A lot of brands stumble to understand the entire working and the ins and outs of the stages of your marketing funnel. Marketers often find themselves struggling to figure out what their customers are looking for and with which kinds of marketing strategies they can address their concerns. At the beginning of your marketing funnel, once people enter, they would have no idea about their needs and their requirements. They would not know where your potential customers are coming from and where they want to go. This means that before they move to the next step of your marketing funnel stages, they need first to figure out who these people are and how they can tailor their marketing strategies to motivate them into engaging with your products and services and cater to their needs.
The need to use actionable content in all stages of your marketing funnel
Brands that typically generate a lot of different kinds of B2B content often get shocked that their marketing strategies are unable to drive more customers in their marketing funnels stages. This seems particularly surprising since analytical data reveals that over 70% of specialists engage with a minimum of up to three content pieces before they make a purchase.
This discrepancy in the numbers and the rate of engagement usually originates from the insufficiency of knowledge about the consumers and their needs. Marketers don’t always know exactly where the customers are in the marketing funnel stages and tend to be unaware of their pain points. As a result, they don’t know when the consumers engage with their content. On average, there are up to five different kinds of people concerned in a particular B2B purchase; hence they have to scale their marketing funnel measures to manage each need of the decision-maker.
Transform your marketing funnel content using actionable steps
Many marketers fail to optimize their marketing funnels which may directly or indirectly result in the failure of a campaign. Brands should aim to map out the various kinds of content they have and then match these to every marketing funnel stage.
The most successful marketers map their content according to the stages of their funnel. B2B marketers need to use advertising as a method to leverage and pass this information along. This will prevent marketers from creating a lot of content that doesn’t get mapped. Mapping out different kinds of content to these funnel stages can make it easy to develop relevant resources and move consumers along those areas.
Awareness:
In the awareness stage, marketers need to focus on reports, calculations, quizzes, blogs, infographics, and videos that can inform them about the problems their customers face, This kind of content can be useful in helping you discover the pain points of your consumers and how you can leverage your products to solve their problems at later stages. Instead of informing people about a problem, marketers need to focus on helping them discover if they have a problem that can be solved with your products and services.
Consideration:
The solutions that are offered by your content during the awareness stage are not suited for everyone. This is why marketers need to utilize the consideration stage and clarify the purpose of what they are offering. This content should focus on utilization instead of pressing your customers to make a purchase. Avoid having any sales discussions during this stage, as this may disqualify and expel people from the marketing funnel stages. Marketers need to use interactive trials and demos to help their consumers understand the ways that your solutions can help them.
Decision:
Once the customers reach the decision step, marketers should provide them tailored content that can address their most significant concerns, considering the kind of individuals that are involved. In this stage, marketers need to focus their questions on the customers. Some examples of such questions are:
- Product-specific sheets that can appeal to technical-minded consumers.
- Product webinars to appeal to visually-inclined customers.
- Product comparison guides to appeal to top-level decision-makers.
Utilize new messaging designs in ad platforms
Tailored content for your marketing funnel stages should not simply sit on your website waiting for your customers to find it. It should be out there across various advertising platforms. This content needs to be adjusted to work within every channel. However, marketers could employ the marketing funnel stages as a guide in the process. Use the basic funnel, the awareness, decision, and consideration stages, and do the same thing on different ad platforms and formats.
Marketers could use their funnel framework on ad messaging platforms such as Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and Google Ads, among others. The key is adapting the various content formats to suit the platforms and optimizing the platform being used and matching the appropriate marketing funnel stage.
Conclusion
All marketing funnels will look completely different for each marketer but using this is an excellent way to meet consumers on the platforms that they use to drive revenue. As you keep using this strategy, you will obviously keep modifying it during the testing stages. However, your marketing funnel stages can help you understand where your customers are, what they are looking for, and how you can use your products to help them. A lot of brands often tend to overlook the marketing funnel stages, and this consequently results in missed sales opportunities. To maximize your profits, as a marketer, you need to improve your marketing funnel stages using actionable content.
Started working as a digital marketing expert, Varun Sharma is now also a well-known digital marketing speaker – a speaker on performance development, and a trusted mentor to businesses in the digital world. His keynote expositions are based on the digital marketing theories, which provide a fascinating insight into the secrets of high performance.