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The sales funnel is a traditional but reliable way to grow your business and extend your reach through conversions. A funnel works by nudging multiple entities into a paying position, similar to how it works in an physical funnel.

In marketing, funnel mapping and tracking can be done through software that allows capture pages to collect customer data and follow up to generate leads and conversions.

There are variants of sales funnels that each serve specific purposes, all of which are found on a funnel mapping software. These tools can be created through these marketing planning software products from a basic level to a more advanced system to generate larger scale conversions. Funneling can be your business’ best friend, and it has shown time and time again that these techniques work well to create better growth.

Types of Sales Funnels

These are basic sales funnels that can offer any enterprise improved conversion rates and a further reach on customers when implemented correctly.

Configuring these is easy with a funnel mapping tool to tailor-fit these to your tastes and needs.

1. Homepage Funnels

This funnel is about creating a standard home page and converting it into a lead funnel. The first page serves as the first impression for visitors. First impressions can have a lasting impact, and if your homepage does not tell the story of your business distinctly, people are less likely to purchase.

Cramming sign-up forms or other intrusive page elements and design can a hinderance for site visitors, so be subtle in the way you promote your business’ products.

2. Sales Letters

This funnel is useful in increasing value for your business. Sales letters come in the form of emails containing codes for discounts or future purchase incentives to get people excited to go back. Some people don’t think sales letters are powerful, but it is actually something that people look back at when they remember your business. Doing a quick search on their email mailbox will show them all emails from your company and will allow them to find the discount codes sent to them.

3. Squeeze Pages

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Squeeze pages work towards obtaining email addresses of potential leads. Using things that spikes people’s interests like unique headlines, free offers, and attractive graphics can lead customers to sign up for newsletters and accounts. Curiosity is a large driving factor of modern-day sales, and people generally like to experience things for themselves. By giving them a reason to take an interest, they will likely convert.

4. Memberships

Membership funnels are a way to convert people into membership sites and paid service subscriptions. People are normally hesitant to part with their money, so giving them an option to try a product by signing up is a great way to generate potential conversions. Funnel mapping tools can help you create pathways and plans to link people with free trials to unlock full content for a set period.

5. Surveys

Survey funnels are often done to make visitors engage with your business and find out who your visitors are. This tool helps with conducting market research and finding better strategies for retaining clients or attracting more customers. Based on what demographic they fall under, funnel mapping software can help make messages specifically tailored to their group.

6. Lead Magnets

These funnels can retain clients, as this gives them a free item in exchange for signing up. Lead magnets can be used for a specific number of times per email address to prevent over-sharing material.

7. Hero Funnels

Sharing your business’ skillset and stories to visitors will allow a followers list to build up. The more relatable you craft your business to people, the more likely they will either promote or buy from your company. This funnel is an excellent opportunity to get more conversions and has better word-of-mouth marketing, which is free advertising for your business.

8.Webinar Funnels

Giving people a registration form that allows you to contact them and send meeting call join links is a great way to do outreach and gather better conversions. Webinars are a great way to sell larger ticket items, and make an audience more solution aware.

9. Ask Campaigns

This kind of campaign funnel shows what customers want before you create something for them. This funnel means using software to determine what piques people’s interests, which you can use to optimize your newsletters or outreach messages better.

10. Auto/Evergreen Webinars

These webinars that are pre-recorded and informative on specific subject matters can allow you to funnel visitors into your database. These auto webinars promote your products non-stop and enable people to choose the days and dates of when they want to attend or watch.

Building an Effective Sales Funnel

Sales funnels are incredible tools that allow growth. However, always approach your targets by using a strategy in any marketing funnel or campaign. When it comes to sales funnels, you will likely be investing in funnel building software, which means extra expenses for a business. Whenever money goes out in entrepreneurship, you will always want the best returns on investments. Otherwise, the money will effectively go to waste.

One of the most important aspects of sales funnels to start with is the homepage funnel, as this is where most people land when looking at your business. Having a well-designed and optimized homepage can make the difference between higher bounce rates and increased conversions.

Strategizing the methods used and the ways funneling will be conducted will be important in generating better conversions. By finding and applying the best practices to use sales funnels for your business and which ones can apply, you will enjoy the best ROIs.

Conclusion

Funnel mapping software can help in the overall marketing sphere of your business. By exploring all outreach methods and improving conversion rates, your company can operate more seamlessly and efficiently. Hire a professional’s services if you have no knowledge of effective funnel marketing and use the proper marketing budgeting software and tools.

For the best marketing planning software that can assist with various sales funnels and other marketing budgeting, visit MarketPlan for a new way to manage your strategies. Plan, execute, project, and tweak your campaign strategies all from a single software source.

Sign up for the free plan and start planning your marketing campaigns today!

A business can have all the goals it wants, but at the end of the day, a lot of the decisions that a company can make are limited by its budget. Smaller or budding businesses need to especially focus on this because it can take a long time for them to build a budget they can work with.

In short, finances are a limiting factor in all businesses, and the flourishing of a business depends on its ability to manage its income and expenses. However, not exceeding your budget does not guarantee success now or later or, either.

As a matter of fact, under-capitalization remains one of the most common causes of failure in new businesses. According to statistics from the US Bureau of Labor, only 80% of companies survive past their first year, and 50% of enterprises don’t make it past their fifth.

It goes beyond not spending beyond your means.

As such, it is vital to go beyond limiting your spending. A business should employ strategies that make the most out of every dollar spent.
One method of making sure a business’ operations fall in line with the budget is through automation & technology, especially when it comes to marketing.

Marketing is one of the most important aspects of any growing business, but more often than not, it is one of the hardest-pressed aspects of its operations. Not all enterprises have the budget to hire a marketing team, but this does not negate the need for meaningful advertising strategies for growth.

The concerns most businesses have

One thing is certain about customer interactions: they prefer a more authentic experience. They prefer responses that are personalized to their situation and inquiries.

Studies have shown that:

• Personalized emails deliver six times higher transaction rates,
• Personalized emails are more likely to be opened by up to 29%,
• 79% of users say they are more likely to take up an offer if it was tailored to reflect previous interactions.

However, this might be challenging for a small business with neither the staff nor the technical know-how to handle the load of customer emails and social media interactions.

One option is to offer repeat customers new promotions and discounts on products or services related to their past purchases, and there are many other equally viable strategies.

How automated marketing can improve the customer experience

A customer’s data—their name, location, preferences, transaction history—can now be used to tailor their emails, increasing the likelihood of positive responses.

This capacity goes beyond email marketing, for example chatbots on your social media accounts can relay important information to inquiring customers.

The most commonly asked questions from customers can be written in and accounted for, giving them the right answers instantaneously, instead of forcing them to wait for a response from the person who manages the page.

You don’t have to dedicate an entire employee to answering all those inquiries, giving you more freedom to dedicate your manpower to more critical tasks. This can save you crucial time and money that you can use for growing your business.

Providing a fantastic customer experience is one of the ways you can make your business stand out in the market.

Research has shown that even a one-second delay in your website’s loading speed can cause a 7% drop in your conversions. A delayed response to a customer inquiry can result in even more dangerous drops and harm your branding.

One of the easiest ways to provide convenience and simplicity to your customers is through the automation of various processes and responses.

You can collect valuable data

Automation methods don’t just include the customer experience. Automated marketing tools can gather important data on customer behaviors.

It’s not just about gathering their contact information, but how they interact with your website and your marketing at various stages.

This is especially effective if your online sales strategy involves what is known as a purchase funnel, a system in which different marketing methods are applied to a specific lead, depending on what stage they are in their purchase.

The data gathered by your automated software can be used to identify your campaign’s strengths and weaknesses, allowing you to change and adapt your strategy as needed.

The best part of this is that it can be done in real-time. Any mistakes or missteps you’ve made can be corrected immediately, minimizing any negative blowback.

Beyond your website, automation can also be applied to your content marketing campaign—in particular, to your SEO content. Using data gathering tools, you can carefully take note of your website’s ranking on Google by using the relevant keywords.

In reality, you can use automated data gathering tools for literally every aspect of your marketing outside the qualitative. This information is the best way to gauge the success of any of your marketing activities.

Without understanding the data, your marketing strategy can be compared to putting messages in a bottle, throwing that bottle into the ocean, and hoping for the best. It is just aimless without any goals or strategies involved.

Automation platforms can help you gain understanding

The best thing about many of these modern solutions is that they compile all your relevant data and actions in a single platform. You could expect to understand the success of your marketing strategy by looking at one simple platform.

You might think that, by automating your marketing activities, you are relinquishing control of each piece. In reality, you are gaining greater understanding of your activities and strategies by compiling the data in one easy-to-understand location. It allows you to see the bigger picture and use this bigger picture to your advantage.

In conclusion

Having a smaller budget does not necessarily have to translate to having less oversight over the path your business will take. As long as you make smart choices and invest in the right marketing tools, you can get more value from whatever amount you spend.

