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hey there i'm greg finn filling in for christine's earnhaud aka shop and it is officially marketing a talk on these special episodes we take a break from reading the news and we take a deeper look at a specific digital marketing topic today we're going to look back at something that quite frankly gets confused quite a bit by traditional marketers and for good reason you'll see marketing throughout the funnel and just like our famous friday news shows you'll be able to catch this episode on youtube on the search engine journal network or you can check it out over on marketingclock.com and you can see the direct link to our smiling faces and our special guests first somebody who you may know digital marketing manager here at cypress north and marketing o'clock co-host and fan favorite mark salts rally at marketing by mark on twitter welcome mark yep thanks for having me greg ready to talk about one of my favorite things that i talk way too much about so let's get this b2b marketing party started and there might be one person out there that talks more about the funnel than you mark and we've got him here host of the funnel reboot show and founder of marketing what's new agency and power listener of marketing clock here glenn schmelze welcome glenn thank you very much greg it's great to be here awesome fantastic to have you and finally we have show bff of 2021 fan favorite senior digital marketer at co-marketing andrea cruz welcome andrea thank you for having me ting and ask mark said i'm so excited to talk about the funnel because this is my favorite topic besides advertising in general i can't wait all right well we can't wait either and i will be moderating the discussion making things flow it's going to be a good conversation here and hopefully bring some light to the challenges that the majority of b2b marketers face as well as somebody to see but really taking a look at it and also marketing advertising in general so let's get started here is one of the things i think people get tripped up on a little bit when people talk about the funnel it can be confusing because we don't necessarily know what the is in the funnel there's many there's sales funnels there's marketing funnels content funnels conversion funnels lots of different funnels out there so when you see somebody talk about the funnel it can get a little murky so glenn is there one that you can explain before we move ahead with the marketing and content like the sales funnel absolutely greg and i just got to say up front that anything that i can talk about on funnels i learned from somebody that popped up on a pre-roll ad that i saw on youtube last night oh sorry never mind no actually please do not listen to the people who show up on your pre-roll saying they know what a funnel is okay uh because they just add to the confusion right like let's be honest the the thing with a funnel is let's remember guys we're just making a model here okay and it's an artificial thing it's to me a model of how we make sense of the way that buyers move towards buying a product and there's a couple of reasons why it can only be a model okay so this is why i just want to let her hair down for a second and just not worry too much about it it's helpful but it has its limits first limit we actually don't know where buyers are in the fun okay buyers don't necessarily move in a straight line and most importantly despite what all the analytics products out there say until they actually tell us we don't for certain know where they are in the fun so let's just relax about that the other thing is that even if they do tell us where they are in a funnel we have to remember we're marketers okay if i were talking sales okay that's great but that's only for one individual for marketers we've got a little bit of a higher bar to hit and that is we have to worry about the masses of buyers so we can use a funnel but when we're doing that we're really just trying to understand how we would do something for a group of people that happen to be similar to each other right they form a segment together and by them doing that we kind of look at them and we can act on them and we can maybe measure how effective we're being against that group depending on where they are in this artificial thing what we call a funnel right so i just want us to all remember that yes we can do tracking yes we have a lot of great tools at our disposal but let's also just keep in mind this you know it it's not exactly a science it's more of an art great and i think there's a lot of value there where you know everything can be different i mean like each process is inherently different from company to company and is there anything andrea or mark that you wanted to add to that maybe on the sales side or just on the uniqueness of a funnel side i think the key when when thinking about a funnel it's and i like how glance it and which is there's no some you cannot copy and paste them it's going to be different for everyone it's going to change from business to business and it might change from individual to individual we might jump stages people might go back they might tell you they are somewhere but they are somewhere else and that's how marketing goes i love the what what you said glenn about it's an art rather than a science because i think it's 100 accurate yeah and i i love glenn that you called out the lanky youtube real thing i can't wait to see what ad is going to be on this video when i first watch it on youtube because those things drive me nuts when i'm watching marketing o'clock every week it's so funny to see what this guru is going to come up with next it is hilarious and it should have started with a disclaimer that said anything you just watched we completely disavowed but i think practically speaking i totally agree with both of you like i've never worked with at one single client who had like the same definitions of either like their marketing funnel or their sales funnel at anywhere and i i think for me like when i'm