Did you know that about 96% of the people who visit your company’s website aren’t there to make a purchase? They want more information about your products or services by doing research first.
They want to know if your business is trustworthy and if your product or service is worth the investment. Instead of letting that traffic go, you need to create a B2B marketing funnel.
This will help you capture your customers and build a relationship based on trust. That trust turns into sales and long-term, loyal customers for your business.
Keep reading to find out how you can build a B2B marketing funnel that converts.
1. The B2B Marketing Funnel Goal and Purpose
You’re about to invest a lot of time and energy into building a marketing funnel that converts. It needs to have a goal and a purpose that’s aligned with your business goals.
The ultimate purpose of the funnel is to move a customer through the stages of the buyer’s journey. In marketing, the buyer’s journey is mapped through a common phrase called AIDA.
It means attention, interest, desire, and finally, a customer will take action.
Making someone aware of your product or service doesn’t make them a customer. You need to move them through the funnel to the point where they are ready to take action.
What are your goals for the funnel? That will determine what that last action the prospect will take. For example, you may want your funnel to generate appointments that your sales team can close.
You may want the prospects to make a purchase. With B2B sales, the sales cycle is often longer than B2C sales and there are more stakeholders involved. You need to take that into consideration when you set your goals.
2. Learn Your Target Market
Do you know your target market? How well do you understand your target market? A funnel that converts is built on solving a very specific problem for a specific audience.
You have to do research into your prospects’ needs, which can be challenging for B2B sales. You need to figure out the person within a company that’s most likely to come to your site.
It could be the CFO of an organization or it could be a marketing intern. Both positions have a completely different set of needs and career goals.
If your company is targeting different departments within one organization, you may need to develop a funnel for each department or customer profile. That allows you to deliver personalized content that they can relate to.
3. Develop the Offer
Another component of a high-converting funnel is the offer. You have to create an offer that is relevant to your audience and solves an immediate problem.
Think about a quick win your audience can achieve by moving through your funnel. If you can deliver a quick win, you will build trust and credibility to the point where a prospect needs to take the next step.
Another way to provide value is to offer proof. You can deliver case studies that show how you’ve been able to help other companies grow. A software company can provide a free trial.
The offer is the trigger that will take prospects from awareness to interest and desire. Once you have the offer, you can design an email sequence that leads them to action.
4. Design Your Funnel
Now that you have the goal and the action lined up, you can reverse engineer the rest of the funnel. The end of the funnel is to get someone to schedule an appointment.
Take the next step backward, which could be an email sequence or relevant ebook download. Then map out how people will get to your site.
In B2B sales, you can use PPC ads, LinkedIn, and blog posts to drive traffic to your site. This is top of the funnel content that people can engage with.
For example, B2B Beast uses blog posts that are about small business growth. These posts are targeted towards small businesses that want to grow.
5. Create Your Landing Pages and Forms
How will you capture email addresses? You’ll need to create a signup form on your website and set up an email marketing solution if you don’t already have one.
Your email marketing solution needs to integrate with your customer relationship management system. This will make it much easier for the sales team to see how engaged prospects are. They can devote their time to the most engaged ones, increasing their chances of closing a sale.
The most important part of the forms and landing pages is the headline. This is the one place that captures attention and gets prospects to keep reading.
6. Set Up Retargeting
Since most people are going to leave your website without converting, you need to have a way to continue to engage with that traffic. Retargeting ads can serve that purpose.
These are display ads that will appear on websites within a certain ad network, usually Facebook or Google. You probably have noticed that when you visit a site, you see an ad for that company a few minutes later.
That’s retargeting. A tracking cookie is placed on your website so when people leave, your brand stays in front of them. They can click on the ad and return to your site and convert.
7. Launch and Test the Funnel
The final step is to launch your marketing funnel. You’ll be tempted to look at the statistics every day to see how it’s doing. That’s not going to give you an accurate measurement of the results.
Wait a couple of weeks and then analyze the results. If you find that something isn’t working well, test one aspect of the campaign, and see where changes can be made.
Creating an Effective B2B Marketing Funnel
Most of your traffic is going to leave your site without ever returning. A B2B marketing funnel gives you a chance to convert those visitors and turn them into prospects. You can then turn those prospects into sales.
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