That way, your marketing budget can yield better results, helping your business succeed in ways both measurable and immeasurable.

If you are looking for help with your next marketing campaign, send us a message at MarketPlan. We aim to help you make your agency or business as successful as it can be.

One of the most important elements of success in business is collaboration. After all, it is not a single person who creates success for a company.

There might be naturally born leaders and people confident to stand out with their brilliant ideas, but at the end of the day, business is a collaborative effort. Victories in commerce are won by organizations, not individuals. They are won by companies that are greater than the sum of its parts.

Studies have shown that collaborative teams perform at levels a whopping 400% more efficiently and productively than their competitors. A survey of over 1400 professionals also found that 86% of them believe that a lack of collaboration was responsible for many failed endeavors in the workplace.

More and more studies out there show that companies that favor collaboration over competition are more likely to succeed. The value of a cohesive team with relationships built on trust is now something companies can no longer ignore, but achieving it is no simple task.

As such, we have created this guide to help businesses of all sizes build better connections between their employees to promote teamwork and collaboration. With these strategies, you could quite possibly create an improved and more productive work environment that your employees look forward to being part of.

1. Go back to your company’s mission, and never forget it

People are always more motivated to do their individual tasks when they know their work goes towards a higher aspiration. One of the ways to do this is to return to the company’s mission. Why was this company founded? What did the pioneering members set out to do?

If the answers are not clear, then it might be time to rethink it and recreate a new mission—one that inspires and motivates your employees by making them feel like what they’re doing goes towards something good. Once this common goal is set, make sure to continually remind yourself and your employees of it.

2. Include collaboration among the company’s goals

If your employees do not know that they are supposed to work together, they might not. If you make collaboration a minimum standard in your operations, it will immediately make employees more comfortable about working together. It could even be part of your onboarding process, which can make the adjustment process a lot easier.

When telling employees about their goals, make sure to include the goals they are expected to carry out in collaboration with their colleagues, in addition to their individual expectations. That way, they will be sure to know that collaboration is rewarded in your workplace setting.

Regularly discussing these goals your team will also keep them accountable, and it will keep upper management aware of their progress. Maybe you can even let the team manage their own goals once they have had sufficient training in the company.

3. Highlight individual strengths, and cover for weaknesses

Every person is different, and as such, they are all likely to have unique strengths and weaknesses. Not everyone is good at or comfortable with public speaking. Some people prefer working on the numbers behind a project rather than its qualitative aspects. Whether this comes from personal reasons or just differences in skill sets should not matter.

Your teams and the roles in them must account for the intricacies of each employee. Not only can this strategy help cover weaknesses, but it can also develop the abilities of each employee. This can allow them to learn from one another, share perspectives, and develop more skills.

4. Promote community

Many have experienced an unhealthy work environment at one point or another, and one of the reasons this can happen is from a lack of community in the company. This is so valuable and rare that 54% of employees report that they have stayed at a company longer simply because the company had a strong sense of community and healthy relationships with their peers and colleagues.

For this to happen, employees must feel that they are valued. They must feel that their input and opinions are both heard and appreciated. When this is achieved, your employees will feel more comfortable communicating whatever concerns they might have.

This can create an environment where ideas flow more freely, ensuring collaboration and productivity.

5. Encourage creativity

One of the reasons for the success of many companies is that they allow individual employees to work on their own ideas on company time.

This is the reason why Google has branched out to create many different systems, such as browsers, office suites, cloud storage, and so on. Having seen this success, companies all over the world are giving their employees leeway to be creative.

In an environment conducive to creativity, better collaborative habits can be achieved through brainstorming and discussion.

6. Be an example

You should never be seen as apart from your employees. A good leader is never an unattainable standard. In terms of collaboration, you must appear to be as important to the team as any other person there.

The more you are there, on the ground, with your employees, the more comfortable they will be collaborating with you and the rest of the team.

As in all things, a leader must set an example. A collaborative attitude towards company operations is not an exemption in this regard.

7. Invest in collaboration tools

Now more than ever, collaborative tools are important to the successful operations of a company. With many of us forced to work from home, it has become more difficult to foster a community among your employees. As such, having smooth communication via collaboration tools is paramount.

With the right tools, you can make working lighter and easier to deal with.

In conclusion

The core of these seven strategies is that success is built from great collaboration, and that collaboration is built on trust and creativity.

Fostering an environment that encourages and rewards teamwork can turn unhealthy competition for recognition into a non-zero-sum game. At the end of the day, the success of the company belongs to everyone in it, not just one individual or group of people.

If you’re looking for resources on team collaboration tools, send us a message at Market Plan. We have the expertise and experience to bring your company to greater heights.

Maximizing your marketing budget will help you track your business’s growth and work efficiently towards positive scalability. This is far better than putting your money into immeasurable marketing goals that don’t have clear returns on investment.

Unfortunately, this is a common occurrence among most online businesses who simply pay for ad campaigns without proven results.

This guide will help you view your marketing budget as your priority in producing lucrative campaigns. We will look into the importance of maximizing your budget and then discuss how you can do so effectively.

The Importance of Maximizing Your Marketing Budget

Consider the following benefits and defining qualities behind businesses that maximize their marketing budget:

• Affects your business’s profitability

Amplifying your marketing campaigns should always be viewed as a means to get customers and reach new markets. This is the key to profitability for any business. Fortunately, modern marketing tools let you check on the cost-per-customer acquisition for every ad run.

Remember to view your marketing budget in terms of its profit rate, and rely on customer feedback and actual sales garnered from the ad campaign.

These will help you efficiently allocate funding for customer conversion and returns. They will also allow you to identify what you may need to remove or improve in your next ad campaign.

• Vital to your business’s future growth and scalability

You also need to maximize your marketing budget for growth and effective scalability. This is because businesses are meant to scale or progress further. If you are in business without looking to scale, you might miss out on long-term profitability and make your company more vulnerable to bankruptcy.

Use your marketing budget as a means to thrive in your current and potential markets. For instance, you may want to grow your business in different parts of the United States, so plan for more localized or state-specific marketing campaigns with a reasonable budget.

Doing so will allow you to visualize your growth and the opportunities you have to set up in different areas.

• Effectively promotes your brand identity and core message

One of your main missions as a business is to influence your customers to empathize with your core message and branding. It’s not just about them buying more products; it’s about making a difference and finding effective solutions to daily problems.

With a fully maximized marketing budget, your campaigns become more strategic in nature and measurable in terms of sales and customer reviews.

You can fund ad runs that creatively bring your core message to life, as more markets become attracted to your business.

• Playing to your business’ strengths

Your business has certain defining strengths that set you apart from others.

For example, you may be the only business with a team collaboration software recognized by Google and Apple in your state. This edge allows you to reach local customers more effectively and use your recognition to grow in other markets.

Effective marketing campaigns, paired with exact budgeting, allow you to better promote your strengths to as many target customers as possible.

You can use these tools as a means to improve your business’ weak spots and become more prominent and profitable in other markets. Before you know it, you grow into a worldwide business capable of serving broad and diverse audiences.

• Doing better against your competitors

Marketing has always been used by big and small companies everywhere. It has been around since T.V. and print media became big industries.

However, there will always be loopholes in the campaigns of your competitors.

Through effective budgeting, you can first establish your business presence in a market. Then, you can increase or decrease your budget, depending on the success of your advertising as compared to your competitors. This will allow you to always have the upper hand against them and be an aggressive player.

How to Maximize Your Marketing Budget

Now that you are oriented on the importance of maximizing your marketing budget, make use of the following tips to put it to action:

• Do your industry and market research

When coming up with your next marketing plan and campaigns, remember to ground them with market research. Doing so will help you better understand your goals as a business and stick to what is measurable. Have your digital marketing team conduct focus group discussions to confirm market trends.

When you maximize your marketing budget, your responsibility is to make sure the data on your customers is grounded strongly on facts. Collaborate with your digital marketing specialists daily or use live analytics software to effectively track and validate your marketing efforts in real time.

• Use funnel mapping and tracking

If you are maximizing your marketing budget, you need to get specific about how much money it takes to convert a prospect into a paying customer. This is what is known as funnel mapping and tracking, which is an effective visualization of your sales and marketing.

To approach this analytically, you need to use funnel mapping software to get accurate readings on the sales funnel of your business.

This will not only enable you to maximize your marketing budget. It also allows you to better understand your customers and what you need to do to improve your products and services.

• Utilize marketing budgeting software

Analytics and numbers never lie. This means you cannot leave room for human error, like a miscalculation on the customer-per-click rate or bid rates for certain ad keywords. You also need to do your marketing audit and performance records to match the projections of your defined marketing budget.

Use specialized marketing tools, such as marketing budgeting software, to ensure the right calculations and rates are integrated into your campaigns. This will effectively maximize your budget and take the pressure off you and your team to deliver on expectations. This software also allows you to make methodical decisions to scale your business without worrying about the risks.

