About
About
You might be familiar with the infamous outbound marketing-based sales funnel: a symbolic representation of the buyer’s journey from a prospect to a qualified lead to finally becoming a customer. With the evolution of the web and technology over the years, this sales funnel has aged like fine wine. And today, most B2B buyers prefer to search for a cure to their ailment on the web before actually reaching out to the seller.
This is the reason why the principles of inbound marketing are in vogue today. Companies providing inbound marketing solutions deliver intent-based marketing messages to the user, sharing content most relevant to their buying cycle.
However, this strategy works best when both marketing and sales teams are aligned across all stages of the inbound marketing funnel. And that is the secret ingredient to the success of your inbound marketing strategy! Let’s delve deeper into understanding the different stages of this funnel and how ‘marketing teams can contribute to each stage.
Top of the Funnel (ToFu): The Awareness Stage 85% of the visitors on your website are at this stage of the funnel – Adweek
This funnel constitutes prospects who are still doing their research, finding possible solutions to their problem, and getting to know the industry.
A word of caution here: they are NOT looking to buy your product or service just yet. Hence, feeding them with a sales message is a bad idea. But does that mean that the sales team shouldn’t be involved at all? No.
The sales team is more experienced indirectly dealing with the customers and their objections. Because of this, they’ll be intimately aware of the most common questions, pain points, and fears of your buyers. All those insights can make your content, user experience, and conversion numbers even better.
Hence the marketing team should align with the sales team and try to solve the prospects’ problems by providing them with helpful and relevant information. This might not lead to purchase as of now, but hold on! The next time whenever your prospects come back to the decision-making stage, they’ll surely remember you!
Some content pieces that might interest your prospects are blogs, infographics, whitepapers, interactive content, ebooks, checklists, and how-to guides.
Adweek says that around 10% of your total website visitors fall under this category. These are the visitors who have already done some research and have an idea about how to go about solving their problem. They are trying to compare, and contrast between the options they have shortlisted post the awareness stage.
But remember, they still might NOT be ready to purchase. Try to reach out to these visitors and explain to them how your product or service could be a catalyst in solving their problem. And while this mostly includes the marketing team sharing content using different inbound marketing channels, the sales team could also play a pivotal role by bringing the human element to the picture.
The reason inbound marketing works is because it is a more personalized and humane approach to marketing. And the sales team is the first point of human contact someone might have with your brand. So it becomes important for the marketing team to make sure all the content they share online aligns with what the sales team is pitching to the leads in person. The content should add enough value for the user to encourage them to share their contact information.
Focus on converting them through case studies, calculators, product demonstrations, and product comparisons.
With only about 5% falling under this category, these inbound marketing funnel visitors are the rarest of the rare. They are the ones who did their research, went through the shortlisted options, made up their mind, and are finally ready to make a purchase. What you need to ensure at this stage is that signing up and ordering isn’t a hassle for them.
Remember, the prospects at this stage are qualified leads on the verge of becoming customers. As a final effort in winning them as customers, try to provide them with consultations, free trials, demonstrations, and detailed case studies.
You might be wondering why to do all this pushing, pulling, and carrying of clients down the funnel when you can directly target the visitors in the BoFU funnel. Well, every prospect in ToFu is a potential customer in BoFu. By spending the right amount of time creating content for all your prospects, you will turn them into qualified leads and further into happy customers.
So now you know about the inbound marketing funnel and how the marketing and sales teams should work in alignment. It is thus time for you to put these ideas into practice and see your company grow in real-time. Give your company a head start with our inbound marketing services!
