A Comprehensive Guide to Build B2B Marketing Funnel

A well-crafted and thoughtful B2B marketing funnel helps to maximize lead generation – but what does that mean? To answer this question, businesses must first develop a structured B2B marketing funnel based on their sales department’s unique needs. 

However, what elements is this funnel composed of? How does this funnel work in favor of the company? What factors are necessary to increase this funnel?

This article will answer all your queries about the B2B marketing funnel and offer insights and opinions about it. Let us first understand what a B2B marketing funnel stands for.

What is a B2B Marketing Funnel?

A B2B marketing funnel is a step-by-step guide to attract users to your website. This helps build awareness and loyalty and convert soft leads into hot leads. 

Once these leads become customers, the marketing funnel describes their buyer’s journey and highlights the marketing strategies that worked for them. This provides valuable insights into the strategies to work on for the next lead to acquire at every stage of the funnel.

A B2B marketing funnel is lucrative in the long game, even if it takes more time than the consumer sales cycle. It also helps segment the target audience into multiple categories for customized messages designed for a specific lead at every stage. These messages help increase the company’s sales.

Now that we see how a B2B marketing funnel boosts long-term success and audience segmentation, let’s understand the different stages to increase the sales pipeline of a campaign.

4 B2B Marketing Funnel Stages to Increase Revenue

There are two kinds of website visitors – the ones who are first-time visitors and the ones who visit your website regularly. These visitors differ in the kinds of questions they ask and the interactions they have on your website. How can businesses ensure that they cater to their specific needs?

This is where the B2B marketing funnel stages come in, as they provide an accurate idea of the stages and marketing tactics required to lead a customer down the funnel stage. Let us take a look at these stages step by step:

1. Top of the Funnel (TOFU) – Awareness + Attention

Majority of the marketers create more top-of-the-funnel content than the middle or bottom of the funnel. Before the buying stage comes the awareness stage since your broad audience first needs to know about your product. For many marketing decision-makers around the world, TOFU is defined by:

• Content Marketing
• Paid Advertising
• Influencer Marketing
• Brand Building
• SEO
• Social Media Marketing
• Video Marketing

In this funnel stage, you address the pain points of your potential customers that they want resolved and engage with them to build a relationship. Your customers are completely oblivious to your brand, which is why you need to put in suitable marketing efforts to draw their attention and keep them engaged.

Such a tactic is difficult to pull off in crowded marketing channels like social media platforms. Hence, building a clear marketing funnel is necessary to build initial awareness for your brand, which aids in developing relationships with potential customers. Social media campaigns, including social media ads, are a major driving force in achieving that.

2. Middle of the Funnel (MOFU) – Interest + Consideration

The next in line after TOFU is the middle-of-the-funnel stage, also termed the interest or consideration stage. Grabbing people’s attention in TOFU is the foundation on which the MOFU stage takes place.

The details provided in the TOFU stage on what to do with them help create strategies. The first stage of the funnel is rarely the purchase stage, as it requires more than intent to make a purchase. 

Before businesses can sign on the dotted line, trust and relationships must be built for the product. MOFU helps solve multiple pain points as you reassure the converting customers that your brand is reliable. To do this, make sure to:

• Understand those issues
• Be interested in solving the prospect’s problem
• Provide the prospects with efficient solutions to their issues

Hence, marketers in this stage churn out targeted educational content to guide customers to their desired answers. 

This stage serves only to provide free information to the customer. However, make sure to convince potential customers that the easiest and most convenient way to solve their issue is to buy your product. 

It is still a long way from any purchase decision, but businesses work towards their goal through this stage, which is also called the evaluation stage.

3. Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU) – Intent + Action

The final stage is the one that marketers like the least to build content around. The bottom-of-the-funnel stage is also called the intent stage or action stage, which focuses solely on the conversion. 

Businesses create awareness and enough relevant content in the first two stages to capitalize on their gains. They do this by building strong calls to action that attract multiple leads to the website. Making your product stand out by addressing its unique value proposition and why it is the best consideration for your lead is one of the strategies put into work.

The potential customer evaluates your product/service to their problem. At this point, you have built awareness around your product and convinced the customer to make the purchase. Now it is necessary to ensure they turn to you as their problem-solver, not your competitors. This can be done by:

• Comparison Guides
• Demos
• Optimized Landing Pages
• Case Studies
• Webinars
• Free Trials
• Social Proof

4. Post Funnel

The above stages are not the end of the marketing funnel once you have made the sale. Businesses utilize their established relationships to the fullest by utilizing post-purchase engagement. 

