A founder standing up paid marketing usually does the obvious. They turn on Google, Meta and LinkedIn, and they wait.
Traffic goes up. Spend definitely goes up. But pipeline stays exactly where it was. It’s what happens when someone with a deadline and a credit card is told that “we need to get in front of people” or “we need to fill the top of the funnel”
You need marketing that produces meetings now, and the fastest source of those is
This post covers:
Why to start at the bottom of the funnel
How to identify people who have raised their hand but not converted
How to practice on free traffic before you start paying for it
What to do when you turn on paid
Start with the bottom of the funnel, not the top
“Generating awareness” is lovely and all but if it isn’t generating pipeline, it’s wasted effort and you should measure it that way from day one. Forget impressions, clicks and engagements. Focus on pipeline, or more specifically: completed meetings with your ICP.
Most people start at the top of the funnel because that’s where the fun, creative stuff in marketing tends to happen. Instead start at bottom, immediately upstream of a meeting being booked. Whatever is closest to the meeting is always closest to the money and to building pipeline.
Turn on a visitor de-anonymizer
Use a tool like RB2B, Vector or Syftdata to identify who is already on your site. Even if it’s only one or two people a day. In fact, especially if it’s only one or two people a day, because that means you can actually do something about each of them.
Run the visitor data through an enrichment tool like Clay or Apollo to filter out visitors who are not your ICP and fire the alerts into Slack so and have your SDR, founders associate or even you (founder) call them within minutes. Minutes matter as a person who was reading your pricing page at 2:10pm has very probably not forgotten you by 2:15pm but by tomorrow they will have.
Script the call as if it were normal
The most common worry is that calling site visitors feels creepy. It doesn’t if you’re upfront from the start: