Journeys aren’t just for your favourite comic characters and storybook heroes. Your customers are also on a journey and for you as a business, customer success journey map matters most.

The buyer’s journey refers to the steps customers make to discover and purchase products. It’s the reason why inbound marketing has proven to be so effective. Inbound strategies leverage every step of the buyer’s journey to drive sales.

Behind every successful buyer’s journey is a foolproof inbound marketing funnel. Whipping up a quick sales funnel isn’t enough. You need a funnel strategy that converts inbound leads into loyal customers.

Here are five telltale signs that your funnel isn’t working and what you can do to get those leads flowing again.

1. Your Conversion Rates are Too Low

Poor conversion rates are the most glaring sign of trouble. Generating inbound leads without conversions is like building a staircase to nowhere. If your leads aren’t converting, something is clogging up your funnel.

Your funnel should create a smooth pathway to sales. Here are four more roadblocks getting in the way of the buyer’s journey.

2. You Do Not Have the Right Content Strategy

Content is a cornerstone of every inbound marketing funnel strategy. The goal is to lead customers through every stage of the buyer’s journey. You can’t achieve your goals without the right content strategy.

Several things can plague a content strategy from the start. Deploying the wrong content for a particular inbound stage is a frequent problem. Not diversifying content is another issue.

You need to create content for the three primary buyer’s journey stages: awareness, consideration, and decision-making. However, the best inbound funnels also include a fourth follow-up or “delight” stage.

3. You’re Targeting the Wrong Audience

Stellar content is worthless if it’s marketed to the wrong audience. Begin your marketing funnel project with market research. This necessary step will reveal your target consumers’ ages, locations, ambitions, likes, dislikes, and more valuable information.

Turn your market research into an ideal customer profile, and cater your inbound funnel content to that ideal customer. This method will help you generate inbound leads with high customer lifetime value (CLV) potential.

4. You’re Not Monitoring Your Inbound Marketing Funnel

Strategy, budgeting, content creation, and deployment are only four parts of an inbound marketing campaign. Real-time monitoring is essential for campaign success. Monitoring can also prevent some serious marketing pitfalls.

Monitoring lets you know where you’re going wrong right away. Customers aren’t afraid to get opinionated online. That’s why social listening is a critical part of any inbound funnel campaign.

5. You Didn’t Analyze Your Last Campaign

Did you say “Bye, Felicia” to your last campaign after it flopped? That was a big mistake. 

Monitoring is one way to analyze your mistakes as you go. This method will help you tweak your campaigns when necessary. You may discover that you’re spending your budget on the wrong social media channels or content delivery.

You’ll also need reliable analytics tools to perform a thorough campaign analysis. Everything from website speed to relevance impacts campaign performance.

Invest in reliable marketing management tools that allow you to monitor social media conversations, PPC campaigns, email blasts, and website activity.

Rethink Your Funnel Today!

There’s still time to improve the flow of your inbound marketing funnel. Remember these five critical issues as you reassess your campaign and you should be able to devise a new, more effective inbound marketing funnel!