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Steps for Creating an Effective Marketing Funnel in 2022

 Business to business (B2B) marketing funnel is a visual representation of a buyer’s journey. It is a representation to show how a step-by-step marketing communication can convince a potential customer to take action.

The B2B funnel has proven to be fundamental in understanding the buyer's journey. It’s a way to guide people through a series of interactions and purchases that leads to your final product.

Any B2B marketing funnel consists of three stages:

  • Top-of-the-funnel (TOFU)
  • Middle-of-the-funnel (MOFU)
  • Bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU)

A B2B marketing funnel lays out the steps in your buyer’s journey before they purchase your products.

Let's understand how the marketing funnel works along with how to build a basic funnel with the aforementioned three stages.

Need for funnels in the B2B space in 2022

Assume you have a product or service to sell.

You start with identifying the target audience - the set of people who need a solution to their problems - a solution that you can provide. Then, you either create content to reach them organically or run ads after that people might visit your website or sign up for the webinar or take action through the ad copy. Now you ask them for sale in their first interaction.

The odds of this approach working are almost zero because they don't know you.

They don't know who you are, what you offer, or why they should care about it.

First, you need to get them to know you - who you are, what you stand for, your expertise, why they should give attention to whatever you’re selling them.

This is where the funnel comes in. It’s a process – a journey – that your prospect takes which slowly increases their involvement with your brand. You end up converting

Building a B2B Marketing Funnel

To build a robust B2B marketing funnel, let’s expand the three-stages of the funnel a bit further through the following steps:

  1. Create a lead magnet: Top-of-the-funnel B2B marketing level (TOFU).

    Content is the center of marketing. Lead magnets are a form of exciting content that aims to offer additional value in exchange for an email id.

    Lead magnets can be in various formats so long as they offer value to the target audience. To make it valuable, keeping it relevant and interesting is important.

    At this stage of the marketing funnel, maximizing the spread of your company’s brand name with relevant content is important.

    So be it through your website blog, newsletters or social media channels, infographics, or guide books, every channel that reaches the right audience should be explored.

  2. Awareness and Interest: Middle-of-the-funnel B2B marketing level (MOFU)

    Once the audience is engaged in your content, the next step is to nurture this contact effectively over a period of time.

    This is an important stage as you want to build trust with your audience and sustain it across their hesitations or questions.

    Remember at this stage, the number of people in your list will start to shrink as not everyone attracted to your content in the TOFU Stage is your bulls-eye prospect.

  3. Desire and Trust: Middle-of-the-funnel B2B marketing level (MOFU)

    When your audience engages with your brand, a relationship between your brand and that prospect commences.

    You need to make this relationship healthy and grow their trust to a level where they would be open to considering doing business with you on your final product.

    Trust is the most crucial element of the entire sales process. People don't buy from anyone randomly. People buy from people they trust.

    You can build trust through email sequences and retargeting ads.

    Trust is very fragile. It is built over time, in small doses. You need to create a sequence of content that instills trust in small doses at a regular interval. However, people trusting you doesn't mean they will buy whatever you are selling.

    They should have a need strong enough to warrant the purchase.

    This is the next stage where the consumer already knows about your brand, is interested, but is not sure whether or not to make a purchase of your final product. This is the stage where you need to convince your prospects that your products are better than their alternatives.

    The marketing tactics at this stage aim to inform the prospective customer about the value that you provide and what makes you unique. If they develop purchase intent, they will move to the next stage.

  4. Action and Transaction: Bottom-of-the-funnel B2B marketing level (BOFU)

    With correct lead scoring and buyer’s intent, you will know that prospect is ready for the next step.

    In this stage of the funnel, the buyer has interacted with your content for a substantial amount of time, perhaps they have heard or seen some of your thought leadership content and they may have asked some questions to your demand representative.

    All this information can help the sales teams to interact with the prospect in a knowledgeable way to close the sale.

Challenges in Building Funnels

There are a few challenges that can set businesses behind while working on the funnels. They are as follows:

  1. Regular quality content:

    Regularly sharing content is important as it builds consistency and trust. There is a lot of mirrored content amongst industry competitors today as most businesses now know that content is important. Creating quality content helps to stand out.

  2. Managing Lead Sources:

    Lead sources are where your audience is. Knowing your audience thus is very important. And in the age of trends, one must be flexible to place content where the audience is getting it.

  3. Managing Lead quality:

    This is an important step for the funnel to work. Lead quality can be subjective and in order to have clarity, a tool like lead scoring should be used.

  4. Alignment between sales and marketing teams:

    Often sales and marketing teams have different ideas about lead qualification. There has to be a constant dialogue between the sales and marketing team about qualified leads. This is one of the areas which becomes challenging for the effective functioning of the B2B marketing funnel.

  5. Customer’s perspective:

    In the flow of making effective reach out and counting leads, often the customer’s perspective is missed. Buyer personas are one such living document that captures multiple aspects of the target customers. It is critical to know what are customers’ challenges, likes, and dislikes.

Conclusion

Needless to say, creating a winning funnel is easier said than done. It takes a team effort and expertise to create, sustain and leverage the B2B marketing funnel.

Working with experts can help you jumpstart the process as well as gain the required support to effectively leverage the information from the funnel.

The 4P Solutions specializes in B2B digital marketing and has 10+ years of experience.

If you are looking to partner with a B2B digital marketing agency in Dubai, message us today for a free consultation.

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