• Make use of professional marketing collaboration tools and software

Marketing campaigns are more customizable now than ever before, but this means the market also constantly shifts. This means there will be specific changes that may affect the successful run of your business. Luckily, you don’t have to go through a difficult learning curve to produce professional marketing campaigns made to produce undeniable results.

With marketing collaboration tools and software, you can focus on other aspects of your business as your ads run with a fully maximized budget. All the money you invest is put into results and conversions. These marketing tools and software will let you take on new markets with confirmed results and more realistic projections.

Conclusion

Take note of all the previously mentioned tips and tricks today to fully optimize your marketing plans for success and viable scalability. Remember, the goal of any business is to maximize revenue, and the path towards that depends heavily on how well you manage your marketing activities.
Are you in need of a professional marketing collaboration tool in the United States? We at MarketPlan can provide you with that. We are equipped to plan, execute, and project your entire marketing plan professionally with excellent results. Partner with us today to upgrade your approach to digital marketing effectively.

Before the age of the internet and digital marketing, marketers had to make do with creating and implementing marketing campaigns with broad mass appeal. Given that the most powerful distribution platforms of the time—the radio, newspapers, magazines, and television—were all geared towards attracting the most number of audience possible, it was important to cast a net as wide as possible to maximize the returns from advertising costs.

The most that a marketer could do was to get the message out, hoping that customers would eventually head to the stores to purchase their products. With the internet now in the center of most of modern society, marketing has evolved from being an exercise in creating mass appeal to finding niches and thriving in them.

Instead of simply broadcasting an ad and hoping for the best, marketers are now more empowered to take a more active stance when it comes to marketing products. Nowadays, they can identify leads, figure out what makes them tick, and work on ways to nurture them step-by-step until they become paying customers.

This is what marketers today call the Customer Journey.

What is the Customer Journey?

According to Marketing Dictionary, the Ryte Wiki, the Customer Journey refers to “the path followed by a customer via so-called touchpoints before making a purchase decision.”

These “touchpoints” can be found both online and offline—which, more often than not, is the result of cross-platform marketing campaigns enabled by funnel mapping and tracking tools, such as the one we offer here at MarketPlan.

The Funnel Analysis

Marketers today have become quite adept at managing campaigns over several platforms. Aside from the traditional channels mentioned earlier, today’s marketers have access to online distribution platforms that provide more data about their target customers.

This data allows them to create customized experiences for each customer segment—which contrasts with the traditional mass appeal approach.

In general, the customer journey is visualized as a funnel divided into three categories: top, middle, and bottom.

• Top Funnel: Consumers classified to be in this part of the funnel are those who have just become aware of an issue or problem that they need to be solved. They are generally thought of as those who have begun researching for solutions and are the target of most blog posts, videos, infographics, and native content that seek to introduce a solution in the form of products or services.

• Middle Funnel: After some time spent on research and comparisons, customers can eventually move on to the middle part of the funnel.

At this time, customers are already comparing solutions based on a number of factors, including, but not limited to, price points, services, features offered, and brand equity.

This is considered the most crucial part of the funnel, as the customers are already coming close to a decision. This is when lead nurturing material, such as case studies, free demos, and other materials that showcase the product in deeper detail, are most useful.

• Bottom Funnel: Leads are considered to be on the bottom once they have been converted into paying customers. That being said, they remain in the funnel because the next goal for marketers is to retain them as customers through good customer service.

How do marketers get leads to move along the funnel?

As mentioned earlier, customers move deeper into the funnel when they are convinced that a product or service can help solve their issue or improve their situation. Unlike the hard sell tactics used in the past, customers today need to move on their own volition, and will not be swayed by transparently forceful techniques.

Generally, marketers do this part of the job with these two main processes.

Personalized Messaging

The only real way to prod customers further along the customer journey is by providing them real and engaging information that will help them make a decision in your favor. Ideally, the messaging must always be relevant to the customer with respect to where they are in the funnel.

This means that if the lead has been identified to be already in the middle, they must not be targeted with messaging intended for those still at the top, and vice versa. Once a lead has been converted, you will want to use a different content strategy to retain them as customers.

Another important thing to remember is that as much as possible, you’ll want to control how much you expose your leads with your messaging. While cross-platform advertising is definitely needed to capture your leads’ attention in this media-saturated world, you’ll still want to adjust the frequency based on their position at the funnel.

This is possible through the use of funnel mapping and tracking tools, as well as campaign planning software that allows marketers to collaborate, map campaigns, run projections, execute, and monitor results, all in one place. Without these tools, marketers would be lost in the mountain of information gathered in these campaigns.

Emphasis on User Experience

The user experience (UX) is a blanket term used to refer to the various interactions that a customer has with a brand. This includes the whole process, from the advertising to the actual experience of using the product or service, and even to the customer service. However, given the digital nature of today’s transactions, there is a big concentration of effort in developing an effective user interface (UI).

Developing an effective UI is very important when it comes to designing websites and digital campaigns. Aside from just getting the message understood, UI designers and marketers need to carefully create their own customer journey in trying to convert potential customers, with respect to the larger customer journey at play.

This is why having an all-in-one marketing collaboration tool is essential for marketing teams today; Everything has to be coordinated to ensure that every aspect of the campaign is aligned and complementing each other.

Conclusion

Marketing strategies are always evolving. However, the rate at which it has changed in the past few years is unprecedented, which is mainly thanks to how the internet has changed not just the way we consume media, but in how we live our daily lives in general.

With the world absolutely drowning in content, the challenge for marketers today is to find ways to maximize their marketing efforts without resorting to techniques like spamming—which is not only ineffective, but it may also hurt the brand in the long run!

Do you want to take your marketing campaigns to the next level? Marketing Plan has the right funnel mapping and tracking tool for you!

Our all-in-one marketing collaboration tool allows you to work in every stage of your marketing journey effectively. Try MarketPlan today for free to get a taste of how our platform can revolutionize your marketing experience—no credit card required!

Understanding how a marketing funnel works will bring valuable insight to your marketing strategies.

It’s the process of converting leads into actual customers, which begins from the first time someone learns about your business and ends when they purchase your product or service. While all your customers begin at the first stage of the funnel, it’s important to make sure they progress through all stages until they ultimately engage with your company.

The leads in each stage must be treated carefully in order to coax them into the next one. Pushy sales tactics to force them along will easily turn them off.

Instead, offering informative and relevant content will encourage them to do business with you, which is ultimately the goal. Here are the most important components of a marketing funnel and how they help make a sale.

Tripwire

A tripwire is a product or service that is very attractively priced to encourage potential customers to pay for it.

This cannot be a throwaway product that has little to no worth; the tripwire must be game-changing enough to convince a person to engage with your content and purchase it.

Customers must see the worth in your tripwire in order to be convinced to progress to the next stage in the buying process.

A tripwire helps them see additional value in your company, and make them curious enough to browse through your offerings until they see one interesting enough to purchase.

Lead Magnets

These usually act as the entry point in a marketing funnel, as it is an initial offer that is promoted to your audience in exchange for their contact information.

The lead magnet convinces your target market that a valuable piece of content offered by your website is worth exchanging their email address for, which is crucial for your funnel.

Sometimes, lead magnets alone are enough to promote your business’s products to your customers. Other times, a tripwire is needed to nudge them further into the buying process.

Landing Pages

A landing page is where your customers have the choice to sign up for newsletters or a specific offer, which will give you access to their email address or payment information.

Your tripwires and lead magnets will be found on your landing page, and they should lead to a thank you page. This page should lead to other valuable content on your website, such as relevant blog articles, videos, or your business’s social media platforms to persuade them to visit your other pages.

Your thank you page should also include the option to download a free product via email. This will train your customer to standby for emails from you, which can encourage them to engage with you further.

There are many platforms available to use to create your landing pages. You’ll be able to test them and duplicate the pages to test your funnel, which will help you create an attractive and effective landing page.

Core Offer

Apart from the tripwire and the lead magnet, you’ll also have another component to convert your customers through the core offer.

This is the ultimate goal you want to achieve with your customers, as this is what they’ll be purchasing at the end of the buying process.

By the time this core offer is promoted to your customers, they should have already engaged with your company in some form, whether it’s reading your content or browsing your website.

They see the value in your brand and need a little encouragement for them to purchase the offer.

If you have different subgroups of your target market, you can utilize different core offers to entice them.

Regardless of the product or service, it should be the principal item you’re aiming to tell in your marketing funnel.

Email Automation

A strong email marketing strategy is crucial to the digital marketing funnel; in fact, an effective and high converting funnel cannot exist without it.

If a customer signs up for your newsletters without purchasing a product, then inbound emails are the perfect way to nudge them towards a purchase. Email automation will help your customers stay engaged with your company regardless of where they are in the marketing funnel.

These emails must be specially crafted according to customers at different stages of the marketing funnel. Otherwise, your customers may lose interest and unsubscribe to your emails.

Beginning with a welcome email once they engage with your lead magnet or tripwire will help them stay in the loop.

