B2B businesses rely on consistent pipeline generation to sustain their business. B2B marketing funnels are a great way to plan strategies or blueprints to bring leads consistently.
A B2B marketing funnel is a strategy to improve pipeline velocity by directing new prospects to sales. It enables a systematic sales journey for customers. The marketing funnel for B2B is a long-term project with goals including drawing new visitors, converting them into paying customers and ensuring they keep coming back to you.
In a study, Harvard Business Review found that companies with well-designed B2B marketing funnels are 62% more likely to close high-quality sales. Hence, building a well-functioning funnel can make all the difference. The best part is that you can bootstrap a funnel across any industry to generate pipeline.
How to Build a B2B Marketing Funnel and Improve Funnel Velocity
Every B2B marketing funnel is unique from the other — each has its specification. You cannot just copy-paste your competitor’s model and hope for lucrative results. Here is a six-stage approach to how to build a B2B marketing funnel that grows your revenue.
Set Clear Goals and Objectives
We have already established the fact that every business is unique. Similarly, every business’s end goal also might be distinct. Therefore, you will need to set clear goals before you design your B2B marketing funnel.
Your goals could be to:
· increase total sales
· improve sales pipeline velocity
· average sales value
· increase conversion rate
· increase repeat sales
Your sales pipeline goals will differ as per your intent, industry niche, and customer base. It brings us to our next point.
Understand your buyer persona
Who are you targeting?
A buyer persona is critical when you want to improve sales pipeline velocity. It helps segment and target your communications based on various parameters such as:
· geography
· industry
· firmographic (B2B) characteristics
· and demographics (B2C) characteristics
Note: Firmographic parameters usually include the business (industry) and job position traits.
You cannot get this wrong. Without buyer persona, it won’t matter how much money you spend in your marketing campaigns, as you won’t be able to see maximum results. So, think about it — if you don’t understand your customer’s needs, wants, and pain points — how will you take the right actions at the right time.
Align and organize your team
B2B marketing funnels have multiple elements. If you’re willing to improve pipeline velocity, you’ll need to draw on talents and knowledge.
To get the most out of your B2B marketing funnel, your sales and marketing people must work together. When these two teams become siloed and communication breaks down, your B2B marketing funnel becomes much more inefficient.
Be where your customers are
Choosing the correct channels is crucial to building effective B2B marketing funnels. It will depend on your target audience more than anything else. For instance, if you’re targeting only top-tier executives of a company, then contacting them directly through LinkedIn or emails might be the best way.
Be ready with your assets
High-quality content is the crux of digital marketing. Therefore, you must produce qualitative content throughout the B2B marketing funnel. Your content type will depend on the stage of your B2B marketing funnel.
Here are some insights on the content you should produce for different funnel stages.
a. Top-of-the-funnel
Content-Type: Educational content, evergreen content
It usually includes blog posts, quizzes, videos, webinars, long-form guides, comprehensive guides, email newsletters, checklists, infographics, etc.
b. Middle-of-the-funnel
Content-Type: Solutions to use-case challenges
It includes case studies, how-to guides, product descriptions and data sheets, testimonials, reviews, case studies, comparison content, FAQs, statistics, etc.
c. Bottom-of-the-funnel
Content-Type: Product information
It includes interactive assets, demos, pricing pages, calculators, success stories, etc.
Track your progress
You want to address the right kind of audience with your offerings. And the audience’s needs keep evolving with time. Hence, your B2B marketing funnels must also change. For this, you will need to constantly monitor results and optimize your B2B marketing funnels accordingly.
Improve your B2B marketing funnel velocity
The B2B marketing landscape keeps evolving according to the needs of the B2B buyer. To cater to this target audience, you’ll need to deploy full-funnel B2B marketing strategies and tactics.
A complete understanding of your buyer persona is the only way to kick off your game plan. Make sure you map out each stage of your B2B marketing funnel and use all the necessary channels to improve funnel velocity.
