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Everyone wants to grow their business, but not everyone has the time or patience to learn all the ins and outs of marketing, sales enablement, and making the most out of a CRM such as HubSpot. Join the Web Canopy Studio team, a HubSpot Diamond Partner Agency, as they chat about various topics all designed to help you grow your B2B business.
(00:01):
We all want new ways to get traffic to our website, especially, especially the best kind of traffic, which is qualified traffic. And instead of just thinking about how do we target people with SEO and doing new keyword searches and all these different things, what are some of the other ways that we can boost traffic to our website? In today's episode, I'm going through a simple funnel that you can apply inside of your business, whether you're selling a high-end software, some kind of SaaS product or you're selling services in a B2B format. My name is John Aikin. I'm the CEO of Web Canopy Studio, and this is the Website Conversion Show.
(00:44):
Hey, everybody, I hope you're doing well. I wanted to talk today about better ways to get traffic to your website. I know in the website world, we hear a ton of discussion around SEO and how important critical SEO is to growing revenue growing your site, traffic and so on. And I absolutely agree that SEO is, is an, is an absolutely critical component to every website. However, rather than go down this rabbit hole of all these different SEO topics and trends and strategies and, and, and so on, and wanted to focus a little bit more or today on some other kinds of resources for generating traffic, specifically boosting your traffic with really qualified contacts and really qualified people who are your perfect fit clients. Ideally these are the kind of people that we could get to come to our website over and over and over again.
(01:42):
And so, as you can see here on the screen, I have the website conversion framework. Again, if, if you are listening, you can find a link in the show notes to the website conversion framework, but this is a, a pyramid graphic that we have in, in ideally we're thinking about solving all of the problems that the lower end of this graphic and working our way out and over the last several episodes, we've kind of gone through some different things with platform, with positioning design, with, with nurturing and automation and so on. And today we're talking about traffic and SEO, and rather again, going down this rabbit hole of SEO today, we're really zeroing in on ad funnel strategies. I think, especially for software companies and for people who are doing more B2B kind of higher end, more considered purchased products or services ad strategies are generally looked at as something where we're spending a lot of money and not getting a lot of return, or they're looking at it more for brand awareness campaigns.
(02:50):
Again, these are not necessarily a bad thing, but when we're thinking in terms of client acquisition, and we are thinking in terms of bringing the, the most qualified traffic that we can to our website, to become a lead, to get them on a call or a demo with us, we need to rethink what ads are and how we can actually utilize them for great opportunities to generate our highest quality leads that we possibly could have. Again, going back to the, the thought of SEO, SEO's phenomenal, but we have to think about who we're talking to and who we're trying to target. And for many of you, I mean, we talk to, we talk to SaaS companies and high end service provider companies all the time and overwhelmingly the majority of these clients and these people that we work with. They're selling to the C-suite, they're selling to higher level people inside of their target companies that they're, that they're going after.
(03:47):
Why that's important is when we're thinking about SEO, who are the people who are doing the research online, who are the people who are, you know, looking up how to solve specific problems when we're looking at higher end kind of companies and, and B2B like enterprise level sales, it's not, you're not, your SEO is not targeted towards these kind of people. You might build your strategy around that, but at the end of the day, those people are not the ones who are going to be the ones, doing all of the searching and, and trying to solve these problem problems. They have teams, they have people who work with them who work for them, who are the ones who are gonna be actually doing all of this, this research and so on. So SEO is great, but you know, very rarely are you going to have your ideal client come through and do what you want them to do, right?
(04:37):
You it's, it's usually the person below them, or by low them, even who are gonna be your, your SEO visitors depending on what you sell, everybody's different. Every company's different, every target market is different. So I'm speaking in generalizations and like broad terms here. So what I'm saying, and, and the reason I'm, I'm giving that background here, we're gonna think about getting qualified traffic to our website, by looking at an ad funnel strategy that is tailored around the buyer's journey. Remember, we've talked about buyer's journey before we're talking about like the three different stages that people have to go through before they actually make a, a, a purchase with you. So what I've done is I've mapped out a, a pretty standard funnel actually for looking at, at an ad strategy. And if I just, just take a, a moment to step back and, and kind of talk about where people are going wrong within ads right now, where I see a ton of, of SaaS companies just spending a ton of money that they don't need to is around.
