Silverbird Experts: Make the acquisition funnel the heart of your growth engine

What can B2B fintech marketers learn from Ecommerce?

We sat down with Michael Lorenzos, Head of Growth at Silverbird, to find out! 

I was an Ecommerce marketer before I joined Silverbird. I know from firsthand experience that B2B businesses have a lot to learn from their consumer-facing cousins. 

Firstly, let me say that B2B and B2C businesses have different demands and therefore vastly different approaches to marketing. 

B2C Ecommerce marketers optimise their paid media (branded content, display ads, etc) for the Purchase event. They’re notorious for obsessing over signal optimisation to ensure they send as many events as possible back to their channels. 

Simply put, it’s a quantity-over-quality approach to marketing. 

B2B is different. It has all sorts of potential funnels — and the decision on which event to optimise for can make or break a B2B Growth Engine. 

Let’s say your sales funnel starts from a form fill — a Product-led or Freemium funnel where users get to try your product.

The problem is that the value of Ecommerce orders is clearly distinguished by the amount of money paid for the product, whereas the form fill’s value varies greatly between different businesses. 

For example, the form-fill value of a 500+ employee company is very high when compared to the form-fill of a solopreneur. It becomes more complex when you layer multiple parameters — country, nature of business, and product usage characteristics. 

If your tracking is suboptimal, your marketing spend is compromised.

This is why you should start with Tracking first. Ensure you collect the right events and distribute them to your performance marketing channels. 

1# Maximise for intended conversions — not traffic

The first thing I did in my last two full-time roles was to hire a tracking expert to ensure the frontend tracking was spotless, allowing the data to flow seamlessly to and from the marketing channels. 

This goes against what many do — find whatever event is relevant and optimise for it. 

You’d be surprised. Many Paid Social campaigns are optimised for clicks or traffic, with marketers relying on lookalike audiences to drive relevant traffic to their funnel. 

Essentially, this is instructing your paid channels to get you the cheapest clicks for your budget while draining the Machine Learning power of the algorithm. You want to maximise the intended conversions for your budget — not maximise traffic. 

2# Choose the most relevant event for your end goal

Choosing the right event is a balancing act — it must be relevant to your end goal and suitable for Performance Marketing. 

In most cases, you can’t optimise for actual customers. This is a conversion that tends to happen online and the volume is quite low which doesn’t give your performance channels the necessary signal volume.

There are two competing factors — correlation with business value, and volume. These factors are in a negative linear correlation. Essentially, the higher the business value, the lower the event volume. 

What’s a common pattern between your high-value customers? Is there a way to modify your funnel to better scout for this pattern? The event you want to optimise against might not even exist yet. 

3# Make the acquisition funnel the heart of your growth engine

Don’t just set up your funnel first and then simply drive traffic to that funnel. Your acquisition results can inform the funnel. 

If there’s no optimisation event that has a high correlation between volume and business value, you have options. For example, you could set up a new event in your existing funnel. 

You could also create a new funnel step. This could help you get conversions higher in the funnel that will give you a higher signal volume, or one lower in the funnel that will increase the signal strength without sacrificing too much volume. 

Choosing the right conversion event for your paid media campaigns can make or break a business. 

This blog post was repurposed from Michael’s website. Check it out if you want to learn more about marketing.

?