Guest post by Eduard Klein.

What are the best tactics to use in your B2B marketing funnel to efficiently grow your sales? It starts with marketing plans that are specific to your business model and target audience’s requirements.

Effectively managing the B2B marketing funnel can be complicated, but this article will help you through it all—from assessing ROI to nurturing leads with tailored content and more. Here’s a quick review of the basics followed by seven strategic steps you can use to take your sales to the next level.

What is a B2B Marketing Funnel? What You Should Know.

A B2B marketing funnel of course identifies the stages your sales prospects progress through as they move from initial awareness and interest until they convert into actual paying customers.

Although a B2B marketing funnel is lengthier than a consumer sales cycle, it is more long-term sustainable, which makes it an essential component of B2B marketing. Moreover, your audience is split into different segments for each stage of the process. This means you have specific marketing initiatives tailored for each step, which increases the probability of a sale.

The three basic stages of the B2B marketing funnel are:

Top-of-the-Funnel (TOFU)

During this stage, your objective is to move prospects from being unaware to becoming interested in your product or service. You want to draw attention to your offering(s) and increase brand recognition.

Since the goal is to connect with people who are more likely to be interested in and in need of your products, it’s important to reach the appropriate audience. This means that the leads you generate are qualified and will be more likely to become customers. It’s also useful to think about what sales outreach platforms you can use for the right people.

Middle-of-the-Funnel (MOFU)

After capturing your prospects’ interest, it’s time to develop a rapport with your leads, and offer them some value.  At this point, prospective buyers convey their need for a solution in the middle of the funnel. They are aware of the problems they face and are seeking answers.

Now is the time to position yourself as a promising answer to their issues.

You can begin to focus on their particular needs and recommend how your product or service’s features will help solve their specific problems.

Bottom-of-the-Funnel (BOFU)

At this point, you can deliver a more direct sales pitch to your target audience so that you can help them make a choice.

Although these prospects have shortlisted your brand as an option to purchase from, you’re not the only company they’re considering. In the end, they might decide not to buy your product at all.

For your business to accomplish its sales and marketing goals, you must convert the leads at the bottom of the funnel. This is where you showcase that you are the right choice for them—not just a potential choice but the best choice. And that’s not where it ends; you should still nurture your leads for future purchases as well.

These stages will form the basis of your sales strategy, so at right is a quick overview.

Positioning Your B2B Marketing Funnel for More Sales: Seven Strategies to Use

With the increasing complexity of the B2B buyer journey, your marketing team will require a comprehensive plan to boost sales. Here are seven ways you can focus your efforts in each stage of the marketing funnel.

Start With Content Marketing

A crucial project for every B2B company is to build a solid content strategy which can help you become recognized as an authority and thought leader in your field, as well as increase website traffic.

A great way to do this is by writing blog articles on industry-specific topics to capture your audience’s attention. You should make sure each piece of content you produce addresses the most important queries from your audience and demonstrates how your products may outperform your competition.

In fact, a Semrush report showed that 97% of the businesses achieved positive outcomes from their content marketing efforts.

Here’s where you can incorporate SEO best practices to boost organic search traffic, establish your online reputation, and increase conversion rates. The more your audience is exposed to and derives value from your content, the more you’re able to build their trust in you.

At right is a breakdown by Databox on what type of content B2B businesses like yourselves create depending on the funnel stage.

Design Email Marketing Campaigns

With a well-planned B2B email marketing funnel approach, the conversion process can be completed considerably faster.

First, you’ll need to set up an email list. Ideally, you’ve been building an opt-in email list over time. This can be done if you export LinkedIn sales navigator list. You can then set up several automated email sequences for your leads. You can offer them a free trial (or demo), which can lead to them becoming paying customers.

Here’s an example of how email newsletters can be used to provide your customers with relevant and helpful content while also trying to convert them:

You should also track your campaign results so that you’re able to adjust your future efforts based on the results. You can then A/B test various subject lines or email formats to see which get better open rates. This allows you to improve your ROI over time as you keep on experimenting.

Develop Pay-per-Click (PPC) Ad Campaigns

You can generate leads by setting up relevant paid advertisement campaigns for your content. Drill down on specific keywords based on your industry experience, customer pain points, and competitor analysis. Make sure to use consistent keywords from your ad targeting to your ad copy to your landing page.

It’s also important that you make an effort to consider the perspectives of both future customers and those who are already in the purchasing process within your funnel. Think about whether they’re aware of your product, and what they need to know more about to move towards the end of the funnel.

At this stage, you can also set up automated lead ads that will target your audience based on which step of the funnel they’re at.

In order to get the results you want and qualify the leads that come in, your ad campaign must use the right messaging. Highlight the issues that your prospects are facing, along with suggestions for how to solve them.

