How to Build Your B2B Marketing Funnel In 2024

The B2B marketing funnel is talked about all the time. It's one of the best-known phrases in marketing – but does that mean everyone knows what it is, or how to build one? 

It's not just marketing jargon.The B2B marketing funnel is extremely useful for understanding your prospects as individuals, and targeting your lead generation and content marketing to maximize conversions.

Here's our guide to the B2B marketing funnel, including: 

• How the B2B marketing funnel works. 
• What is top of funnel, middle of funnel and bottom of funnel in marketing.
• Why the marketing funnel is important. 

What Is the B2B Marketing Funnel? 

The B2B marketing funnel is the process by which prospects become leads for your business, and are then nurtured into customers. 

If we visualize it literally, you'll first catch a higher volume of new leads at the top of the funnel. The best ones – the leads who are a good fit for our business and/or have a need for your solution – swirl down towards the bottom over a period of time.

As the funnel narrows, you'll target your leads with different types of content to engage them with your brand, messaging, and finally, your products and services. 

That means that at each stage of the marketing funnel, the type of content and messaging the leads are most likely to respond to changes. So knowing what stage of the funnel each lead is in helps you target your email lead nurturing strategy and other communications much more effectively. 

Variations of the B2B Marketing Funnel 

There are some variations on the marketing funnel.

For example, the AAARRR funnel, affectionately known as the 'Pirate Funnel' (say 'AAARRR' out loud and you'll understand why!) is used by growth marketers and adds an extra stage at the bottom for customer referrals.

Some marketers also include the terms acquisition and activation in their B2B marketing funnel.

Some businesses talk about the sales funnel rather than the marketing funnel, but this is more or less the same thing with the same stages. 

And don't confuse it with the sales pipeline. Generally, the marketing funnel focuses on the journey your lead follows towards a purchase, while the sales pipeline is used by the sales team to track their own actions, including contact, proposal, closing and follow-up – more on sales funnels in this article from Lusha. 

How to Do Top of Funnel Marketing 

As we've explored, the top of funnel marketing stage is for high-volume lead generation and demand generation. 

Marketing top of funnel is largely about brand awareness: putting your business's messaging in front of as many relevant people as possible. 

Demand generation strategies, including ungated content marketing and display advertising, are great for this. With top of funnel demand generation you can also publish blog content and your brand's messaging on social media to be seen by a wide audience. The downside is that, without a form of lead capture, such as a content download form, you won't know who these leads are. 

Even better for TOFU marketing is to invest in B2B lead generation campaigns.

Content syndication lead generation, for example, is a cost-effective and measurable way of getting a lot of valuable named leads in a short timeframe. 

(More info on the differences between lead generation and demand generation in this blog!) 

A study by Semrush found that the five most effective types of top-of-funnel content are: 

• How-to guides 
• Landing pages 
• Infographics 
• Checklists 
• eBooks

How-to guides and eBooks lend themselves really well to being gated for content syndication and other lead capture methods, while checklists and infographics are great content for demand generation. 

And it's not just about content marketing. Face-to-face events such as trade shows are fantastic for TOFU lead generation. 

The Best Strategies for Middle of Funnel Marketing 

The middle of the funnel is where things get more focused. These are the interest and consideration phases, when leads start to identify how your product or service can help them solve a problem. 

This is where you want to nurture leads towards an eventual purchase.

The key is to find out more about each lead. Whether that's by asking them directly through profiling questions, or through using intent data, you'll want to gain a better understanding of your prospects' needs. This will help you ensure they are seeing relevant content that presents your brand as a suitable solution to their problems.

These are our favorite middle of funnel marketing strategies: 

Nurture Track Lead Generation

Nurture track lead generation involves educating your leads on your products and services as part of your lead generation campaign.

At Headley Media, this means when we send your leads to you they have already seen at least two pieces of your content and explicitly consented to hear from you. 

Audience Intelligence Enhancements

The best way to find out what people want is to ask them directly.

With an audience intelligence enhancement on your lead generation campaign, you can add more questions to your content download form – such as size of the prospect's business, or whether they are using a particular type of software. 

Intent Data Targeting 

We love intent data – there is so much (privacy law-compliant!) information about your leads online, if you know where to find it.

At Headley Media our intent data targeting involves collecting information on the content viewed by each of our readers, so we can progressively profile their behavior and feed these insights back to our clients. 

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) 

Account based marketing (ABM) is all about choosing the businesses you want as clients, and then targeting them in a hyper-personalized way.

ABM works at all stages of the marketing funnel, but is especially effective in the interest and consideration stages when you can decide exactly what content and messaging will appeal to a particular lead. 

Optimizing Your Bottom of the Funnel Marketing 

At the bottom of the funnel is where you get sales-ready leads. 

BOFU opportunities are much harder to buy. You have to create them yourself by nurturing your leads through the upper parts of the funnel. 

However, there are some good strategies you can use for marketing during the purchase and retention stages, which include: 

• Retargeting ads 
• Personalized offers 
• Free trials 
• Customer success stories 
• Urgency and scarcity. 

(More great bottom of funnel ideas in this article from MailChimp).  

 Why Is the Funnel Important in B2B Technology Marketing? 

Modern B2B technology buying is done increasingly by committee, and buying committees are growing: up to 25 individuals might be involved with one purchase. 

These individuals are doing most of their research online. So being able to track each lead's journey through the marketing funnel, and pull them further down via relevant marketing, is a major bonus for technology companies. 

The B2B marketing funnel works best if you follow each lead through it, and know what stage they're at all along their journey. Lead scoring is so important here. You can use a spreadsheet to keep assign numerical values to every interaction a lead has with your brand, such as: 

• When they like a social media post 
• When they visit certain website pages 
• When they read a blog. 

This score lets you see how warm your leads are and allows you to segment them accordingly, so you can target warmer leads with more brand-focused content as part of your MOFU marketing. 

We love this free lead scoring template from HubSpot. 

Want to start building your B2B marketing funnel and filling it with leads? Read our Ultimate Guide to Lead Generation or our ungated eBook on how to enhance your lead generation using the buyer’s journey!