The most effective channels and content for targeting the B2B Marketing Funnel
B2B online marketing is a fairly complex system, but by knowing how it works and what elements it consists of, we can achieve great success in this segment. How can I effectively reach decision-makers in the B2B sector online? What advertising channels and tools are worth using to find our prospective partner with the right content and ads at the right time? Most players in this market have already asked themselves these questions or are already applying the knowledge they have acquired to achieve their goals.
For a more comprehensive knowledge and easier understanding of the topic, it is worth reading our previous articles of the customer journey and the sales funnel.
What’s the difference between the sales funnel of the B2C (business-to-consumer) and B2B (business-to-business) market?
Before exploring the stages of the B2B sales channel, it is important to understand the difference between the B2B and B2C markets and what to look for accordingly. With the growth of the digital world, users have more and more opportunities to gather as much information as possible before making a purchase decision. In the consumer market, it depends on the value of the product or service, but consumers usually make a decision relatively quickly. The B2B market is more complicated because the participants i.e. B2B customers do thorough research – in many cases not in one person – before concluding a deal on behalf of their company. There are three major differences:
- Motivation
- Purchaser
- Decision-Making Process
Motivation
The motivation behind a B2C (consumer) and a B2B (organizational) customer is completely different. The main motivation of B2B buyers is to find a solution to their own, or possibly their family’s or friends’ problem. As opposed to this, B2B buyers are looking for solutions that can improve their organization’s performance, thus achieving their goals.
Purchaser
B2C purchase decisions are often influenced by emotions, so most decisions are highly subjective. The final decision can be influenced by family members, friends, influencers, or personal research based on the consumer’s own criteria.
Buyers in the B2B market do not make decisions individually. Often it is the result of the work of a team, and the potential choices need to be presented to the leader of the organization so that the leader can make the final decision. It usually takes a relatively long time to reach the final decision.
Decision-Making Process
The B2C decision-making process is quite rapid, often influenced by emotional and/or impulse based decisions. Take the simplest example of a mobile phone purchase. If our phone breaks down or we lose it, we immediately start searching online and select the model we like relatively quickly so that we can make up for it as soon as possible. Or based on an emotional decision, we stay loyal to the brand we love even if we can’t afford it.
In contrast, the decision-making process in the B2B market is relatively long, it can take several months for the issue to reach the decision-maker. The decision maker is often the head of the company or a key member of a particular department. B2B market participants begin to evaluate the market and select potential partners based on their company preferences.
Stages of the B2B Marketing Funnel
In our article on the stages on a B2B sales funnel, we discussed that a typical B2B funnel can be divided into three main parts, which can be supplemented by a fourth section, the customer management section.The different stages of a B2B marketing funnel illustrate how customers, from getting to know a particular company get to the point of making a deal and then becoming a loyal customer.
Based on this the B2B funnel can be divided into 3 parts:
- Top of funnel – TOFU – Awareness
- Middle of funnel – MOFU – Engagement
- Bottom of funnel – BOFU – Conversion
Targeting and purpose of each stage of the B2B funnel
Awareness
In the stage of the Awareness, the customer becomes aware of a problem for which they’ll need to find a solution. Users are unlikely to know our company at this stage, so it is our job to get them to our website where they can gather information.
In order to support the collection of information, our job is to deliver relevant messages to users, encouraging them to perform user actions (micro conversions).
It is important to mention that all online channels used in the information gathering phase should convey messages that are consistent with the user actions you want to encourage.
E.g. “Learn more”, “More information”
Online marketing channels and opportunities in the Awareness phase
- SEO – search engine optimization solutions
One of the best solutions in the first phase is to create an SEO-optimized blog that aims to get the readers to know us and to start educating them. The driving force behind the educational content is to answer frequently asked user questions about their potential problems that our company can solve.
In this phase, as in all others, our website is of great importance, as it is the “showcase”. The structure of the website should be well thought through and its presentation should be articulated, making it easy to see through. We shouldn’t get lost in the details right on the main page, but rather present ourselves, our product or service, and our unique product advantages in a logical order, with keywords in the entire content.These are just a few of the important aspects, unfortunately it would be rather difficult to explain every angle in a single article.
