B2B Marketing Funnel: What It Is and How to Build, Track, and Optimize Yours

That means connecting efficiently with other companies and the stakeholders within them at every stage of their journey with your brand. The B2B marketing funnel is a kind of roadmap to help you do precisely that.

Being able to see, track, and recognize where customers and prospects are in their journey with you is vital. It’s the first step towards being able to optimize your marketing efforts to convert more of those prospects into customers and keep more of the customers for the long term.

Read on to learn everything you need to know about B2B marketing funnels, including how to build, track, and optimize yours. 

What is the B2B marketing funnel?

A marketing funnel represents the stages your potential customers go through before purchasing. Prospects will enter the funnel at the top and move downwards as they advance in the customer journey, from awareness to decision. The marketing funnel aims to attract, engage, and convert leads.

B2B marketing funnel vs B2B sales funnel

You might also have heard about the B2B sales funnel, which is similar to the marketing funnel. As the names imply, the sales funnel is more sales-centric and the marketing funnel more marketing-centric.

B2B marketing funnel vs B2C marketing funnel

A B2B funnel is also similar to but distinct from its B2C alternative. That’s because the customer journeys which the funnels map are noticeably different. 

Typically, customer journeys on the B2C side of the equation are simpler and shorter. There are fewer stakeholders involved, meaning decisions are often made faster. One-off purchases are also more common than long-term, subscription-based contracts. 

Three traditional B2B marketing funnel stages

The three traditional stages of the marketing funnel for B2B companies are known as the top of the funnel (TOFU) stage, the middle of the funnel (MOFU) stage, and the bottom of the funnel (BOFU) stage. 

Each of those three B2B sales and marketing funnel stages are then typically split into two elements. The TOFU stage includes the interest and awareness elements of the customer journey. The MOFU stage features the consideration and intent elements. Finally, the BOFU stage comprises the evaluation and conversion elements. 

1. TOFU stage

The top of the B2B marketing funnel is when potential customers begin their journey with you. The awareness element of this stage is when they realize an issue or pain point within their organization. They then develop an interest in potential solutions to the issue.

2. MOFU stage

The middle stage of the B2B funnel is when organizations are actively considering products or services that may solve their problem. If the prospect is in your B2B funnel, that means your offering is one of the possibilities. As they progress through this stage, they eventually develop a genuine intent to buy or subscribe. 

3. BOFU stage

The final part of the B2B marketing funnel is when a prospect moves on from considering a solution to their problem to evaluating your solution. This is where your potential customer seriously investigates your product or service to see if it’s the best fit for them. If you successfully convince them that it is, they will then convert and become a customer.

Why should you implement a B2B marketing funnel?

Creating and using a B2B funnel is a useful way to better guide your sales and marketing efforts. It provides a kind of roadmap to help keep all your activities on track. 

The best B2B marketing funnel examples deliver benefits, such as:

• Better understanding of your audience - Building a B2B marketing funnel makes you really stop and think about your customers’ journeys. You’ll get a better understanding of their common pain points and those key factors that help them move down the funnel.

• Greater knowledge of your own brand - Considering what prospects and customers need at each stage of a B2B funnel also helps you better understand your own brand and its origins. You’ll be forced to focus, for instance, on precisely what it is about your offering that encourages prospects to ultimately convert.

• Increased return on marketing investment - An effective B2B marketing funnel gives you a guide against which to optimize your marketing efforts. That, in turn, means you’ll get more bang for your marketing buck. 

B2B marketing funnel metrics and strategies: How to track and optimize your funnel

So, the classic marketing funnel starts at the top, where the prospects interact with your brand for the first time, and ends at the bottom, where they (if you’ve done your job right) convert to customers.

However, any sales rep can tell you that in a real-life scenario, it's a little bit more complicated than that.

Marketing funnels can be messy, with prospects jumping from one stage to another and back again before finally converting, or sometimes leaving the funnel all along, and never coming back.

This is something we need to be aware of when tracking the marketing funnel, so we can spot the inconsistencies and optimize for more seamless customer journeys.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at some crucial metrics to track for each stage of the B2B funnel and tips to make the most of them.

Top of funnel metrics

At the top of the B2B marketing funnel, you want to focus on capturing the attention of potential customers and making them aware of your products or services. TOFU is all about brand recognition and getting that initial interest from your target audience.

For the TOFU stage, track metrics that can give you insights into customer behavior. For example, those which give you information on the three main channels by which new leads may discover your brand—organic search, paid search, and social media.

Organic search

• Organic sessions: Measure the number of organic visitors on your website to see how effective your SEO strategy is. Keep an eye on impressions here.

• Keyword performance: Track the performance of keywords to understand which ones are driving organic traffic.

• Click-through rate (CTR): Monitor the CTR for organic search results to see how effective your titles and meta descriptions are.

• Bounce rate: Analyze the bounce rate to understand if visitors engage with your content or leave quickly.

Paid search

• Paid sessions: Watch the number of visits and user activity from paid ads to understand why users stay on or leave the site.

• Clicks: Track the number of clicks on your paid ads to measure the initial interest. 

• Ad impressions: Get insights into the reach and visibility of your ads by monitoring how many times they're displayed to potential users.

• Click-through rate (CTR) for ads: Evaluate the effectiveness of your ad copy by looking at the CTR.

• Cost per click (CPC): Understand how much you're paying for each click to assess the cost-effectiveness of your campaigns.

Social media

• Impressions: Measure the number of times your social media content is displayed in users' feeds. This indicates your reach.

• Engagement: Monitor likes, comments, shares, and clicks on your social media posts. These metrics show how users are interacting with your content.

• Followers: Track the growth of your followers to see the effectiveness of your social media strategy. 

• Click-through rate (CTR): Calculate the percentage of clicks relative to the number of impressions. CTR tells you how effective your social media content is in generating interest.

• Referral traffic: Measure the website traffic coming from social media platforms. This helps measure the impact of your social media efforts on driving website visits.

• Brand mentions: Track mentions of your brand name on social media. Positive mentions contribute to brand awareness.

A classic tool like Google Analytics will do a good job tracking B2B top of funnel metrics like website traffic, click-through rates, keyword performance, and all of that good stuff mentioned above. 

The next step, however, is to track the quality of the traffic. You need to identify which marketing channels and efforts are driving the most qualified leads to prioritize your resources accordingly. 

That brings us to: Who's visiting your website and why? It's good to know how many website visitors you have, but it's even better to know who they are and why they're there. 

You can use a tool like Leadfeeder to see exactly who’s visiting your website, when, and why. Turning anonymous website traffic into real company names is impossible otherwise. Use it to identify highly qualified leads, see the content they interact with, and how they move through the customer journey. 

This gives you that extra information about your prospects without needing to ask them to sign a form. Also, you get to see how effective your marketing efforts have been in driving the right traffic to your website. 

(By the way, did you know you can try out Leadfeeder for free for 14 days?) 

Middle of funnel metrics

In the middle of your funnel, prospects are aware of your brand, showing interest, and considering your products or services. At this point, they might download a white paper, subscribe to your newsletter, or enter into a lead-nurturing campaign. 

MOFU is all about leads, generating them, qualifying them, and tracking them. Let's review the most important metrics to track here.

Leads generated

The number of generated leads will give you a clue as to how many potential customers are interested in your products or services. 

You want to track both the number of total leads generated and the number of leads from specific sources. 

For example, if you notice a high number of leads from a particular marketing channel, you might consider allocating more resources to that channel. On the other hand, if certain sources generate few leads, it may indicate the need for new approaches.

Leads qualified

In the MOFU stage, most of the leads are typically marketing-qualified leads (MQLs). To move further down the funnel, they need to be nurtured into sales-qualified leads (SQLs). 

The number of leads that qualify for MQL or SQL will tell you how on-point your marketing efforts are when it comes to reaching your target audience. If the number of qualified leads is low, it's a signal that you're not attracting the right audience and need to change your approach.

Cost per lead (CPL)

CPL measures the cost of capturing a lead through marketing efforts. To figure out how much each lead costs you, just divide the total marketing campaign cost by the number of leads you generated. That's your CPL.

Let's say you spend $1,000 on a marketing campaign, and it generates 100 leads. The CPL would then be $10.

A lower CPL means that your business is acquiring leads at a lower cost, which is what you want. However, it's important to consider lead quality alongside CPL to ensure that the generated leads align with the target audience and are likely to convert into customers.

Signups 

Tracking signups will give you a good understanding of how interested prospects are in your products or services. You can track signups for your newsletter, a demo, or a free trial of your product. 

This metric is becoming more important as we see companies move towards a product-led growth (PLG) approach, allowing prospects to test out products for free and buy on their own terms. 

Bounce rate

MOFU is the stage where many prospects leak out of the funnel, so this is where it becomes crucial to track the bounce rate.