defining it i'm thinking more of necessarily like where are we trying to bring people in on the sales side and like what types of interactions are we trying to elicit from a prospect with our client and kind of like shaping our marketing ideas around specifically um what we're trying to get a prospect to do so i think like for me if i'm like defining a funnel which again like we said it's not something that can be applied to everything the same it is an art and a little bit of a science but mostly in art and i think more of just like trying to think of what sales action we're trying to do so if we're trying to get someone to start talking to sales i'm going to say that this is like our bottom of the funnel marketing if we're trying to just get someone to admit that they have a problem or a need um that might be like middle of the funnel for me or if we're just trying to reach someone that's what i would say is like a top of the funnel marketing effort in terms of like kind of framing a conversation about um what this funnel is and you know i think everybody here also manages some sort of ad budget as well and i think those definitions really help to show the value of all the if you're in house those budgets that you've worked hard to secure and if you're at an agency all that work and i guess mark how how do you take the those different steps within you know that sales process that you're talking about those and how do you make that work to to communicate with the client and get better yes so i think of one area where people say like the funnel is dead when they're talking about the sales funnel and like hub spots like the sales funnel should be a fly wheel i think that like dead is true in the sense of glenn's saying that we don't actually know where people are in the funnel and we can't exactly map that but it's still really important to have a defined sales funnel so that a we can measure um our success and so that we can have somewhat of an idea of where someone stands so we can reach out to them appropriately so one thing i do when i'm taking on any new b2b client is i work with them to define that sales funnel together to make sure that we are talking about the same things and that we are measuring our goals properly so i go into like kind of a traditional cycle of like what are we defining a lead and that's usually anyone who's filled out a form and then we have our marketing qualified leads anyone who has filled out any form that has some sort of sales intent so like a demo request or a trial or a contact us and then we go to sales qualified lead which is very um straightforward someone who's been qualified with sales a discovery call has been held then we have opportunity and that is when a proposal is ready to be made there can be a dollar amount assigned to that person or to that company and then a customer obviously is someone who signed the dotted line um they're ready to purchase your product or service and i just think that it's really important to know each of those steps so you can say that this marketing initiative has driven this many opportunities with this certain deal value in this many customers because it's really important to be able to measure the effectiveness of what we're doing and why we do different types of marketing efforts at each of those stages of the sales funnel great and is there anything else somebody wants to add to sort of that sales funnel aspect before we get into sort of the more traditional marketing funnel um i'll add that uh it doesn't necessarily move in lockstep with the ways that yeah we try to break this up so remember i said at the top you know the buyer is on a journey we are trying to match that to other things so you know mark has brought up the top of funnel middle funnel bottom of funnel yeah we can also use a rough guide like that and in some clients scenarios uh just the nature of the offering is that they'll have to talk with somebody maybe there's a lot of configuring that has to you know work to even know how much it costs so in that case uh they might be identified very early um but they still may not be ready for a sale so we we have to just watch that we don't uh try to say okay well uh you know top of funnel i'm using generic and then i'm gonna move into you know branded type things and uh at the middle stage because they're identified no they they might come in um very late in the game and they've been watching you or they've been let's say under the influence of your marketing but they're not uh coming in until the 11th hour to become identified and suddenly they're going into sales so these two things you know ride together and that's all i want to say there absolutely and so speaking of that and really getting into the more traditional whether you use the aida approach attention interest decision action or you go through the the different elements that you know let's talk about that kind of traditional marketing funnel andrea is can you give a quick rundown of the way that you see it and maybe over at co-marketing how you address or like how you envision that marketing fall well it starts with as mark said talking to sales because ultimately sales is going to be marketing's client so making sure that what you are setting up on the marketing side will connect and will start giving inputs towards the sales funnel to be able to have that discussion so in b2b this is very difficult because it's so long um in b2c it's very easy for people to it happens within minutes in many cases that you'll see something you are interested in it you evaluate it and you purchase well on b2b it's longer but the traditional funnel stays which is the top middle and bottom of the funnel the way i like to think about it is the awareness stage i don't know i have a problem i just realized that so you are put into that awareness thing that it's like okay i'm sick but i don't know what i have i need to keep researching to learn more in that process that you start researching you will start coming up with solutions that's when you get into that