(05:40):
We call them like brand in campaigns. So I see a ton of, of softwares spend thousands and thousands of dollars a month to buy Google keywords and to do like Facebook ads and all the, and LinkedIn ads that literally just send people to their homepage or their about page. And it's, like I said before, they're thinking of it from a brand awareness perspective, but that is not how we're going to capture the leads. So what you're gonna look at when you review your data, when you review how your ads are performing, you're gonna base your results on low numbers, because that's what you're used to. So you might be paying ridiculous amounts of money for clicks, because who wants to click to go to a homepage of a product that's not exciting or compelling to me. Right? So the most of the software companies today that are running ads that are running branded campaigns, as we would call 'em are sending them to homepages or pages on the website that don't necessarily convert.
(06:40):
They're trying to educate people again, not necessarily a bad approach, but it's not for client acquisition. It's not something that you're gonna see that come to fruition at scale at mass volume. And you're paying a lot of money to acquire those clicks and to acquire leads. If they end up becoming a lead, I have had client that come to us and they're spending 200, 500, $800 per lead. And they justify it in the back of their mind because they're saying, oh, well, we have a high considered purchase and it might take six months to close that deal. So that's, that's, that's okay to spend that money. And in the back of your mind, yes that's. Okay. However, we don't have to just focus on that. We don't have to just zero in on that kind of a strategy. So all that being said, I wanna walk through this traffic campaign this, this ad funnel strategy here on how we can get people to your website and what that might look like when we start to look at it at scale, if you are watching, you can see the slide that's up on my screen here.
(07:38):
If you are listening there, there will be a link to see this graphic to walk you through kind of how this looks and, and what's happening. So you can just kind of follow along with me for now, feel free to click in the show notes to the link, to follow this as well. But I, I made a, a an assumption that we're gonna, we're gonna assume this ad, that we are running a budget of $5,000. Let's say you have $5,000 for your monthly ad spend, and we're gonna target today. We're gonna say Facebook ads, just because it's the most general, it's the easiest to just kind of describe in regular terms. What we're looking at would be thinking in, in, in a different context than the branded campaigns of what, what I just discussed. And I want to think about lead capture.
(08:28):
Okay. A lot of you have seen different things and you, you probably have done some of these lead capture campaigns already where we're like downloading a checklist or something like that, which is great. That's, that's where I want your mind to be. And a lot of you have, have landing pages on your website now that you already give away stuff like this. Like you download this 10 step checklist for X, Y, Z, here's our strategic guide to solving this problem. These are the kind of, of lead magnets that when targeted to the right audience and positioned to the right people will drive traffic at scale. And so this is where I would spend my ad budget. I'd spend $5,000 in this ad budget to target those kind of contacts. And for SaaS companies, this is some of you are doing this most are not.
(09:13):
And so this is, is very common in the world of info products in the world of all these other things that, that we have going on. And so we're pretty comfortable. We're pretty familiar with, with seeing this kind of, of ad in fact, you've probably clicked on them and done them yourself. So what I would do is have a very tailored ad. We're looking at at Russell Brunson's methodology here of, of hook, story, and offer and making sure that we're telling a very compelling story to get people to click. And so when we have a click, our ideal conversion rate or our ideal click would be, would be a $5 click at a $5,000 budget. Let's say, I even think $5, a click is high. You could, you know, might be, it might be more, it's gonna flush out as you move this over time and kind of massage it.
(09:59):
But let's say you'd get $5 a click just to get people to click on your ad, to go to your landing page. That landing page is an awareness stage offer. This is a lead magnet. This is something where you're like I was saying like the a 10 step checklist, you're giving a template a way to somebody you're giving an assessment. You something of value that solves an immediate problem. Okay. So let's aim for, let's say on that, on that landing page, we can have a 10% conversion rate. Now I know when some of you think about other ads that you're running that are more branding campaigns, rule of thumb is probably 2%, something like that 3% as an industry standard. However, however, when you look at landing pages around offers like this, the average conversion rate that we see is 30%, my best landing pages that are, that are delivered to people at scale at volume, even new, new visitors to our website is 47%.