Bounce rate can help you identify the friction points preventing users from moving to the next stage of the funnel. 

For example, a high bounce rate can indicate that users don't love the MOFU content you're providing. It might not be compelling enough to keep them on the page and progress through the funnel. And if your content is not resonating with potential customers' needs or interests, you want that information. 

New vs recurring visitors

Last but not least, you want to be aware of the number of new vs recurring visitors. 

Are prospects regularly returning to your site, and if so, why? Is it to engage with your amazing content, or is it because they didn't get your message the first time? 

Monitor new and recurring visitors' website behavior to see how they engage with your content. Then, use the insights to tailor your content to meet each group's specific needs.

Bottom of funnel metrics

At the final stage, it's all about converting leads to customers and keeping them. 

BOFU is when potential customers evaluate their options and decide whether they should buy from you or one of your competitors. When tracking this stage, the focus is on metrics like conversions, sales revenue, and retention.

Here's what to track at the bottom of the funnel:

Lead conversion rate

The lead conversion rate will give you the percentage of leads that convert into customers. You should track this to see how effective your marketing efforts are in contributing to actual sales. It’s also worth researching B2B funnel conversion benchmarks for your industry to see how you measure up to your competitors.

Marketing funnel optimization is the key to maximizing those B2B sales funnel conversion rates. If your lead conversion rate is low, it may indicate a need to optimize your landing pages, work more on those lead nurturing campaigns, or A/B test your calls-to-action. 

You should also track your lead conversion rate per source to see how effective different marketing channels are in driving conversions.

Sales revenue

A metric all of your fellow colleagues can relate to (even those not on the marketing team) is sales revenue. 

Sales revenue determines the overall success of your marketing funnel. Monitoring it will help you understand the success rate of your marketing channels and efforts. To find out which channels bring in the most profit, you can compare the revenue generated from different sources.

Measuring marketing funnel success lays the groundwork for strategic decision-making. It helps you be more data-driven, optimizes your marketing strategies, and gets the most out of your budget to maximize ROI. 

Other revenue-focused metrics you need to track are:

• Customer acquisition cost (CAC): How much it costs to gain a new customer.

• Cost per sale: The average expense for your business to make one sale.

• Return on ad spend: The revenue generated per dollar spent on advertising.

Customer lifetime value (CLV)

This is a metric that’s particularly important in the case of a B2B SaaS marketing funnel or any other funnel based on long-term subscriptions. In those cases, how valuable a customer is depends on the customer's lifetime value (CLV).

CLV represents the total income you can expect to make from a customer during your entire relationship. 

You can calculate the CLV by multiplying the annual recurring revenue of the customer with the average customer lifespan. Understanding the long-term value of a customer can help you prioritize resources on retaining those high-value customers.

On the topic of retaining customers, you also want to track the retention rate, the percentage of customers a business retains over a specific period of time.

Build and optimize a B2B marketing funnel to provide a roadmap to success

Creating, implementing, tracking, and optimizing your B2B marketing funnel helps you better understand your relationship with prospects and customers. That way, you can bolster those relationships and turn them into long-term, consistent revenue.

Tools like Leadfeeder from Dealfront help you to gather and make sense of the data you need for B2B marketing funnel optimization. The insights you gain can help you attract, engage, and convert leads, keeping your funnel flowing. 

B2B marketing funnel FAQs

What’s the difference between a marketing funnel and a sales funnel?

Marketing and sales funnels are interrelated concepts involved in tracking and managing customer journeys with your brand. Marketing funnels cover every touchpoint from a prospect becoming aware of an issue or pain point to them converting into a paying customer. A sales funnel focuses more closely on the steps involved in taking a prospect with intent to buy through to conversion.

What are the benefits of creating a B2B marketing funnel?

Creating a B2B marketing funnel helps your business to better visualize the customer journey. That means you can better understand customer pain points and needs and, therefore, optimize your marketing efforts to be more effective in responding to them. All of that can lead to better return on marketing investment, higher revenues, and better customer retention.

Which B2B marketing funnel metrics should I track?

Precisely which metrics to track will depend on your business and its unique marketing funnel. However, you should always measure and track a combination of metrics across the three stages of the funnel. 

Top of the funnel metrics reveal insights into customer behavior and how they discover your brand. Middle of the funnel metrics track the success of your lead qualification, lead generation, and related processes. Bottom of the funnel metrics provide information on overall revenue, conversions, and more.