The fourth of five blogs tying into Bython’s series of marketing whitepapers.
If you set out on a cross-country trip from California to New York, would you normally spend all your budget and planning time only on the first part of your drive and then just sit back and hope the rest goes well?
Of course not.
You’d be focused on every leg of the journey making sure you had enough gas, food, directions, and anything else you and your vehicle need to reach your destination successfully.
It’s the same with marketing.
Effective strategies don’t rely on single campaigns and crossed fingers to get people to buy products. In order to help ensure leads traverse the long road from first contact to signing a contract, marketing will team up with sales to plan and spread their promotional budgets, attention, and creativity through every step of the marketing/sales funnel.
This is called full-funnel demand generation.
A marketing/sales funnel is the layered process of converting general prospects into paying customers. The funnel varies, but it’s usually comprised of six stages: Awareness, Interest, Consideration, Intent, Evaluation, and Purchase. (For more details, see our previous blog entry.)
Demand Generation, just as it sounds, is a tightly-organized operation designed to constantly generate demand for your products and brand through various data-driven campaigns. Full-funnel demand generation is achieved by marketers synchronizing efforts with sales teams to make sure potential customers get all the information they need to nurture them from the Awareness to the Purchase stage of the funnel.
And working side-by-side with sales to do it is critical. If done right, this will create a unified process through every part of the buyer’s journey that will not only offer more intelligent lead generation efforts, it will also help you classify and track each level of qualified leads:
- Inquiry— Responded to your marketing but doesn’t meet minimum qualifications to be considered a valid lead.
- Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)— Expressed enough interest in your product that they are worth sending to your sales team.
- Highly Qualified Lead (HQL)— Assessed by a member of your sales team and displays behavior that they are willing and able to buy.
- Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)— Ready to buy your product and hopefully become a loyal customer.
Plus, it will provide marketers with the ability to provide quantifiable ROI for every campaign; something that isn’t always easy.
Research has proven that the full-funnel approach to engagement is the most effective, and for good reason. To learn more, go to our whitepaper page and download our paper “How to Gain Measurable Results with Full-Funnel Demand Generation.”
To find out how Bython can help you engage B2B customers and create a demand for your products, contact us today.
