4 minute readPublished 10 January
The sales funnel is a tool that will help you better understand your customer journey - or decision making process
Your customers will be at different stages when it comes to buying your products. Some of them will only just have become aware of your existence whilst doing their research into possible solutions. Whereas others may have selected your company and are now negotiating on price or product specifics.
The 5 stages of the marketing funnel
1. Discovery Stage
2. Realisation of Needs Stage
3. Consideration Stage
4. Decision Stage
5. Retention Stage
Marketing has a duty to support sales at whatever buying stage a prospective new customer has reached by giving them content and information that is pertinent to them. And that means creating content for each different persona and stage in the sales funnel.
The content plan on the following pages shows a traditional sales funnel – but every company should create their own.
Marketing has a duty to support sales at whatever buying stage a prospective new customer has reached
1. Discovery Stage
At this stage the prospect is lost and looking for direction or inspiration. Did you know that 80% of purchases start with an online search? If your potential clients can’t find you at this point, they’ll find your competitors instead. Create optimised content, which engages your audience leaving them yearning to find out more.
Examples of ‘find-it’ stage content:
• Engaging blog posts
• Top 10 tips/advice guides
• Infographics/videos
• Issue-based editorial
This is where great SEO can help drive enquiries. Find out more about our B2B SEO agency here.
2. Realisation of Needs Stage
By this point the prospect has found you and consumed several pieces of ‘engagement’ content. They like your style, they have a feel for your company and they are beginning to develop an interest and trust in your opinions. They want to gain a deeper understanding of what it is you’re all about.
You should embed signposts via links from all ‘engagement’ content to deeper level material, designed to put more meat on the bones and generate greater buy-in. Deeper level content includes market reports, buyers’ guides or sector research, that requires an email sign up or data exchange to download or unlock the content. At this point the prospect will be sufficiently engaged to provide you with an email address, name and potentially other information about themselves, such as business sector or job title in order to receive the download content. You will need to build data capture landing pages to simplify this process, leading to the development of an ‘opted-in’ lead nurture database.
ROCKET FUEL FOR YOUR DIGITAL CONTENT
3. Consideration stage
At every stage of their engagement with you, the automated marketing platform will be applying a ‘lead score’. So every time a prospect opens an email, lands on a web page, downloads a report, the system will be tracking and scoring their process. By the time they’ve reached the consideration stage, in all likelihood they will already have been flagged as a marketing qualified lead to your sales team. At this stage they want evidence to support what you are saying and will want to find out what your customers are saying about you.
You can anticipate these requests by embedding links to content offering proof-points and success stories. Automated lead nurture email conversion programmes will signpost relevant content with a call to action.
Typical ‘consideraton’ stage content:
• Product guides
• Case studies/client videos
• 3rd Party Product Reviews
• Industry standards
• Industry awards
• Positive editorial
4. Decision Stage
When your prospects have received everything they need to make a decision and purchase – all it takes is a little encouragement in the form of a sales call to prompt an action or answer any last minute questions. By now you will have tracked online engagement at every stage of your prospective customers’ journeys. Marketing can provide sales with a view of the prospect at every stage of the buying funnel, and they can use this to guide the conversation to complete the sale.
5. Retention Stage
Hooray - your lead is now a happy customer. But be warned - it costs 5 times more to acquire a new customer than retain an existing one - so it’s essential to keep communicating with clients by sending them relevant content and offers. Think about your retention and loyalty programmes – make sure they’re designed to engage existing clients, thereby securing their long-term customer loyalty. Keeping clients on side will save your business money by reducing the amount you need to spend on costly acquisition activity.
