If you are a small business owners, you’ll want to focus your marketing efforts in the middle and bottom funnel. Strategies in these two areas will give you the best bang for your money. Small businesses with small budgets, this approach will get you and keep you ahead of the curve. And blowing your whole budget with a mass media approach is the quickest way to bankrupt your business.
It is tempting to attack your marketing problems with top funnel strategies. Fast talking sales reps from large media company can easily convince you that you’ll want to use their service because they have a gazillian views/readers/etc. The reason top funnel strategies are desirable is the feeling you get from seeing and hearing your business all over the place. For the short time you that have the money to throw at it, this seems like everything is working–until your learn that you can’t measure effectively with this method and it starts to cost you an arm and a leg to get more results. The cost of running a brand campaign is costly with often times limited overall measurability.
Little known fact: If done properly, often times branding is a nice bonus that comes along for the ride when you do middle and bottom funnel marketing.
It is equally tempting to focus your marketing dollars on bottom funnel strategies. This strategy focus your marketing efforts to sell your product or service. If you have a short sales cycle, this direct sales focus can be effective. However, if your product or service requires a little more thoughts or takes more time to evaluate, the bottom funnel strategies can become wasteful.
It has been determined that most people are not ready to buy what you offer today, when they see your ad. As a matter of fact, it takes them 5 to 7 times (or more in some industries) before they make that buying decision. So, constantly shoving offers in front of your audience will only turn them away and cause them to go elsewhere.
While presenting an offer is great, which leads to immediate sale. So often business owners forget that they are leaving almost 95% of the marketing for someone else to reap. Here’s what I mean. When a prospect didn’t buy from you and you move on to the next guy/gal, what have you effectively done? You threw away that first touch and made it where you’re hitting cold traffic again. This is very expensive.
New technology and analytic tools have allowed for a new breed of marketing solutions that take advantage of the wasteful bottom funnel and the expensive top funnel. The middle funnel strategies give you the best of both worlds. For the first time, you can run a campaign to make sales (while building your brand) and then turn around and target that audience again and again for more opportunities with top level branding and bottom level sales.
In conclusion, it is important to have a variety of marketing strategies. At the end of the day, make sure that you make an effort to close the loop and have your marketing attack from all levels. If you want more information, please fill out the form below and one of our advisors will contact you to help you identify which campaign strategy will best work for your business.