Marketing tells your love story – about who you are.
It helps you get noticed – for all the right reasons.
And it helps you get picked out of the crowd!
An effective marketing team or marketing agency uses a combination of long-term and short-term content strategies (called a marketing funnel) to help drive marketing leads and nurture those leads.
Most B2B marketing teams tend to highlight the first part of the marketing funnel (i.e. lead-generation). You can see B2B content-creators (communications specialists, graphic designers, etc) focused on generating awareness and interest through content marketing, whitepapers, blogs, and social media. In other words, they spend a huge effort in getting the word out there.
(Many B2B companies try to build a strong brand presence, first, as part of their awareness strategy. Who, for instance, doesn’t know Coca-cola? That’s the power of strong brand. All of Coca-cola’s marketing efforts fit within that larger brand story.)
The latter part of the funnel (evaluation and commitment) is turned towards nurturing leads. Capturing leads, sometimes by sharing high-value case-studies, is one way that marketers help contribute to the bottom-line.
So why is it called a funnel? Let’s say 100 people visit your company’s website or social media (awareness). Of those, half may follow you on social media or sign up for a newsletter (interest). And during the evaluation stage, 15 may stay actively engaged. And during the final stage (sale), 2 decide to purchase.
Now you can understand why capturing interest and attention in the awareness and interest phases is so important for business! And B2B buyers typically spend 90 percent of their buyer’s journey researching products and services before they decide to purchase. The internet has changed this game even more: Gartner research found that 83% of surveyed customers accessed digital channels even in the late purchasing stages.
Ready to ramp up your B2B marketing content? @Leokadiacreative, we partner with our clients to create compelling stories filled with juicy technical details designed to help promote your organization and sell your services and products.
Leokadia Rucinski 