What is a Marketing Automation Funnel?

Today, when you want answers, you go Google. This is true for CXOs at multinational enterprises, as well as new employees just starting at entry level jobs.

If you understand your customers ‘ searches, you can create custom Marketing Automation Funnels to capture and sell to these people.

How do you do this? Read more.

Step 1: Attract your target audience

First, we need to capture those searches. You do that by blogging. But not just blogging for the sake of blogging, but blogging with a purpose.

Post new blog entries regularly about the questions your audience asks Google. This way, you attract potential customers who don’t yet know they’re potential customers. Link between blog posts to guide visitors to the right content (as I did just there). In this way, create a web of blog entries that captures visitors to your Marketing Automation system:

Exactly how you do it is described in the article How do you blog to generate traffic and leads. (See – I just did it again right there! 🙂  )

Step 2: Capture visitors to your Marketing Automation Funnel

Then capture your visitors into automatic sales funnes that you’ve built with your marketing automation system. Offer them solutions to the problems they were looking for, in return for their email addresses. You do this on a landing page that contains a form:

Once you’ve captured them, it’s time to educate them — give them insights to view their problems in a new light.

Step 3: Give your leads insights about their challenges

Create more material that contains insights you want to convey to your leads. These should not be about products or services, but about their original problems. It may be associated videos, related articles, blog posts, or any other content you may come up with. Email These insights to your audience roughly once per month to educate them over time.

But make sure that your material is eye-opening and educational. Don’t just address their challenges directly. Instead, show them an entirely new perspective. Perspectives they haven’t previously thought of.  This is what smart marketing does: it captures customers who think they have Problem A, but shows them that in fact they have Problem B.

If you have interesting content with valuable insights you will get a fan. And when they start to see their problems from your point of view, you’ll have knocked out potential competitors.

Now is the time for the last step in your sales flow: to sell!

Step 4: Sell with your funnel

Add calls-to-action in your emails. Ask them to click a link at the bottom to see how your products address their challenges. This is the ultimate purpose of all marketing: to sell.

If one of your potential cusotmers is ready to progress in their buying journey, and they found your materials eye-opening, they will click.

What you link to with your calls-to-action can be more product oriented and less educational. You can start promoting your offers more. You can link to features, products or offers that position you as the best supplier. But cause they have the right mindset, the material becomes so much more relevant.

When they read this, your Marketing automation system alerts your sales reps so they can get in touch and close the deal. The entire funnel, from start to finish, now looks like this:

The leads who have gone through it will be more open to dialogue, interested in meeting or discussing with you, and have much shorter sales cycles because they have bought into your perspective.

What do we do with the leads we couldn’t sell to?

Your Marketing Automation Funnels will undoubtedly capture a bunch of leads who are not potential customers. But those are also valuable!

Create your funnels in such a way that these are categorized and added to your “fan club”.

If you accidentally capture competitors, you can use automations to lock them out of future mailings.

Partners, you can process with special partner funnels.

Promoters, you can process with news and insights over time. They will in turn spread your message.

And as for potential customers who weren’t yet ready to buy: Continue nurturing them with educational content filled with insights. From time to time, invite them to take action. When they’re ready, they will take the bait and your marketing automation system will alert you so you can follow up.

How much additional sales can Marketin Automation Funnels contribute with?

How many leads can you get? How many of these can be closed?

Generally, there is a rule: the more expensive the product, the fewer leads. But the final result in the form of revenue is generally the same.

But to answer the question, we can look at a company I helped previously. Because we’ll divulge some numbers here, I won’t mention their name, but they sell IT solutions with order values ranging from tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Here are their numbers:

They get an average of 22 visitors per blog post and month. Note: These are visitors they keep getting today, as a result of a post they might have posted several years back!

On average, 1.5% of these convert to leads via the initial funnel entry point. And of those, roughly 10% become sales ready leads.

So to summarize: Each group of 10 blog posts results 10 x 22 x 1.5% x 10% = 0.3 sell ready leads per month. With a closing frequency of 20% (not  at all unusual with such qualified leads) and an average order value of  €50,000 this results in  $3,000 of additional revenue per month.

If you post a blog per week, after a year you’ll have over 50 blog posts, generating  $15,000 per month. By blogging once a week. An employee can blog 3 times a week and costs less. A clear ROI.

If you focus on building Marketing Automation Funnels, soon the question will no longer be “how can we get more leads?”. But “How can we streamline the handling and closing of all these leads?”. I’ve seen it happen. At the company I mentioned above, we had to employ new dedicated salespeople who’s sole job was to try to close the more than 70 leads we ended up getting monthly.

And the answer to the new question will be the same as the one that led us here in the first place: By using Marketing Automation Funnels to help salespeople be even more effective at their jobs!