Here’s Your B2B Multichannel Full-Funnel Strategy In 5 Simple Steps

As a business-to-business (B2B) marketer, you need a well-structured B2B multichannel funnel strategy.

This will help you attract new customers, generate leads, and land sales.

Without a full-funnel marketing approach, you can kiss your efficacy at brand awareness, lead generation, and sales revenue goodbye.

The B2B marketing funnel involves a multichannel funnel strategy in four stages.

The first three focus on acquiring a new customer, and the final retention stage focuses on customer loyalty.

• Top of the funnel (TOFU): This is mostly focused on brand awareness and prospect generation.
• Middle of the funnel (MOFU): This consideration phase is primarily focused on lead generation.
• Bottom of the funnel (BOFU): This is where the deal is closed and moves on to the sales team.
• Customer retention: This phase focuses on keeping existing customers happy, generating repeat business, and working with referrals.

What’s Unique About The B2B Funnel?

The sales funnel is not new information to you, nor is it unique to your marketing team.

Most digital marketing professionals use some version of full-funnel marketing as part of their sales and marketing efforts.

However, unlike most B2C companies, the B2B sales cycle is often much longer than your consumer-facing counterpart and typically requires a more refined approach.

B2B companies often have to nurture their prospects for many more months than B2C companies before they become paying customers.

They also have a different decision-making process for B2C consumers.

Unlike B2C customers, the B2B buyer is searching for a solution that solves an organizational problem, such as profit, productivity, and competitiveness.

After passing through several internal processes and sign-offs, a group usually makes the final purchase decision or approval process.

B2B buyers tend to use greater logic, fact-based reasoning, and in-depth research than B2C buyers before landing on a purchase decision.

For this reason, a well-devised marketing funnel that guides the buyer along the sales journey is of massive importance for B2B marketers who want to succeed.

So, what’s the problem?

Tunnel (Not Funnel) Vision

Growth marketers are under tremendous pressure to meet deadlines, sweat budgets, hit targets, and make isolated campaigns work.

Performance marketing, after all, demands performance.

The pressure for conversion ROI for each siloed campaign means marketers may lose sight of how their potential prospects move through the “invisible” B2B marketing funnel (awareness, consideration, and acquisition).\

Blind Spots

Additionally, I often find there’s a lack of effort in understanding who the ideal customer is and keeping them uppermost in mind in all marketing activities.

Perhaps it is an oversight or assumption that everyone knows.

However, in the mad rush to sell and generate leads, not enough thought is given to creating content, messaging, and UX focused on the unique buying motivation and decision-making process of potential customers.

As a result, there are missed opportunities in the digital marketing strategy.

Firstly, there are gaps in creating awareness and consideration (top of the funnel) via focused and informative content marketing.

Also, you may be forgetting that marketing qualified leads could be targeted by remarketing.

Remarketing or retargeting audiences can create greater brand awareness and intent-based marketing efforts that support the sales funnel stages.

Here’s How To Succeed With A Full-funnel B2B Marketing Strategy

If you do the marketing in a B2B business, you need a fully-integrated marketing funnel.

If you hope to attract new leads, nurture these over the lengthy sales cycle, and ultimately convert them into paying customers.

B2B marketers can “unleash” the full potential of demand generation initiatives by implementing a solid B2B marketing and multi-channel funnel strategy.

This is because full-funnel marketing aims to give prospects a seamless experience at each stage of the customer journey.

This makes it easier to guide them toward the desired positive outcome at every stage of the funnel, and eventually convert them into paying customers.

Where do you start?

1. Focus On Identifying And Championing Your Ideal Customer

When I ask a company who their target market is, they say “everyone” or “all businesses in America.”

To which I say, “not possible,” unless you have an infinite budget and unlimited resources. No, you need to be specific.

Conclusion

The landscape of B2B marketing has changed.

This is because the B2B buyer is evolving.

Research-based, info-laden, and regulation-driven, the only way to reach this tech-savvy target audience is through deploying full-funnel B2B marketing strategies and tactics.

Kick off your game plan with a keen understanding of your target audience.