(10:56):
And we some that are not seen quite as much that are at 50 or 60% in conversion rates. So 10% at this kind of an offer is not unlikely or unrealistic. So let's say we're at a 10% conversion rate. What that means is we have a budget of $5,000. We have a thousand clicks at $5 a click, and now we have 100 leads because we're gonna say 10% of those converted, okay. Right there is where most people stop. So that is where we see, you know, we'll have some general follow up. Here's some information here's information about our company. Here's what you downloaded. We might put 'em in an email newsletter at that point, and that's essentially where most people are gonna stop their ad strategy. But as you can see, we have all these other boxes that we need to walk people through before they can become a customer.
(11:47):
We cannot think about a strategies, any different than we think about getting people to convert and do what we want them to do, which is take an action, take another action and get on a call. Okay. So where we're, we're skipping, where most people go wrong. At this point, like I was saying is they will just stop at this level. We have to introduce, do more levels to them, and we have to walk them. 'em Through a natural progression of engaging with our company. So the number one mistake that I see SaaS companies and high end service provider companies go wrong. The number one place that go wrong is not including a consideration stage in their marketing process. Every everybody seems to skip over it. And it is the most critical piece because you're not gonna take someone from a complete stranger at an awareness stage, which is, Hmm, I have this problem, right?
(12:44):
This is a problem. Oh, this is a cool solution to a problem. You're not gonna take someone from that stage to then boom, book a call at scale. It's just not gonna happen. It might add, you know, some amount, but it's very rare. And I think we all know that like we would, you would never do that on your own, right. Especially if you were working at a company and this is a purchase on behalf of that company. So we have to put ourselves in the shoes of the people that we're talking to. So at this consideration stage, we need to have a campaign running. And if you're using HubSpot, you can track this very, very well, but a campaign that's running very tailored, follow up email workflows, or nurturing that we might be having a salesperson assigned to that lead as well. And that salesperson can either begin hi, his or her own proactive outreach, an email, maybe call if, if necessary, it might be too early for that.
(13:38):
And it depends on how hungry your sales team is at that time. But the other thing would be maybe reaching out on LinkedIn. And so what we're doing is we're, we're engaging these contacts at these different levels at this consideration stage, trying to get them to take that next step with us. And that, that next step to me would be engaging in a consideration stage video of some kind, a webinar a, a recorded masterclass. We lean on master classes a lot in our own agency for ourselves and our clients, because it works really well, could be something along those lines. Maybe it's a live event, but we're gonna lean on this kind of stage. And so in this funnel, we have this nurture to video rate which is the consideration stage that I was just talking about. And that's at I set it at 40%.
(14:27):
This is what we generally see from people who are in the funnel taking that immediate action within, let's say the first two weeks. So rate of 10%, and then of that 10%, we're saying about targeting about 40% of those to do the next thing, which is that step around a, a consideration stage. We just actually had a an entire episode about booking demos using a very similar process to this. So you can go back and listen to the previous episode, and it will walk you through a little bit more detail of what that funnel, what that campaign might look like. So that would mean that we have 40% of, of those leads, which are 40 people who are engaged and they've clicked. And now in this consideration point, what happens next? We continue to nurture. We continue to move them into the next phase.
(15:19):
The next stage of that buyer's journey is now decision stage. So awareness stage they're they have this problem. They're unaware of who you are. They're, they're not a following your brand at all, but you have come into, into play as a solution, or as, as a way to help solve a problem. So you're giving them a resource to solve that awareness stage issue. Now they're in this consideration stage, which is okay, I see that there's solutions here. I'm gonna start seeing like what the best option might be, and I'm gonna start, are taking it more seriously. So they're watching your webinars, they're viewing case studies, they're reading results. They're looking up reviews of your brands and so on. And so now that they're ready to start deciding what that action is gonna be to solve it, they are, they are ready to book a call with you.
(16:10):
All right. And so what we're saying here is that decision stage in that follow up, we're looking at about 30% as a targeted rate of people who are inside of that consideration stage about 30% to target, to book a call with us. So for those of you that can't see my screen. What we're looking at is a budget of $5,000, $5 a click to give us a thousand clicks awareness stage conversion offer a hundred leads. So 5,000 budget thousand clicks, a hundred leads, 40% of those taking action into the consideration stage, which is 40 contacts watching our webinar or watching our masterclass. And so on of those 40, 30% convert into the decision stage and book a call. So what, where are we at now? That's, that's 12 people out of these 1000 clicks. We're down to 12 people to book a call. Okay.
