Have you ever wondered if the journey of your customer is trackable or even viewable? I have good news for you – it is. You can – in many cases – track how many people know about your business, how many of them consider purchasing your goods and, of course, how many already bought and referred your product to a friend. Being able to view the customer journey, optimise its steps and analyze your efforts is crucial for any kind of business. Trust me, the size does not matter (in this case). Every business should do it.
Marketing funnel is a term that resonates with the majority of marketers. They tend to use this model to illustrate the customer journey – from brand discovery to purchase. As stated, measuring every step of the funnel brings you a much better overview of your efforts and, thus, a higher return on investment, which is your goal, isn't it? The more you can get out of every stage of your customer's journey, the better the results are in terms of number count or revenue.
Let's say your customer journey has three main phases:
Please note that in this case we don't cover the scenarios that happen after the purchase is made (retention funnel).
Each stage represents a different behaviour stage of your potential customer. Say she has a problem which she is able to name. She begins to search for a solution – which you offer with your product or service. As soon as she discovers your business – among others – offers the solution she is already in the awareness stage.
Your presentation, product, its price and other factors determine whether she will move further on the journey. The consideration stage, needless to say, is a phase in which a potential customer already considers your product, is comparing it to your competitors and is aware of its pros and cons.
Decision. That's the phase we aim for. We want her to buy our product, right? That's when a decision is made. In this stage, your potential customer has already conducted the research, has chosen you over your competitors and is happy to buy what you have to offer.
We just described (in a very simple way) what a customer journey can look like. Sometimes it takes weeks to guide her through all stages of the journey, sometimes it is a matter of minutes. Imagine yourself buying a coffee in the city center. You probably don't do any thorough research, but you certainly look for coffee quality and price. You don't spend days comparing the product to other cafés or bars. You make the decision according to a few key factors. Your journey is fast and your decision is made pretty quickly. But it does not mean the café owner should not pay attention to the key factors, like what the café window looks like, or if their prices are reasonable, as it influences the customer's journey.
The customer journey can easily be viewed as a funnel. Therefore, marketers use it to analyze their efforts. To explain the basic idea behind the marketing funnel, let's use the widely-known model AIDA which stands for attention, interest, desire and action. Each of these phases represent a stage in which you might find your customers.
Obviously, your ultimate goal is to guide them through the stages without friction and in the shortest time possible.
Let us look at an example of a basic marketing funnel:
People obviously start at the top – marketers call it the top funnel. This represents the awareness stage. As customers move further in the funnel, they know more about you and your offer and start, as well as continue to consider it more and more.
Here is what a perfect marketing funnel would look like:
This would mean that everyone who discovers your product will decide to purchase. Going back to our example, 100% of the people who enter your café will buy a coffee. Of course, that's a seller's utopia. In an ideal world, this would work, not in the real one.
Your task is to carefully measure your funnel and optimize its steps.
Let's finally give a more concrete example of what a marketing funnel can look like in your case. Say you run a real estate business, and aim to attract potential house buyers with your website. That's also where you generate leads that you can then convert. Your main channels would be:
- social media or ads on Google or Youtube
- a website
- a chat or phone call
You would try to attract as many people as possible with your marketing budget and lead them to your website to show all the products or services you have. After they land on the website, ideally you want them to fill out a form, in case, they are interested in a particular offer. As soon as they do so, you connect with them via phone or email and find out whether their interest can lead to a conversion.
This is what your funnel would look like:
Let's do some math now. Say your marketing efforts help you reach 10,000 people with your ad. 3% of them interact with your ad and visit your website. That would mean you have 300 people on your website, right?
How many of these people are you able to convert into leads? That depends on how your website attracts its users and how juicy your offer is, doesn't it? Let's say you have a 10% conversion rate (10% of website visitors convert into leads). In this case, you would have 30 leads waiting to be contacted.
How many of them can you convert into sales? Again, factors like your response time, will play their role now. If you made it to 50%, you just made 15 sales. Now go back and think about what can be improved...
