How to Examine Your Existing Marketing
When did you last examine your own marketing?
Have you ever done a thorough analysis of your funnel to make sure your content covers everything?
Evaluating your own funnel is a critical process in finding gaps and knowing where you are losing potential customers. You can only plug holes when you know where they are.
For a true evaluation, you need to:
know what you should have
look at the content you already have
find the gaps
make a plan to fill in the gaps
What is a funnel?
A funnel is the old-fashioned way to describe the path that a customer takes when they meet you.
The theory is you have lots of potential customers at the top and a few actual buyers at the bottom.
As you step through the funnel, people drop out because they’re not really interested, or they buy somewhere else, or the product is too expensive for them.
(Did you ever notice the flaw in the funnel analogy? In a real funnel, the goal is to not spill a drop.)
At the bottom of the funnel, you have your buyers.
A primary goal of marketing is to get more people through the funnel. You might put more people in at the top (lead generation) or improve the bottlenecks further down.
It is an old-fashioned way of thinking about marketing. But it’s not wrong.
Old vs New
There are many new methods of marketing that don’t use the funnel analogy.
You might see the circle, or the donut, or the hourglass.
You might read a famous marketer telling you the traditional funnel is sabotaging your business.
They’re all baloney.
All of them are someone trying to sell you their wonderful new system.
You can bring every one of them back to the simple funnel. Every one.
I have never seen a marketing method that you can’t show as a funnel.
They might have an arrow to take you from the bottom back to the top, but that’s just a funnel with an arrow.
One of my favorites is the circle (a twisted funnel), but they make the arrows go counter-clockwise to look different. Still a funnel, just a different shape.
Try not to buy the newest hype in marketing. Remember, they’re in marketing. They’re trying to sell you something.
The reality of these systems is the same: make a lead aware of your product, get them interested in buying, and push them to take action.
You might have heard the acronym AIDA, which stands for Awareness Interest Desire Action.
Everything starts with Awareness.
The prospect might not be aware of your company. Make them aware.
The prospect might not be aware of your product. That’s a much harder problem to market.
Think about a roof. Everyone knows what a roof is, right? But what about a solar roof? Not so many people knew what a solar roof was twenty years ago.
Back then, a solar roof was a new product, but it had the advantage of entering an existing market, so it wasn’t impossible to get people to understand.
Imagine a brand new product in a brand new category. First, you need to get people to understand the category before you even tell them about your product.
That’s awareness, which is possibly the hardest thing to market.
Next comes Interest.
You might have seen a hundred ads already today. How many were you interested in?
I’m not in the market for most of the drugs advertised on television, because I don’t have that disease.
I’m not in the market for a new car.
I’m not in the market for people who need a shipping container transported across the country.
None of these things capture my interest. Maybe one day I’ll get a new car, so brand marketing could help, but I’ll never need to ship a container.
You can quickly tell where interest is going to go.
Selling a generator which costs a million dollars? Which is a better market, people watching a football game, or people reading Power magazine?
Simple answer, right? Interest in your product is a function of the audience you’re talking to.
The next step in the funnel is Desire.
Your audience is aware and interested. Your mission is to get them to desire your product.
You can do this in several ways, but the most common is to push information at them about the product. People like to be sold on something, and may need several touches before they continue.
Maybe you’re showing them white papers or case studies.
Maybe you’re doing comparisons with the competition.
Maybe you’re showing them how much money they will save.
Maybe you’re selling them the lifestyle of someone who buys your product (‘If you use our product, your work will be 50% more efficient’).
Different people decide in different ways. Your job is to cover all the bases (or at least all the relevant ones).
If you can convince them they want your product, you’re almost there.
Because the last step is for them to take Action.
They know what you sell and they want to buy. You need to push them to the purchase.
This step should be the easiest of all, but you can still get in your own way.
Everyone knows the adage of customers needing the right number of touches before they buy.
Those touches need to be the right ones, and they need to propel your prospect to become a customer.
It might be simple or difficult to get them there. That depends on many factors (is it easier to get someone to buy a million dollar generator or a one dollar candy bar?).
If you’re not getting people to take action, all the rest of your marketing is useless.
Now comes the hard part. Examine your marketing.
Start by thinking about the categories you should market in. Some people call these your cornerstones or pillars. They’re the anchor items for you to market on.
Let’s go back and imagine you sell solar panels. What do people need to know?
How efficient they are, compared to other energy types
How they are installed
How they protect the customer during grid outages
How they work with other technology, like batteries
How they’re connected to your system and the grid.
Each of these is something a potential buyer might ask themselves. If they google it, you might be the one to answer their question.
Think about your own product and come up with a list of major items. You’re looking for up to ten of them to turn into cornerstones.
Make a spreadsheet to see what you already have.
In the first column, list your marketing content. This includes white papers, one-sheets, success stories, blog posts (yes, every single one!). You should even look at your customer sales database. Are there frequently asked questions that might fit a cornerstone?
Across the top row, put your ten cornerstone questions, one in each column.
Then go through the list and for each piece of content, check off every cornerstone question it covers.
It might take a while, but it will be of immense value to you.
By the end of this process, you’ll see where you’ve done well, and where you have gaps.
Some other ideas as you go through this:
If you have the info available, include the audience size for a piece of content. Maybe you have logs of your web traffic telling you how many views each blog post has, or download counts for your white papers.
When you’re looking at how well you’ve covered one of your topics, you can also consider whether your content was read five times, or five hundred (remember a hundred blog post views is not the same as a hundred white paper downloads).
Next, think about where each topic belongs on the AIDA list. Do most of them fall into one area, or are they spread out?
Finally, many web traffic logs will tell you where a person goes from the page they’re on. If you find people are leaving your site from one page, look at the page to see if it is directing them properly. Maybe they see nowhere to go after finishing the page, and you can add some links to other parts of your site.
The obvious step now is to look at the gaps.
If you’ve neglected an area, add it to your content calendar.
If you have a lot of items on one topic, ask yourself if they are doing their job. If not, why not?
Something I always look for is to see where people are dropping out of the funnel. Is that step not explained well enough for them to continue, or is there not enough content in the following step?
At the end of this process, you should have a list of things to do to fill in the gaps and get your funnel rolling again.
One final thought: Never delete blog posts!
If a post isn’t performing well, ask yourself why.
Maybe it’s not specific enough. Maybe badly written, or off topic. Maybe the headline doesn’t work.
There could be several reasons, but don’t delete it. You might rewrite it to work better, or do all kinds of SEO magic to make it perform.
But here’s a little free tip for you: an old post has age, which Google loves. Clean it up and the age stays the same, but start a new post and it resets the clock.
Summary
In this post, we looked at what a funnel is, and the basic steps through a funnel.
We decided most modern funnels are just variations on the classic version, adding terminology or diagrams to sell you their version.
We looked at the four major steps everyone takes through a funnel.
We figured out where all of your content fits in each of those steps, and in the pillars which form the basis of your content marketing strategy.
Finally, we examined your results, found the gaps where you are leaking prospects, and created a plan to fill in those gaps.
Now you can follow a plan to improve your funnel and reap the benefits of your work.
This post was created by Steve West, the Power Copywriter. Steve helps companies in the energy industry plan and write long-form content. This includes blogs, newsletters, white papers, case studies, and more. For help with your marketing strategy, contact him for a free conversation at powercopywriter.com.