- Paid ads
During the Awareness phase, the role of PPC (pay-per-click) is to drive traffic to our website, to attract interest among our target group(s) and to start building audience lists that will be useful to us in the future.
Audience lists can be website visitors, visitors of specific subpages – or even who have met a predetermined condition (e.g. scrolled down 50% of the page; spent more than 2 minutes on the website; viewed 3 subpages, etc.).
In Google Ads, you may want to advertise in your search campaigns on general keywords that are relevant to our audience. Keep in mind that sometimes less is more!
Display and YouTube campaigns also play an important role. In the first phase of a B2B sales funnel, it is extremely important to keep in mind the visual display of out brand, as it is not certain that the potential target group knows us, so they don’t know exactly what product or service we can provide a solution with. In addition to the display and YouTube network’s excellent ability to increase awareness, their cost is much lower than that of the search network, and the targeting options are now almost inexhaustible.
Google Ads is constantly evolving, so in this article we won’t be able to cover all the targeting options, but the Discovery and Performance max campaigns are worth mentioning, because they will no doubt play an increasing role in the near future.
If we’d like to broaden our opportunities, we have the ability to run traffic campaigns on Facebook and LinkedIn, which are slightly different from Google according to their targeting options. Obviously, Linkedin is a business-like platform, but fewer people know that B2B audiences can be reached on Facebook as well, so if you have the budget for it, it’s worth a try. On the other hand, it’s important to know that you have to meet strict requirements if you’d like to advertise on LinkedIn, because it’s much more expensive than advertising on Facebook.
- Organic Social Media Activities
Organic social media activities include unpaid posts uploaded to our Facebook page. It’s worth taking the time and energy to be active on our Facebook page. Just think about how uninviting it is when a user navigates from our paid ad to our company’s FB page and comes across an almost blank page.
Engagement
In the stage of Engagement the greatest emphasis is on education. While in the Awareness phase the potential target group did not yet know our company, they didn’t know what solutions we can provide, in the Engagement phase they get to the level of knowing us, they know what we are doing and they are also aware of why we are worth being chosen. The biggest challenge at this stage is to get some kind of commitment from potential customers.Our most important task is to get them to do some kind of action, so we can learn more about them. E.g. the name, e-mail address or telephone number of the potential customer, possibly the name and scope of activity of the company, without them asking for a quotation.
Why is this important? The answer is simple.The more information we have about potential customers, the more relevant content we can produce for them, helping them choose us. Also, if they’ve already completed a conversion or micro goal, you can create more personalized messages by creating new, even more personalized audience lists. Nowadays Google, Facebook, and other systems are based on artificial intelligence. Based on this, if we have data about our customers, we can also create so-called lookalike audiences, which the system uses to try to find users who behave very similarly to our potential customers.
What can be the steps of helping the customers engage?
For example, a registration, or even a PDF download (price list, catalog, brochure, demo subscription, etc.)
Online Marketing Channels and Opportunities in the Engagement Stage
- SEO
As written above, a professional blog can be a good solution in the Awareness stage, so it makes sense to write additional blog articles in the Engagement stage, along with collecting newsletter subscribers. If we have the capacity to do so, we can write case studies that are available for free. All users have to do is enter a few personal details (name, company name, email address, possibly phone number) on a registration form and then download the case study.
It is very important to recognize that it’s not the most expedient if we just want to sell with our communication. However, we do not have to completely withdraw from writing more sales-type articles in which we specifically present our product or service. The article should be authentic and by no means exaggerated. Unfortunately, we are not the only ones on the market, probably not even the best, but we can state what our strengths are.
- Paid ads
For paid ads, we can use the same channels, but we need to put a lot more emphasis on retargeting.
Using Google Ads, Display remarketing and possibly YouTube remarketing ads would play an important role. In the latter case, we should use a creative that is no longer aimed at cold targeting. We should optimize your campaigns for micro conversions the system can optimize for, e.g. PDF downloads, registrations, etc.