evaluation stage what are my pain points what are my issues how can i solve them is there are different people that can help me solve solve this problem and then you go into that final consideration stage which is okay i evaluated everything i know i have an issue then i just need to consider what's going to be the approach i'm going to take to solve it and that's when you're entering using mark's um names you enter into that lead or marketing qualify lead which is like hey i want to reach out to you because i know i have this issue can you help me out great okay so i i guess we've we've kind of got that where mark really kind of well glenn i think set everything up really nicely from the kind of the the sales process standpoint and kind of that unknown and also the fact that everybody's different every company is different mark had added in kind of the fact that trying to add those steps and those processes to best try to figure out where folks are is still very beneficial and then taking a look at the marketing funnel whether it's top of funnel middle funnel bottom funnel that there's very different intent um you know going back to aida glen gary glenn ross alec baldwin there that you've has been you know popularized that okay so we've kind of defined the sales funnel and the marketing funnel and how they're different um one sort of how both of the journeys are different so let's talk about those different stages that were just outlined by andrea so what i just want to talk tactics so what tactics specifically glenn um do you like use or what do you think about throughout those processes that you outlined that sometimes can be a little bit fuzzy are there specific tactics that work better at certain points oh yes uh and i think the only thing that is similar to them is the line of questioning that you do to get to which tactic you're gonna go with um so let me take on for example what kind of offers and call-to-actions you're going to put at different stages of the funnel so to me a really simple way to think of it is that if they're just at that upper you know we could call it top we could call it awareness stage they're just yeah what is the problem so for me um we try to work with clients where in the most considerate of purchases there is even content that talks about that and maybe it's not gated but there's at least something that we can see are we getting a uh amount of traffic to that and is that being consumed so that we can tell for anybody who is catching us at that earliest of moments have we got um something to offer them for that then the offers get a little bit more uh for fair value right so if they're coming in at the middle stage where as andrea eloquently put you know they're talking about okay so what is the approach that i might take to solve that problem so if you let's say are in a like a considered purchase and let's say you built a software a fast product that can deal with a problem but it's also something that there are services that solve that problem well so now you're into okay my approach versus their approach and maybe you have a piece of content that you want to offer and see if you can acquire an email over that then getting down to the lower level the most important thing there is let's imagine that they have accepted the approach that you and your competitors take to solving that problem it's how do you set yourself apart from those others why are you you specifically the best party to buy you know the solution to the problem from and so your offer at that point is probably going to be case study related or maybe down into a dedicated we'll show you how you know maybe in a demo we can absolutely solve your particular needs because we've got a line of people here who've had the exact same problem in the past and we've dealt with it and we've successfully served their problem so to me that line of questioning helps somebody understand what are the pieces of content that i need to have to cover all of those scenarios no matter where they are up and down that line i i love that last part you said because i think a big thing people don't usually consider when they're doing like very templatized um funnel processes when they're approaching the bottom of the funnel they're just like oh yeah it's a it's a demo request we're just gonna include our value propositions but they don't think of the other types of content we need to be building around of the bottom of the funnel and really understanding what your prospects are looking for from you that they can't get from their competitors so i think a lot of for a lot of companies case studies are an afterthought whereas they should be something you should be thinking of at the beginning of how can we prove our value to our prospects through case studies and other really helpful bottom of the funnel content that and i've seen like demo videos that are ungated just work really well and it's thinking about what else besides that form do we need to be thinking about great and we'll talk about offers in a second here but i just want to go back to andrea quick and say so we know that there's different intents right glenn did a fantastic job laying that out um is there anything that you do with different messaging in those different portions of the marketing funnel 100 and i think it goes back a little bit to what mark was just talking about um i've done this for a few very specific clients in the past i would grab and this takes a while to build but you would grab all their content all their landing pages all their access where you actually have an action to take and i would start labeling them this is top funnel middle funnel and start labeling next to them services this is related to service a service b and try to find gobs because the reality is a lot of people will say oh we're writing content all the time we have all our bases covered and what it's usually forgotten is that middle of the funnel and how to connect people in a way that it makes sense so when you are setting up campaigns you are missing