After a certain amount of time has passed, you can send them emails that advertise your core offer, especially if these are potential customers who have not yet made a purchase.

Nurturing all leads, from those that have already purchased to those who only signed up for emails, is incredibly important. Keeping them interested by offering valuable content will keep customers in the funnel until they’re convinced to finally buy your product or service.

Ad Management

Lastly, online ads are a crucial component of the marketing funnel. Facebook ads, in particular, is an effective way to promote your content to your target market while reaching new customers.

Facebook has the exceptional ability to hone in on target audiences, which will help your business reach the right people while moving them towards the purchase stage of the buying process.

Facebook ads are also a great way to retarget customers and to convert people who are already in the marketing funnel but have yet to make a purchase.

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This will help support email strategy and encourage prospects to move further down the funnel to buy the core offer.
However, Facebook ads will work only if you have a solid marketing funnel, so you have to make sure the other stages are strong before promoting your business through the platform.

Conclusion

While a marketing funnel may seem complicated with its many components that must be in sync, it is effective at improving conversion rates.

Now that you know the components of a marketing funnel, you’ll be able to craft a funnel strategy that expertly guides your audience through each stage of the funnel until they finally purchase your product.

If you need a funnel mapping and tracking tool to help with your marketing strategy, we’ve got what you need at Market Plan. Our all-in-one software is specially designed to help you plan, execute, and optimize your marketing strategy all from one place.

Get started for free today!

Marketing happens everywhere on the internet, and it comes in various forms. Sometimes, it is overt—you see a banner ad along the bottom of an app, or a company hosts a giveaway on their Facebook page. Other times, it is indirect, as is the case with marketing funnels.

Even if you have never heard of marketing funnels before, you have likely gone through one online.

It is vital in helping a brand grow its reach online, and funnel mapping and tracking help brands learn more about its audience. Keep reading to learn more about this strategy.

What a marketing funnel is, and what it does

Marketing funnels are collections of stages that make up a customer journey. These convert people from strangers to consumers by delivering the right types of messages at each stage.

A funnel does not need to be complex at first; businesses building their first ones can have only the fundamental parts—awareness, consideration, and decision—at the start of their campaign.

You can optimize your funnel according to the data you gather from repeat runs and adjust your key metrics accordingly.

What happens in a marketing funnel

Building a marketing funnel starts with identifying leads or prospective customers. A critical factor in successful conversion is differentiating how you interact with leads at different phases.

For example, people at the top of the funnel should receive a different type of content than the ones at the bottom. Since they are at the start, you should focus on awareness.

Giving them a discount for your products will backfire at this stage. They do not know your brand, and most things that are sold at a discount come across as subpar or suspicious. Alternatively, they might be familiar with your brand, but not be open to buying yet.

Meanwhile, if you give this discount to someone at the bottom of the funnel, they will be more likely to purchase since they have gone through the other phases of your funnel and are ready to buy.

Note that this is not an automatic process; people are not machines, and they need time to make a decision. Just keep nurturing your prospects by delivering high-quality content and making a case for your brand.

The top of the funnel – awareness

During this phase, you have people who have not heard of your products, or those who do not know much about them. Furthermore, they might not even know that they have a problem or an issue that they should resolve.

Since they are new, you must introduce your brand. In the awareness stage, you must reveal a problem or a “pain point” that they might have but are not aware of, and why they must address it. 

Do not make the mistake of assuming that people are ready to buy your products at this point. Pitching your products while building awareness for them will not be effective; they will likely see it as a pushy sales tactic. Instead, slowly build a case for the urgency of solving the pain point, and save for later your product’s introduction.

Additionally, try to capture the right people, instead of focusing on getting the greatest number of leads at once.

For instance, if you are a brand selling office supplies your target market would likely be adults and professionals. A funnel mapping tool can help you identify the target audiences for your brand.

An example of a pain point you could bring up is not knowing how to the right chairs, ergonomic or low-back. Send your audience how-to blog posts about office chairs, guides for choosing the best ones for various occasions, videos of these posts, and similar content.

At this point, your audience does not have a relationship with your brand specifically yet. As such, you must provide value to them and establish yourself as an authority in your niche.

The middle of the funnel – consideration

At this point, your lead is aware of their pain points, and they are actively looking for solutions. When they reach the consideration phase, they will already be interested in learning how to fix their problem. However, they are not 100 percent sold on choosing your brand as a solution.

These leads have visited your website and are familiar with your brand. They have most likely browsed your offerings, but they have not purchased anything. Your prospects are probably comparing various brands and considering different solutions similar to the one you provide.

To get them to the next phase, you must convince them that you offer superior products or services. At this point, you can introduce free webinars, e-books, case studies or FAQs about your product. You must prove to your leads that they will make the best choice when they decide to choose your brand.

Taking our example earlier, a office supply company looking to move their leads through the consideration stage can send their prospects a free chair sizing pdf for different heights and weights, or sign them up for regular newsletters offering the latest updates in the industry or any special offers & deals.

The bottom of the funnel – decision

Here, your customers are ready to make a purchase. They have done their research, and they understand the costs and benefits of choosing one product over another. They have probably narrowed down their list to two to three brands.

In this phase, one of the most valuable things you can do is provide positive customer reviews about your product.

Hearing success stories can convince someone to make a purchase. Social proof drives action, and people want to know that your product has been useful for others. Aside from reviews, you can also provide bonuses when they make a purchase.

For example, you could give the first 100 people to buy through your link a five percent discount on their items. You can also offer bonus items to those who purchase within a certain timeframe. This part is about closing strong; it is time to convince your leads that you have the best deal.

Conclusion

Guiding your customers through a marketing funnel takes time and requires plenty of collateral. However, if you use it correctly, you can reap great results. Help your marketing team plan and execute the best funnels by giving them the right tools for the job, like specialized communication and mapping software.

Ensure your team’s success with MarketPlan.io. Our funnel mapping and tracking tool lets you visualize the customer journey, acquire customers, collaborate with your team, and so much more. Get a free account today or contact us for more details.

The importance of having a solid marketing plan cannot be overstated. A good marketing plan defines your business goals and outlines the necessary milestones that will help you achieve them.

Far from just being a glorified idea board, it can also help you anticipate and weather any challenges that may come your way.

The Types of Marketing Plans Your Business Needs

Marketing plans come in many forms and can either tackle very specific details or paint your strategy in relatively broad strokes. Here are a few kinds of marketing plans that outline fairly different goals, but all serve the same purpose of helping you grow your business by generating revenue.

• Quarterly or Annual Marketing Plan

This particular kind of marketing plan outlines tactics and strategies with respect to a timeline. It usually includes specific time-bound milestones that need to be achieved. Utilizing this helps executives and business owners see the big picture of a campaign, and is usually created before a marketing strategy is formed.

Both annual and quarterly plans usually describe key performance indicators, budget allocation, and relevant marketing channels. To provide context to the goals presented, it’s also a good idea to include a few choice case studies and market research.

• Content Marketing Plan

Contrary to popular belief, a content marketing plan is more than just an editorial calendar. This should also contain your content goals, audience profiles, targeted keywords, and topic priorities.

Once you have all those figured out, then you can start working on your editorial calendar. Aside from telling you when to publish your content, the calendar should also specify the format, the content distribution channel, and the platforms that you are going to use in the publishing process.

Having an organized content marketing plan allows you to follow a consistent publishing schedule, which helps you measure growth accurately.

• Paid Marketing Plan

A paid marketing plan is a specialized type of marketing plan that deals with strategies concerning paid marketing methods.

This includes native advertising, pay-per-click ads, social media ads, and the like. It also contains the goals that you want to achieve through paid advertising options and outlines the specific steps necessary to achieve them.

A paid marketing plan looks almost exactly like a content marketing plan, differing only in implementation and the distribution channels used.

More often than not, this plan also includes funnel mapping and tracking, which is very useful in defining the message needed to execute campaigns properly. Sometimes, the paid marketing plan is embedded in the content marketing plan for an integrated marketing campaign.

Depending on your needs, you may need one or a combination of these three marketing plans.

The Elements of an Effective Marketing Plan

Despite these differences, an effective and useful marketing plan needs to have these three elements as well:

• Good Data

Market research is a must for every kind of business that wants to achieve growth in a sustainable and meaningful way. Information, such as market trends and competitor research, allows you to adapt and innovate ways to reach your own goals.

Having good data is even more important when it comes to digital marketing. This is achieved by using good marketing collaboration tools and live analytics software that allows you to get into the granular data and fine-tune your campaigns.

It’s worthwhile to note that data is only useful if arranged meaningfully. This means that a marketing plan should contain only the most relevant metrics to avoid confusion and enhance focus.

• SMART Goals

To be of any use, the goals you set for your business have to be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timebound. An example of a SMART goal would be to as follows:

“I will acquire 10 new clients for my digital marketing business within two months by doing search engine optimization on my website, launching a social media marketing campaign, and networking with local businesses. This will allow me to grow my business and increase my revenue.“

The goal is specific and measurable because it defines the number of clients needed to increase revenue.

