When planning your B2B marketing strategy, the importance of knowing your audience cannot be understated – offering accessible brand position, what you stand for, and stories at any time. These days, your customer wants to know who you are beyond your products and services.
With smaller markets to connect with across Australia and New Zealand, this can be both a blessing and a curse – however your ideal target customer, if spoken to directly, will begin to understand exactly how you can fill their needs.
One of the best ways to demonstrate an understanding of your B2B industry audience is how you structure your marketing funnel strategy. A marketing funnel is a system for guiding potential customers through the buying process, from awareness to purchase. A well-designed B2B marketing funnel can help you increase brand awareness, generate leads, and close more deals.
We’re also interested in showcasing how incentive and loyalty programs can assist with the creation, implementation, and success of your B2B marketing funnel. We’ve laid out the details and advantages of how B2B loyalty programs can support a B2B Marketing Funnel in these processes.
Before building your own marketing funnel, it’s important to properly grasp what a B2B marketing funnel is and what it can do for your business.
A B2B marketing funnel is a series of steps taken by the business to attract specifically targeted leads to a website or store. The main purpose of this marketing funnel is to build brand awareness through the ability to educate potential customers, increase customer loyalty and convert a potential customer into a qualified lead.
The marketing funnel, when laid out, will establish the customer journey, and outline the B2B marketing activities that businesses across Australia and New Zealand will need to carry out at each stage of the funnel.
It’s integral to understand the importance of this as a B2B marketer because, while a B2B marketing funnel may take longer to cycle through than a sales cycle, it is a more sustainable process long term. It will also help you segment the customer’s journey and customer experience by personalizing your relevant content based on where each customer currently sits in the buyer journey, resulting in more consistent sales success.
Now that you get what a B2B marketing funnel is and the importance it holds to both a sales team and marketing team, you may be asking about what advantages it holds to implement one for your customer journey. We have highlighted a few of the key benefits below:
These advantages go hand-in-hand with the creation of a B2B loyalty program and will be supplemented by the program itself. Your loyalty program benefits create engagement and loyalty from your customer base, as they will relate to your brand from meeting the requirements of continued purchases.
The B2B sales process generally has longer sales cycles, as more decision-makers are involved in the buying process. By being aware of the lifecycle of the process, you can provide the right information at the right time, leading to a longer customer relationship, as a successful product on the first attempt can provide you with a customer for the lifetime of the business.
We can create self-funded programs, maximizing your ROI. The data that you gather from your audience when having them sign up to your incentive program can also assist with building a greater understanding of your audience, which will then allow more effective search engine optimisation.
These are only some of the benefits that a B2B loyalty program can provide your business, but it’s clear that it aligns smoothly with the purposes of creation of a B2B marketing funnel and sales funnel.
So, if you’re still reading, you’re clearly hooked on the idea of building a marketing funnel of your own – after all, why wouldn’t you? The next step is building your understanding of what the three stages of a marketing funnel are:
Top of the funnel (TOFU): This is where your dream audience of new customers will become aware of your brand and product if they’re not already. This is the where the audience are aware of their pain points and start looking for ways to solve them.
The aim of your business should be to increase awareness of your brand and begin creating leads. This can be created through various techniques, such as organic awareness through blog posts, ebooks, white papers, social media posts and sharing to connect with your target audience, or paid awareness through Google or boosting social media ads. Campaign collateral can solve most of your issues here – we can assist with defining your audience, so that we can work on how to best capture them in this early stage of your funnel.
While your customers may be building an understanding of their pain point, they may not completely understand how your product will solve it. It is better to let them come to their own conclusion, so avoid seeking large commitments at this stage such as sales contact or trying to schedule a demo. Demonstrating awareness of these common pain points through your content can communicate to your audience that your product contains value to their situation.
Middle of the funnel (MOFU): Once the customer fully understands their problem and are actively looking for a way to solve them – this is sometimes called the consideration stage.
Now is the time for you to introduce your product! Your customer won’t exactly be ready to purchase yet, so don’t go all-in trying to lock them down, but be prepared to have your content demonstrate how this may solve the problems they’re facing.
For a B2B-focus, it’s important to keep in mind that the customer won’t be buying this for themselves, but rather to improve their business outcomes or shooting for a competitive advantage. Aim to show how your product can help achieve this – examples such as industry reports, case studies, product videos or surveys, demonstrating examples of profitability or showing the negative impacts that not going with your product may cause.
Your website and online presence will be a powerful tool in this stage, as this will provide them with an understanding of your brand and product without seeking a firm commitment. However, utilizing contact forms to gather data will provide your brand with a clear path to utilizing advanced marketing techniques such as cold email and remarketing, outbound lead generation, and retargeting ads to nurture marketing qualified leads.
Bottom of the funnel (BOFU): This is sometimes known as the decision stage, where the customer has narrowed down the potential list and is prepared to make a buying decision. This stage is useful for filling in any of the gaps you may have had in your customer’s information, while also furthering their understanding of the product through free trials, consultations, quotes, and training.
This section will usually be handled by a marketing representative or outbound sales team and will be built around preparing your marketing-qualified leads to become sales-qualified leads. By gathering as much intel as you can on the customer and their specific needs in this stage, you better prepare your sales rep to seal the deal with the ideal customer.
Your B2B loyalty program can greatly assist at this stage of your marketing funnel. By using the program platform, you can incentivise your audience to provide their details when signing up, which allows you to gain further insight into your customers and communicate with them regularly to ensure your product stays front of mind, while also providing them with further incentive around continued business with your brand. This is just one of the B2B retention strategies offered by the creation of a B2B loyalty program, and how it can supplement the effectiveness of your B2B marketing funnel.
4. Track your results. It’s important to track the results of your marketing strategy so you can see what’s working and what’s not. This will help you make adjustments to your marketing strategy as needed. There are a number of different tools available to help you track your marketing results, such as Google Analytics and HubSpot CRM. In terms of strategy, we can help with the strategy for your B2B reward or loyalty program, which as we’ve shown, shares many overlapping components with your B2B marketing funnel and sales funnel.
Here are some additional tips for creating a successful B2B marketing funnel:
By following these tips, you can create a B2B marketing funnel that will help you achieve your business goals. However, understanding the process is only half the battle. Since 1996, we’ve been helping B2B businesses build strategy in reward and incentive programs targeting their desired audiences. Get in touch with us today to find out what we can do for your brand!