content because you don't have anything that really talks about maybe how you are different what you actually do very very common issue in b2b you go to a website it has a lot of beautiful words but they don't mean a thing you don't really know what they do you don't know how they do it you just know that your conversion rates are going to be better or your sales are going to skyrocket but it doesn't really tell you how yeah it's a very common issue in b2v and we don't notice that unless you really think about okay what are the stages people are actually taking on my website before converting is there anything missing and how do i convey at that point in time look this is what we do this is how we do it and this is how we are different the what the hell and the why great so you mean my content that my message of saying we dynamically scale and align marketing synergistic technologies didn't make sense it does not [Laughter] all right great so we know a little bit about the intent we know about the messaging and why it's important to speak to people knowing their intent and now mark you had started talking about some of those offers and i know that's one of your favorite things can you expand a little bit more i know you started can you wrap that up yeah and i think there's kind of two layers to this and we've touched on both of these that there are types of offers that are appropriate for certain stages of the funnel but there's also kind of different types of content within each of those offer types that also speaks different stages of the funnel like as andrea was saying like a blog post we might typically think of as like a top of funnel type of asset but we also need blog posts that speak to different stages of the funnel so it gets kind of complex there so first i just want to break it down by offer types so when we're talking about types of offers that we want to build awareness at the top of the funnel we're usually talking about things like blogs videos infographics podcasts maybe like an email newsletter just something that's like very informational for the middle of the funnel when someone's starting to kind of consider a problem or a need but they don't necessarily like know they need to solve it or how to solve it yet they are aware at this point we're thinking of longer form content that's probably gated so like ebooks white papers guides some sort of report a webinar an interactive tool or a gated video and then at the bottom of the funnel this is where we're trying to talk to sales they realize they have the problem they realize that you might be able to solve it for them um this is like a demo request a trial a consultation just getting in contact those are like kind of what we're thinking on the offer side but then when we're talking about actually writing this content and like doing that messaging like andrea was talking about there's different ways we need to speak and write at those different stages of the funnel so at the top we want to be thinking about informational content we're just trying to educate we are writing content that qualifies someone as a member of your target audience but we're not actually necessarily saying that they have a problem or a need yet we're just making them aware at the middle of the funnel i think this is where we're starting to kind of qualify this person as this person has a problem or a need that needs to be solved and we might be helping them solve that problem or accomplish something that's not necessarily directly related to our product or service but it's pretty close and then at the bottom of the funnel we are thinking of things that are directly related to your product or service this is content um that's kind of like glenn said helping differentiate you from your competitors and this is speaking to someone who's interested in making a purchase from you or your competitors so i think here like this is where we're talking about like if we're doing content it might be like a demo video or like a buyer's guide an roi calculator like a one-pager um so like while we have like ideas of like types of content we should like offers that we should be doing at each stage of the funnel there's also kind of subsets of like how we can make something like a blog post which might traditionally be something we would consider for like a top of the funnel marketing effort there also are bottom of the funnel applications for that as well to kind of muddy that but there's kind of two ways you need to think about your content there okay so i think we've covered the basics of kind of the intent and how to communicate throughout and some of those different tactics and different resources that can be used and so now let's talk about some go-to strategies so maybe not network specific but i guess overarching strategies i know this is hard because we just explained for about 15 minutes that everything's different but i mean i guess is there any one strategy that anybody like to expand on i know we don't have hours and hours here but like is there anything just specifically that you'd like to let people know about um you know when we look at this throughout um i would like to say correct that it i like that people think that one platform will be their one solution for everything and that's not the case and it should never be your case um when thinking about the marketing funnel and all the different networks and platforms they all when you go to a different network it's because people are doing something differently there um for example you don't go to linkedin to find how-to recipes for something um you don't i think i've been using linkedin wrong you use linkedin a lot mark but i don't think you use it for that i found a great recipe to hashtag crush it though the other day oh god okay i'm gonna keep going i'm gonna ignore that comment um so think about what your audience is actually doing in those platforms it's highly unlikely that somebody will go to linkedin to find a demo about a specific company they will most likely go to google for that