Companies spend time and money generating as many leads as possible, only to lose them at the bottom of the sales funnel.
To boost conversions of leads that have been in touch with your brand for a while, you need to nurture them.
Nurturing means addressing their common objections and providing content to empower them to make the purchase—that final motivation to help leads convert.
In this article, you will learn four ways to convert leads at the bottom of your sales funnel by addressing their needs and convincing them to make a purchase.
The sales funnel is a metaphor for the stages a potential client goes through before making a purchase. There are many models, but we’ll be discussing the classic sales funnel in this article.
The classic sales funnel has 3 stages:
Most B2B marketing teams focus their efforts on attracting leads at all costs, launching massive social media, email, and display ad campaigns to gather as many prospective customers as possible.
However, it’s just as important to pay attention to the leads at the bottom of the funnel, nurturing them with content and proving the value of your brand—think of the top of the funnel as just the beginning.
The differences between the sales and marketing funnel are debatable since many companies use both terms interchangeably to illustrate the steps of the customer journey.
Even so, a line of thought considers the sales funnel to be more focused on measuring sales readiness, whereas the marketing funnel measures engagement with lead nurturing campaigns. This would be a difference in optics rather than key features that set both terms apart.
Like top of funnel leads, bottom-of-funnel prospects have objections, too. They know about their problems and that your service is a possible solution. But even so, they may not have been entirely convinced in their customer journey.
When it comes to B2B marketing, you need to address the whole buying group. Managers, directors, senior leadership, and individual contributors have different objections that should be addressed in your content.
After all, anyone from the buying committee may interact with your brand and can be a key influencer in the buying process.
Imagine that one of these influencers may showcase your products/services to other members of their team. How do you want that pitch to go? It all depends on how well you nurture that lead to address the common objections of their team.
Here are some questions you can ask yourself:
And even better: you can ask these questions to your bottom-of-funnel leads with a survey to clarify these objections once and for all.
Once you know the objections, you can apply lead nurturing strategies to boost conversion rates.
To find the best content for leads at the bottom of the funnel, firstly, put yourself in their shoes: At this stage, they have already been contacted by your brand multiple times and are fully aware of their challenges and the possible solutions.
Thus, you need to create content to ‘seal the deal’, a final push to convey trust in your offerings over that of competitors. Here are some ideas:
Find more ideas in our Lead Nurturing Playbook for content that works in every stage of the sales funnel to engage your audience. And if you are looking for more inspiration, check out 30 creative content marketing ideas to cut through the noise with your campaigns.
There are many ways you can convert leads at the bottom of the funnel. Below are four that work for many B2B companies, regardless of their industry.
Read the four ways below and test them in your next marketing campaign:
Remarket to your email, social media, or Google leads with valuable content they can download from a landing page.
Example: a software logistics company boosted their conversion rates at the bottom of the funnel by remarketing to leads with a downloadable spreadsheet to calculate logistical costs.
eBooks that teach your leads about your services (as well as address their objections) are another tactic to convert prospective customers who are undecided.
Remember that the content has to be unique and valuable. Don’t make content for content’s sake—inform and educate in a way that will actually nurture your leads and entice them to make a buying decision.
Remarketing means you are getting back in touch with leads that are already knowledgeable about your brand and have been impacted by your campaigns previously. Always keep that in mind when creating content and ads since you don’t want to sound repetitive in your messaging.
This tactic works best for SaaS companies––many offer a free 30-day trial to any leads that have been idle at the bottom of the funnel.
A free trial will give them a chance to test the features of your service and you can even offer a discount at the end of the trial to seal a long-term subscription.
In case your company can’t offer free trials, product demos with a sales representative are also effective. Book a day with your prospective customer for your representative to showcase the service in real-time.
The main benefit of demos is that you can train your sales team to be ready to leverage the demo experience and lead straight into a purchase negotiation.
The first method we mentioned was remarketing with downloadable content—in this case, you’ll be remarketing but with offers to boost conversion rates.
You can create display ads and banners with promotional codes to your bottom-of-funnel leads. A 30% discount might be just the ticket they need to sign a contract.
And yes, this might hurt your bottom line in the short term (depending on the average price point of your products/services), but it’s in the long term that you’ll be seeing increased revenue.
Upselling is another method. In case you have a freemium service, you can offer a discount for an upgrade. Or you can create a limited-time discount for clients that sign up for the premium service instead of the basic version.
Be mindful of your promotional offers, as discounts can decrease the perceived value of your services if they aren’t timely or well-justified. A meeting between stakeholders, sales, and marketing teams is always recommended before going ahead with this tactic.
Events and memorable experiences are a great way to get your leads to understand the value of your brand—and ultimately, seal the deal.
Experiential marketing is a campaign that provides your prospective customers with a unique experience, which can be digital, an in-person event, or even a pop-up downtown.
Docker is a great example, which showcased its brand-new enterprise solution with an interactive video game at a conference. Over 5000 attendees joined in, and the event reached 3.6 million people through organic media.
Another example: Healthymagination is a global initiative by General Electric (GE) to make healthcare more accessible with affordable machinery in undeveloped parts of the world. And to demonstrate the impact of this initiative on over 1.5 billion people, GE organized an event with Hollywood-level movie sets showcasing the equipment in action with doctors. Over 700 people attended, and the event won a Business Marketing Association Tower Award.
According to a study by the Content Marketing Institute, 81% of B2B marketers use in-person events as a tactic. And experiential marketing can liven up a regular conference into a shareable event that your audience will remember.
If you don’t want your lead generation efforts to go to waste, you need to develop specific campaigns for your bottom of funnel leads.
The four ways we mentioned above can be a good choice for your company, but consider the specific demands of your prospective customers when creating content.
Think of the objections your leads may have and the obstacles that are preventing them from converting. If you address both, you’ll see better results in your B2B marketing.