You can see that there are more factors that influence the efficiency of your funnel (and your efforts). One bit of advice would be: measure each step of the funnel, focus on the customer and do your best to improve the areas where it falters!
Going back to our example, simply by making your ad more appealing, you can increase your outcome from 3% to 6% which (if other metrics don't change) make 30 sales at the end of the day! Improve your website from 10% conversion rate to 15% and you almost hit the sky… You know where I am heading, right?
You may be wondering where you can get all of this data? Tools like Google Analytics, Google Ads, Facebook Business Manager or our own app that simplifies the process of ad management, can give you great insights into how many people you reached, how many of them interacted with your content, how many made it to the website and finally, how many were converted into leads. There is a plethora of ways to measure your marketing funnel – the customer journey. Even a piece of paper and good data sources can create miracles…
One thing is for sure: if you don't measure your efforts carefully, you may be investing money and energy into something which does not bring you results at all.
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How to Publish Articles (Natively) on LinkedIn Like Pro
If you're wondering where you can get your articles published, so that it reaches a broader audience, we have great news for you: LinkedIn allows you to create and publish articles natively on their platform. Not only can you leverage the wide user base that LinkedIn has, but you can also use their analytics to see how your posts perform.
Like Facebook did with Instant articles, LinkedIn has switched from being a solely networking-based platform, focused on professionals, to a content-based platform that allows its user to educate themselves while spending time on their platform. That's also what both LinkedIn and Facebook (amongst other platforms) desire – to keep you, me and other users on their platform for as long as they can.
Does this feature represent the potential for you to share your knowledge among other people? You bet it does - if “done well”. Let's jump right into how you can publish articles natively on LinkedIn like a pro.
To get started, click the “Write an article” button. Can’t find it? It's right there, have a look:
Isn't this one of the features that has been in front of your eyes the whole time, but remained undiscovered?
Once you hit the button, magic happens. You are redirected to an interface where you can create your native LinkedIn article. Having said that, you can now configure the content: add a headline, background image, write the article, add engaging or educating infographics or other visuals and finally, publish!
We won't leave you without any tips and tricks to get started (just keep reading), but we recommend you play around with this feature to get a better idea of what all you can do.
10 Best Marketing Tools for Small Businesses
There are over 7,000 marketing tools you can use today. And I'm going to name them all. No, just kidding, Scott Brinker already did. Actually, he updates the database every single year, so I don't have to. ;)
- If you have a lot of time on your hands and want to spend it browsing a list of tools, here is an Excel sheet
- If you want to print it as a poster for your bedroom wall, click here
- If you are a marketing expert, I would appreciate your feedback down there, in the infamous comments section.
If you are new to marketing and want to learn about the 10 most useful tools for small businesses, keep reading!
How to Target People According to Their Interests
Have you ever wondered about how it is possible that you actually like the products you see in your feed? That is because of the targeting. You should always know who you are talking to. Who is your buyer persona? If you know it, you can tell Facebook what your potential customers look like and Facebook will target them.
Facebook allows you to target custom audiences, lookalike audiences and saved audiences. The saved audiences are our topic in this article. Those are the audiences that you can define by choosing people’s interests or location, demographics, used devices, income level, etc. You can create Saved Audiences both in the campaign setup phase or in the Audience Manager. To narrow or broaden your audience, you can combine those as much as you like!
Regarding demographics-based targeting, you’ll get plenty of topics to refine your audience based on many options. The basic 3 are: Age, Gender and Language. That’s easy.
Location targeting allows you to pick the whole country, a city, or a specific radius around a pin you drop on the map. Imagine you are a realtor and you have a perfect house to sell in California! As an example, you can target people currently traveling or planning their next trip right there… To read more about the location targeting, read this article.
What is interesting here is the interest-based targeting! Interests are one of the best (and easiest) targeting options. They allow you to target people interested in a specific subject related to your product. Does it sound like a good option to target people interested in your competitors or the market segment you are in? To target people based on interests, you can either browse the menu with hundreds of interests or simply type some of them in and see what Facebook can suggest and offer you.
Everytime you edit your audience, you can check your potential reach and estimated daily results based on your campaign objective.