and can change their exceptions to all the exceptions but think about what the audience is doing when they go to that platform um are you in youtube and you are getting a demo for something you've never seen ever in your life that's probably not the way to go um is are you seeing something related to a brand that you actually know something already about and and what are you doing in the platform as a user that matches what the company is actually asking you to do that's how i think about it and that's what i always um tell people to think about if you are targeting someone what type of ad are you using is that at actually helping you get to the goal you are trying to gain and is the user you doing something that would they will stop whatever they are doing to actually take that action on your behalf i love that point because i think too often especially in ppc we like people like to brand like a certain network as being for a certain part of the funnel but in reality you should be thinking about how your prospect your audience is using that platform and a great example i have is facebook people are always like facebook is for top of the funnel but i've kind of had experience where you can use facebook for each stage of kind of where someone is in the buyer's journey depending on what types of targeting you're using and messaging and offers and you can kind of build a full funnel experience there and i used to work at a restaurant technology company and the big thing is restaurateurs are very very active and engaged on facebook so whereas in other industries people might be very passively engaged on facebook if you're advertising them as a b2b brand and it's not some place where you want to be getting a demo request because odds are if someone's actually submitting that form they're going to forget about it but when you get people who are managing their restaurants from facebook and are very attentive on facebook we were had different audiences were using a very strict like opportunity based lookalike to drive demo requests and we had a different audience for content downloads and we had we were also driving blog traffic that was converting into subscribers and ebook downloads and we had different audiences and different offers for where someone is at that funnel stage and the other thing i would think about is again not falling into like these are like you should use facebook for top of funnel linkedin for the middle and google search for bottom of the funnel it's also kind of breaking out of those um channels that we're told about and being aware of different channels that are specific to your industry like i think a lot of time there are like publications where you might be able to um pay for an ad to generate content downloads in the middle of the funnel or you might be able to use something like capterra or g2 to drive qualified sales leads who are literally looking for a software product great and speaking of channels let's get into that right after we just said not every channel is created equal i think that there are some general themes and some general channels where that excel at different portions of the funnel so again nothing is i think glenn set the tone right when early saying not everything applies across the board so um i guess glenn is there anything specifically that you know channel wise that you see success with or again generally directionally speaking um you can find success with specifically yeah i'll give it a shot um the way that i would probably break down our channels first and i'll ask people to maybe look at their google analytics it's getting a little dicey with google analytics for just rolling out but in general google divides people who are coming to us and we eventually find them on our site by uh they were acquired from a search source a social source or a referral source and you know i think any of us who are agency side or maybe more intermediate uh in-house marketers are familiar with these but for those who aren't you know it's a good starting point so what are some of the basic themes that we can think about well the nature of social and referrals to me those they seem to rise up a little when it comes to discovering right so if i think to where i have come across something that i'm finding out for the first time um an offering i didn't know about or even a way to crack a problem that i have that i didn't think about it was on a network that i was on a social network um and or it was on a website maybe like mark said an industry pub and it's talking about it so those are good places if we want to imagine broadly speaking where we might put some of that upper funnel content then in general if we're talking um search and i'm going to leave for later the other parts of google ads so i'm only talking about the search portion of google ads that's yeah a good one where if your audience has been given the words to use it i think a very typical one that we all think of is personally you know you i don't know you have an eight or something you go to the doctor the doctor says hmm that might be and they ramble off some term you go home what do we all do right and you type that in and you google it so i'm going to die right right am i going to order so you're you're already aware of it and you're moving down into the okay so what can be done about it and you know i'm now into heavy duty research uh it's not just a like a useless piece of trivia i just want to know no i've got a deeper intent than that so uh those parts are there and then the last one results in that i imagine we can cover more of it later is all right i've landed on a website and i am being retargeted because of my behavior so you know i'd say in general if we want to think of those flows with you know the referral and social and then search and then the only other flavor that you know of course we talk about because the three of us are agencies here is the paid portion right where it's more active i'm not just seeing who's gonna wander by i'm actually going and i have a job with for