From target audience to buyer: My marketing funnel tactics to reach and convert SaaS users

Defining your marketing funnel helps all team members communicate effectively.

I’m a big believer in simple frameworks that empower teams to self-organize, set clearly documented expectations, and enable cross-functional collaboration and communication.

This piece briefly covers my marketing funnel definitions across the buyer journey (read this complementary piece to learn more about that). The main point of this piece is to share the details on how I turn those funnel stage definitions into experiences that drive profitable customer activity.

Targets

A target is an audience member who hasn’t visited our website yet.

Tactics to reach targets could include:

• Organic social media: Videos, reels, stories, posts, etc.
• Organic search engine optimization: Content marketing, blogging, interactive tools, product pages, programmatic SEO (alternatives, comparisons), etc.
• Paid ads: Social media, search engine marketing, display, magazines, print, etc.
• Public relations and press: Press releases, media quotes, brand and buzz, etc.
• Guesting partnerships with other businesses: Blog posts, podcasts, webinars, research reports, etc.
• Conferences and events: Trade show booths, speaking gigs, socials, Meetups, etc.
• Affiliate programs: Affiliates may introduce your products to their network of targets.
• Influencer programs: Influencers, like affiliates, may share your brand and solutions with their network of targets.
• Sponsorships and sponsored content: Sponsorships are typical anytime you hear the terms “brought to you by”, “made possible by”, and related jargon — podcasts, blog posts, articles, news, emails, etc.
• Product-led growth: Empower your software users to refer people like themselves to your solution — review programs, referral programs, gamification, etc.

Suspects

A suspect is a website visitor who has an ideal use case for your product.

Suspects are a great opportunity for marketing and sales.

Dynamic website experiences

Based on content suspects view, you may dynamically change website popups, hello bars, bottom banners, full-screen takeovers, and more.

For example, if someone views a blog post about “catchy blog titles”, I make sure they see calls to action for CoSchedule’s Headline Studio product.

In addition, for B2B organizations, you may use a tool like Clearbit Reveal to capture information from the suspect’s IP address. Reveal will give you information about the company account, such as annual revenue, company size, and more.

You can use that information to dynamically display calls to action for specific product lines.

For example, CoSchedule’s Marketing Suite product is designed for enterprises. CoSchedule’s Marketing Calendar is great for small- and medium-sized businesses. So I use data from Reveal to ensure enterprises see calls to action for the product line with which they should be most successful (and smaller businesses see the product with which they should be most successful — everyone wins).

Retargeting ads (like abandoned cart)

Retargeting ads are a great way to keep your brand in front of suspects.

You can take your budget further by retargeting suspects who visit specific pages that indicate higher likelihood of conversion, too. This is important if you have multiple software product lines.

At CoSchedule, I classify suspects as warm or cold for the product lines. This is temperature.

For example, a warm suspect for Marketing Calendar could be one that visits the Marketing Calendar product page, a blog post about content calendars, or a knowledge hub page about marketing calendar templates.

Cold suspects are those who visit pages that aren’t aligned with product intent. Cold pages for CoSchedule are blog posts like “how to write a white paper”. Marketing Calendar users may organize and create white papers with the software, but interest in writing a white paper doesn’t necessarily indicate that the suspect is interested in buying Marketing Calendar software.

The temperature for warm and cold also apply to the remainder of the funnel stages.

Sales development reps, outbound sales, and account-based marketing

For B2B, suspects provide good opportunities to gather data that empowers manual strategies, too.

Again, Clearbit offers an amazing product called Reveal. When a suspect visits your website, Reveal will provide you the information of the company for which the suspect works.

From there, you can set up some automations to send messages to your SDRs via Slack (e.g. the account earns $10 million annual revenue). Or if ABM is your thing, this information could certainly help marketing teams understand how their work is influencing action (and follow a similar play to that SDR example).

Prospects

A prospect is an email subscriber.

Suspects and prospects are pretty similar. The one key difference is that you may now complement the tactics you would use to reach suspects with email marketing/marketing automation.

