Common Roadblocks in Marketing Funnels

Creating a marketing funnel is a great way to bring more customers into your business, but simply creating one isn’t where you stop. A marketing funnel needs to be constantly adjusted and readjusted to make sure that it’s running without a hitch. Plus, sometimes you need to address roadblocks that you simply didn’t anticipate when you created the funnel in the first place.

Here are a few that you may have run across.

KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid)

It seems cliché, but it’s actually very important. If your website is too cluttered or too difficult to navigate, you’re going to drive customers away. No one wants to work for their information or work to become your customer. Keep it clean. Keep it short. Keep it simple.

If you’re curious about whether your website needs to be cleaned up or the navigation needs to be changed, ask some close friends and family to review it. Find people who will really take the time to look at your website and also be honest with you about what they find. There are also user testing companies like User Testing and uTest that can give you the same result, though they are obviously costlier than a pizza and a six pack of beer.

Poor Targeting

The blog Overview Partners points out that poor targeting is a common problem for marketing funnels. You feel great when you’re funneling thousands of people to your website, but if they only spend a few minutes on your site and then leave, then there’s something wrong. One of those problems might be poor targeting, meaning you’re funneling the wrong people to your website.

Before you go out and funnel people into your sales funnel, you need to make sure that you’re funneling the right people. Get a good understanding of your target market. Think about the websites your target buyer visits on a daily basis. What kind of social media accounts do they use? Do they have a job? Are they night owls or morning people? Do they like the outdoors or are they more likely to Netflix and chill on a Saturday? The more information you can gather about your target audience, the better you can target your marketing to them.

Lack of Follow Through

If you manage to hook a visitor, they may have a question they want to be answered. That’s great, it means they’re interested! But many sites lose their visitors here because they’re not showing the same urgency that their customers want or need.

The site Click Funnels offers some great tips to catering to the needs of your clients so they feel taken care of. For example, have some email auto-responses ready with key answers to the customer’s question. Think of it as an FAQ response.

You can also have an automated email sent to customers that manage their expectation of response time, such as, “Thank you for your inquiry, someone will reply to you within 24–48 hours”. This way a visitor isn’t concerned that the request was simply lost or ignored if he does not get a response right away.

If you’re willing to pay a little extra, you can also get a chatbot for your website that will answer questions at all hours of the day. Just be aware, that not all chatbots are created equal.

No Marketing Strategy

If you don’t have a marketing strategy, it’s like tossing spaghetti against the wall and seeing what sticks. It’s great to target the right people, but that’s just the top of the sales funnel. After that, you need to figure out how to convert those people from visitors to buyers to longtime customers. That’s where a sales marketing strategy comes in.

I wrote about one a few months ago here. There’s also a follow-up article here, that will help you enhance that strategy as it starts to solidify and take shape.

With social media and constant internet access, the marketing landscape is constantly changing. You need to evolve your marketing funnel continuously to keep up with those changes.

Written by Erika Towne