A Marketing Funnel is a visual representation of your customer’s journey with you. Right from the initial stages when someone learns about your business, and all the way to the purchasing stage, marketing funnels map routes to conversion and beyond.

“A marketing funnel is a model that shows the way a potential customer goes from becoming aware of your brand to purchasing a good or service. This model involves several stages of customer engagement with a brand. Companies use marketing funnels to understand their customers’ needs in each stage, optimize their marketing efforts, and generate more sales.” – (Source – sendpulse.com)

Marketing funnel is an important & expert marketing strategy that entails using different marketing tactics depending on where the customer is in his buyer’s journey. Maybe you’d better understand its importance if we put it this way – building a marketing strategy without a funnel will be like taking a shot in the dark.

Stages of Marketing Funnel

When it comes to Marketing Funnel Stages, there’s no such fixed division that applies for everybody the same way. The number of stages in a marketing funnel depends on each one’s approach and their customers’ behavior. However, the most prominent stages are as follows –

1. Awareness – People get to know about your business
2. Interest – Your potential customers show their interest towards your company and its products
3. Consideration – Leads turn into prospect and gain more knowledge and idea about your services and/or products
4. Evaluation – Here, your prospect thinks about and makes a decision whether to buy from you or not
5. Purchase – The final stage, where they take the decision of purchasing from you, thus becoming your customer

What major role does Marketing Funnel have in ‘B2B Marketing & Lead Generation’?

B2B Business Model implies a lot of decision-makers – departments or whole companies. Making a purchase in B2B often takes weeks or months. Due to the fact that they operate on niche markets, B2B businesses have to focus on identifying their buyer persona and building stronger relationships with customers. To close deals, marketing and sales teams often join hands in the funnel’s lower stages.

Adjusting your funnel to suit your buyer personas instantly makes it more effective.

Here’s a list of the major benefits that Marketing Funnel has in B2B Marketing & Lead Generation –

1. Marketing Strategy

Marketing funnels help in choosing your customer journey. Knowing the latter helps you to understand when and why potential customers drop off before making a purchase, and what tools and strategies you can use to keep them engaged with your company.

2. Promotion

A Marketing Funnel helps you in staying consistent with your promotions. What you need to do is create a plan of marketing activities for each stage of the funnel and interact with your leads to drive them towards making a purchase with you.

3. Increase in Sales

When you have a marketing funnel, you can nurture leads until they’re ready to purchase.Without a funnel, you lose money if a potential customer forgets about your offer and doesn’t buy from you ultimately immediately.

4. It’s easier to close the deals

In the B2B Business Model, closing deals requires combined efforts of the marketing and sales teams. Marketing funnels provide your salespeople with such detailed insights into your leads’ behavior, which gives them more hints on how to close the deal easily and smoothly.

5. Save your Time & Effort

Knowing your customer journey and having the activities planned for each stage allows you to automate your marketing efforts. It saves tons of time and helps you achieve better results because you are able to put the extra time and energy onto other things.

6. Future Sales

Marketing funnels help you to understand the results of your marketing activities better. Gaining knowledge into lead conversion for each stage, you can predict how many of your leads will eventually turn into paying customers.

7. Helps retain your customers

Planning your post-purchase marketing activities helps in keeping customers engaged and making them return now and then. Retaining customers is much cheaper than acquiring new ones and this funnel helps you with exactly that.

The Final Word

Marketing Funnel for B2B lead generation is a reliable system that provides quick win-win results. The B2B marketing funnel consists of a company’s website, social media platforms, and other promotional channels. The inclusion of these channels has resulted in more leads being generated for companies.

B2B marketers can never get enough of lead generation. And that is because they’re always chained to the decision-making process of prospects and are always seeking out new ways to qualify leads, close deals, and generate more revenue.