At this stage, your brand identity becomes a vital factor in retaining customers. A strong and consistent identity not only reminds customers why they chose your business but also nurtures loyalty and builds a lasting connection. Most of your customer base is occupied by repeat customers who regularly view your website for multiple discounts and offers. This is where you need to keep engaging with the client, ensuring they are getting the right solutions for their problems. You can also upsell and cross-sell your additional products by:

• Display how both of your products work better with each other
• Let them know about the improvements you have made in your product
• The features of the premium packages

The purpose of this stage is to keep the conversation fluid so that whenever the client is looking for a product, you are the first option they think of. The goal of every sales and marketing funnel is to offer valuable insights and convert the right leads. Achieving this requires not just effective strategies, but also reliable tools.

Clodura.AI helps not only in lead generation but also verifies their email addresses through a free email verification tool that efficiently facilitates lead information. This ensures that the email address is valid and your email will reach the right inbox to convert the right lead. 

6 Benefits of a Marketing Funnel for B2B Companies

We talked about the significance of a marketing funnel; let us now talk about the benefits of the funnel to address the general benefits. The six best reasons to implement a marketing funnel in your lead generation campaigns are:

1. Enhanced Customer Needs

A marketing funnel in a B2B business aids in creating a map of the customer’s journey that provides insights from their very first interaction recorded.

These insights help you understand your lead’s specific needs in different stages of the funnel. Furthermore, they can help you solve their problems quickly and decrease the company’s Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).

2. Improved Lead Nurturing

The only way to retain more leads is by making the least mistakes at the beginning. Companies can do this by crafting a decent marketing funnel. 

This would help them in targeting the different leads with different outreach strategies which will bring in high-quality sales revenue. 

Furthermore, the right marketing funnel can get you the best leads. Even if they make ambiguous decisions on the website, lead nurturing would be equally effective since the marketing funnel would display the team what the leads want exactly. 

3. Optimized Resource Allocation

A good marketing funnel will help the sales and marketing team to decide the areas where time and budget should be allocated. 

By understanding the stages of the funnel that require more attention businesses can easily optimize their marketing efforts. This helps them to focus on areas of higher impact with better ROI and provide increased conversions. 

Hence, companies tend to devise a marketing funnel carefully that can assign numbers regarding time and money to the different stages of the funnel for better optimization. 

4. Measurable Success

Due to the highly structured blueprint of a marketing funnel, the marketing efforts become immensely measurable for the users. 

Marketers can easily track metrics like conversion rates, drop-off points, and lead velocity at every stage of the funnel. 

Since the metrics are highly statistical and require a data-driven approach to understand, businesses can constantly improve their strategies by refining them for better results. 

5. Enhanced Sales Alignment

A B2B marketing funnel makes room for enhanced alignment between your sales and marketing teams. The marketing team can seamlessly transition their lead to the sales team at the designated stage. 

Sales teams then make sure that they can handle the lead better and qualify them as a permanent client. Such an alignment increases cooperation between the teams and reduces the sales cycle enhancing the overall efficiency. 

6. Scalability

One of the best things about a marketing funnel is how scalable it can be for lead generation and conversion. The growth of a business depends on expanded strategies to adjust to larger audiences. 

It can also increase the lead volume and automate processes without losing too much quality of engagement or customer experience.

How to Create a B2B Marketing Funnel in 6 Steps

Developing a marketing or sales funnel is a data-driven process. Understanding how and why people move from a certain stage to another is primary knowledge for a sales rep. They also need to know what causes the leads to drop off. Marketing teams also work on different strategies to refurbish their funnel.

Let us take a look at the process of building a marketing funnel.

Step 1 – Set a Target and Goals

It is impossible to lead prospects anywhere without a clear objective. Hence, it is important to determine the target that you want to achieve. This helps align each step you take with your business’ success. 

Step 2 – Understand the Audience by Gathering Data

One of the most significant aspects of how to execute a marketing strategy is to understand the target audience. Gather enough data about your clients through their pain points, challenges, and responsibilities to know your customer’s user persona. 

A signup process is a great start to getting to know your paying clients better, as they are required to add information about themselves on those forms. They will add data like their company size, industry, job, and role that can help sales teams understand their needs and requirements for your product.

