Being a successful modern marketer means understanding the digital funnel.
This visual representation shows the journey your prospects take to become your customers. It helps you to understand your customers’ mindsets and where they are in the buying journey.
Often, companies will focus more on their bottom-of-funnel marketing than on middle-of-the-funnel.
This is a mistake as all three steps in the marketing funnel need equal attention to convert the most leads into customers.
What is Middle-of-Funnel Marketing (MOF)?
The marketing funnel is also known as a sales funnel. It helps you understand the buyer’s journey and the steps a potential customer will take to become your company’s client.
The marketing funnel has three stages:
Top-of-funnel
Lead generation and branding marketing are also known as the awareness stage in the buyer journey.
Middle-of-funnel
Lead nurturing or educational marketing, is the consideration stage in the buyer journey.
Bottom-of-funnel
Lead decision-making is called closing marketing, also known as the decision stage in the buyer’s journey.
In the middle of the funnel, leads who know your brand are more likely to buy your products or services.
This buyer journey stage is when prospects seek more in-depth and detailed information about your brand. Educational content will be crucial in this phase.
It is also essential to assess your prospective customers’ needs and determine if they fit into the customer profile.
You can then pass the lead to your sales team so that they can help the customer move down the funnel to become a client.
Middle-of-Funnel marketing: It’s important
For those new to the marketing funnel concept, there may be better places to invest time than the middle part.
It’s not just about educating leads and qualifying prospects.
No. The intermediate step of the funnel is just as important as the others.
Your leads may lose interest in you and your brand if you don’t have a middle-of-funnel marketing strategy. They might even move to your competitor.
This can make the transition between sales confusing and misaligned.
Middle-of-funnel advertising can be considered this way: While sales teams may say they are looking for more leads, they want better information.
What is Lead Qualifying and Nurturing?
The following steps that you take after generating leads are equally important.
Lead qualification and leads nurturing help you sort through your prospective customers and determine who are interested in your products or services.
Lead qualification
This is the process of analyzing leads and prospects to determine who will be your future customers and gauge their interest in your brand.
Lead nurturing
This is the process of moving leads through a marketing funnel by building a relationship with them and then maintaining this relationship through marketing, messaging, and communication.
Common middle-of-funnel marketing strategies
As we have seen, the middle of the funnel is often overlooked in favor of top-of-funnel tactics that generate leads and bottom-of-funnel techniques that close sales.
This leaves you in an unfortunate position where your leads need to learn more about your brand and are not nurtured.
As you plan your marketing funnel, keep these best practices and middle-of-the-funnel marketing strategies in mind.
Investing in Email Marketing
Email Marketing can be a powerful way to keep your brand at the forefront of your audience’s minds.
You want your emails to come across as spam only if you are careful. But carefully curating them can help lead leads through the marketing funnel.
Avoid pushing for a quick sale. Customers in this buying process have yet to be ready to buy.
Provide product updates, helpful blog posts, or ebook links. Personalize your content to the extent possible to strengthen the relationship.
Create detailed How-to Guides.
Leads interested in your brand’s products or services want to know more before committing to becoming a customer.
Guides, demos, and instruction papers can help you communicate to your customers exactly what they do with your products and services.
This content provides information and education and makes your customers feel comfortable with your brand.
This eliminates any unnecessary frustration or friction your customers may experience while researching your company.
Make communication straightforward.
Make it easy to reach you if customers are in the middle funnel and have questions or concerns.
Your prospects should be free to buy anything to speak to you or receive answers to their queries. Chatbots, quizzes, or FAQ databases are all tools that can help you avoid frustrating your prospects.
You can also improve your relationship with your prospects by making communication easy.
Leads are more likely than not to purchase from a company that offers excellent customer service.
Examine Your CTA Structure
CTAs are not just random links and buttons at the bottom of blog posts and websites.
These valuable tools can help customers understand the following steps and guide them on the path they want to take.
You should develop a CTA structure that has a specific goal in mind.
Look at your CTAs if the leads you get in this middle-of-funnel marketing step aren’t as good as you would like.
Are they logical, and do they lead your leads to a purchase? Do they show customers back to pages they’ve seen before?
Implement Lead Scoring
Lead Scoring helps you improve your efforts to qualify leads.
You can determine a lead’s interest in your brand by giving them a numerical score.
You can assign scores based on a visitor’s or lead’s behavior.
Do they visit high-value pages or leave? They may have filled out a contact form, followed a social media account, or unsubscribed.
Adding a score, you can let your sales team know the most promising leads to follow up with.
Improve internal handoff procedures.
Sales teams play a crucial role in middle-of-the-funnel marketing.
A transparent handoff between marketing and sales will help you to determine when leads are ready to be passed on to the sales team and when they require more time.
Improved communication between marketing and sales creates an improved working environment and can help avoid potential friction and slowdowns between teams.