Voiceover: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors, Neil Patel and Eric Siu.

Eric Siu: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

Neil Patel: I'm Neil Patel.

Eric Siu: Today, we're going to talk about what part of your funnel should you focus on. There are multiple steps in different funnels but I'll start this off by saying you have the top of the funnel which is known as ToFu, right? This is traffic where you're trying to target a larger audience, right? Then, you have your middle of the funnel, maybe people that have visited one of your services pages or maybe people that have opted into your e-mail list. These are people that are a little further down the funnel. They're closer to making a kind of conversion or sale, something like that and then, you have your bottom of the funnel. These are the people that may have purchased already, so your current customers, and people that are extremely close to purchasing after going through a couple of steps already. These are much closer than the people that are in the middle of the funnel or at the top of the funnel. Neil, I mean what part of the funnel should people start to focus on?

Neil Patel: If you don't have a lot of visitors, focus on top of funnel. If you already have a lot of visitors but you feel you don't have enough conversions from them, look at your analytics and see where the drop-off is, whether it's top of funnel … I mean not top because if you already have a lot of visitors, it won't be top. It'll be either medium or bottom of the funnel. What I would do is I’d look at the drop-off rate within Google Analytics or Mixpanel or Kissmetrics or whatever analytics solution you're using, then focus on optimizing that part and that could be through A/B test or whatever you want. It could be surveying people and redoing the user experience. It just depends on where the fall-off is but I judge where I should focus on, assuming I have enough traffic, purely based off the drop-off.

Eric Siu: Right. Then, I mean just to go to basics again, an example of how you might bring people through an entire funnel, I'll give you an example. Let's say we have a case study we did on one million backlinks and we're focusing on SaaS companies. That’s the first step. We're focusing on SaaS companies. That case study is for SaaS companies. The second thing is it might be a webinar dedicated to seven steps to a better online marketing for SaaS companies, so that might be middle of the funnel. You've given them some content in beginning, then you’re getting them to a bigger commitment and then, at the very end, you say, “Okay, here. Let's do a 15-minute consultation targeted at SaaS companies. We're going to talk about how you can grow your SaaS business.”
You want to make sure that when you're bringing people through the funnel, that the journey needs to be consistent because if you break up that story at any points, there starts to be inconsistencies, your conversion rates are going to drop. Ultimately, I mean what Neil said is correct. Those are the basics around this episode. You want to focus on a larger audience or people that don't know you. Start with top of the funnel and then take people down a journey but again, a journey is also a story as well. Make sure you're telling a good story.

Neil Patel: Yeah. No matter what you're doing, if you don't have like five, 10,000 people coming to your site, just focus on top of them.

Eric Siu: Great. I mean there's a lot of good literature around this. I mean DigitalMarketer has some good stuff. There's a guy that his blog posts are really good. He runs a agency called Rocketship. He actually helps Noah Kagan out a lot, Noah Kagan over at Sumo but if you Google or go to medium and search of his name, it’s Chris Von Wilpert so that's Chris V-O-N and then last name is Wilpert so that's W-I-L-P-E-R-T. He has a couple frameworks out there and I've talked about SaaS in here so he has a couple of SaaS examples too but if you want to learn how to build out these frameworks and learn how to make content promotion work for you in top of funnel, middle if funnel, bottom of the funnel, it goes into more detail here. I mean we can only cover so much in a five-minute podcast episode. Neil, you want to add anything?

Neil Patel: No, that's pretty much it.

Eric Siu: Okay. Before we go, we have a one-year annual subscription of Crazy Egg that we would like to give away. Crazy Egg is a heat mapping analytics tool and we are giving away one of these every single week for the next year, so if you want to get in on this, just go to singlegrain.com/giveaway. You can actually get multiple entries so if you want to learn more, again, singlegrain.com/giveaway and we will see you tomorrow.

Voiceover: This session of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of and don't forget to rate and review so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow right here on Marketing School.