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“How many leads will this plan produce for the business?”
“We need to reduce the marketing budget, what can we cut out while still hitting our target?”
“What’s the return on ad spend and return on investment of budget A vs budget B?”
“How can we gain market share to compete with our competitors?”
Sound familiar?
Like many marketers, these questions can induce anxiety, particularly among those of us who aren’t naturally left-brain or confident with numbers.
But there’s a relatively easy way to work out the answers to these questions and if marketers take a data-led approach to planning their marketing, then there will be workings ready to go back to, providing estimates quite quickly.
Notice the use of the word ‘estimates’, instead of answers, as short of having a functioning crystal ball all any business leader would expect is a good estimate.
But how to provide a good estimate? That’s where customised funnels come in.
Let’s take the first question as a working example: “How many leads will this plan produce for the business?”
To provide an estimate on this, start by considering the customer journey and related data-points to build a customised funnel.
Let’s assume you’ll get in front of your target audience via paid ads.
The next action they would take might be to visit your website, from which they may either bounce, read some content, or click a button or complete a lead capture form.
The lead form would then be automatically sent to a sales rep who would attempt contact, leave a voicemail or have a conversation, follow up the customer and hopefully convert them to a sale.
Each step in this funnel should have data alongside it providing an average conversion rate to the next step being achieved.
Ad platforms would provide average reach and click through rates.
Website analytics platforms would provide average bounce rates, event data and conversion to leads.The CRM platform used by the sales team should contain data on average contact rates (attempted and successful) along with conversion rates to customer sales.
Implementing these company benchmarks in a funnel then allows for estimations of individual marketing tactics versus expected leads as a result.
Bear in mind that estimating individual tactics within a plan is more accurate as the conversion rate benchmarks will be specific to a particular marketing channel type, however it won’t de-duplicate leads from customers who may interact with more than one of your marketing tactics.
To estimate the leads from the complete marketing plan, it would be necessary to estimate the degree of duplication you might get among your marketing tactics.
Check out the 'Free Downloads' for a template on how to estimate duplicated reach across multiple channels. You may be able to apply the unique reach vs total reach delta as a proxy to your total leads to estimate the unique number.
You could also work out the delta between your plans total reach estimate versus the sum of the individual tactics as a proxy to do the same.
A customised funnel may look something like the below:
Input total impressions
(average click through rate)
Funnel output: estimated clicks (impressions x CTR)
(average onsite conversion rate)
Funnel output: estimated conversions/leads (estimated clicks x onsite conversion rate)
Alternatively if building a customised funnel for an event tactic, it might look like the below:
Input total booked/expected attendees
(average actual attendance rate)
Funnel output: actual attendees (expected attendees x attendance rate)
(average conversion to comp entry or other lead gen mechanic)
Funnel output: leads (actual attendees x lead gen mechanic conversion rate)
Building customised funnels will help you reduce the mental load for yourself and your stakeholders to answer questions more easily and with more confidence.
The added benefit is that if actual results are different from estimates (which they almost always are) you’ll have the working assumptions to refer back to and understand where the differences are occurring. This also removes stress, as rather than wondering what went wrong, you’ll more easily be able to pin-point the assumption that needs to be adjusted and recalculate your estimates based on actual data. You can then confidently ideate ways to get back on track.
Funnels are a great tool for marketers wanting to take a data-led approach to make their lives easier, reduce stress and mental load as well as impress their stakeholders, leaders and peers.
