes to the number of KPI’s to track, more than 3 < 10 is a good practice.
Comon KPI:
- Conversion rate
- Open the rate
- Click to rate
- Total revenue
- Unsubscribes
- Lead to customer ratio
- Return on investment
