The B2B buying process is rarely straightforward.
There are often multiple steps and stakeholders. There are also various funnel types to consider.
It’s not as simple as attracting customers to your website, encouraging them to fill out a form, nurturing them with emails, and getting them to buy.
That’s a pretty dream. But it’s rarely the case.
Instead, many B2B buyer journeys look more like this:
You’re probably thinking, “Well, if that’s the case, what’s the point in building a growth marketing funnel?”
It’s a fair question.
Where most companies go wrong is failing to be deliberate about their funnel. You can’t guess.
You can’t just replicate someone else’s funnel, but you can (and should) borrow ideas and get inspiration from other funnels.
To build a successful funnel, you must know who you’re targeting, how best to reach and interact with them, and get feedback from customers and prospects to improve your funnel.
This article will show you how to build your growth marketing funnel so you can confidently go to market and start driving massive growth in your company.
Before I answer that question, let’s remind ourselves of what growth marketing is. Growth marketing is a full-funnel approach to marketing. It aims to take potential customers on a journey from virtual strangers to brand advocates.
Whereas traditional marketing focuses on getting new business in the door, growth marketing is crucial in turning new customers into fans. To that end, think of a growth marketing funnel as a visual representation of that process.
Visualize a prospect’s journey from becoming aware of your product or service to becoming a revenue-generating customer. Along the way, the process includes multiple stages with unique goals, metrics, and strategies.
The best way to improve the performance of your growth marketing funnel is to optimize the entire customer journey.
Building a funnel is crucial to maximizing revenue and customer acquisition while minimizing acquisition costs. Identifying and understanding how each stage works can eliminate friction in the sales process and maximize your marketing budget.
At Lean Labs, we believe wholeheartedly that growth marketing is the best way to drive success for our clients. We start by working with you to understand your buyers, competitive landscape, and market.
Together, we identify core metrics and KPIs that matter most to you and then build a customized growth marketing strategy to optimize each stage of your funnel. Want to know more? Book a Growth Mapping Session today, and let’s start planning for growth.
As you can see, each stage of the funnel is crucial. You can’t miss any steps, and to maximize each stage, you’ll need a plan and a way to track and analyze performance. This is where key performance indicators (KPIs) come into play.
If you want a detailed breakdown of the growth marketing metrics you must track, check out this article: The 6 Growth Marketing Metrics Every Business Needs to Track (& How to Track). For now, here’s a quick breakdown.
We touched on this earlier, but for a visual representation, you can see that traditional marketing focuses on the first two funnel stages: awareness and acquisition. While it’s essential to bring new customers in, what happens next?
The growth marketing funnel answers that question. You create a funnel that feeds itself by dialing in the next four stages. In turn, the retention and reputation stages feed awareness and acquisition.
Developing a growth strategy and creating your funnel intertwine. As you build your growth strategy, you’ll see how your funnel shapes your ideas and helps execute your plan.
Our article “Build a World-Class Growth Marketing Strategy in 10 Simple Steps” provides a detailed roadmap to building your strategy. Let’s look at the essential steps you must take.
Now that you’ve laid the foundation, you can start planning how to improve your growth marketing funnel. You can now choose your marketing channels and tactics, create your marketing assets, and test and optimize your strategy.
You can map your customer journey with the information you gather and organize. A simple way to break down your funnel stages is to think of the top, middle, and bottom of your funnel and how you can optimize each step.
Understanding your ideal customer informs how you’ll market to them. Think of lead criteria as all the things you need to know about your customer:
Related: [ULTIMATE GUIDE] Lead Generation Through Content Marketing
At the top of the funnel, you focus on creating awareness and attracting leads. This is often (but not always) the first step in the customer journey. How can you generate leads?
Organic, high-quality content is a long-term play that drives results. You’ll attract ideal customers if your content is relevant and helpful. Content includes your blog, videos, webinars, and social media posts.
Pro tip: Go where your customers are. If they often hang out on social media, focus your content distribution on social channels. If, based on customer surveys, your ideal customers like to consume video content, focus on video content.