The goal is attainable because the necessary steps to be taken are already defined, and relevant because acquiring new clients is what directly drives business.

Meanwhile, giving yourself a timeline of two months makes it time-bound, and allows you to have a way of determining if a goal has been accomplished.

More than giving random numbers and timelines, goal-setting should be backed up by good data. You could be using the most advanced campaign projection tools and still completely miss the mark because of the lack of workable information.

• Concrete Strategy

Once you have secured your SMART goals and relevant data, it’s time to discuss strategy. This is because the tactics you use should always be informed by your goals and what your data tells you.

Your strategy is only as good as your data, so make sure that you are continuously looking for patterns in the data that tell you which rising trends could be indicative of your campaign’s success or if it needs some more tweaking.

Here are some things to consider while devising your strategy:

• Budget

Your budget is the lifeblood of your marketing operations and your business as a whole. Like everything else in business, the things you can do with your marketing campaign is entirely dependent on your capability of paying for it.

• Paid or Organic

Contrary to popular belief, organic and paid marketing efforts are not mutually exclusive. Organic marketing methods, like SEO campaigns, give you long-term results but can take a while to bear fruit. Meanwhile, paid methods, like PPC ads, may give you quick results, but it can be very expensive to run on a scale that makes it effective.

Together, both methods complement each other. This is because PPC ads are generally ineffective without brand equity—a facet that can only be achieved with a long-term brand building initiative like SEO campaigns.

On the flip side, PPC data, such as keyword rankings, can be leveraged by SEO campaigns to achieve the best results.

• Platforms or Software to Use

Running a marketing campaign involves a lot of moving parts, especially in digital marketing. Because the industry is relatively new and moves at such a fast pace, different platforms and channels end up using different names for the same metric.

Compound that with optimizing for your sales funnel and the whole process can be confusing and ineffective.

To solve that, you should be planning to use all-in-one marketing collaboration tools, much like what we offer through MarketPlan!

Tools like MarketPlan allows you to plan, execute, and implement your marketing plans in one place. This greatly reduces inefficiencies across the board and helps you plan and execute tweaks on your existing campaigns on the fly.

Conclusion

Marketing plans are supposed to guide your business decisions, but should not be treated as something unalterable when it comes to improving your campaign. This means that when new data comes along, you should be ready to make some changes right away!

Marketing plans should not strip you of your ability to adapt to any situation. If anything, it should allow you to look for any possible contingencies along the way, and help you keep a few steps ahead of your competition at all times.

Are you looking to boost your business’ marketing process through the use of marketing planning software? MarketPlan is an all-in-one marketing platform that allows businesses to plan, execute, project, and optimize their entire marketing strategy all from one powerful place. Sign up for free and try MarketPlan today!

Every business needs a strong and robust marketing strategy in order to achieve milestones and set goals.

Technology has transformed industries at such breakneck speed that it can be difficult to keep track of the latest trends and innovations, which is why it’s important for businesses to adapt their strategies in order to keep up.

The emergence of marketing tools and software has proved to be a huge help to companies, as it offers a faster and more efficient way to map out strategies and implement them.

However, there are lots of marketing software on the market, so you’ll have to make sure you choose one that best fits your company’s needs.

Here’s what you need to know about choosing the best marketing tools and software:

The Definition of Marketing Software

First, it’s important to know what exactly marketing software is. It refers to online tools, platforms, and programs that help businesses meet their marketing goals.

These often offer features that allow them to efficiently plan, execute, measure, and analyze their marketing efforts to evaluate their success.

In fact, marketing software is so essential to a business’s marketing efforts that a significant portion of the marketing budget is funneled towards software and automation.

This is because of the wide variety of benefits it brings to a business, such as increased efficiency, the return of investment, improvement of marketing accountability and customer experience, and increased customer lifetime value.

The Different Types of Marketing Tools and Software

There are several different types of marketing technology out there that companies have even combined tools and software to create a “marketing technology stack”, which has mushroomed over the last decade.

Nicknamed MarTech, it is composed of tools that complement each other to create a comprehensive system that optimizes a company’s marketing efforts.

Here are a few of the most common marketing tools and software:

Customer Relationship Management

Customer relationship management (CRM) is one of the most important marketing tools a company can use.

This platform spans multiple departments and can be used by any team of a company; in fact, this tool is so essential that it is often called the company’s heartbeat.

It contains all customer data, including demographic, information, and transactions, which are essential details needed to implement marketing campaigns.

Some companies opt to keep it simple in the form of a spreadsheet, although this is vulnerable to data loss and compromises. As CRM holds one of the most important data, you’ll want to make sure it’s on a secure platform that’s easy to access and manage.

It should be comprehensive enough to become the all-in-one resource that contains critical marketing information.

Once you choose your CRM platform, make sure it’s a platform you foresee yourself permanently using. Otherwise, you’ll have to deal with migrating customer and marketing information from platform to platform, which can be extremely tedious and time-consuming.

SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is another important part of every business’s marketing efforts, as it’s the main component that drives website traffic and leads to company discovery.

There are plenty of SEO softwares that consolidates tools to offer a more complete and comprehensive resource for implementing your marketing strategies.

SEO software lets you monitor inbound links of important SEO metrics, like inbound links of blog posts or links to website content, landing PageRank, and domain authority.

Some software, like Google Alerts, allows small companies to track mentions in media, which can be utilized in strategy crafting.

Software that allows companies to measure and track their SEO efforts is crucial to their marketing strategies, as it allows them to determine neglected keywords, platforms, and other aspects that could benefit them.

It also lets companies assess whether their current strategies to increase website traffic are effective.

Content Marketing Tools

Creating high-quality content is also extremely important in a company’s marketing efforts. In fact, it birthed the maxim that content is king, which is an accurate notion, as the content is what encourages people to engage with a company if they find it interesting enough.

Planning the content is a great way to offer valuable information to your customers while spreading it out over a period of time to make sure they keep coming back to your website.

Content tools are especially helpful when it comes to creating and managing content. They can assist with curating content marketing, managing workflow, and handling guest blogging.

It also has the capabilities to determine what your readers prefer to read and the ways they prefer to consume it, whether it’s short-form microblogging or through videos.

Content tools provide you with important insight that is critical in finding marketing success, as they contain information that will help you refine your content to make it perform well and deliver results.

Website and Mobile Analytics

The fast-paced evolution of technology has paved the way for consumer behavior to turn towards mobile. Nowadays, people frequently browse the Internet on their mobile devices, which has become an important metric in marketing.

Websites now have to be optimized for smaller, mobile screens in order to rank well on search engines, for example. Some companies have revised their content to fit people’s mobile device habits in order to find the most success.

Website and mobile analytics platforms are incredibly helpful when examining user behavior on websites and mobile apps.

These tools support companies in gathering important information surrounding the instances people access certain pages.

You’ll want to know what kind of content people consume when they’re on their phone or their mobile Internet habits in order to optimize your marketing strategies.

Conclusion

Knowing the different kinds of marketing tools and software is key to optimizing marketing processes for your company.

These tools are designed to reduce the time spent gathering and analyzing information, which is valuable time saved for your company to do work that can’t be automated.

It offers valuable data in just a few clicks, which you’ll be able to factor into your marketing plans. With the right software, you’ll pull off your marketing campaigns with finesse.

If you’re looking for a marketing collaboration tool, get in touch with us at MarketPlan! We are an all-in-one marketing platform that allows your company to plan, execute, project, and optimize your entire marketing strategy all from one powerful place.

That platform is built for your success and features more than ten built-for-marketing mini-apps. Sign up for MarketPlan for free today!

In the current climate of digital advertising and marketing, it is imperative that both old and new brands need to direct their advertising efforts to focus on digital platforms.

Maintaining a brand’s online presence requires a heavy workload of developing, executing, and analyzing a marketing team’s campaign. Professional marketers go through this rigorous process by optimizing their systems with the help of marketing operations management.

Understanding marketing operations management

Because marketers today have more than their usual set of responsibilities set out for them, they need to know how to allocate their time and effort with the help of an optimized organizational workflow to result in an efficient and successful ad campaign.

Marketing operations management is an organizational system that oversees the integral points of the marketing process.

It’s a guide to executing the different phases of a marketing project through an end-to-end format, allowing individual staff of a team to perform their work effectively by focusing on their respective marketing collaterals in mind.

Optimizing your business’s processes

Keeping an optimized organizational workflow is an essential part of running any aspect of your business.

Marketing operations management is a necessary addition to your marketing staff because it introduces a structured workflow.

Like any corporate project, your team must consist of a unique set of individuals with the right skill sets to achieve success. A diverse group can tackle complex marketing issues.