Contact Leads with Cold Calls

Although some marketing and sales influencers think the days of cold calling are over, it’s helpful to move people through your B2B marketing funnel.

Let’s start with the basics: your goal is not to sell, but to develop relationships. So, you must focus on human connections by focusing on their needs instead of selling. This way, you can gain their trust through active listening.

Offering value and asking insightful questions helps make you more attuned to their wants and needs, so later, you can adjust your pitch to make sure you hit their pain points. To improve your cold-calling skills, take a look at some delivery tips you can use to further increase your sales.

Experiment with Cold-Emailing

One way to get in touch with potential clients is by sending cold emails. Yes, that means (carefully!) sending unsolicited emails straight to senior executives and decision-makers at your target companies.

By doing your homework on the businesses and people you are trying to contact, you can tailor your message and provide more interesting content that will get the recipient’s attention. This means looking into their goals, challenges, and business objectives. The more you understand your target audience, the more persuasive your messages will be. This also allows you to create a clearer proposal, pinpointing the product or service benefits that your clients will find compelling.

Without requiring a major increase in expenses or resources, cold email marketing can reach a large audience. You can also test for new markets, offers, or messaging strategies to see how prospective clients react. But make sure you’re delivering your cold emails properly to the right audience.

Leverage Social Media Channels

Almost everyone seems to be on social media, including your potential customers. For your target audience, identify the channels they use, the material you will publish, and the tools you will use to make the process easier. This will help you cover all the bases.

You don’t only have to publish content for social media, it’s also a great way to reuse the website content you’ve written. This allows you to send your customers on a journey through your channels as well. Ultimately, you’ll be able to give your brand a voice and engage your audience deeply by drawing them in.

Utilize Data and Analytics

By tracking your audience’s activity across different channels, you can get a clearer picture of buyer behavior and trends. This also helps you understand how to interact with them and where you can come in to boost their trust in you.

With smart use of analytics, you can identify the friction points by carefully analyzing each step of your marketing funnel and your users’ progress. You can find out at which stage users are dropping off, why they are having a slow decision-making process and more.

This way, even after your customers have converted, you still have a chance to use upsell tactics by targeting their specific issues.

We’ve only mentioned a few of the strategies you can use to improve sales with your B2B marketing funnel. There is more you can explore as well, but the key takeaway here should be to focus on your customer: the better you understand them, the more likely you’ll be able to cater to what they need.

Tips to Keep in Mind for an Effective B2B Marketing Funnel

It’s highly unlikely that your buyer journey is linear. However, these tactics can help you achieve increased conversion rates at each stage of the funnel, and ultimately higher sales.

Here are some pointers that can help your customers have a smoother funnel journey:

• Personalize the content: The secret to improving relevance and engagement in your B2B marketing funnel is to tailor the content based on data-driven insights. You should make sure that your content is interesting and relevant. In fact, many businesses are now leveraging AI in content to speak to various audience segments.
• Use cross-channel promotion: As noted above, you don’t always have to use your content only for the platform you’ve created it for. You can break down a longer blog post into shorter infographics for social media or share it as an email newsletter for a campaign. The possibilities for repurposing content are endless, and you can tap into a variety of audience segments, which will boost visibility and affect your messaging.
• Don’t forget to follow up: What too often happens post-funnel is that you become more focused on putting newer prospects through the funnel again. This means you’re losing out on retaining your current clientele, which leads to lower sales in the long run. You should also think about reaching out to those who were in the funnel but didn’t end up converting. This can provide you with insight into what’s working at certain stages and what isn’t.

Bottom line, your B2B marketing funnel should not only focus on marketing initiatives but should also help boost your sales conversion rate and ongoing customer sales.

Takeaways: How Can Your B2B Marketing Funnel Help Improve Sales?

There can be complexity within the B2B marketing funnel, especially when it comes to executing the right tactics at each stage. Though the funnel typically focuses on marketing efforts, it ultimately facilitates the sales process by moving users forward.

Consequently, sales and marketing teams should work closely with each other to coordinate efforts. This eventually allows leads to easily move from the marketing funnel to the sales funnel.

Finally, you should always track how well your marketing funnel strategies are working and make adjustments in response to performance data. When you’re seeing a positive shift in conversion data, you can be sure your B2B marketing funnel is doing its job!

It’s vital to keep up with current and future trends so that you’re always taking care of your customer’s needs. Combining proven strategies with leading-edge practices will make your brand the best solution for your B2B clients.

Eduard Klein is an International Digital Growth Marketer, Blogger, and Entrepreneur with a global mindset. He is the founder of RocketGrowth and guides through the process of starting and growing a digital business, and riding the wave of digital technology and marketing without getting swept away.

The post Streamlining Your Sales Process: A Guide to the B2B Marketing Funnel appeared first on B2B Marketing Blog | Webbiquity.