some budget to go and you know mindfully get some of the people to go see that uh information and act on it so and the strategy there would be i'm getting data back for it right please please please if you're going to spend any money or time even on a content or campaign idea expect data in return so you can understand whether or not it's working great and andrea did you have any other thoughts on that specifically about the different channels philosophy i know mark is covered it's always different but anything specific you'd like to add no i think glenn's example is great you just start somewhere and then always expect to get something in return um it could be a micro conversion i think it's it's a lie too when we are always expecting that anything you do it's going to give you a foreign submission because that's the whole way of thinking but think about minecraft conversions are you looking at assisted conversions if you have the knowledge of how to get to that information um is that helping you shorten your cycle what is your percentage every time somebody downloads a pdf a data sheet something along those lines of your website then how many of those actually become customers or they move down the funnel at some point getting that information always expect something and anytime you send someone to a landing page or to a legion form or whatever that might be make sure that you have the mechanisms to track what is happening on that page are people scrolling down if you are sending them to a blog post um do you have a pdf that you are giving away for free are you tracking those because you can use those as remarketing after you can create look likes you can do a ceiling on things but always expect something in return i think that was a great point for england fantastic all right so if you're up to this point now you might have been taking a nap thinking that this is you know 101 201 um content here so as tom brady would say lfg and i want to talk about post conversion and something that's criminally underrated and by post conversion i'm talking about the lead through the opportunity status so how do you cultivate those folks that are a lead and coax them through and remarket and re-message them so andrea or glenn is there anything that you do sort of post-conversion when you are thinking about your marketing and the funnel sure i'll give it a crack the thing that i imagine always is okay they have moved out of having a conversation inside their own head and now they're having a conversation with somebody on the other side somebody right i mean that's how we interact as humans we say oh my name is and you know we're waiting for the other person to reciprocate so the most important thing and i work on organizations who maybe haven't adopted a full smart tech stack yet this is where i try and say to them well you don't just want to have an impersonal like corporate voice getting back to them so they have a name you need to pick somebody else who has a name and it doesn't have to be a sales person it could be the ceo of the company but in anything you do from that point on i think it should simulate a one-to-one experience because that's what relationships get built on so uh i think it's really important for the tone of it to change then not from you know our solution and we are this it should be hey i'm glenn i used to have a problem like yours i know what it's like to be in your shoes i think i've got some information here that might help you right to me it's a huge distinction yeah that was great i'm going to cut that clip it and run it as an ad at the beginning of this video andrea is there anything you do specifically you know once post-conversion that you find great success with yeah so um harvard business review has actually an article about this that in any v2b decision making process there's at least five i don't even remember five or six people involved and we all you only focus on the person who submitted the lead and we forget about they work with other people they might not be the decision maker if it is the decision maker he probably didn't do the research somebody did it for him because he doesn't have time because it's a big b2b software or a big project or who knows one so at that point you have all the information you need you have if he became an opportunity you know then you know his company name you know where he is located you know what his title is so you have pretty much all the information you can to actually remarket the people or start targeting the people around him that are influencers to that decision and go from there i have always found that that really helps because you start i mean it happens if you being able if you've been ever involved in a sales discussion normally to the demo will go one person maybe two then they go they talk internally if they come back they will bring more people to that discussion so how can you influence those people before they even get to the table and have a demo with you this is why you're a fan favorite here that's amazing i mean again that's so powerful um so so mark i know you're you're sort of you know i'd say you know at least on the automation side our lead here is there anything you'd want to add specifically mark to this yes and i think kind of thinking of like the fact that we've talked about a lot is that like the funnel is something for us but it's not necessarily the same thing for like the lead and like they don't know they have to go to like the next step in our funnel so we can't make them do that work like we have to take them to the next step we can't just expect them to get there on their own so we have to do everything in our power to kind of hold their hand and take them where we think they should go next and from an automation perspective after someone converts there's kind of three main buckets that i like to make sure are covered first is kind of how this person fits into the sales process after they've submitted a form so i want to make sure everything in the crm is updated so the salesperson