Other plays include:
In the middle of the funnel, focus on providing massive value and building interest. Lead nurturing is about warming up prospects and showing them that your products and services solve their problems.
Content is still the best play here. You can use well-crafted emails to engage potential customers. Did they download your lead magnet? Or sign up for a free trial? Now is your chance to wow them. What else will they find valuable?
Segmenting your audience and personalizing the content they see is good practice. Make it easy for them to see how you can help them. Demo videos, free trials, case studies, and testimonials demonstrate how your prospects can solve their problems using your product.
You want to educate, entertain, and inspire your audience to take action and continue through your funnel.
The bottom of the funnel is about closing deals and turning leads into customers. At this point, leads are ready to buy; they’re unsure if they should buy from you. Help them make a decision.
You can use free trials to provide a hands-on experience using your solution. It’s risk-free for potential customers, and you can encourage them to take action and make a purchase. Personalized offers are another great play. Tailor your offers and show potential customers you understand their needs and desires.
High-quality customer support is paramount here. You need to build trust and confidence. With quick and effective support, you can address any concerns or questions and give potential customers the confidence to purchase.
Related: SaaS Content Writing: How to Attract, Engage, and Delight Your Customers
Provide your sales team with the tools to engage effectively with leads. When you align sales and marketing teams, you create a cross-functional growth team that eliminates silos. Instead of producing leads that the sales team ignore, marketers can create content that answers critical buyer questions.
To align sales and marketing teams:
Remember, your funnel doesn’t end with your lead becoming a customer. Retention and reputation are essential stages in your funnel. Here, you’ll create brand evangelists who will tell the world (OK, maybe just their friends, family, and peers) about your solution.
This feeds back into the top of the funnel. HubSpot uses the flywheel analogy. A flywheel keeps spinning because it has momentum. Happy customers are your best marketers and are the key to sustainable growth.
At this stage, you want to stay in touch with customers. Ask for regular feedback. Got a new feature? Have them try it out first. Give them the first look. You can optimize your funnel and improve your products and services with their feedback.
Alright, you’ve got a lot of information to take action on. Here’s a handy checklist to help organize your steps.
Along the way, you might need some help building your funnel. We can point you in the right direction! We have a couple of free tools you can use today, and we also have recommendations for tools that will make designing your funnel a breeze.
Our Growth Grader diagnostic tool lets you discover what’s working in your current setup and what’s underperforming. You’ll diagnose the vulnerable parts of your growth system and identify what’s causing friction within the buyer journey.
You’ll identify the metrics you need to improve, track the right KPIs, and find opportunities to drive growth. Your entire team can focus on the metrics that matter.
Bonus: In a quick tutorial video, we walk you through the exact process of using the Growth Grader.
Here’s the link again: The Growth Grader
Another free tool from us! The Growth Playbook lets you peek behind the curtain and see how we drive massive growth for our clients. You’ll discover:
Here’s the link again: The Growth Playbook
HubSpot is our CRM of choice. If you want to build a website (for free), you can. Manage contacts? Yep. Execute powerful marketing strategies, track progress, and deliver ROI? Yep. Enable sales and marketing team alignment? Yep. Provide impeccable customer service? Yep.
HubSpot is the complete solution for growing businesses. You can manage your sales pipeline like a boss, and there are analytics tools galore. Best of all, you can start for free. HubSpot grows with you.
Book a no-obligation call today to chat with us about HubSpot. We’ll help you determine if HubSpot is a good fit for your company and walk through what implementation could look like for you.
Many companies struggle with marketing funnels because they do the right things in the wrong order.
It’s no use building a funnel based on what you think is the right way. You must understand your buyers and the competitive landscape, and make sure your funnel makes sense for your market, buyer, and company.
By following the steps above, you can build a growth marketing funnel that attracts qualified traffic, converts leads into customers, and ultimately drives business growth.
At Lean Labs, we use the growth funnel concept to great effect with all of our clients. Want to find out how? We’ll tell you our secrets. Unlock the Growth Playbook today!