Listed below are some of the critical responsibilities that your marketing team need to handle:

• Customer relationship management (CRM)
• Content management system (CMS)
• Digital asset management (DAM)
• Lead generation tracking
• Data analytics
• Call analytics

Improving your chances of success with marketing operations management

As a business owner, you may find it challenging to keep up with the assignments and roles that your marketing team must perform. If you’re having a hard time creating a plan for your staff, here are three ways to help maintain your staff’s effectiveness.

1. Divide and designate your project workload

When you create a marketing campaign with specific marketing goals in mind, you should divide your team members’ efforts to increase your chance of reaching these objectives.

Grouping your marketing teams can help you focus on one goal in mind, instead of shouldering the full weight and responsibility of the entire project.

You should make them aware of their responsibilities and roles from the start to keep them informed of their accountability in the project’s overall success.

Doing this will help you create several teams that handle different types of campaigns to diversify your approach. It would also help if you requested scheduled performance reports from your project heads to see if your team’s progress is in line with their target deadlines.

2. Implement and utilize digital tools

The way marketing is done evolves continuously with evolving technology trends. AI-optimized digital tools and voice search functionality are just some of the many advancements that are becoming incorporated into different kinds of marketing strategies.

Although marketers have their hands full with the growth of networks and platforms, they also benefit from using digital tools to help them perform their tasks.

It is absolutely vital that your marketing staff also needs to arm themselves with the right equipment.

Modern marketers use well-built marketing operations management software to assist them in performing their various tasks and responsibilities.

For example, digital asset management software can help reduce the steps it takes to move from one stage of a marketing campaign to another. It allows brands to organize their marketing materials as a hub of their brand’s assets.

Having a curated server that holds different essential files, such as company logos, email signatures, brand headers, and other marketing collaterals can help systematically send, edit, and proofread content from one staff member to another.

3. Collect and review your projects’ analytics

A vital reason that marketing operations require a smooth flow is that companies can archive and analyze past project data to help them in creating better campaigns.

A marketer’s ability to adapt immediately to sponsor and client responses is an essential part of running a successful campaign.

The proper curating of these past strategies helps fine-tune individual elements of marketing campaigns that generate positive responses from customers.

In running a marketing campaign, you need to make sure that your staff keeps a close eye on your different strategy’s analytics and conversion tracking. You shouldn’t wait until the end of the campaign or the quarter before you review your analytics.

Your marketing management process must always observe whether you’re reaching your target results or not so that you can make necessary adjustments where possible.

Utilizing automated marketing campaigns

The main goal of your marketing ops management is to create a robust marketing strategy that can quickly adapt and respond to your customer’s responses.

Also known as trigger campaigns, automated marketing campaigns require rigorous research and pre-emptive planning on your consumers’ potential actions or changes in the market.

With the help of digital asset management software, marketers compile a list of assets, such as marketing templates, reporting guidelines, creative assets, and business rules.

These pre-made marketing collaterals will allow a seamless workflow that generates and receives fast results, whether content-posting or lead confirmations.

Conclusion

As a business owner, you need to understand that building and maintaining your brand requires a considerable investment of your time and effort.

Some businesses can grow faster than others, similar to how other industries are more adaptable with the transition to digital marketing. You need to understand that your company has its trajectory and pace in achieving success.

A successful marketing campaign is only as competent as the people that run it. You should know how to rely on your team while trusting in the planning and execution of your well-thought-out marketing plans.

No marketing campaign is complete without the right tools to help the marketers perform their best. We offer comprehensive marketing collaboration tools to help your team in executing your marketing campaign across the world. Subscribe with us today and see how our marketing plan software can lead your business to success!

To further increase the profitability of marketing campaigns, businesses have been turning to various marketing automation platforms.

Driving a 14.5% increase in sales productivity, it’s no wonder these systems are taking the industry by storm. If you haven’t yet considered introducing a marketing automation tool to your workflow, here are the reasons you should and how you can get started.

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation platforms aim to increase the efficiency and productivity of online marketing campaigns by automating time-consuming tasks.

These might include crafting emails and messages, scheduling them for delivery, triggering specific actions based on customer behavior, or doubling as a campaign analytics tool. Used by thousands of B2B and B2C companies across the U.S. below lists the benefits your business can reap from this type of service.

• Personalization

By pinpointing valuable consumer information and incorporating customization features, you can easily personalize marketing campaigns to suit specific customer needs and preferences. Through this, you can cut down marketing costs drastically while acquiring business intelligence (BI), improving your overall customer experience (CX), and integrating them seamlessly into your customer relationship management (CRM) systems.

• Increased Revenue

For most businesses, higher revenue is an ongoing goal, regardless of how much your business has grown. Automation has been able to grant marketers greater control over their campaigns, allowing them to glean over data insights in a more methodical manner. Historically, automation campaigns have proven to increase the retention rate of customers as well as achieve other peripheral goals.

Who Uses Marketing Automation?

Despite the misconception that marketing automation tools are useful only to larger corporations, small and medium-sized businesses can just as easily benefit from them.

Some of the top marketers have attributed their success to the use of such platforms and have improved lead management and campaign measurability, irrespective of their company size. If you’re experiencing any of the problems below, it may be time to invest in an automation tool.

• Your Email List is Lagging Behind

If you haven’t given consumers an incentive to sign up for your email list, you’ll need to up your game. With marketing automation, you can strategically place an opt-in form on an area of your website that increases their chances of signing up. You can then effectively track how your email efforts have fared based on metrics such as open rates, link clicks, and sales through email.

• You’re short on manpower

If you don’t have the budget to hire a specialist who can oversee your marketing campaigns, investing in an all-in-one marketing tool can substitute for a dedicated full-time member. Automation platforms will execute commands and actions depending on your workflow and already-developed marketing campaign.

• You Aren’t Seeing the Profits You Want

If your business isn’t making money, you can mitigate the problem by better tracking the statistics that dictate how well your campaigns are doing. In particular, marketing automation allows you to focus on results, tweaking upcoming campaigns based on how well your previous campaigns have fared. Through this, you can more effectively split-test your ads and course them through your campaign analytics software.

• You Don’t Have the Time

If your marketing strategies require more effort than they should, you can either simplify your efforts or incorporate a marketing automation tool into your workflow. For a campaign to succeed, consistency is vital. If you can’t test, segment, and analyze conversions on your own, a tool may be able to do it for you—and save you the time you would’ve been dedicating otherwise. By delegating the bulk of the work to your platform, you can zero in on the bigger picture.

• Your Growth Has Plateaued

Seeing your entrepreneurial dreams succeed is a powerful moment for any self-made marketer. Yet, you can’t let your business run its natural course from here. If you haven’t yet explored marketing automation as a means to grow your business, you can leverage your tools by having them run repetitive tasks while you focus on other priorities.

How to Choose a Marketing Automation Platform

To guarantee success in your digital marketing efforts, utilizing a platform that combines power and simplicity is the first step towards crafting modern solutions.
Among the other things to consider are:

• Simplicity

More complex software doesn’t necessarily beget more useful features. Marketing automation is a software that promises high levels of potential—you want it to be a simple platform that is easy to navigate. Creating and tracking marketing campaigns should be as streamlined as possible, which may prove impossible if your interface is difficult to maneuver.

• Lead Management

Being able to determine which leads will generate the most revenue is key to a systematic conversion process. With funnel mapping and tracking, you can rank leads that are most likely to convert to sales.

• Enabling Sales

As previously mentioned, marketing automation provides users with insights that allow them to predict consumer behavior. Through this, you can project campaigns according to high-ranking search terms and popular web pages that make closing a sale quicker and easier.

• High-Performing Analytics

With a live and real-time analytics software like MarketPlan, you can easily measure the effectiveness of your ongoing marketing campaigns and make the appropriate adjustments instantaneously. Especially useful when it comes to email marketing, you can easily maximize the profitability of your campaign.

• Integrated Social Media Marketing Tools

If your business isn’t capitalizing on the potential of social media platforms, you may already be behind. To improve your overall branding and find better ways to engage with online users, marketing automation software can help you achieve your Facebook and Instagram goals.

Conclusion

Given the near-limitless potential of marketing automation software, companies that employ them can justify price points according to their short-term and long-term goals. If benefits such as campaign optimization are outweighing the costs, then yes—marketing automation is worth the investment!

There’s no better way to throw in automation into your marketing mix than with Market Plan. With our funnel mapping and tracking tools, you can easily map campaigns and collaborate with teams across the U.S.—all from a live and centralized interface!

It can be a daunting task to go about making the most of your marketing budget, but for any business, running a cost effective marketing campaign is a top priority.

It should produce the best results while spending as little as possible. In order to do that, it will require intensely creative moves on the part of the marketer.

In this article, we are going to go over the best ways to handle your marketing budget, and how to make the most out of it.

The most important allocations

The digital age has brought with it new basic necessities when it comes to the promotion and protection of an enterprise’s brand. As more and more businesses & companies scramble to and through the digital space every day, it has become increasingly important to have a well-maintained online presence.

As such, a registered web domain is a good baseline and a necessary expense in your marketing budget (the initial web design should be part of your overhead).