How does Facebook know? The interests are based on its users’ likes, apps they use, Pages they’ve followed, and more. Adding more than one interest will target people with at least one of them so you’ll broaden your reach.
Behaviour-based targeting allows you to target Facebook users by their purchase history, events they were interested in, personal anniversaries, etc. This data is gathered by Facebook analyzing many factors and also using external data sets.
You can include or exclude people based on another kind of information or connections e.g. ads they click, pages they engage with, the mobile device they use or the speed of their network connection. Interesting, huh? You can read more in Facebook article about best practices for detailed targeting.
Pretty much everything is summed up in the picture above. To save your time, save your audiences, so you can always use them again, copy them to make small changes and have a brand new one.
To read more about this topic, you can download our e-book below!
How to Market Real Estate on Social Media
One of the main problems of real estate agents, is getting listings. To make it work, you shouldn’t just focus on your website. Social media and the online world, overall, could be a marvelous extension of the brand you present yourself as offline. If you take advantage of its options, you’ll reach more people, build trust and most importantly - sell.
Here are a few things you should know about social media marketing for real estate.
40+ Tools for Creating Visual Content on Social Media
It is well-known that visual content is the basis of success on social networks. It’s easier for users to consume pictures and videos, than text. It’s also more visible in a mess of other content. According to some studies, tweets with pictures receive up to 150% more retweets than plain text posts without pictures. So, it is clear that the importance of visual content is steadily increasing and you definitely shouldn't ignore it.
You don't have to worry, you don't need to hire expensive agencies right away. You don't even have to learn to work with complicated and expensive tools, like Photoshop. Fortunately, today there are plenty of free online and mobile apps available to create visual content in just a few clicks.
In this article we will introduce you to 40+ tools that are available on the internet for free. We use these tools on a daily basis, so we can highly recommend them.
Canva
By far the most famous online tool for creating all kinds of visuals, and not just for social media. Canva allows you to create literally everything you can think of — from nice Facebook covers to Instagram Stories to beautiful Infographics. You can choose from dozens of templates and it all works for web browsers or mobile apps.
Vizzlo
Whether you need a simple pie chart or a complex business graphic, Vizzlo's portfolio offers you a broad range of different visualization choices. It works for browsers and it is easy to use. You can enter your data using the simple sidebar, and then choose to import spreadsheets from Excel or Google Sheets. Add the result to your slides and documents or directly share it on all your social media channels.
Graphicriver
An endless collection of various templates, fonts, logos, flyers and much more. Graphicriver is where you can find ready-made graphic designs for almost any digital content. You don't need to hire an expensive agency and create all visuals and graphics from scratch. It is often enough to modify existing templates. This saves you not only a bunch of time, but also money, because the prices of the templates are very low.
Tip: If you are not familiar with editing graphics, try to outsource it via Fivver.
Landscape
Size matters! At least when it comes to social media. Landscape has hundreds of recommended dimensions, sizes and ratios across different platforms and devices. It is easy to get lost in these constantly changing numbers. So try to use Landscape by Sprout, it helps you resize multiple images for your profiles automatically.
Online channels demography and their usage.
You may be wondering if your advertising tactic is the best for your company, or what options may be better suited for your needs. Because of this, we’ve outlined the pros and cons for the most popular of online channel. As well as we show you how popular they are and among which audiences.
Today around seven to eight in ten Americans use social media to connect with one another, engage with news content, share information and entertain themselves. Explore the patterns and trends shaping the social media landscape over the past decade below.
Bear in mind that users use several channels and most important of all, they do it almost simultaneously.
Imagine an average household, three people = three users. Each user can see their favorite program on television while they have their mobile phone in hand, with the Instagram app open and making stories about what happens in that program. How many channels come into play in this situation? How many channels can you use to reach that user in one way or another? At least 3. Television, the Smartphone and Instagram itself. Al that without taking into account the rest of applications and tools that are inside that device.
Since this blog is mainly for small business owners or entrepreneurs, and especially it's about online marketing, let's talk more about the online channels.
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