3 Strategies For When Your Lower Funnel Campaigns Underperform

As marketers, we often find ourselves laser-focused on lower funnel campaigns and metrics like conversions, cost per acquisition (CPA), and return on ad spend (ROAS). These metrics are vital as they directly impact revenue and business growth. However, many marketers are experiencing a decline in these lower funnel performance metrics. This dip often stems from market saturation or the limitations of targeting strategies that have already been optimized to their peak. Once we’ve squeezed every ounce of potential from optimizing these lower funnel metrics, knowing what to do next becomes a challenge. This is where mid-funnel metrics become the most fertile ground for optimization.

Mid-funnel metrics occupy that crucial middle ground between awareness and conversion. They help bridge the gap, nurturing leads that are interested but not yet ready to buy. By focusing on mid-funnel metrics, we can significantly enhance our lower funnel performance. So, let’s dive into 3 strategies for when your lower funnel campaigns underperform.

Optimize Lead Scoring for Lower Funnel Campaigns

The middle of the funnel is where potential customers are evaluating their options, and nurturing at this stage can make or break your sales. Mid-funnel metrics like engagement rates with educational content (e.g., webinars, whitepapers), social shares, and email click-through rates help you understand how well you are building a relationship with your prospects. This engagement with mid-funnel content makes the transition of better qualified leads to the lower funnel stages smoother and more likely to result in a sale.

Practice

• Implement a rigorous lead scoring system that evaluates and ranks leads based on their likelihood to convert.
• Design a scoring model that combines behavioral data (like web page visits and email interactions) with demographic data (such as job title and industry).
• Use data-driven insights to create content tailored to retarget high scoring audience groups.

Artificial intelligence (AI) based tools can streamline and enhance your lead scoring process by analyzing large sets of data far more efficiently than manual methods. AI algorithms can assess the likelihood of a lead conversion based on mid-funnel interactions, ensuring that your sales team focuses on the most promising leads. Utilizing AI tools like Pixis can be highly beneficial because the AI integrates effortlessly with multiple data platforms, and automatically evaluates and informs you about mid-funnel audiences that are most primed for lower-funnel campaigns. 

Improve Pipeline Velocity

Mid-funnel metrics such as pipeline velocity provide insights into how quickly leads move through your sales funnel. The faster a lead progresses through the funnel, the shorter your sales cycles and the higher your revenue can be. Reducing the time it takes to convert a lead means better utilization of your marketing resources and quicker revenue generation.

Practice

• Use sales automation tools to handle repetitive tasks such as data entry, follow-up emails, and meeting scheduling.
• Create highly-personalized actionable sales content that helps your customers understand the next step.
• Utilize unified analytic dashboards that help you holistically view customer journeys across multiple attribution channels.

AI can be a great tool to help automate both general and analytical tasks to free up your sales team’s time, allowing them to focus on high-value activities like building relationships and closing deals. AI models such as Pixis can also analyze vast amounts of data across multiple touchpoints to create a comprehensive attribution mode through its smart insights dashboard. Pixis Smart Insights can provide insights that human analysis might miss, such as identifying nuanced patterns in engagement behavior or predicting which content will most effectively move a lead closer to conversion. Through Pixis’ unified analytics platform, you will be able to visualize the most successful customer journeys through the funnel across all channels, allowing you to replicate these paths for new leads and accelerate their progress.

Develop Multi-channel Nurture Campaigns

Multi-channel nurture campaigns involve engaging potential customers across various platforms to deliver a cohesive and consistent message. This approach is crucial for improving mid-funnel metrics because it ensures that leads are continually exposed to your brand in a personalized and relevant manner, regardless of the channel they prefer. By maintaining consistent communication and providing value through multiple touchpoints, you can nurture leads more effectively, thereby increasing their engagement and readiness to move further down the funnel towards conversion.

Practice

• Develop nurturing campaigns that leverage multiple channels such as email, social media, and retargeting ads to keep your brand top of mind across various platforms.
• Create a cohesive strategy that integrates email drip campaigns, social media engagement, and retargeting ads to provide consistent and valuable touchpoints for your leads.
• Guide leads through the funnel by addressing their evolving needs and preferences across multiple platforms.

With AI, you can automate these multi-channel campaigns, ensuring timely and relevant interactions. Pixis’ Performance AI can predict the best times and channels to engage a particular lead, boosting the effectiveness of your nurturing efforts, and continuously improve by learning from ongoing performance data. It can dynamically adjust strategies to ensure that marketing efforts remain relevant and impactful, thereby keeping the funnel flowing efficiently.

For marketers whose lower funnel campaigns are underperforming, pivoting to mid-funnel metrics offers a new frontier for optimization. By focusing on engagement and nurturing leads, improving pipeline velocity, and enhancing multi-channel attribution, you can further boost your lower funnel performance.

Want to know how Pixis AI has helped our clients boost mid-funnel metrics? Follow us on LinkedIn, or book a free demo.