Having a website is generally an easy and cost-effective way to deliver messages, freely advertise, and answer frequently asked questions about your product or service.

Having a robust marketing team is also a necessity, especially for bigger businesses or businesses that are scaling.

As a company expands, so too should its marketing operations. With a sufficiently large team, it makes it easier to manage all the diverse strategies to marketing more efficiently and effectively.

Other worthy allocations in your marketing budget

The hiring of new staff should also be supplemented by paying for automated marketing services, such as chatbots, good support documentation and video tutorials.

This eliminates the need for there to be dedicated members of your staff answering customer inquiries that could be answered automatically by a chatbot, especially if there are similarities and trends in the customers’ questions.

Sponsored web content is also a good investment when it comes to the field of digital marketing. A lot of information on the internet is driven from an insatiable desire of the market to consume content; as such, it would do your brand well to produce meaningful and engaging ways to convey its message.

This could come in the form of content marketing or video marketing or a combination of both. And the wonderful thing about either is that Search Engine Optimization can be applied to both of them so that your enterprise’s website and social media could rank better on search engines.

All of these methods will be discussed later in greater detail.

How much of my gross revenue should I allocate?

One of the main causes of businesses failing early on in their lifespans is undercapitalization. The same can be said of the marketing in its early stages. As such, it is important to allocate a significant portion of your revenue towards your marketing—as much as 12–20%.

As for what the goal of the budget should be around this time: it should be designed around brand awareness and capturing a new market. And once you’ve reached a point where the branding of your business has been built up, you could start to reduce your budget.

If your business has been in operation for longer than five years, has established its brand, and staked a claim in its market, it should allocate about 6–12% of its projected gross or gross revenue to marketing.

Content creation is essential in today’s market.

We spoke before on the benefits of investing in the creation of meaningful and engaging content, but in this section, we aim to highlight the importance of content creation and content marketing even further.

Videos, blogs, whitepapers, infographics, and other materials can go a long way towards elevating and increasing brand awareness. In today’s content-driven environment, it is important to keep your target audience interested and invested.

Content creation can also help you capture new markets with targeted content striking at the heart of their interests and tastes, which is now easily deduced by the gathering of data.

And while it takes time and expertise to create content, it is now more easy to outsource this endeavor to other service providers in order to alleviate the weight of content creation from your marketing team’s shoulders.

Referral programs and customer advocacy are a worthy expense

Allowing your existing customers better deals on future purchases through customer advocacies can help them feel valued. Such programs could turn customers into repeat customers.

Their testimonials and referrals could help your business gain new customers that you otherwise would not have gained through any means.

At the end of the day, word of mouth is still a powerful form of marketing. And as such, a referral program wherein your existing customers could get discounts if they referred new customers might be the perfect way to stoke the fires of a word-of-mouth campaign.

Software can make your life easier

The wonderful thing about the information age is the intense level of automation we can now apply to the operations of a business. A lot of the things businesses used to by hand (even in marketing) can now be done on and by computer software.

We’ve mentioned chatbots before as a way to automate responses to customer inquiries. Why stop there? Using the right social media management tools, for example, can allow you to produce and release content on the right schedule.

Some of these tools are even capable of gauging the optimum time to release content for maximized viewership.

Outsource some of your operations

Nearly everything, from the regular creation of content to your company IT needs, can be outsourced to a service provider if you know where to look.

And one of the great things about outsourcing services is that they often don’t cost the same amount of money as keeping someone on staff to do it, especially if they need specialized equipment that your business would have to provide.

Make sure to look into the things you can outsource to other providers so that you and your core team could dedicate their efforts to more worthwhile endeavors. Partner with vetted providers to make sure you get your money’s worth.

In conclusion

Marketing is a treacherous field, with results that are sometimes difficult to measure or describe. Luckily, modern technology has given us new and inventive avenues not only to market but to measure the success of these advertising endeavors. And with the right budget and the right strategy, you could quite possibly achieve all that you hope for your business.

If you need help with your next marketing campaign, why not try MarketPlan today? We have the expertise and resources you need to take your business to greater heights.

With the hundreds of thousands of products being marketed and sold in the world today, it has become near impossible to make a product that truly stands out. One can even say that there’s no new thing under the sun.

In many fields, particularly in marketing, the battle is not in figuring out your competition’s trade secrets. Instead, marketing departments and agencies around the world need to concentrate on getting the right data sets to work on, and the right marketing planning software to do that work with.

Marketing Today

The marketing landscape in 2020 is particularly diverse. Marketers today are constantly looking for new ways to reach and capture the attention of their audience.

With constantly changing motivation and purchasing behavior brought about by the concurrently evolving use of technology, marketers need to be able to adapt as quickly if they want to keep producing results.

It’s also worth noting that the customers of today respond differently to marketing techniques than their parents and grandparents. This current generation of consumers are rarely surprised or impressed with new technology.

With enough information to last them a lifetime easily accessible through their mobile devices, consumers already know exactly what they want.

They no longer need the pitch: they’ve already seen some derivative version of your product or service in any of the media and marketing channels that are available to them.

How Should We Reach Our Target Audience?

Marketers should be able to determine exactly where their audience is, and give them the right kind of information that they need.

Reaching your audience can be a relatively simple process if you’re only vying for the attention of one or two segments with a handful of touchpoints.

However, the process can be challenging for marketers working with large multinational companies who need to market several lines of products to different customer segments at the same time. Add in the task of figuring out the right channel, writing the perfectly written and personalized message, conducting A/B testing, and performing various other optimization tasks, and the process can be downright chaotic.

For these companies, the stakes can be high, and any marketer whose green behind the ears are sure to be overwhelmed. And yet, companies manage to sell several product lines to different demographics just fine.

How do they do it? Simple. They use a marketing planning software that lets them do three simple things efficiently.

Whether you’re a small business owner searching for a solution to simplify your marketing efforts or a marketing executive looking for a robust marketing collaboration software to use for multiple campaigns, these three features should be non-negotiable:

Processing of Raw Data Into Actionable Insights

With the abundance of marketing channels and no industry-wide standard of naming and organizing information, having to refer to big data every time you need to make a decision can be a distraction or worse, become a source of confusion.

The point of having automation in any field is to simplify the work process. While it’s valuable to understand how to process and interpret the big data yourself, a good marketing planning software should be able to condense big data into easy to digest information, leaving you to make appropriate decisions.

Because you’re no longer spending valuable time and energy in data processing, you will have more bandwidth in looking for patterns and connections that may lead to unique insights. By distilling big data into actionable insights, marketers can concentrate on implementing new strategies that will lead them to success.

Seamless Integration with Various Platforms

As mentioned earlier, consumers today leverage multiple platforms in a day to get to the content, product, or service that they need.

This means that if a marketer truly wants to cut through the noise, their campaigns must be found in most, if not all of the relevant marketing channels.

In this scenario, an all-in-one marketing planning software is useful only if it is able to perform across channels seamlessly. Because different platforms may have different names for the same thing, marketing analytics tools need to be able to unify various metrics into a form that will help marketers to make a decision.

Ability to Evaluate the Messaging Impact

While picking the right channel and funneling strategy for each segment of your audience are incredibly important for a campaign, understanding how to make an impact through your messaging is even more crucial in determining your campaign’s success.

You can use the most effective media or platform to reach your audience and still miss on generating revenue because of ineffective messaging.

For marketers, this means knowing your audience in a way that allows you to help them with their specific needs.

While this doesn’t mean letting a computer take the role of a talented copywriter or the insights generated from a focus group or survey, a good marketing planning software should include analytics that is intelligent enough to evaluate the impact and make suggestions based on the available customer data and platform characteristics.

Conclusion

To say that a marketer must utilize every tool at their disposal is not only wrong, but it can also lead to disaster.

Instead, marketers must look for the right tool to do their work with precision and efficiency. Additionally, marketers should constantly look for opportunities to better their understanding of technology and customer trends.

By using a marketing planning software that’s able to distill big data, manage cross-platform campaigns, measure messaging impact, marketers stand a better chance of generating actual results from their campaigns.

Market Plan’s all-in-one marketing planning software allows you to plan, produce, and execute campaigns within a single window.

Contact us today to know more or try the tool for free to see the amazing things it can do for the planning and tracking of your marketing.

Funnel mapping is the method of creating a diagram to visualize your customer conversions to drive sales figures.

It’s a model that contains everything about your marketing process, from your traffic sources, the stages of your funnels, customer interaction points, landing pages, and even remarketing methods.

Funnel mapping is a useful tool that a capable marketer can utilize and develop in presenting marketing strategies and fine-tuning different parts of a campaign.

Simplifying funnels

In the marketing industry, a funnel describes the journey of a customer towards opting in for a service or making a purchase. This includes various types of actions ranging from signing up to a newsletter, filling in a form, or buying a product.

Once a person successfully performs one or more of these tasks, they’ve successfully gone through a conversion process.

