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sales-funnel

What are Low Funnel Leads?

If there’s one thing every great marketer needs to know, it’s what the customer journey looks like with your particular product or service. Marketers need to understand the path in which their prospects take when engaging with your brand – from their first interaction to their purchase and beyond. Knowing this will improve your marketing processes across the board. Ultimately, it’ll boost efficiency, attract true-intent prospects, and generate revenue.

What is the Marketing and Sales Funnel?

Most marketers and sales professionals refer to the customer journey as the marketing and sales funnel.The funnel maps out a prospect’s entire path to conversion. This ranges from the moment they become aware of your brand, to the point at which they ultimately buy from you. 

AIDA Model - Explanation, Examples, & Variants | Feedough

There’s many steps that go into this process, and your marketing has everything to do with it. Great marketing strategy and execution can push prospects down the funnel more quickly and help you earn more revenue. On the other hand, losing sight of the funnel can cause you to quickly lose your prospects’ attention and miss out on opportunities to close sales.

The AIDA marketing model

The marketing and sales funnel shows several stages of the prospect’s journey as they engage with your brand. At a given time, you will likely have all sorts of prospects in your funnel, who are in very different stages of engagement. Some may have just become aware of your brand and what you offer – but may or may not intend to buy. Others may need to make a purchase quickly, and know your brand has what they need.

The AIDA Model | Smart Insights

One way to help you keep your eye on the prize – or low funnel leads – is to know the” AIDA” marketing model. The AIDA model represents 4 stages of the sales funnel –

  • Awareness
  • Interest
  • Desire
  • Action

To generate low funnel leads, you will want to hone in on stages 3 and 4 in the “AIDA model” – desire and action. In other words, you want your prospects to have a genuine desire to do business with your brand and are likely to soon take an action.

Keep in mind that as a marketer, it’s good to attract all kinds of leads. Generating awareness and interest in your brand is important too! However, leads with intent will be more lucrative to your company at the end of the day.

What are Low Funnel Leads?

What marketing or sales professional doesn’t want to shorten the sales cycle, and get their prospects to buy quicker? Shortening the sales cycle is a top priority for many sales teams. It can help your team manage more leads, close more sales, save time and resources, and much more. Targeting low-funnel leads is one way that can help you achieve this.

Low-funnel leads (aka“bottom of funnel leads” and “sales-qualified leads”) are further down in your sales funnel compared to “shoppers“. They have a more serious intent to buy, and are actively seeking more information from your company to make an educated purchase. Additionally, they should be “sales-ready,” or ready to talk to a sales representative about purchasing options.

Low-funnel leads can be either branded or non-branded prospects:

  • Branded: The prospect has heard about your brand and its product/service. They are actively seeking to engage with you about making a purchase.
  • Non-branded: The prospect may not have heard about your brand before. Nevertheless, they are searching for your product/service, and will likely benefit from talking with you.

Whether or not a prospect has heard about your brand before, they can still qualify as a low-funnel, sales-qualified lead.

Many sales professionals get frustrated with “window shoppers,” or leads that are unlikely to convert into a sale. If you work low-funnel marketing strategies into your marketing goals, you’re setting your team up to work with serious buyers with true intent to buy. These types of leads should be well-worth your time.

Which Marketing Strategies Attract Low-Funnel Leads?

Luckily, there are specific strategies that marketers can use to acquire low-funnel customers. It can be as simple as understanding current buying trends, targeting certain marketing channels and providing valuable assets that cater to true-intent prospects. Here are some marketing channels that tend to attract lower funnel leads:

Email marketing 

Developing an email marketing strategy and using it consistently can be a great source for acquiring low funnel leads. Emails allow you to create customized messages targeted towards prospects who have intent to buy. For instance, you can create email templates that ask specific questions about a prospect’s pain points and needs. Then, you can add a call to action, such as a response or prompt to fill out a quote form. If the prospect follows through, you know your product/service’s offering has resonated with them. Therefore, they are likely a sales-ready candidate.

Telemarketing 

While some consider telemarketing to be an outdated form of marketing, it can be a useful strategy in attracting low funnel leads. This is because telemarketing allows you as the marketer to get a prospect on the phone and ask them questions for yourself. Did they respond to what you have to offer with interest and agree to take the next steps? If so, it tells you that they are seriously considering doing business with you and are ready to talk to a sales agent. If they are not interested, you can rule them out as a low funnel prospect – and save yourself the time and effort in nurturing them!

