10 Tips to Overcome Your Mid-Funnel Challenges
We recently came across an article from our friends over at Hubspot that called out several challenges people have when it comes to converting their leads into paying customers. This led us to think about how we help our clients turn their intenders driven by awareness marketing into returning customers so we decided we’d do our own take on these ten items. So without further ado here are ten surprising facts about lead generation and how we help solve your consideration level challenges
1. 65% of businesses consider traffic and lead generation as their biggest marketing challenge.
This one is hardly a surprise but the numbers are surprisingly large. 65% of businesses do not feel that they have enough traffic to adequately run their digital operation and scale their business. FieldTest helps overcome this challenge by allowing you to easily create awareness level ads with our digital ad creator and publish them to your custom audiences in minutes.
2. 93% of B2B businesses believe content marketing to be more effective at generating more leads than traditional marketing tactics.
This is a topic we love at FieldTest. Content marketing is one of the most powerful tools you have at your disposal to bring in new traffic and convert interested intenders. From blog content to third party review sites we always encourage our clients to keep their content front of mind when deciding what to promote with FieldTest ads.
3. 74% of global companies prioritize lead nurturing and conversion
This is another statistic that shouldn’t come as a surprise, but does go to show just how important it is to take your awareness level traffic and push it down-funnel towards conversion. With FieldTest we recommend this be done with informative content that sets your brand apart from the competition, served to your highest performing awareness audiences.
4. 93% buying decisions start with an online search for B2B brands.
The B2B world isn’t exempt from the challenges of digital marketing, in fact they rely heavily on digital awareness marketing to drive traffic. We’ve had a number of B2B brands achieve success using FieldTest ads using their SEO-boosting blog content as awareness level marketing.
5. 96% of website visitors don’t come to a website with an intention to buy
If you run a DTC brand, this number might be a bit galling to see. Still, studies suggest that the vast majority of clickers on your website are doing so not with intention to buy, but with intention to research and get a feel for your brand. This is why we lean so heavily on the concept of the Sales Funnel, because it is important to remember that the customer journey is not simply one of clicking on your site and making a purchase. Converting your traffic into customers takes some convincing in the mid-to-lower funnel.
6. 68% B2B businesses will use landing pages for lead nurturing and conversions in the future
This statistic is one that warms our hearts here at FieldTest. We recommend building landing pages to support your advertising campaigns and with good reason - they’re a great way to inform your customers about what makes your brand special and they are shown to be strong converters when properly designed to funnel customers to checkout. We hope this statistic will lead the other 32% of brands decide that a landing page is worth their time to build and promote in their mid-funnel.
7. Just 29% of the businesses invest in nurturing their existing customer base
While the vast majority of brands (81%) were reported to be investing in sending new traffic to their sites, only 29% were reported to be focusing on nurturing and upselling to their current customers. If you’ve designed your funnel properly you should have a highly qualified group of intenders and converters in your lower funnel stage that you can then set to receive drip messaging about seasonal promotions and sales while you continue to focus on expanding your customer base with more awareness level marketing.
8. 53% of businesses confess that most of their leads take a long time to convert.
This is a challenge we receive from time to time and often it can be solved with one of a few small changes to a marketing campaign. We often find that when a client is having a hard time converting their intenders that there is some element along the line that is not aligned either in creative, messaging, or on their website. If you have beautiful ads and great headlines sending people to a dead web page or an ad that has a headline that says one thing and leads to a page that says another, people will draw back and be less likely to purchase. Still, even perfectly set up campaigns take time to convert customers and we recommend waiting at least 30 days before seriously assessing the ROAS of your digital marketing campaigns. This is doubly true for new brands who don’t already have a base of traffic to draw from.
9. 50% of marketers say increasing lead-to-customer conversions is their biggest challenge & top priority.
While marketers have a whole bevy of challenges and concerns, the top reported challenge still remains converting leads to customers. This, perhaps surprisingly, comes in ahead of lowering costs and increasing traffic. This means that marketers would rather spend a little more to convert their existing traffic into intenders than spend that money expanding their traffic with new audiences. Whether this is right for you relies heavily on your brand, but many don’t have to choose! Simply create high quality informative content in consideration, bid it a little higher than perhaps you usually would and follow through with smart retargeting ads in the conversion stage and you’ll be converting your traffic in no time.
10. Aligning content with a prospect’s stage in the buyer’s journey can boost conversion rates by 72%
Echoing what we said at the last bullet, this is one of the most important lessons to learn when taking on your digital marketing. The funnel is the foundation of our marketing strategy for a good reason, complying with it and conforming your content to the strategies prescribed at each stage is shown to increase conversion immensely. This isn’t just an arbitrary set of standards, it’s a proven set of psychological steps your customer is going through when they browse the internet. By designing your marketing around the funnel strategy you are ensuring that every step is being taken to consistently turn your awareness audiences into converting customers.