How to review your marketing – the complete funnel

Sometimes, when it comes to our marketing, we forget or don't find the time to do a proper, decent, ‘step back and look at the whole thing’ review.

It’s easily done. We’re checking our marketing metrics to see how we’re doing on a daily, weekly, monthly etc basis. We’re monitoring each marketing campaign or marketing tactic we use – ‘How’s it going?’, ‘Has it worked?’. But this focus on each individual marketing communications piece means we can lose the bigger picture.

So, I invite you to make space, take a step back, and review your entire marketing and sales funnel.

Let’s look at how.

Step 1. Review each of your ‘stages’

Whether you’re calling it a funnel, pipeline, the Buyer’s Journey or something else, it will have different stages. You need to review each of those stages in turn.

Here at The Marketing Spaces, we call it The Buyers Journey. 

So, when we do a ‘step back whole marketing review’ we look at every stage of our Buyers’ Journey in turn. 

For example:

Unaware: how many people are in our marketplace? How many of them do we need to move from being unaware we exist to being aware we are here? What is going on in their lives? What do we need to be aware of?

Aware: what marketing do we have in place for people to become aware that we exist? How effective is it? What is working well? Are these just vanity metrics?

Interested: how many people are ‘hanging around’ us? What marketing material do we have in place? How well is it working?

You have to systematically review each stage of your funnel, detailing what marketing you are doing, then assessing how well it works.

This short video shows you how to do an assessment of your marketing. 

Step 2. See how well it flows into the next stage

Part of this review means looking at how each stage links to another. What we are doing here is seeing if you have ‘blocks’ at stages of your funnel. This is where we really get to see if your marketing is working. 

For example, it might seem like your marketing is amazing because your awareness stats are flying – loads of engagement on socials, loads of positive PR, people love you when you speak at an event. But…how many are moving through to the next stage? How many are interested in us enough that they hang around and keep consuming our content?

When marketing ‘doesn’t work’ it’s often these essential links to the next stage that aren’t working well. There can be many reasons for this, but it often boils down to:

• You’re attracting the ‘wrong’ type of people i.e. those who are never going to buy from you, so they don’t move through your funnel
• You haven’t made it clear where people are to go next
• If you do signpost them to the next stage, it doesn’t give them what they want so they move on.

Step 3. Look for the quick wins

It can be disheartening when doing a marketing review to see the ‘Actions’ totting up. All those improvements to be made, are probably a big project to undertake, e.g. rebranding, creating more marketing material, a new website, and just lots to do.

That’s why we always look for quick wins.

--> What is the one improvement you can instantly make at each stage? <--

Some quick wins include:

• Updating an existing blog post / article / newsletter / Landing Page with a new image / headline to give it a refresh and see if it works better this time
• Creating a new segment on your Mailing List (or updating a current one)
• Deleting / removing old content / contacts / posts that no longer serve your business
• Making one phone call / sending one email to reconnect with people

Find a quick win for each stage, then implement it within 48 hours of finishing your review. 

Step 4. Prioritise your Action Plan

This is key. As well as finding your quick wins, look at all the actions that have come out of your review. Then start to prioritise. 

We always do our reviews where we apply a score to each stage of the pipeline. This means that our Action Plans are about how we can improve the score. 

We begin with the area with the lowest score, so our weakest area. We think about how we can shift that score up a bit. What are the actions that need to be done that would mean we’d give this a higher mark?

We then also look at the areas that most affect others. So, if we know that a huge project is coming out eg a website redesign or new products, that has to be started on quickly because it will take the longest. But what can we do in the meantime that will support that? 

• Write some great LinkedIn Articles, so that when we launch the website, we can use these articles as the basis of blogs.
• Tidy up our Socials so that, while the website is under construction, we can still do our marketing but keep people away from an inadequate website until the new one is in place. 

Finally, we make sure that we are keeping people in our funnel.

It’s no good getting loads of enquiries if we lose most of them because our way of dealing with enquiries is poor. So, we might begin at plugging that leak, that place where people disappear from our pipeline. 

When we run Marketing Reviews, we use a combination of all these things – improving the score, actions that most impact others, and plugging huge leaks – to decide on the priority order of our Action Plans.

Step 5. Be realistic

It’s so easy to do a Marketing Review, get all fired up with what needs to improve, set tough but seems to be achievable deadlines then…back to work. Back to the everyday marketing. Back to the making things happen, back to do, do, do.

So, when you set your Prioritised Action Plan, be realistic about when you can get each improvement done. Look at doing it all over 12 months. Yes. One Year. Not one month! Your goal is to have a robust marketing pipeline / Buyers Journey and this takes time. It can’t be done instantly. Invest that time.

The other part of realism is making sure you have set time aside after the review so that you can put your Prioritised Action Plan together and do some of those quick wins. 

We recommend you book the time out to do the Marketing Review and then half a day the following day to ‘crack on’. You will be more motivated if you can see some quick wins instantly. 

Conclusion

Taking the time to do that ‘whole funnel’ marketing review is so important – it will really help improve your marketing and make it more effective. 

Further info

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This Article appeared on The Marketing Spaces.