If you’re taking part in marketing strategy efforts, chances are your most important KPIs are in your marketing funnel. That marketing funnel usually becomes – depending on the size of your team and company – the centerpiece of your daily’s, weekly’s, objectives, and so on.
Main Three Stages Of The Marketing Funnel
In many cases, marketing teams keep a single marketing funnel that looks (in high-level) like this (with variations, which we’ll get to in a future blog post, such as a digital funnel with visitors, or adding customer evangelists or renewals as part of the funnel). Each company builds a funnel marketing strategy around its funnel.
Leads
A lead is anyone who left their details with you. This can be someone you “scanned” in a conference (and we’ll discuss conference leads in a future blog post), someone who downloaded a gated asset in your website, or a webinar participant.
MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads)
An MQL is a lead that is qualified from a marketing perspective. This means that they not only agreed to be scanned in your conference booth, but also did other things that show intent, or are well-targeted for your products (for example, if you’re selling to CMOs, and they happen to be CMOs).
In your digital assets, in many cases, there is a scoring system, where a lead accumulates points as they’re taking actions. For example, when someone downloads a whitepaper they’re getting 30 points, then 5 points for each Middle Of The Funnel content page they’re reading. When they reach a certain amount of points (e.g. 100), they qualify as an MQL.
Some things to remember: All MQLs are leads, not all leads become MQLs. A person can immediately be qualified as an MQL, they don’t need to “mature” as a lead. For example, someone who visits your website and immediately signs up for a demo (which may have 100 points attached to it), may immediately become an MQL.
SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads)
An SQL is a lead that is further qualified for sales activities. Such a customer often transforms into an Opportunity (more on that on a different day :)). An MQL may become an SQL after rigorous SDR (Sales-Development Representatives) activities, salesforce activities, or just digital nurturing. In B2B it is usually the salesforce who are qualifying leads as an SQL, by validating that they indeed have the budget and project for whatever you’re selling them.
Of course, in many cases (including B2B), your sales cycle (for some or all the products or services) may be digital and automated. This may mean that SQL is just another phase in your customer journey (for example: adding a product to the cart).
In future posts, we will discuss the full-funnel digital marketing strategy, and dissect it into parts, but let’s leave that as a high-level overview for now.
What Is Multi-Funnel Marketing?
Not to be confused with a multi-channel funnel, multi-funnel marketing is a situation when a marketing organization needs multiple marketing funnels to control and achieve its objectives. There is no one concrete situation when you need to apply multi-funnel marketing, but let’s discuss some cases where a multi-funnel approach is needed.
When Do You Need More Than One Marketing Funnel?
On one hand, you don’t want to have an obscure marketing view, where you’re dealing with thirty different marketing funnels for each product category, so as with most things – you need multiple funnels when it makes sense and helps you achieve your goals. Also, in certain cases, you have multiple marketing funnels that converge into a single marketing funnel (for example: when having marketing funnels of separate business units).
However, here are some examples of cases where you need a multi-funnel approach:
Completely Different Product Lines
When you have completely different product lines that require different resources, different channels, and different budgets, it may make sense to have several funnels. A good example is when a company has a line of B2B products, as well as a line of B2C products. Each line is sold in a different way (for example one is sold mostly digitally, and one through partner channels), and having visibility of one funnel may hurt your understanding of what works and what doesn’t work.
Different Business Units
When you have products that are managed by different business units, by different people, with completely different parameters, you will need multiple funnels. You may combine the data at a certain point to have a Funnel of Funnels.
Multi-Funnel vs. Multi-Channel Funnel
Another tool to handle complicated funneling is to have a multi-channel funnel. That can be, for example, a marketing funnel that is built off multiple channels, and can allow you to quickly understand which channels contribute to each step of the funnel, which channels need fixing at which step, etc. Obviously, multi-channel funnels are very popular, and we will discuss them in a future blog post.
Conclusion
This was scratching the surface about multi-funnel marketing. I will probably revisit this post at a later stage to add some more examples or do part two in the future.