The lead funnel – steps, tactics and CTAs

There’s a lot of talk about the differences (and similarities) between B2B and B2C marketing. Some say the tactics differ greatly, others say that in the end you sell to people, so B2B isn’t that different to B2C.

Regardless if you’re camp different or camp similar, both marketing strategies include something known as a lead funnel. This is a visual representation of lead stages, starting from the initial ones, where you get more, less qualified leads to the later ones, where leads get more and more interested about your services or products, but also decrease in numbers (hence, the funnel).

Based on each stage, you have different tactics to engage with your leads, that engage with different types of content and take certain actions, which can be summed up like this:

Let’s take a closer look at each of the 4 stages starting with Awareness and Conversions.

In these stages, someone that hasn’t been in touch with your business visits your website or social media pages (becomes aware of your brand) and then takes an action to give you their contact details (converts from a stranger to a lead), using the tactics and call to actions mentioned below.

Take into account also that the content they will be looking for varies based on the stage they are in. So, a lead that has a first interaction with your brand may be more interested in thought leadership pieces than in sales one. In comparison, a lead in the closing stages will care more about special offers than a letter from your CEO.

Singlegrain wrote an interesting piece about the right content for each stage.

The remaining 2 steps in the lead funnel are meant to get your leads to buy from you (Close) and then become so engaged with your brand that they recommend it to others (Delight), each with their designated call to actions.

This should give you an idea about both the stages that leads go through, but also what your marketing tactics are to engage with them at every step.

Use the funnel as your starting point. As you start to understand the lead flow, how they progress through stages and what information your clients are after, you can improve performance through lead nurturing, something about which we’ve written before.

Plus, if you want to see the lead funnel (but mostly the lead nurturing) in action, you can also check out this case study on lead nurturing.

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About the author:

I am Raluca Apostol, Founder and Account Director at Event Marketing Stars and I have helped generate over 30,000 leads for clients in B2B and B2C, on 3 continents.

I am passionate about events, lead generation and monetisation. If you want to reach out, you can find me on LinkedIn here.