Paid search

Paid search (aka “PPC”) campaigns are a great way to target low funnel leads. When a prospect is looking to buy quickly, they often turn to search engines like Google to find what they need. To draw these sales-ready prospects into your funnel, you can put up paid search ads that will appear when the prospect types in certain keywords. The best way to make sure your ad reaches as many low funnel prospects as possible is to bid on a non-branded keyword. Your ad will appear when the prospect types in a phrase such as “commercial copier.” When they click on the ad, they will visit your page and learn about your product.

SEO

To be clear, SEO can be an effective strategy for all stages of the marketing and sales funnel. But there are ways you can use SEO to target primarily low funnel leads. Similar to paid search, you can use popular non-branded keywords in your blog posts, articles, and website content that are likely to rank on a search engine. SEO is a strategy that takes a bit longer than methods like paid search to attract leads. However, once your content begins to rank, you’re in it for the long haul! Meaning – if you properly utilize keywords and create great “call-to-action” buttons within your content, you can continue to acquire low funnel leads from the same piece of content for a long time.

Social media ads

These days, social media platforms are making it easier than ever to grab low funnel leads. For instance, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram all have sponsored and paid ad features. Many of these platforms also now have their own easy-to-use, built-in tools such as lead gen forms, retargeting methods, and more. Post a paid ad on one of these platforms, and set the parameters for the types of leads you are looking for. If you see conversions, you can confidently say these leads are interested in buying from you.

What is the Best Manage Lead Management Strategy?

Once you have brought in low-funnel leads, there are many ways you and your team can effectively engage with them:

1. Speed to Lead

Once your marketing team has attracted low-funnel leads, you want to make sure your sales team calls them as quickly as possible. This method, known as “speed to lead,” can increase your conversion rates significantly, shorten your sales cycle, and result in revenue for your company. Here’s everything you need to know about “speed to lead.”

2. Log Every Lead into your CRM

Does your sales team use a CRM to manage their low funnel leads? If you are not staying organized by tracking your sales funnel, you are likely missing out on tons of sales opportunities. Additionally, using a CRM can give you real time data about the effectiveness of your sales and marketing processes. This can help you improve your strategies down the road and continue to bring in valuable leads. Learn more about how using a CRM can benefit your marketing and sales efforts.

Why Attracting Low-Funnel Leads Pays Off

There are tons of reasons to invest in marketing strategies catered towards low funnel leads. Doing so can result in a slew of benefits. Here’s just a few of many:

Save time, money, and resources

Marketing and sales is time-consuming, not to mention expensive! For marketers, it can require a huge budget and tons of hours to create marketing assets for every stage of the funnel. For sales professionals, speaking to every lead (especially ones with little intent to buy) and providing them with custom quotes can feel like a huge drain on time and resources. If you develop your marketing strategy to hone in on sales-ready leads, you are saving both sales and marketing teams time, money, and resources.

Have more valuable conversations

It can be frustrating spending your valuable time on prospects with little intent to buy. Using low funnel marketing strategies makes it more likely that you will be feeding your sales team with valuable leads. As a result, your sales team will be spending their time on prospects that are more likely to result in a purchase.

Improve close rates

Today, we are inundated with “shoppers” and prospects have more choices at their disposal than ever. Spending too much time marketing to upper funnel prospects can result in low conversion rates and low close rates. However, spending your time speaking to low funnel prospects will improve your close rates and boost your bottom line revenue overall.

Increase your bottom line

At the end of the day – this is the goal! We want to be successful and bring in revenue. Low funnel marketing strategies let you cut to the chase. You will be trimming down your marketing efforts to focus on the leads that really matter. Ultimately, you will be more certain that your marketing efforts will turn into value and hopefully, incremental revenue.

Are you a B2B SUPPLIER? 360Connect is a premier low funnel lead generation source for over 13 years. We simplify your marketing strategy and deliver valuable, sales-ready leads to your inbox regularly. Want to find out what opportunities we have for you and your team? Let’s talk!

Are you a MARKETING pro? 360Connect is always looking for quality marketers to join our affiliate team. Launch low funnel marketing strategies, easily send the leads to 360Connect, and earn quick revenue. Get in touch with us to talk more.

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