How to make your funnel convert higher in 24 hours

“Build customer development by asking non-leading questions.” That’s one of the key takeaways in this second episode with Dan. We also talked about how you can drive efficiencies really quickly, how to place the value prop so that it sticks, and a few more tips on how you can optimize your funnel.
About the speaker

Dan McGaw

McGaw.io

 - McGaw.io

Dan is the founder and CEO of McGaw.io, an analytics and marketing technology consultancy. He has also previously served as CMO at Kissmetrics.com and VP of Growth at CodeSchool.com.

Show Notes

Quotes

  • “I’ve been in the game for over 20 years. I got my start in 1998 sending mass emails before there’s even mass email. I’ve been using marketing technology before it was even a thing. In the music industry, I was the first one to start an online booking agency for DJs and producers. I don’t know if you’ve seen the FYRE Festival, the documentary, that was my real life except I wasn’t a fraud.” - Da0n“You have to understand in the marketing food chain who you are marketing to. But the easiest way to get a marketer to listen to you is through education. When I was at Kissmetrics, luckily the engine they had built was all content marketing and focused on education and it really was a bottom up approach.” - Dan“That bottom-up approach from a long-term strategy is usually going to be the most cost-efficient, the one that will build you the most rapport and it’s gonna be the one that makes you the most money, if you know how to make money which I think is a fundamental problem most marketers have. They still struggle with that conversion part.” - Dan“At Kissmetrics many people don’t know that we’re an analytics company. They just know that we write a badass blog. So the first thing we did is to ask how we can generate leads through this blog and that includes creating dynamic ad insertions at the bottom or middle of the blog post. So we would have a downloadable case study for Facebook Advertising, for instance and that was like the low-hanging fruit. There was a 17% increase in lead count.” - Dan“People kind of forget the buyer’s journey. They just focus on page views and clicks and they never think about it, hey they’re aware now we need research so they can make a decision. Taking them through the educational story was our main way. On top of the blog post, we turned that into a webinar series, and then how to convert people from the webinars basically making sure they have sales reach out.” - Dan“So the content repurposing was what I call the echo chamber of the content and it was what ended up increasing our traffic by 50% during a six-month period because we were just able to triple the content that we’re putting out.” - Dan“I’ll say that I’m a victim of doing this with the MarTech podcast. Sometimes you fall in love with a marketing strategy or tactic that fills the top of your funnel and you just take the middle and bottom of your funnel for granted. There is a conversion rate so if I keep dumping more prospects into the top of the funnel, my middle and bottom funnels are static and now I’m gonna have a higher output instead of optimizing the top, middle, and bottom.” - Ben “My consulting company is focused on two primary things. Either you lack visibility into the funnel which is where our analytics come into play, or you lack the ability to engage the people that are in the funnel and that’s where basically our marketing technology comes into play.” - Dan“The biggest thing that we focus on in that middle of the funnel, and this is the area where a lot of people got screwed up because they don’t focus enough on the right content that should be served at the right time, they don’t focus on the segmentation of buyer persona is, and what content should be served to them.” - Dan“Have you ever heard of the book The Challenger Customer? It’s a fantastic book and extremely helpful for talking about how you sell to an organization with those five buyers. You might have a champion but you have four people that make the decision. The typical marketing practice is, “Okay, let’s personalize our messaging to each of those four people. What actually happens when you do that tailoring in a deal like that is it makes those four people more align with their own personal goal, focused on their own priorities which mean they never purchase.” - Dan“A natural marketing habit which is to personalize to each person, if you have five buyers that are making one decision for one company that’s like the opposite way to sell to that buyer. So, you’ve got to collaborate with sales if it’s a harder sales-driven process because whether you’re gonna sell five people with one decision is a lot different if you just gonna have Joe who’s gonna buffer all on his own. They’re very different buyer journey.” - Dan“I can definitely say this because I’m a marketer, marketers are stupid. You gotta make it really, really easy for them, and the reason why I say that is because of marketers like pretty. They like flow, they like things that are easy to understand and a lot of that is because of the pressure that we have on top of us. We are overwhelmed with the number of priorities we have which means we have to make a lot of decisions while multi-tasking so we’re forced to make these gut decisions really, really quickly.” - Dan“I do think that marketers have shiny object syndrome where a lot of the time we are distracted because there are so many different directions you could take your marketing strategies. A lot of the time what marketers end up buying is the thing that they feel like they need to have and not necessarily something that their customers really want or something that is a need for their business.” - Ben “One of the things that I’ve learned in my career is that if you’re the hipster, the innovator that is in front that’s great. But you have to remember that you’re still a hipster and a lot of the shiny objects that you are going to test out are not going to work.” - Dan “So everybody who thought they were being cool and was an innovator or a hipster found out after the set up that 75% of the tools that they had didn’t work with it. Heatmap didn’t work. Then you have to spend double the money so that all these technologies will work with it. Meanwhile, you have people like me. You know what, I’m not gonna be a hipster, I’m gonna keep using WordPress because it’s tried and true and the internet uses it and is used to it. I made more money than most of my competitors because we didn’t have to spend twice the money on developing something and twice the money trying to get everything to work with that shiny new piece of software.” - Dan“Give yourself some time. Don’t be the first one to the party. It’s okay to be a little late when it comes to marketing technology because I promise you this, you wind up saving more money and earning more money.” - Dan“There's a difference between point solutions and platforms. I think you can find innovative solutions. I think you can find something that solves a discrete problem. It can be a valuable piece of Martech. When I’m talking about segment which is I need a platform that’s gonna integrate to every single connector I have and all the data points, that can be very challenging to build and develop and you want to see those platforms to come to a point of maturity where you’re not constantly trying to innovate for the platform.” - Dan

About the speaker

Dan McGaw

McGaw.io

 - McGaw.io

Dan is the founder and CEO of McGaw.io, an analytics and marketing technology consultancy. He has also previously served as CMO at Kissmetrics.com and VP of Growth at CodeSchool.com.

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