Although a funnel can represent one act, the entire process before and after the conversion is a complex sequence of elements that a marketer provides to a potential customer.

This is the reason funnel mapping and tracking helps in plotting the interconnected steps that a visitor makes before they’re added to a company’s conversion figures.

Understanding what funnel mapping means

A sales funnel isn’t as straightforward as seeing a product they want to buy, then moving forward to purchase it. The reality is that smart consumers will go through several steps before they can decide on choosing a product that’s worth their investment.

(Pic – A GIF or Image MarketPlan’s funnel mapping canvas)

It can take anything from a few days to several months before people can be convinced to enter your customer conversion funnel to drive your sales.

One recurring reason customers aren’t quick to make a purchase is that they want to assess whether other brands and companies offer the same benefits or price range.

Funnel mapping allows you to dissect the different steps that your customer encounters in purchasing a product.

Through visualization and data presentation, you’ll be able to create a marketing model that can help implement and improve your current sales strategies so that customers will have a seamless experience.

Visualizing the marketing process

The use of the term ‘funnel’ represents how customers approach your business in driving sales.

At the top of the funnel are the people who have taken the first step in your marketing offers. A reliable marker for this is the number of online foot traffic that your website receives.

As your potential customers look for products or services for their needs, they’ll end up seeing different landing pages that your brand offers.

Along the way, some customers tend to lose interest if they don’t see any incentives in convincing them to opt for your services.

This process then continues until your target demographic is filtered through the thousands of people who were first introduced into your marketing campaign.

Presenting the necessary elements

As a visual diagram, your funnel map should include all the necessary ingredients that will lead customers to make a sale. Listed below are the elements that should be included in your funnel map:

• Traffic sources: Your traffic sources are a set of platforms that you’ll use in driving people towards your sales funnel. This can be done by identifying what methods you’ll use in attracting traffic or from what mediums you’ll be expecting your customers to come from.

• Website content: This describes what type of content you’ll be presenting as they reach your website. You can start by presenting your company’s mission and vision, presenting an engaging video about your service’s processes, or leading them straight to a product purchase page.

• Landing page: This step should include how you can make your potential customer proceed with their purchase. Include what types of elements on your page will help them make the right choice in assessing the quality of your products and services. You can also include achievements awarded by authority figures in your industry, or make use of customer testimonials to increase your credibility as a service provider

• Incentives: How you’ll attract your customers in purchasing your product can also depend on how well you market your incentives. You can offer a trial version of your service so that customers can get a feel of your service free of charge, or provide limited discount periods to help your potential buyers feel a sense of urgency.

• Remarketing attempts: Many times, a transaction with a customer doesn’t end with the purchase. Remarketing efforts allow you to make the most out of your customers’ attention to offer other products and services that they may be interested in.

By organizing the trajectory of your sales funnel, you’ll be able to see an overview of your full process. This allows you to show an organized and accessible format of your sales plan to potential investors.

It can also serve as a blueprint that your team can analyze to determine which processes are doing well and which ones require improvements.

You don’t have to be a master at graphic design to visualize these steps easily. Thankfully, there are several funnel mapping software tools available to fit your marketing model’s preferences.

Widening the funnel

Your goal as a business owner is to make sure that you “widen the funnel” by reaching the highest conversion rates with your site’s foot traffic.

The closer the percentage is to your total foot traffic, the more successful you’ll be in converting online visitors into invested customers.

Repeat customers will take less time to purchase new products, so they tend to skip the conventional steps of your sales funnel. Nevertheless, make sure that you maintain contact with your previous clients by sending them relevant product releases that might interest them.

Conclusion

When creating a funnel map, you should always define your end goal. By figuring out what it is, you can then design your customers’ trajectory towards it by working backward.

Keep in mind that your funnels aren’t always strictly about purchasing a product. Sometimes, you can use modified funnels to create different ways of generating traffic to your website. Doing this allows you to discover alternative strategies in implementing your overall sales funnel model.

A digital marketer needs to have reliable tools to make sure that they can help a business grow. We offer an all-in-one marketing platform to give you the resources that you need to develop your sales funnel.

Subscribe with us today and see how our funnel mapping software can help your business optimize its conversion process!

Collaborative marketing is a strategy that involves cooperating with similar companies in the industry to build brand recognition, minimize costs, and increase sales. It can also take place between rivals, and in either case, has shown repeated success.

It is one of the longest-lasting advertising and promotion strategies used in the industry. While the principles of collaborative marketing remain relatively the same, it has shown immense success in the digital age.

An example of a successful and strategic Collaborative Marketing Campaign include Taco Bell’s partnership with Doritos to create the Doritos Locos Tacos, which sold a billion units in just the first year of its release.

This is proof that one of the most important effects of collaborative marketing is the fact that it is a way for companies and brands to overlap their markets and grow their captive audience by leaps and bounds.

Successful collaborations not only increase awareness of the brands involved but also improves how it is perceived. Customers are more likely to see both brands as innovative and creative.

With modern marketing collaboration tools, such partnerships are easier and more efficient than ever. However, before we get to the tools, a well-planned strategy must be in place. Here are just some of the most important strategies for better collaborative marketing campaigns:

1. Choose your collaborators wisely

This is where collaborative marketing begins. It is important to be selective with your collaborations, especially since an ill-thought-out partnership can hurt your brand and bottom line. Make sure that the companies you tie-up with share your values and quality of work.

With the right partners, you can not only bolster every aspect of your business, you can do so for a fraction of the cost. A good collaboration covers the weaknesses of everyone involved, and maximizes each company’s strengths.

An interesting example of a well-chosen and equally beneficial collaboration was the interesting partnership between Pottery Barn and Sherwin-Williams, which gave customers the ability to seamlessly select paint colors based off of their furniture from Pottery Barn. It captured two audiences that may not have had much overlap had the collaboration taken place.

2. Remember that the consumer is a powerful resource

One of the most powerful aspects of the digital age is how modern technology has shaped the landscape of commerce. Social media and the internet have expanded our world in so many ways while simultaneously closing the gap and making everything easy to reach. Now more than ever, the average person has a greater capacity to carry and express a meaningful message.

It would do your campaign wonders to remember that the consumer has power. Creating a strategy that relies on and utilizes the engagement and involvement of the consumer can cause the messaging of a collaborative marketing campaign to spread like wildfire.

Even a single consumer, enamored by your campaign, who shares a video or expresses positive thoughts about your campaign, is valuable.

Many marketers and marketing collaboration tools will tell you that organic growth is the most valuable type of consumer reaction.

When given a platform to interact and engage, a consumer will be a carrier for the message, spreading by word of mouth, social media, and so on. Essentially, an empowered consumer can become a beacon of free advertising.

3. Strategize your goals

While it is important to have similar and unified goals with your collaborative partner, it is just as important to tailor these goals to the needs of all involved. It is also important for all brands to have their own goals.

The partnership between Sherwin-Williams and Pottery Barn is a great example of companies who have similar audiences and most likely similar goals come together for a mutually beneficial effect (which has continued for several years).

With the right strategies and an honest approach to each brand’s strengths and weaknesses, there are so many possibilities of what types of companies you can partner up with, and to what goals you can set as partners.

4. Plan, plan, and plan

Rare is the successful endeavor that did not begin with a sound plan, and the same can be said of marketing partnerships.

A good plan begins with research on marketing campaigns from similar companies that have been successful. Ask yourselves what made those plans great, and how you all could embolden your own plans with what you learn.

While it is easier to enact a collaborative campaign with more entities and partners, the planning will be a lot more difficult. Certainly, it might cost less if you all split the costs, and the combined followers of each brand could be redirected to the others. However, the enactment of such steps in a plan must be as the movements of a well-oiled machine.

For this, you will need comprehensive marketing collaboration tools to smoothen the interactions. The bottom line is: the more companies and brands are involved in the process, the more planning the campaign will need.

When a good plan has been made, make sure that the expectations and goals of the campaign are set into writing and contracts so that every member of this partnership will take their commitments seriously.

5. Adapt

There is no telling what disastrous events may come to throw a wrench into all your best-laid plans. It may come in the form of a pandemic or a sudden shift in the market—or all of the above. Whatever the case may be, it is important to at least have capable people ready to make backup strategies to adjust your campaign as needed.

Adaptation isn’t just about being ready for disasters or unexpected changes in your circumstances. It can be about adjusting your strategies based on gathered data. Your target markets can react in unexpected ways, and as such, it is always good to adjust your strategies to what you learn.

A good marketing collaboration tool should be able to provide the right data in such events. From there, you can then decide which steps to take to ensure the success of the collaboration.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, it is every company and brand’s hope that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. While this is definitely along the lines of easier said than done, the strategies discussed in this article can help when coming up with a comprehensive plan for collaborative marketing.

If you need the right marketing collaboration tools, we at Market Plan have the resources and expertise to help serve your needs and solve your problems. Send us a message if you’d like to discuss your goals with us; we’ll be happy to help you achieve them.