The Art of B2B Marketing – Funneling Your Prospects Towards the Final Conversion

The Art of B2B Marketing – Funneling Your Prospects Towards the Final Conversion

As the impressive trend towards a digital age of marketing continues to expand, pay-per-click (PPC) marketing strategies are an essential tool used in marketing strategies. Click-through marketing is used to generate sales volume, or produce leads that create new consumer outlets. A PPC marketer calculates search queries to prod internet traffic to a landing page.

Now, what happens when the standard focus goes beyond the business to consumer model? This is where marketers begin to focus on a renewable source of traffic. The B2B or business-to-business marketing strategy can be vastly different. The B2B cycle can last nearly 3 months longer than the whimsical business-to-consumer (B2C) phase.

The simple consumer, someone looking for a specific product, can be lured with an immediate call to action. However, there are multiple actions at play in the B2B marketing strategies. One characteristic is the different players that can be involved when focusing on a business as opposed to a specific consumer group.

B2B marketers use a funneling concept. An immediate hard line approach, or hard sell, may turn off a potential business connection. B2B marketers need to begin with a more gentle approach. Instead of posting the benefits of buy-it-now for instance, companies promote their online presence and work towards building a trustworthy reputation.

There are steps to perfect this funneling process. Marketers employ AdWord strategies to engage an audience that has a high probability of being a qualified target. This helps to create the right tone of voice for each ad campaign, as targets are funneled deeper down the process.

The closer a target gets to the end, the more they can be nudged towards the call-to-action phase. The trick is to make sure you get them into the larger, more inclusive top of the funnel. If a prospective target ignores the initial attraction, the rest of the cycle is essentially wasted effort.

The first two areas of concentration need to be branded-keyword objectives. Once the initial goal is accomplished, using an open-ended keyword attraction, the marketer needs to keep the target moving down the funnel. This is accomplished by using branded-keywords. A comparative analysis is one way to trigger them to research your product or service.

The next pair of steps will render data that can be used to focus on the more successful strategy. Using AdWord attribution, it is easy to follow the trail of data. There will be a direct correlation between a certain number of actual clicks and the final conversion rate for closed-won deals.

Following the trail of conversion success, another way to immediately brand your image for the B2B strategy is through video ads. Keep in mind the fickle nature of video viewers and keep the material short. Ads as short as six-seconds can be enough to keep your image branded in the minds of potential targets.

B2B and B2C generally have the same ultimate objective, but they follow dramatically different courses to get there. The cycle is longer, the number of potential players greater, and the need for continued focus greater.

A marketer is going to have to immediately engage and keep that level of engagement consistent as the target funnels their way towards a closed-won final objective. By following the data very closely, B2B marketing strategies can be adjusted to create the perfect campaign. It's all about getting the target through the funnel and ultimately to a closed deal.