(17:07):
And you can start to see this becomes a lot more realistic when we start to think about it in terms of, of those numbers and of those 12, if people now it's up to your sales team, it's up to you. How, how good are you at closing? A really good benchmark would be to aim for 30% and everybody's across the board. Some people are like, well, when I get people at this stage and I can actually talk to them, I'm gonna close them no matter what our sales team's great. We only get really highly qualified people. Awesome. So move your bench up all the way up to 80%, whatever feels good to you. We're saying here 20%, so it's a little bit below what we would target for a SAS industry average, which is probably better for estimating anyway, so that you can kind of shoot it outta the park.
(17:47):
And so what that means is we're closing two to three deals. All right. So let's just say that's three deals. Let's say we're closing. You know what? Let's just stick with two deals. We closed two deals. If you are a software or a service selling $5,000 a month, that you're, that's your target. That's what you're, you're generally licensing your service or your software we're out for that is $60,000 a year in annual recurring revenue. And if you close two of those, you're at $120,000 of annual recurring revenue. And if you close three, you're at 180, right? So you're at $180,000 of annual recurring revenue from this one ad campaign that you spent $5,000, just an ad budget to run. Okay. You might be hiring somebody to run the ads for you. You might, you might need creative and copy and, and someone to, you know, manage the inner workings of, of the ad platform.
(18:45):
And that's great. But what you are sitting at right now is a 20 to $180,000 return on investment for a $5,000 ad budget. And now you are running that for 12 months and you're optimizing it and you're tweaking it and you're converting it. And if you're doing your other marketing things that we're talking about on other tips and strategies, and in these episodes, you're improving your conversion rates and your nurturing and the website functionalities and, and all these different things to improve. Even your, your calls booked and make all these conversion rates go higher over time. So, you know, you can easily see how running this. Let's say you close $120,000 for, from two you contacts. And I get it. Some people are, you know, you guys might have a year long sales process. I get it, but you have to put people in somewhere.
(19:37):
Okay. So $5,000 this month get you $120,000 a year from now, as long as you're tracking that. And you can see that. That's awesome because you're gonna continue to run that $5,000 a month budget every single month. Okay. And so now you're generating, what is that like over $2 million in revenue, just from this budget, just from this one campaign. And here's the other thing once, you know, it's working well, you know, if I know that this is generating X number of calls, I, of this, this, you know, $5,000 gets me two calls, I'm gonna spend $10,000 the next month, or maybe 15,000 or wherever. I end up feeling more comfortable because if that, just to test it out, cuz if that stays true, I'm gladly investing money into something that I know works. Okay. So once again, just to recap here, where I'm at, we have the ad funnel the ad funnel strategy that we just went through.
(20:32):
If I, if I break it down just really quickly, again, what is included in this ad funnel? Number one we have targeted ad has to be a hook story offer. It has to be compelling enough to get people to engage. Number two, we're sending them to a compelling lead magnet and awareness stage offer number three so that they convert. Number three, we have a tailored, nurturing consideration stage offer that we're trying to get them to engage with something that's helpful and will help solve more problems for them, but also help them build a little bit of more trust with us. And so we're looking at a webinar strategy, a masterclass strategy and so on. And then number four, finally, we're, we're getting them into a demo or a strategy session. And so that's it guys, that's the ad funnel strategy. That's, that's how we're looking at boosting traffic on our website in other ways that are not just relying on SEO and thinking in terms of website, being that kind of a functionality, your website is involved at every single step of the way of this pro that I just walk through with you.
(21:28):
And if you're curious about how this might work with you or, or where you might be failing in different areas inside of your website or where you're actually just really, really awesome. And you want to validate that, go ahead and go to our website and, and go to webcanopystudio.com/assessment. Take our website, conversion assessment, answer these 30 questions on your, on your own. And as a result of where you're at, we will give you it actually just pops out right away, your, your own customized website report. That's gonna give you a checklist of what you should work on how, how things are impacting your CRM along the way, resources for what you might wanna look at, and you'll be able to see exactly how you're faring. So I think that's it. Let me know if you have, have any questions and we'll see you next time. Thank you.