Do you sometimes feel your marketing efforts are about as successful as shouting from a mountain, and your voice is not travelling far enough for anyone to hear? Or maybe you’re just dreaming of a vacation because you can’t figure out how to boost your consumer engagement. The way to ease these frustrations is to use an inbound marketing funnel, but let's keep going with the daydream sequence to visualize how that funnel works.
What if, on your vacation, you’ve skipped the mountain and found yourself in a secret passageway with a crowd waiting at the opening? Maybe if you yelled from here, you’d be heard? Yeah, you would! The answer to the question of how to reach a bigger piece of your target audience is to…go on vacation — I mean, adding an inbound marketing funnel to your marketing plans to lead customers straight to your company’s doorstep.
An inbound marketing funnel is a planned path of unique marketing offers that coincide with your leads' needs and preferences. Using a marketing funnel energizes your leads and guides them from discovering your brand to becoming loyal advocates. If this is all brand new to you, you’re in the right place. Let’s break down all the stages (and, later, find out how you can use existing marketing content throughout your funnel).
How to Get Started with Inbound Marketing Funnel Stages
An inbound marketing funnel has multiple stages: Attract (aka Awareness), Convert (aka Consideration), Close (aka Decision), and Delight (just as it sounds). The core of content in all these stages is trust-building, personalized experiences that help your audience solve problems. But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s break down what happens at each of these stages:
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In the attract stage, you draw in potential customers using blogs, social posts, or short videos to gain high-level interest from a broader audience (though still within your ideal consumer range). This is top-of-the-funnel content. (The top of the funnel is the wide bit that can collect lots of new leads.)
You're going to lose some leads as the funnel narrows. And this is a good thing. While the numbers are fewer, the chance that those remaining leads will convert is higher because they’ve shown you that they truly want to be in the funnel.
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The convert stage falls here. Hello, middle-of-the-funnel! This is where you'll up your content game to include longer and more valuable and detailed information to feed the research beast and hone in on how your business can solve their problems. Here’s where whitepapers and e-books (assets that prove you are the one who can solve their problems) can move marketing-qualified leads to sales lead status.
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As leads slide down the funnel to the closing stage, you nurture these marketing contacts toward becoming customers using more personalized communications. Your sales team will play a bigger role here as they connect with high-quality leads and work on sales. Bottom-of-the-funnel content can be an offer like a free demo or one-on-one consultation.
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You could technically say the funnel is complete when the sale is made. However, you’re going to want to keep happy customers happy, satisfied and loyal to your business – not only to increase referral potential but also to encourage repeat buying. This is the delight stage.
Content creation for inbound marketing funnels is time-consuming, though it’s much less difficult when you have a content plan. Now that you understand the stages of the funnel, you can read about actual content creation work here (and here’s a bit about AI because we know you want to know more about it, too, and this content is meant to help you solve your problems. See what we did there?).
How to Use Existing Content to Kickstart a Marketing Funnel
Marketing campaigns that consider the stages of a buyer's journey and how consumers make their buying decisions are more effective when laid out in a funnel approach. And, even if you’ve never used an inbound marketing funnel before, you likely have what you need to get started: all you need is your existing marketing content catalogue. Start with a base of existing materials such as blog posts, web pages, and marketing emails. Then, you can refresh, revise, and classify each piece to be repurposed at the appropriate stops along your consumer’s inbound marketing funnel travels.
The content you already have can be reused or reworked for your new marketing inbound funnel to reach your buyer personas. These are the folks who will actually buy from you: your ideal customer base. Once you know who they are, what motivates them to buy, and how much information they will need to make a buying decision, you can create a marketing funnel. Your buyer personas are not a mystery; you know who needs your product. Fleshing out the characteristics, habits and buying preferences of your known customers gives you the information you need to differentiate buying groups. (You can use the customer activity feed in HubSpot to see this informant for each contact.) Then, you can use this information to build and repurpose relevant content for each group.
You’ve got to show how your business can solve your new lead’s problems. Do you know why they come looking for your product or service and how they come across your business online? If your answers are “no” and “no,” let’s talk about how HubSpot CRM can give you this must-have information for an efficient inbound marketing funnel.
Tips for Better Inbound Marketing Funnels Powered by HubSpot CRM
You’ll need some key elements and tools to get your funnel off the ground and make it successful — to bring in new sales and boost your bottom line.
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Search engine optimization (SEO) consideration is crucial at all funnel stages. Before creating content for your funnel, take the time to do some keyword research to pinpoint market interest so you can add the keywords to your content and direct your ideal consumer base straight to it. Keyword content includes language that describes your product, service, or even location, making it easier for the top-of-the-funnel content to attract new leads.
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Use technology like HubSpot CRM (customer relationship management) to optimize your inbound marketing funnel. With HubSpot CRM’s tools for website design, email marketing campaigns, contact management, and automation capabilities, you can design, create and disseminate funnel content that’s personalized and relevant. Even better, HubSpot CRM ties everything up in a useful analytics bow (using information such as customer activity tracking) so you can track what’s working well for your conversion rates and keep building from your successes.
Now, you’re ready to start an inbound marketing funnel! Remember to follow the preferences of your target audience and create content they’re going to engage with and that ensures the buying decision happens. And once the sale goes through, don't forget about your customers. Your inbound marketing funnel work does not end with a sale. Add your established customers to a new funnel that keeps buyers connected to your business, continues to build trust, and fosters long-term loyalty to your brand.
It’s time to get your team together to build inbound marketing funnels that energize new customer engagement and keep repeat customers interested. Help your salespeople close more deals (and give your company the supercharged sales growth you’re striving for).
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