knows very clearly like whether this person downloaded a piece of content or like requested a demo and understands everything that we know about where that person is in the sales funnel based on what they just converted on i want to make sure that lead is assigned to the right person automatically because the thing is if we're not assigning them to a salesperson we're just putting contact information into a database that's not why we pay for crms and marketing automation platforms we're not storing information if i wanted a bunch of contact information i could just pay someone to scrape that from the internet i want to make sure it's actionable and i want to assign that to a person and i want to make sure it's assigned right away because a lead is much more likely to take the next step if you're able to respond to them within the first 15 minutes of their conversion and then i want to make sure that i'm assigning any relevant tasks out in the crm to the sales person so that it's very clear to the salesperson what they should be doing next and this is especially important if you are very fortunate to have high lead volume you want to make sure that your sales person doesn't really have to like think too much about what they should do it's like very clear to them what the next step is for this person who converted and then making sure that sales has visibility into everything we're doing on the marketing side they can see email engagement they can see ad engagement they can see page views so that they can use that like glenn said personalize that sales process based on what they already know about us or what they're specifically looking for the next bucket is email nurturing i want to make sure that if someone's downloading an asset that we have a very well created nurture that helps the lead along and it's not just about helping us get that person the next stage it's continuing to be helpful and build trust giving them content that helps them solve the problem they initially had and kind of using that content to keep surfacing that hey there is this problem it needs to be solved and then eventually explaining how we can help them solve that problem and kind of helping them get there because that you don't go from an asset to a demo request right away you kind of have to prove that out and do so in a way that is actually helpful in the lead to where they see value like glenn said make sure it's very personalized so even if you're doing this on a mass basis if it's automated that it still feels like it's coming from that sales person they feel like you're reaching out to them and there's a lot of handy ways to do that in marketing automation platforms and the last one is um crm retargeting which is i use this a lot if you're generating a lot of content leads and um they're not naturally getting to the next step it might make sense to kind of automate some sort of crm retargeting where someone is added to a remarketing list based on their engagement with your company um you can do this on like facebook linkedin google ads there's lots of ways to do it i think just the one two big things here is really think about what the next step you want them to do here make sure it's cost effective because you might be paying for this person twice so this isn't like a traditional advertising cost you to think about the entire big picture cost of crm retargeting and then i guess lastly and this also applies to email nurturing is to make sure you have the right safeguards in place to make sure that if this person does start talking to sales that they're not still getting ads and emails from you because we want to make sure that handoff is clean and they're not getting mixed messages from us they're not feeling harassed they are feeling helped not harassed i i have a funny story that you just remind me reminded me about i got i was looking to get pet insurance for my dog this is a true story i started creating a quote and i left i left it there because i wanted to compare prices in different places and they started emailing me hey come back finish your quote whatever whatever i a few days after i decided okay i'm gonna go with this company i i am already paying i've been with them for three weeks at this point and i still get emails don't left your quote hanging finalize the process i get so real it happens so often it's like i am already a customer i already gave you my credit card and you're still emailing me to tell me that i have a quote that i haven't finished it's like what are you doing and it's so simple all it takes is one contact field and you could solve that entire mass i know it's crazy in case anybody hasn't seen rocco the corgi on twitter it's rocco.the corgi uh as fracco has his own our instagram page sorry instagram not twitter all right and let's i think we've covered quite a bit here we're up on the time um so i want to talk a little bit about tools specifically but maybe we can make that into a part two so let's go with some parting thoughts here and you know i think that for many people this topic is it could be really daunting one especially if you're new to it so andre are there any parting thoughts you have for the audience any recommendations you have for somebody that's really trying to have success you know throughout the funnel and take some some maybe more specific approaches than they have in the past i don't think people will like this answer but here we go um grab a piece of pen and paper sit down and think what are the actions i have on my website or through my social ad campaigns whatever it might be that are driving awareness what are the ones that are driving on consideration and which ones are the ones that are driving the evaluation stage and you start thinking about how can i connect the people who are thinking that they know at this point they know they have an issue how can i connect them to the next level and again as as we said at the very very beginning of this um show it might be messy we don't know where they are but you have to try to find a way to be able