How to Identify Blind Spots in Your Marketing Funnel

A funnel can get clogged if it’s filled too fast or with the wrong things—the same can happen to your marketing funnel. Although you have the best of intentions when setting up your marketing campaigns, there’s always the risk that you’ll come across blind spots and areas that you’ve missed. One way to avoid the surprise is to take a proactive approach. 

To that end, we’ve created this guide to help you find and fix blind spots and other missteps that could be affecting the success of your marketing funnel. That way, you can trust that things are running smoothly and efficiently. You’ll also be able to ensure that you’re not missing out on any valuable leads. 

Awareness is the first step 

As with driving, you can’t mitigate your blind spots if you’re not aware of where they are. Most of the businesses that struggle here do so because they haven’t taken the time to assess the situation and make their sales reps (and leaders) aware of where the blind spots are throughout the funnel. At the same time, you should be assessing the competition to find out what they’re doing. 

• What type of ad campaigns and marketing efforts are they putting out?
• What is their website volume like?
• What’s their annual revenue and their employee count?

Some analytical tools can assist with parts of this research. However, there’s also something to be said for just taking a trip to your competitors’ websites and taking a look around. See what they’re doing and how they’re getting more leads. Maybe they’ve got a blog or a resource section that you don’t have. Perhaps their landing pages are more direct than yours. 

Whatever the case may be, you can avoid a lot of blind spots from the start by taking the time to be aware of what others are doing to avoid them. 

And speaking of awareness, when you’re looking internally, you need to make sure that you’re monitoring the right KPIs to see where people might be getting lost in the pipeline. There are literally hundreds of different metrics that you can find, but it’s important to pay attention to:

• Bounce rates
• Cart abandonment rates
• Video watch times
• Average time on page
• Pages viewed per visit
• Open rates for newsletters
• Social media share rates
• Percentage of returning vs. new visitors
• Churn rates (how many customers are just abandoning your company?)

When you have all this information, you’ll be able to tweak and modify your marketing strategy so that you address all the potential blind spots in the pipeline and create a more streamlined, effective process from the start. 

Understand the marketing funnel and its stages

Another important part of getting rid of blind spots is to fully understand what you’re working with. That might sound a little bit obvious, but you wouldn’t believe the number of sales teams and marketers that just start building a marketing funnel without much more information than the basics. If you don’t understand the marketing funnel, how can you possibly improve it?

The stages of the sales and marketing funnel can be divided into as many steps as you’d like and everyone has their own preferences. However, for the sake of simplicity, it’s easiest to look at the funnel in three parts:

Top

The top of the funnel is where you’re just attracting potential leads, and it’s where most of the marketing efforts get invested. You’re trying to reach your new audience(s) and bring in a new market of leads. This is done by presenting your company or its products/services as a solution to the customer's pain points or problems. 

TOFU (top of the funnel) blind spots include:

• Blanket marketing without audience targeting
• Too many steps to get into the funnel
• An incorrect assessment of problems/pain points

It’s important to get things right at this stage or the rest of the funnel will be affected, no matter what you do. You need to develop buyer personas, create target markets, develop a streamlined sales process, and make sure that your team is ready to launch into the rest of the funnel before moving forward. 

Middle

The middle is where leads start getting engaged and qualified. This is known as the “consideration” stage to some, and it’s where people will explore solutions, learn more about their problems, and work toward deciding where they will choose to convert. Blind spots in the middle of the funnel could include:

• A lack of resources or information to drive the conversion
• Incorrect sales information 
• Too-soon sales pitches 

Qualifying and organizing your leads can keep your reps from pitching too early. It’s also essential to have relevant information and offers here, such as case studies, demos, free downloads, etc. 

Bottom

At the bottom of the funnel, you have the people who are ready to buy or convert in another way. They have made it through the rest of the funnel and will gladly make a purchase, provided that there are no blind spots stopping this final step. Common issues that stop people at this last stage include:

• Cart/ordering issues 
• Pricing misinformation/added costs
• Last-minute changes of heart

While you can’t do anything about people who simply change their mind, making sure that your sales process is simple, accurate, and well-designed will avoid several of these issues cropping up at the finish line. 

When your leads improve, will you be ready?

Now that your lead generation is getting better, you’re going to have more calls and messages coming your way—are you prepared? You can partner with the virtual receptionists at Smith.ai for a 24/7 answering service that ensures you never miss a single opportunity. 

Plus, we can even assist with your outreach campaigns and marketing in the first place, and handle lead intake and appointment scheduling for those who are ready. To learn more, schedule a consultation or reach out to hello@smith.ai. 

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