Introduction
Can a funnel that was never built properly be really broken? The answer is crystal clear: obviously NO.
It is a common phenomenon for B2B marketers and leaders to use the term “broken funnel” when they notice that their content, messaging, customer journey, and follow-ups strategies are not achieving the sales and marketing desired goals, especially when the leads are coming in, but there is little to no conversion.
However, the reality is that a funnel can never be broken; what often leads to this assumption by the sales and marketing team is what is termed funnel misalignment. This misalignment occurs mostly between targeting your audience and the message you’re delivering to them. Funnel misalignment also happens between the offers you’re presenting and the stage of the buyer’s journey in your funnel.
Additionally, if there’s a disjointness between the content you are creating and the pain points of decision makers within your target market, then funnel misalignment can’t be avoided.
Understanding what funnel misalignment is, how to identify it, and the practical steps you can take to realign your marketing funnel strategy is what we will be showing you in this article.
Let’s dive in.
How to Identify Funnel Misalignment
How do you even know that your funnel is misaligned? Look out for these three (3) key indicators to ascertain a misaligned funnel.
1. Misalignment between audience and offer
This occurs when your sales and marketing efforts are directed toward the wrong segment of your targeted audience. A great example of this would be seeking to offer an enterprise-level solution to small businesses, which do not have the resources and requirements for such complex solutions.
2. Message Misalignment
If there’s a slight message difference between what your ads say and what prospects eventually see on your landing page, then you have confused them. This “little” confusion poses a risk to the authenticity of your brand with your potential customers and as a result, they may never engage with your funnel, which will overall impact your sales and marketing objectives.
3. Stage Misalignment
This is one crucial moment where you may find yourself requesting potential customers to access a trial or demo of your product when in fact they are still in the initial awareness stage of their buying journey. This approach won’t only lead to confusion, but might also disrupt their customer journey with you, which may leave a negative impression on your brand.
How to Realign Your Funnel (Step by Step)
1. Align your message with the right audience
To successfully engage your target audience, it is essential to review your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). This will help you in ensuring that your message speaks to their specific pain points, hits their decision triggers so that such a message becomes a top priority for them. By putting these into consideration, you will increase your chances of capturing their attention to drive meaningful engagement in your funnel.
2. Match your offers to the appropriate funnel stage
When it comes to effective nurturing of your audience segment, it is important to match your offers to the appropriate stage of the funnel.
Top-of-funnel: This is the initial (awareness) stage of your funnel, where your primary focus should be on creating and sharing educational content that resonates with your target audience. This can include comprehensive guides, webinar replays, and in-depth reports that are specific to your niche. The goal of this stage is to position your brand as a thoughtful leader by providing valuable information that catches the interest of your audience.
Middle-of-funnel: At this stage, it is crucial to share with prospects strong and persuasive real-world experiences and detailed case studies of your product, which should also show the potency of the same. By doing so, you are intentionally building up a trust-relationship with them regarding the ROI they can expect, moving them closer to making a purchasing decision.
Bottom-of-funnel: Finally, at the bottom of the funnel, it is highly important to define and provide clear calls to action (CTAs) that serve as a guide to your potential customers in making their purchase decision. These CTAs could be in the form of demos, free trials, or consultations, all which contribute to increasing conversions and drive sales. By strategically matching your offers to the appropriate stage of the funnel, you can strengthen your customer journey and refine your overall sales and marketing objectives.
3. Optimize content across different touchpoints
It is essential to unify all touchpoints in your sales and marketing strategy, which includes everything from your ads and landing pages to your marketing emails and proposals. Each of these elements should consistently tell the same story in echoing your brand’s unique selling proposition (USP) at all times. This degree of consistency is particularly crucial in B2B, as a significant amount of trust and credibility are required when potential customers are making a purchasing decision.
4. Use data to track alignment
To ensure that your marketing objectives are aligned and practical, it is also important to understand data through CRM and analytics tools. These tools can help in identifying major and minor drop-off points in your funnel, from which you can then make informed decisions for realignment. Platforms like Zoho CRM provide valuable insights into lead scoring and engagement levels, which can show you where the misalignment may be coming from. These marketing automation tools offer a new approach to your funnel strategy.
Why Funnel Realignment is Better than Starting Over
Rebuilding a sales or marketing funnel from scratch means a complete revamp of months and years of strategies, content, and blueprints. This process isn’t just on high-cost, but also very time-consuming. Instead, a funnel realignment is a better approach to this, and here is the why and how.
1. Cost Savings: Rather than throwing away your existing blueprints and starting over from the ground level, a more strategic and cost-effective approach would be to refine and enhance what was initially working. This could be termed as the optimization approach.
A great example of this in email marketing is conducting an A/B test on a single landing page. By making minor adjustments in the content and comparing the performance of the two variations, you can easily gather valuable insights into what resonates well with your segment audience. This optimization approach would yield better and faster results at little to no cost.
2. Time Efficiency: A common misconception that B2B marketers hold about funnel optimization is that it requires huge auditing that could take several months if not quarters, but in reality, most realignments are minor tweaks on content, messages, and audience refinement, which overall takes about just a few weeks. Since these changes do not require rebuilding the whole sales funnel, they can be tested, implemented, and validated within a few weeks. In other words, funnel realignment helps you to:
Test your changes quickly and gather immediate feedback for improvement.
See the measurable improvements in lead quality and conversion rates within a quarter or two.
Build team momentum by showing results from above that funnel optimization and realignment work.
3. Growth Benefits: Beyond the cost and time benefits, realignment of your sales and marketing funnels will have a large extent in affecting the core of your business objectives. According to Forrester, businesses with strong sales and marketing alignment don't just survive amidst others, but experience 15% faster revenue growth and 19% profitability.
How Funnel Realignment Drive Revenue
1. Higher quality leads: Through the data analysis conducted above while tracking alignment, your marketing team will have an idea of what an ideal qualified lead looks like, which will then be communicated to the sales team for nurturing and follow-ups. This way, both teams focus their resources on revenue-focused leads, ultimately leading to a higher conversion rate and a more efficient sales cycle.
2. Improved deal conversion: The coherency between the first message in your ads that your potential customers encounter to the final sales call with the sales team builds trust and credibility and makes them more confident in their purchasing decision. This consistency can conclusively increase deal closure time and win rates, as both sales and marketing are in unison in guiding prospects through a strategic funnel.
3. Longer customer lifespan: A customer journey doesn’t end once the deal is won; rather, it’s a continuous process of consistently delivering value to your customer base. The goal here is to increase retention rate and ultimately reduce churn rate through available reports based on data analysis, which will, in turn, boost customer lifetime value (LTV) to become a recurring revenue source.
Conclusion
Once again, your funnel isn’t broken; it’s simply misaligned.
By properly aligning your message with your specific audience segment, matching offers to the appropriate stages of the customer journey, optimizing content across different touchpoints, and leveraging data to monitor and track alignment, you can transform an underperforming funnel into a reliable revenue machine.
How Proconnect Digital Helps
What we offer at Proconnect Digital is helping B2B businesses like yours uncover the mystery behind their funnel misalignment and strategically realigning your customer journey for maximum and efficient conversion rates.
Ready to realign your funnel? Let's talk strategy to get your funnel aligned.