We all want to move leads down our B2B digital marketing conversion funnels—especially the coveted qualified lead—but does your team know what to do with those leads once they have them? For B2B technology and SaaS marketers, the answer is usually to bring in even more leads, faster, at higher quality, for less money, and then to expedite their trip down the funnel. Sounds easy, right? Let’s dig into how to make it happen.
We’ve pulled these five steps from The Ultimate Guide to B2B Digital Marketing to help you begin to think about how to structure your potential customer journey down the B2B digital marketing funnel. Follow this roadmap for a smoother experience, from the top to the bottom of your B2B digital marketing funnel.
Funnel phase 1: Awareness
It all begins with your top-of-the-funnel marketing strategy. Did you know that 20% of B2B buyers will take an entire year to make a purchasing decision? Furthermore, 90% of B2B buyers loop back and repeat at least one or more tasks in the buyer’s journey.
One great way of structuring your approach is to pull out your buyer’s journey map and run through a couple of different scenarios for each of your personas, identifying gaps and listing out the content and creative that you’ll need to fill those gaps. At the awareness stage of the funnel that typically also includes search, targeted ads, and paid content placements.
Funnel phase 2: Interest
Once you’re on their radar, stay top-of-mind and speed leads down the path to purchase with ad retargeting and email automation that’s triggered by an action such as downloading a white paper or registering for a webinar. These types of lead-nurturing activities can help close 50% more sales, at a third of the price of traditional methods, by using digital platforms to automate activities.
This is also the time to draw your B2B leads down the funnel a little further by amplifying enticing and relevant content. Not sure what that content might be? Let your ideal customer profile, buyer personas, and buyer journey map serve as your guide.
Funnel phase 3: Consideration
Congratulations, you’ve piqued their interest and your lead is now seriously contemplating whether to select your product or service. That brings us to the consideration phase. This is the point where B2B technology and SaaS buyers share their research, and your relevant content, on products and brand comparisons with other stakeholders.
Now is a great time to leverage paid search campaigns that target bottom-of-the-funnel keywords that are likely to lead to conversions. YouTube advertising gives you the ability to target based on search history and Google account data significantly increases ad relevance and targets buyers at this stage of the funnel.
Watch: Key Elements of a Solid B2B Digital Strategy
Funnel phase 4: Decision
While search ads are most effective in the middle to bottom part of the buyer’s consideration-phase of their journey, display ads are excellent bookends at the top (awareness) and the bottom (decision) of the funnel phases. These ads use a pay-per-click (PPC) business model to drive traffic to your website or landing page.
At the bottom of the funnel, you might serve display ads promoting a free trial or a limited time special offer to retargeted users who’ve previously clicked on your ad or visited your website. Retargeted visitors are 70% more likely to make a purchase, according to some estimates.
Funnel phase 5: Retention
At the end of the decision phase, your contact becomes a client. However, if you’re lucky, that’s not where your funnel ends.
Retention is perhaps the most important phase of all and ensures that the qualified lead you worked so hard to nurture along their journey sticks around for the long term—and refers your business to others. When the initial customer journey ends, a new one begins—one that enables you to offer new services or products to customers who could very well grow to become some of your enterprise’s most loyal fans.
Transform Your B2B Digital Strategy Today
PMG has a long heritage of championing B2B technology and SaaS marketers to help drive business value through high-impact content and digital marketing programs—helping companies like yours define their strategies, deliver on their objectives, and smash their KPIs.
That’s why we’ve developed The Ultimate Guide to B2B Digital Marketing, offering tips that can help you maximize return on spend while gaining a deeper understanding of your customers—tracking every step of their journey. Download The Ultimate Guide to B2B Digital Marketing or contact PMG today.