Step 3 – Track Customer Touchpoints and Marketing Channels

Identify key business activities of your leads through the data you have gathered to understand easily. This helps you devise a functioning B2B marketing funnel that fits your business. To do this, map out the touchpoints at every stage and determine the steps needed to be taken to help the client reach the next stage. 

Step 4 – Incorporate your Marketing Strategies

Once you have decided on the marketing activities needed to be implemented in the funnel, you can easily start to execute them at every stage. Some of the media that help in doing this include:

• Marketing Channels
• Content Formats
• Messaging
• Actions you want prospects to make

Step 5 – Monitor your Marketing Efforts

Once you have executed strategies, it is time to analyze the ones that work and those that don’t. Track user behaviors to spot how prospects communicate with your marketing content, which gives you a competitive advantage over other prospects. This practice helps teams to convert leads better in the next stage.

Step 6 – Refurbish and Optimize your Marketing Funnel

Analyzing your funnel helps you spot the dropoff points and areas of friction that reduce your conversion rates. Also, understand the different stages at which these drop-off rates are frequent, as it is important to optimize to ensure a smooth customer journey. 

B2B Marketing vs Sales Funnel – A Comparison

Both marketing and sales funnels help generate more leads and awareness for the product. However, they are different in the type of strategies and lead acquisition. 

Let us take a look at their detailed comparison below. Below is a breakdown of the key differences: 

This is what separates a B2B marketing funnel from a sales funnel in the first place. Regardless of their differences in strategies, the primary goal of both these elements is to acquire leads with buyer intent.

To effectively achieve this goal, utilizing the right tools is crucial.
Clodura.AI is an AI-driven lead generation software that allows users to not only meticulously plan a sales and marketing funnel but also execute their strategies to convert them into clients.

Importance of a B2B Marketing Funnel to Acquire Hot Leads

It is clear how the marketing funnel helps create brand awareness; however, why is it important to implement it in your sales campaign? 

A marketing funnel not only describes the customer journey but also ensures the steps your teams need to take in their sales and marketing efforts to persuade the customer at every stage of the funnel. 

As every buyer’s journey is different, it is perfectly fine to have different marketing funnels. Businesses must ensure a seamless marketing process to generate the best leads for their companies.

Create an Effective Marketing Funnel for Hot Leads

Developing a B2B funnel is certainly not a walk in the park. Extensive research and wise marketing tactics are required to implement this strategy. To make it seamless, that’s when Clodura.AI becomes invaluable. 

Clodura.AI is an AI-driven sales prospecting platform that helps in building an effective B2B funnel and offers other features. These features include a direct dial finder Chrome Extension,  effective CRM integration, and sales cadence to analyze your emails’ status. 

Besides these features, Clodura.AI entails a database of 600M+ contacts and 120M direct dials, allowing users to tap into a massive pool of contact information to generate effective leads. It is a one-stop solution for an effective marketing funnel that converts cold leads into hot ones.

Frequently Asked Questions on B2B Marketing Funnel

1. Is it necessary to create both a sales and a marketing funnel?

Yes, to fully describe and understand the user’s journey, it is necessary to analyze both since they teach you what actions or steps to take at every funnel stage. Decisions based on user intent, budget, and the lead’s position in the funnel shape the buyer’s journey. Clodura.AI streamlines the sales and marketing funnel, simplifying the process of understanding and managing the buyer’s journey.   

2. Which marketing funnel metrics should one track?

The metrics to track in the funnel depend on the customer’s stage and the goal you are trying to achieve. Some significant metrics to track at the awareness stage include website traffic, unique visitors, and social media engagement metrics. The metrics to track at the end of the funnel include purchases made, conversion rates, and post-purchase metrics like customer testimonials and reviews. 

3. How much does it cost to create a B2B marketing funnel?

The average US price ranges from $5000 to $10000 to build an effective B2B marketing funnel for an organization to acquire hot leads and convert them into clients. However, there are no restrictions on building your own marketing funnel with your in-house team. Clodura.AI steps in right there—it helps generate leads and allows you to build your own marketing funnel at a more affordable rate than the range mentioned above. 

4. What does a typical B2B marketing funnel comprise?

Every funnel is ultimately unique, according to the team that builds it. The typical B2B marketing funnel includes awareness, interest, consideration, decision, and action stages. These stages guide potential customers through their journey, from first becoming aware of a product or service to making a purchase decision and taking action.