Startup Marketing 101: The Full-Funnel Approach

The Startup Marketing Challenge with Full Funnel Marketing

Most startups are hungry for leads, sales and traction in the market. They usually want to move as quickly as humanly possible to start making money but have a pretty tight marketing budget.?

So how do you drive sales with a minimal budget? I bet the first things you think of are lead generation or acquisition campaigns. You can get some Google ads going and watch those sweet leads flow in but here’s the catch: your average acquisition costs will quickly rise, and eventually, your campaigns won’t be ROI positive. Why? This is what we call a startup marketing challenge - without replenishing leads on the top end of your marketing funnel with brand awareness tactics, you’re marketing to a smaller group of people who have never heard of you, and who you have to work harder to convert. Another challenge startup marketing teams face is a led source tracking bias as top of the funnel activities can be hard to track and therefore seem underperforming. You can read more about startup marketing challenges here.?

Back to Basics - How Does the Marketing Funnel Concept Work?

The best way to combat these common challenges is to use the concept of the marketing funnel. The marketing funnel helps visualize where customers are in the different stages of their buyer journey and helps marketers strategize different campaigns and tactics to move these customers closer to purchase. The funnel itself can be broken up into four sections: awareness, interest, desire and action.?

Awareness: your buyers discover your brand and who you are

Interest: your buyer is interested in what you have to offer and wants to learn more about you

Desire: your buyer wants your product or service

Action: your buyer takes the actions necessary to become a customer

The Marketing Funnel in Action - Case Study: DropBox

At the Startup Lessons Learned Conference in 2010, CEO & Co-Founder of Dropbox, Drew Houston, explained an experiment his company conducted regarding paid marketing. Dropbox utilized paid search, selected searchable keywords, beautiful landing pages, hired affiliate marketers and hid the free option of their cloud service for those coming from paid search with hopes that they would convert to paying customers.

Results:

• Sales were still going up but the cost per acquisition was between $233 and $388 while their service itself only cost customers $99
• Dropbox started developing a reputation of being buggy and confusing by hiding the free version to certain customers
• Overall takeaway: while paid search is a way to collect demand, it is definitely not a way to create it and is not a sustainable option for a start-up

What they did instead:

• Heavily focused on brand building
• Encouraged individuals to work from home and use their service to keep track of their files
• Offered referral programs that benefited both the customer and the person they’re referring the service to (inspired by PayPal’s $5 signup bonus and Dropbox noticed that signups continuously continued to grow by 60% organically)
• Made big investments in analytics

As we can see, DropBox struggled with one of classic start up marketing challenges of not focusing on the entire marketing funnel, and ended up with high acquisition costs. With an adjustment in their strategy, they can bring those acquisition costs down.

Additional Resources

Here’s where you can get more information on this topic:

• Why Every Business Needs A Full-Funnel Marketing Strategy
• The Startup Marketing Challenge: Why Full-Funnel Marketing Can Be Counterintuitive But Necessary
• Dropbox @ Startup Lessons Learned Conference 2010?
• Book a Chat With Prosh

Need some help with your marketing funnel approach?

If you’d like to explore more about how your startup can activate a full funnel marketing approach, feel free to book a meeting with us.

About Prosh Marketing

Prosh Marketing enables CEOs, Startup Founders and Marketers to maximize their potential with proven marketing leadership that has helped companies attain nine-figure exits and launch over 50 products and brands in worldwide markets. Leveraging over 15 years of experience and a wide network of specialists and fractional CMOs (fCMO), the company designs cost-effective programs that are built to deliver a ROI, and uses a sustainable approach with flexible team integration, hands-on training and knowledge transfer to build internal resources and capabilities. Prosh Marketing’s clients are emerging businesses across a variety of industries, including technology, professional services, and retail in both B2B and B2C sectors, and are located across Canada, the United States, Europe and Australia.

To learn more about Prosh Marketing, visit?www.proshmarketing.com