Lead Generation Funnel In an effort to get potential customers or prospects, marketing teams and sales forces from B2B (business-to-business) or B2C (business-to-customer) companies must not forget the concept of lead generation. Where they need to do prospecting by attracting attention and changing audience behavior to be interested or interested in buying a company’s product or service. However, in the midst of digital development and transformation in the business industry (the concept of business digitization), marketers and/or sales forces must be able to arrange the stages of obtaining prospects or lead generation funnels that are most in line with digital marketing trends.
Overview of the Stages of the Lead Generation Funnel
Simply put, the lead generation funnel or also known as the lead funnel is a systematic approach or process for bringing in new prospects to converting them into buyers (lead conversion) through a series of lead management stages and lead magnet offers. The process is believed to simplify business operations in terms of sales (sales operations) and marketing (marketing operations) which will indirectly increase business productivity.
Since its first appearance, the lead generation funnel consists of three main stages which must be in line with the growth marketing strategy that the marketing team applies. This way, companies have the opportunity to create personalized customer experiences that specifically address customer needs. The three stages consist of:
- Top of the Funnel (TOFU) which refers to the awareness stage. This stage explains how the audience first knows the brand identity as well as the solutions that the brand offers (brand recognition) through certain marketing channels.
- Middle of the Funnel (MOFU) which refers to the engagement or consideration stage. This stage describes when prospects are familiar with the product or service and are starting to consider buying it. So, the prospect of starts to get involved (customer engagement concept) with the company brand (brand engagement) to solve the problem.
- Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU) which refers to the conversion funnel or process that influences customer purchasing decisions. Usually by maximizing the customer experience during the customer journey and building strong relationships with prospects (customer relations).
Steps to Build a Lead Generation Funnel
So that the benefits of the three stages of lead generation above can be obtained easily. It would be nice to follow the following ways and tips for compiling a lead generation funnel.
- Demographics – Age, gender, location of residence, and level of education).
- Psychographics – Life goals (personal and professional areas) and beliefs (religion and citizenship).
- Customer challenges and pain points.
- Source of information most liked or visited frequently – Blogs, websites, social media, influencers or public figures, and others.
- The buying process or buying cycle – How often customers buy a product or service and what makes them stop making the buying process (customer churn).
After that, analyze the data by looking for common characteristics, problems, and challenges that most customers have. If necessary, collect some customer feedback initiated by the customer service team through sales calls or customer satisfaction survey emails. Later, a persona category will be obtained which refers to the nature or characteristics of the audience, starting from competitive, spontaneous, methodical, or humanistic persona.
2. Map the Customer Journey
The next step is to understand and map the customer journey where the company team visually represents the entire customer experience in the marketing funnel. While communicating with the brand until finally buying and using the company’s products or services.
This stage will streamline lead nurturing efforts because customer journey data will be based on customer behavior, customer lifecycle, and other customer information. Where later marketers need to collect (data mining), manage (customer data management), and integrate customer data into customer data platforms such as Google Analytics. Only then is the data visualized (data visualization) so that the customer journey data can be seen clearly.
3. Drive Brand Awareness
After successfully determining the buyer persona and mapping the customer journey, continue to optimize brand awareness through the following methods.
- Implement content marketing strategies or personalized content marketing and timeless content or evergreen content (evergreen marketing concept). Whether it’s blog posts or social media, e-books, infographics, videos, podcasts, webinars, and so on.
- Optimize marketing campaigns through social media marketing and social ads by paying attention to the application of hashtags, marketing automation tools, social listening, and determining the timing of posts on each social media platform.
4. Drive Traffic in the Business Sales Funnel
Then, direct traffic in each business omnichannel to the sales funnel by implementing inbound and outbound marketing methods.
Mainly, the outbound method focuses on implementing cold calling or maybe cold email and outreach marketing on social media. Meanwhile the inbound method will involve creating digital assets that attract visitors to websites and/or other marketing technologies by:
- Utilizing organic marketing strategies on search engines by doing search engine optimization (SEO). Be it local SEO practices, semantic SEO, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO. Or just maximize the use of keywords, search/user intent, internal links and backlinks, as well as the best user experience (UX).
- Implementing paid advertising campaign strategies or paid ads which focus on pay-per-click (PPC). Be it on search engine platforms (Google Ads) or on social media (Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, Twitter Ads, YouTube Ads, TikTok Ads and LinkedIn Ads).
- Doing email marketing in the form of a regular newsletter or drip campaign complete with videos and CTAs. In order to increase open rate, lead nurturing, and email engagement.
5. Maximize Closing Sales
If the four previous steps have been implemented properly. Now is the time for marketers to start marketing products (product marketing) or business services (services marketing). Where later the sales team will maximize it by carrying out the sales process until they finally succeed in closing sales. Moreover, the closing technique is the spearhead of the successful form of business sales methods. Because the sales team convinces sales leads to buy products or services by offering product or service benefits (value-based selling). Thus, companies from various business niches have the opportunity to increase sales (sales growth) more effectively. As well as acquiring many prospects to become customers who buy (customer acquisition). This condition will also indirectly increase customer conversion rates (conversion rate optimization) and more positive business development.