By some accounts, there are more than 23 different types of B2B marketing campaigns, each of them optimized for a particular part of the sales funnel. 13 of these are “top of the funnel,” 6 are “middle of the funnel” and 4 are “bottom of the funnel.”
That seems to be making things overly complex. 23, after all, is the same number of split personalities as the lead character in the Hollywood thriller-horror film “Split” by M. Night Shyamalan (who also gave us “The Sixth Sense” and “Unbreakable.”) Unless you want your B2B marketing campaign to have numerous split personalities, it’s best to focus on creating one single type of campaign for each stage of the funnel.
For example, at the top of the funnel, you’d want a strategy that would help to attract prospects to your website and get them to give you their contact information.
At the middle of the funnel, you’d want a strategy to engage and nurture customers. They may be interested in your products, but are not yet ready for the next step – such as a sales demo. So you have to give them additional educational content as part of the nurturing process. Maybe a nice e-book or whitepaper can help to move them through the funnel.
And, at the end of the funnel, you need a strategy that helps to close the deal. This might be a live sales demo, a final ROI calculator to convince people to sign off on the deal, or a case study that’s been customized for a specific industry or sector. Having a high level of detail and tailoring can make all the difference, as it might transform a concept that once seemed abstract into something with very clear real-world impact.
But there’s another factor to keep in mind – and that’s gravity. (Imagine a sales funnel being turned upside down) The conventional sales funnel assumes that once you pour in a few leads, they’ll eventually drip out at the bottom. That’s gravity doing the work. But what about all the leads that never drip out? They don’t really disappear, but they don’t clog up your funnel, either. They’re stuck in a kind of funnel limbo – these leads may be worth pursuing, as long as it’s not too time consuming.
That’s why you’ll need a fourth type of marketing campaign that’s designed to tease out the best of these potential leads. The name of such a campaign – the “drip campaign” – is perfect. It perfectly connotes what you are trying to do – you are literally hoping that just a few people out of a hundred (or several hundred) will drip out of the end of the sales funnel. One classic drip campaign involves an email campaign designed to re-engage customers who might have purchased from you in the past, or who almost bought from you but then abandoned their metaphorical shopping cart.
In the real world, it would be almost as if you took that sales funnel and gave it a nice, vigorous shake. And then, presto! A number of leads would drip out.
Thus, you may not need the full arsenal of 23 different B2B marketing campaigns, but it is worth keeping in mind how different types of strategies can be used to target specific parts of the sales funnel. Doing so will help you transform as many leads as possible into sales.
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.