to pass that message along um yes you might miss one person but think about how you can scale this in a way that it makes sense for people and you are constantly having that feedback and you are not like me and my dog's pet insurance that i keep getting emails for something i already did um because as mark said it's just about sitting down and sometimes it's just a few clicks away well a wise insurance broker once told me you could never have enough insurance so but that's a fantastic point glenn how about you any parting thoughts for the audience one and i think anybody listening to this is probably already bought into this you want to think about the program and not just a single campaign when we get stuck into a campaign mode i mean i think all of us have had this conversation maybe with new clients and you say all right so we're you know figuring out how to make your funnel work for your kind of customer and they say something like yeah but in the first six weeks of working with you guys we you know got a lot of traffic and i want to know how many of them have now you know become a sale or you know moved into our crm and talking with sales that's the wrong way to look at this okay your maybe a better way to look at it is sure you know you do need to expect something for money that was spent but imagine that it's changing by time and if we kind of think like how we move through school and they put us in grade 9 and then grade 10 and like grade 11 and grade 12. well you don't mark a grade 9 against a grade 12 exam so you know your your funnel is evolving over time and you need to hold it accountable but at the level that really you should expect at that stage and if you do like a cohort analysis where you say all right but the people entering our funnel in this period of six weeks most recently we're expecting that you know as they move through their buying journey in a couple weeks we're probably going to get a little bit better performance than that cohort that we had when we were just figuring this out so if you think of it as a program and you get out of the mindset of a specific campaign that you have to expect good performance on you're going to have an easier go of it because you're understanding that you're making changes you're experimenting and that is making things better overall fantastic and mark quickly any parting thoughts on your side yeah i think the most important thing you can do is make sure that your marketing and sales organizations are completely integrated with each other i think having alignment isn't enough that it's more you need to be completely working together on this you need to have the same goals in terms of the business and have the same definitions for everything and really be speaking the same language and then not really stopping at the lead handoff like you're not just hanging them the lead in the story is over um you want to help them help that lead get to the next step and you want to solicit their feedback on those leads so that you can continue to improve what you're doing on the marketing side and pivot your strategy over time like you need to have a very strong feedback loop there fantastic so thank you again to glenn andrea and mark for joining me today you can catch mark on marketing clock every friday rain or shine but mark where can people contact you if they want to learn more talk b2b marketing how do they find you yep number one place reach out to me on twitter i'm at marketing by mark i talk a lot so i also like to tweet a lot um i'm not the most active all the time but if you tweet at me i will respond um linkedin it's linkedin.com slash in slash mt salts of rally or you can just search marcus altorelli and of course cypressnorth.com all right and andrea bff of the show and the senior digital marketer at the fabulous co-marketing where can people find you hopefully mine is is easier than marx it's just andrea cruz 9-2 everywhere it's the same for everything so you can find me on twitter on linkedin on instagram everywhere with them um but if you need and you have an urgent question twitter is the place where you will find me and if you're really looking for pretty much any digital marketing conference now you are right there on the main stage i'm trying okay great and co-marketing also so and give that a kind of follow you guys do a great job there at co-marketing on twitter anything else andre or did you get it all that's it all right and of course glenn schmelze of marketing what's now and if you made it this far you should for sure listening listen to the funnel reboot podcast where glenn gets deeper and deeper in the funnel and digital marketing each and each episode so glenn is there anything how do people find you anything you want to plug for the listeners sure well i have to plug all of what we do because i think the three of our agencies have a really good amount of content and i'd encourage people to check that out so yeah any of those websites are good in our case it's marketingwhatsnew.com no punctuation um i recently put out a guide for like i said those people who may not know all these things around how to measure funnels so if you want to go on our website you can find out about that it's called the c-level guide to paid acquisition and it's uh kind of that primer that maybe sets the stage so that people are ready to hear from the likes of our listeners who want to fight the good fight with getting more leads uh how you can find me is on hey glenn s on pretty much every social network great and maybe you can even on follow glenn at hey glenn s and maybe you'll have that there pinned or tweeted out so you can find that link really quick if not it'll be over at marketingclock.com and if you are looking for digital marketing news with lots of really bad puns you can subscribe and we're here friday every week with just bud mark saltorelli in addition to these special round tables that we are releasing every month that may well kill me and it is now officially not marketing o'clock and we will see you next month