Let’s review some of the ways you may reach suspects and prospects:

• Dynamic website experiences: Popups, hello bars, bottom banners, chatbots, live chat, etc. Whatever messages these contain (e.g. “It looks like you’re interested in X topic for which Y product provides Z value”), you may also deliver that message into a prospect’s email inbox.
• Retargeting: Social media ads, display ads, email inbox ads, etc. Again, you may complement the messages in these ads with a full-fledged campaign when you simply add emails to the experience for prospects. If you’re interested in direct mail, that could be yet another option for building an unforgettable brand experience.
• Inbound/outbound sales and account-based marketing: Sales development reps may reach suspects based on website behavior. Technically, this is an inbound sales play (although without information provided from the suspect, the sales tactics to reach the right contact within a target account are similar to outbound — LinkedIn, email scraping or buying, direct mail, phone calls, etc.). When prospects provide their email addresses willingly, they’re also more willing to chat with SDRs (from personal experience, this simply performs better). You can complement these efforts by aligning SDRs and email marketing/marketing automation.

In addition, email subscribers simply expect value. Value newsletters that share helpful, educational, and entertaining content are an old-yet-well-founded concept that can keep prospects engaged.

Prospects also subscribe at times to receive deals. Regular product promotions can be helpful for prospects just as they are helpful to your business. Think REI or other B2C brands that stand out in your inbox with discounts, BOGOs, bundles, and more. If it works for them, why not try something similar for B2B? After all, our goal as marketers is to influence profitable customer action.

Leads

A lead is an audience member who signs up for a freemium product (or trial) or schedules a product discovery call with a salesperson.

You could probably guess that leads are a very good marketing opportunity.

Tactics to reach and engage leads may include:

• First-run onboarding: How may you help new users achieve core milestones?
• Getting started guides: How may you educate new users to fulfill the marketing promise? Guides can be helpful when you create them for all learning styles: Microsites and webpages (to read and visualize), PDFs (to download, print, and write on), videos (to hear and see), interactive courses with worksheets and quizzes (to experience challenge), etc.
• Use case guides and power tips: How may you help users expand their use cases and subsequently discover more value in your application?
• Just-in-time onboarding: As leads progress in their usage, how may you deliver valuable information inside the application precisely when users need help?
• Dynamic website experiences: Like suspects and prospects, you may use popups, hello bars, bottom banners, chatbots, and live chat to deliver messages to leads. Simple examples of this would be using these tactics as delivery channels for use case guides.
• Retargeting: Again, ads and emails can be effective ways to deliver information to leads, such as getting started guides, use case guides, product news, and more.
• Cold warmup re-engagement: If leads become cold (e.g. unengaged), targeted ads, emails, and SDR outreach can provide value (e.g. sharing helpful content and use cases and reminding them of the value your product provides) and have potential to re-engage these folks in your sales process.
• Product promotions: Leads are a great fit to receive product promotions. This stage of the marketing funnel is the closest path to purchase, so promotions can serve as a tipping point to convert leads into customers.
• Product announcements, newsletters, and press: Free users and those involved in sales processes may find value when they know your software is continually innovated. Product announcement articles and videos, user newsletters, and new feature welcome areas inside your application are simple ways to deliver those messages.

Customers

A customer is someone who is paying for your product.

Tactics to reach and engage customers may include:

• Application: How may you deliver the right messages and experiences to the right people at the right times when they use your software?
• Retargeting: How may you continually help customers discover new use cases and additional value by reminding them with remarketing emails and ads? User guides are a great way to educate and engage, but you also must deliver these messages.
• Dynamic website and blog: How may you deliver messages to customers when they access your content marketing and product information? Pop-ups, hello bars, and bottom banners may be helpful. In addition, empowering your customer service team that runs live chat with information about product enhancements, use cases, and more can help those team members provide value on a one-to-on basis.
• Launches and announcements: In my experience, customers like to know they’re buying up-to-date, innovative software that introduces new technology, functionality, and features often. Share these messages as product and press announcement pages on your website, then distribute them through newswire services, an announcements area inside your application, email marketing, newsletters, social media, ads, and more. There’s an old best practice in marketing that communicating the same message many times over can lead to an audience member’s information retention.
• Press and brand and buzz: How may you gain the attention of reporters who may cover your stories and launches?
• Customer experience team enablement: What resources could you create to empower customer success managers strengthen their customers’ use cases with your software? Use expansion can help increase average revenue per account and average customer lifetime.