Use the audience lists created in the Awareness phase so we’ll be able to reach users who have visited and shown interest in our website.
It is primarily worth using lead generating campaigns on facebook. As with Google Ads campaigns, it’s a good idea to optimize your Facebook campaigns for relevant conversion types so that the system shows your ads to the most relevant audience.
Conversion
This is the bottom section of the classic B2B sales funnel (Bottom of funnel – BOFU). At this point when the user reaches this stage our goal is to get the final conversion done. Based on our marketing activities in the previous phases, we give the final push to “finally” engage our prospective customers or partners. Try to encourage users to take direct action, such as submitting a request for quotation or booking a free trial, so that they can put into practice the solution we offer.
Now remarketing plays an even more important role, in order to get ahead of our competitors and especially get into the reach of qualified potential customers who initially showed interest, commitment but have not yet contacted us.
Source: 1_zoOrhc0Se-xrqbeH8zb82Q.jpeg – https://medium.com/@er_17361/bottom-up-the-next-wave-in-b2b-software-67e99a153142
In this phase, we can use the user data collected in the previous two sections for choosing channels and targeting and we can also use the audience lists we’ve collected in the past, such as the list of those who have already viewed a particular page, content, blog, or participated in a free webinar. This allows us to run targeted Google Ads Search, Display, or YouTube campaigns to reach users who are actively searching for keywords with a purchase intent, and to take advantage of the various channels available for our remarketing activities. On the Google Display Network and YouTube we may also show our ads to users who have some level of commitment to us.
Online Marketing Channels and Opportunities in the Conversion Stage
- SEO
SEO now has less of a role to play here than in previous stages. It’s especially worth trying to use keywords that suggest buying intent or refer to our brand.At this stage, users are already “conscious”, they have an idea of which solution to look for, so we try to meet this need from an SEO point of view as well.
The phase of decision making should focus on content that helps the consumer choose the right solution, therefore, seller reviews, product comparisons, and product guides can be useful tools.
The best keywords in this section are ‘reviews,’ ‘pros and cons,’ ‘comparison,’ and ‘review.’ “Free trial” and “test” are also terms worth considering.
- Paid ads
At this stage of the process, the focus of paid advertising is on remarketing.For Google Ads search ads, it’s best to use and specifically target the keywords listed above that express your intent to sell, and use remarketing lists as well. Remarketing also plays a key role in targeting display ads. With display campaigns we can easily re-target our audiences, gathered according to the right criteria. The so-called “Customer match” campaigns are also expedient,where we can already use the data provided by our potential customer (e.g. email addresses) to target our ads.
It won’t be a surprise that using remarketing on Facebook and LinkedIn are also effective. Utilise the traffic built up in the previous sections and re-target those who have already visited our website. To a lesser extent we can also use similar audiences. We may also create form extensions for our ads to allow users to submit a form directly from the ad. Its disadvantage is that the received data has to be downloaded and processed manually.
Marketing tools such as email lists, CRM data, free case studies, and audits can be also useful to us at this stage.
Source: what-is-tofu-mofu-bofu.jpg – https://terakeet.com/blog/tofu-mofu-bofu/
Summary
In this article, we have analyzed the stages of the B2B sales funnel, as well as the most appropriate marketing channels and targeting for each stage. We can see that each part of this funnel requires a different approach, but the process as a whole is made up of sections that build on each other and have a strong impact. How effectively we achieve the desired marketing goal depends on us, but it mostly depends on our knowledge of the funnel and its mechanisms.
If you need professional support for your digital marketing activities, do not hesitate to contact us!
Sources used:
https://www.business2community.com/b2b-marketing/how-to-build-a-b2b-marketing-funnel-02428922
https://medium.com/@er_17361/bottom-up-the-next-wave-in-b2b-software-67e99a153142
https://terakeet.com/blog/tofu-mofu-bofu/
https://filtpod.com/the-conversion-journey-tofu-mofu-bofu/
https://seopressor.com/blog/marketing-funnel-stages-explained-with-seo-strategies/