Conversion funnel optimization can make the difference between your website generating a healthy profit or hovering over its break-even point.
MEDIA 7: Given your years of experience creating comprehensive demand generation strategies, designing and implementing effective marketing campaigns, and more, what are your thoughts on market attribution and its importance today?
ANIRUDH SHARMA: I believe every marketer should use attribution as part of their reporting and insights to:
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Reach campaign goals faster and more effectively
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Increase the ROI of their marketing spend
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Continue to help grow their organization's bottom line.
If you aren't using attribution to make your campaigns as efficient as possible, you put your budget at risk. So, the next time your client or your C-suite needs to cut costs, their first stop will be your budget. Once you make attribution reporting a regular part of assessing marketing performance, I bet you will start asking more challenging, exciting questions.
First, transit to a data-driven attribution model (which Alight's dashboard supports) and scrutinize all your converting and non-converting paths to see which touchpoints will lead to a conversion. Now you start to see how different channels and tactics work together to create results beyond what they could accomplish individually.
M7: As the Marketing Director at Trantor, what is your approach to optimizing the lead-to-opportunity funnel?
AS: Conversion funnel optimization can make the difference between your website generating a healthy profit or hovering over its break-even point. My strategy is to increase your conversion rate by taking fewer yet faster steps towards conversion.
To build a working conversion funnel optimization strategy:
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Imagine your ideal customer persona and keep them in mind.
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Set measurable goals for their journey and systematically address each step by measuring and testing.
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Adopt additional analytics tools to understand what's happening on your high-exit pages.
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Heatmaps, scroll maps, and confetti maps are great tools for visualizing how visitors navigate your page, where they click, and how far they scroll down. Another way to observe individual visitors is to record their sessions.
Here are a few ways that I think are the best and used to optimize a marketing funnel:
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Getting to know your target audience
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Finding creative ways to answer critical questions
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Maintaining a solid social media presence
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Evaluating your landing pages
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Snagging email addresses from your prospects
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Providing convincing social proof
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Supporting your funnel with top-tier content
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Including solid calls to action (CTAs)
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Simplifying checkout pages and sign-up forms
Once you understand the importance of creating a solid conversion funnel to become a successful online business, figure out the goals for your business, and start analyzing with online tools to enhance the process. Focus your efforts on your main competitors, and adjust your strategy accordingly.
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Audience building is essential for any business's online or offline success.
M7: What has been your approach to audience-building for Trantor?
AS: Audience building is no easy task. You may have a great product and a highly competent team, but you can't generate revenue without an audience. Audience building is essential for any business's online or offline success. Brands need to gain exposure and get noticed by their target consumers to sell their products and services. Marketing acts as the bridge between your brand and consumers. It helps your brand attract the audience you need to sell your products and services.
My approach and tactics are:
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Before starting audience-building, you need to figure out your target audience. This is essential because, without a target audience, you cannot market your brand. So first, you need to build a customer persona and target the audience that fits that persona.
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Researching your competitors can give you tremendous insights that can help you frame your strategy.
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You need to figure out your unique selling point to get your brand a massive audience - something that differentiates you from all other brands in your industry. This will help you stand out from competitors and gain a vast audience.
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Social media is a great tool to market your brand. You have the options of audience building, engaging with them, getting leads, and even selling your products. Build social media profiles, study your audience, engage with your audience, link your website to social media, use relevant hashtags, and utilize paid ads. The opportunities are truly endless.
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Influencer marketing can help you in rapid audience building. With influencer marketing, you can collaborate with several influencers to help you achieve your goal.
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Content marketing is a great way to get people to notice your brand online. It doesn't matter how good your brand or product is. You need content marketing to sell it and catch people's attention online.
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Search engine optimization comprises procedures to rank higher in search engines. According to data from Parse.ly, Google sends 49% of traffic to websites on the internet. Facebook, on the other hand, sends 28% of the traffic.
For audience building, you need to be proactive and consistent. Then, with a proper strategy, you can build a massive audience for your brand.
M7: How does Trantor help enterprises across the globe expand their engineering capabilities and build successful technology products?
AS: Trantor is a pioneer in creating enterprise technology solutions and state-of-the-art CaptiveCoE™. It assists enterprises across the globe with their digital transformations and business needs. Our commitment to excellence and authenticity has led to long-term working relationships with our clients and solution partners.
Since 2012, Trantor has helped enterprises expand their engineering capabilities and build successful technology products. With deep expertise in cloud strategy, cloud-native development, containers, application modernization, AI/ML, and Security/Compliance, we help our customers leverage the full capabilities of the AWS cloud to expedite innovation.
Trantor's expertise in AWS cloud services helps customers achieve operational excellence, security & compliance on AWS Cloud. Trantor enables customers to optimize AWS usage through Managed DevOps services and commits to accurately forecasting migration costs and building a detailed AWS migration plan. Trantor helps customers take control of costs and continuously optimize spending while building modern, scalable cloud applications to meet their needs.
Trantor leverages the trifecta of Analytics, Automation, and AI to deliver intelligent automation solutions. We enable customers to scale their strategic technology and marketing Initiatives. Our deep experience in FinTech, MarTech, E-commerce, and Captive Centers is visible in our comprehensive portfolio and globally spread customer base.
We also nurture strong partnerships with leading technology providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe, Cloud Lending, Genpact, etc. To learn more about Trantor, please visit
www.trantorinc.com.
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Today, the process of customer acquisition and marketing is quite complicated.
M7: What are some of the biggest changes and developments that have taken place in marketing over the years?
AS: As you can see, marketing as a function has undergone a significant transformation. With the mainstreaming of the internet and social media, the ubiquity of technology, and the world becoming more connected, marketing is no longer restricted to traditional methods.
Marketing has become multi-dimensional. Each kind of marketing has a business side, an analytics side, a creative side, and many more. In addition, the target groups vary in terms of demography and geography. Since marketing now includes multiple kinds, the need for specialization has emerged.
For example, social media marketing differs entirely from influencer or digital marketing. An influencer marketer's approach to a particular brand's campaign will be nothing like a content marketer's strategy to manage the same campaign. The best marketers are the ones who not just create trends with their unique marketing campaigns but also keep an eye out for what's brewing in the marketing world.
Today, the process of customer acquisition and marketing is quite complicated. But technology helps make everything better. Technology enables you to collect, analyze, and process data about everything and make better, more informed decisions.
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Assignment selling
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Predictive lead scoring
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Personalized video in the sales process
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Product-focused videos
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Long-form videos
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The continued importance of local SEO
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Voice search
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Google Discover
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Content written for user intent
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Mobile SEO
M7: What is a piece of advice you would like to share with marketing professionals?
AS: As you kick off your career, you probably get lots of advice from everyone you know. And maybe some from people you don't know.
My Advice:
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Know your audience. Know who they are and what they care about, know the language that will appeal to them, and understand where they spend their time.
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Work out your goal and messaging first, design your advertising to deliver that message, set up your landing pages, goals/analytics/measurement, and then buy the media to get the ad to your audience.
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Not all of your marketing will be easily measurable, but when it is, ensure you're taking the time to set up the correct tracking and specific, relevant, and achievable goals.
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Accept that the data is a single truth and believe in it. Forget about your thoughts based on what you think your audience needs or wants because, more often than not, data will prove you wrong.
General Advice:
Take a load off, go confidently in the direction of your dreams and realize you don't know everything, yet. Lastly, don't shy away from a challenge.
Bottom line: Be yourself - and all these other things, too.