The sales funnel is a tool that will help you better understand your customer journeys – or decision making process.

Your customers will be at different stages when it comes to buying your products. Some of them will only just have become aware of your existence whilst doing their research into possible solutions. Whereas others may have selected your company and are now negotiating on price or product specifics.

The 5 stages of the marketing funnel

1. Discovery Stage

2. Realisation of Needs Stage

3. Consideration Stage

4. Decision Stage

5. Retention Stage

Marketing has a duty to support sales at whatever buying stage a prospective new customer has reached by giving them content and information that is pertinent to them. And that means creating content for each different persona and stage in the sales funnel.

The content plan on the following pages shows a traditional sales funnel – but every company should create their own.

1. Discovery Stage

At this stage the prospect is lost and looking for direction or inspiration. Did you know that 80% of purchases start with an online search? If your potential clients can’t find you at this point, they’ll find your competitors instead. Create optimised content, which engages your audience leaving them yearning to find out more.

Examples of ‘find-it’ stage content:

• Engaging blog posts

• Top 10 tips/advice guides

• Infographics/videos

• Issue-based editorial

This is where great SEO can help drive enquiries. Find out more about our B2B SEO agency here. 

2. Realisation of Needs Stage

By this point the prospect has found you and consumed several pieces of ‘engagement’ content. They like your style, they have a feel for your company and they are beginning to develop an interest and trust in your opinions. They want to gain a deeper understanding of what it is you’re all about.

You should embed signposts via links from all ‘engagement’ content to deeper level material, designed to put more meat on the bones and generate greater buy-in. Deeper level content includes market reports, buyers’ guides or sector research, that requires an email sign up or data exchange to download or unlock the content. At this point the prospect will be sufficiently engaged to provide you with an email address, name and potentially other information about themselves, such as business sector or job title in order to receive the download content. You will need to build data capture landing pages to simplify this process, leading to the development of an ‘opted-in’ lead nurture database.

Typical ‘realisation of needs’ stage content:

• Exclusive industry research

• Whitepapers

• Buyers’ Guides

• Podcasts or vodcasts

• Webinars

Read the next Article

Stages 3-5 of the sales funnel  →