There are many challenges to successfully running a marketing agency. When you’re first starting out, it can be difficult to close deals with your customers, especially if you don’t have an impressive existing portfolio. You need to be raising awareness about your brand, creating interest among your target audience, generating leads, and guiding these leads along the customer journey towards a conversion to turn them into paying customers. This is where the lead generation funnel comes into play. You may have heard of it before but are unsure of what exactly it is and how best to use it. 

Here you can learn all about the lead generation funnel and how you can build your own to help grow your business. You’ll also find a simple lead generation funnel example, so you can get an idea of the resources you need and how it all works to convert your lead to a paying customer. 

Why Lead Generation Is Important

Lead generation is where you create interest in your products or services with the objective of turning that interest into a sale somewhere down the road. A lead generation strategy is crucial to attracting prospective customers and building brand awareness. Even if they’re not ready to buy right away, they’ll know you’re in the business. 

Lead generation offers you the chance to build relationships with your target audience and understand the buyer persona of your ideal customer. This can help you generate content based on your knowledge of the field to satisfy their curiosity. You can engage with your target audience and become a trusted source of information they value. It’s easier to convert leads if they know you’re an expert in the relevant field. 

Lead generation also helps you gather useful information on your target audience if you know how to use landing pages, forms, and subscriptions. You’ll be able to keep track of who’s interested in your brand, follow up to see what they require, and nudge them along to a successful conversion. It’s also much cheaper than advertising using traditional media like television, billboards, and newspapers, which would be unaffordable if you’re running a small marketing agency. 

What is a Lead Generation Funnel?

A lead generation funnel, sometimes known as a lead generation sales funnel, is a systemic process to generate leads by drawing a wide but targeted audience into the top of the funnel and gradually guiding prospects down the funnel, ultimately converting them into customers. Lead generation funnels have three main phases, each with its own objectives to help guide your leads towards a sale. 

TOFU – Top of the Funnel

The top of the lead generation funnel is the awareness stage. This is where you make first contact with your potential customers and introduce your brand to them. The goal is to make your brand easily discoverable and generate interest in your services. Blog posts, YouTube videos, and social media pages are all great ways of grabbing the attention of your target audience. 

MOFU – Middle of the Funnel

The middle of the lead generation funnel is the consideration stage. This is your chance to engage further with your leads and provide additional value to nurture your relationship with them. Here, you’re building your reputation as a trusted source with a wealth of knowledge by providing your potential customers with a valuable resource. 

Such a resource is called a ‘lead magnet’ since it can attract potential customers and generate leads for your business. You can request the lead to register in order to access this lead magnet, allowing you to follow up with them later to nurture the relationship further. 

BOFU – Bottom of the Funnel

At the bottom of the lead generation funnel is the conversion stage. This is where you make your all-important final push to convert the lead into a customer. By this point, your leads are no longer random visitors to your website. If you had done everything right, they would already be convinced of your capabilities and be ready to make a purchase decision. 

How to Build Your Own Lead Generation Funnel

Now that you know the purpose of a lead generation funnel, let’s see how you can build your own. It starts with identifying who your ideal customer is, understanding what questions they have, and developing your answers to those questions. After that, it’s all a matter of how to present these answers in a way that can generate leads and then develop your relationship with them towards a sale. 

Identify Your Target Audience

Before you start generating leads, you need to have a clear understanding of who your best customers will be. If you have been operating an agency for a while, you’ll know who they are. If not, look at your customer records. Study the data to find out who’s buying from you. If they have identifiable characteristics, you can segment your customers accordingly. 

You can even come up with a buyer persona, a fictional representation of your ideal customer. This will help you understand what their interests are and allow you to tailor your marketing efforts for those customers. As you will realize later, this will also make it easier to find qualified leads. 

Identify a Problem Your Target Audience Has

If you have experience working with clients, then you’ll already know what their problems are through feedback and what questions they ask regularly. If you’re new to the business, then there are a few ways you can do some customer research online to identify these problems. 

Online platforms like Reddit, Facebook groups, and relevant industry forums are great places to start. Twitter hashtags will give you an idea of trending issues, and YouTube comment sections will also provide some clues as to the questions that are being asked. Go where your target audience is gathering online to discuss their woes. Find out what problems you can solve using your unique knowledge and expertise. 

Develop a Lead Magnet That Solves the Problem

The lead magnet is the trusted resource you provide to your ideal customer. The lead magnet offers the solution to their problem and can be downloaded or accessed online. A good lead magnet should provide relevant and useful information that your leads can apply to their business. 

You should aim to impress your ideal customer and develop your lead magnet with the same level of professionalism you’ll have for your paid service offerings. Some examples of lead magnets you can make are ebooks, case studies, webinars, templates, resource libraries, and comprehensive guides. 

Make a Landing Page For Your Lead Magnet

Next, you create a landing page, allowing your potential leads to access your lead magnet. While lead magnets are given for free, these resources can be locked behind a simple registration process to obtain customer information and gently push your leads further down the lead generation process. 

You can present the landing page as a ‘squeeze page’, a simple, short, and to-the-point landing page that looks like a pop-up message. You could also build it like a proper sales page with ad copy and an introductory video to really sell your lead magnet. The idea is to make the landing page appealing so that your target audience will be compelled to access your freely given resources. 

Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing is needed after your ideal customer accesses your lead magnet. You can set up an auto-responder to follow up with your leads, or your sales team can do it themselves for a more personal touch for more important clients. The goal is to provide additional value while you make your sales pitch for your paid services. 

Limited-time discounts, free consultations, and demos are some of the methods you can use to close the deal. A free trial can give your leads a taste of your services, which can be followed by a reminder to continue as a paid subscriber to get access to more services. 

Drive Traffic Towards Lead Magnet Landing Page

You can use both inbound and outbound lead generation tools to drive traffic to your lead magnet. For inbound lead generation, the goal is to produce targeted content that appeals to your ideal buyer. Creating blog articles that are educational and provide value is one example. You can use search engine optimization strategies to improve the chances your target audience will find your articles online. 

YouTube is another great way to attract potential customers since many prefer to watch product videos before they buy. This type of content marketing is organic and much cheaper than outbound, making it ideal if you’re a small business. 

In outbound marketing, you can utilize mass email campaigns and paid advertising to drive traffic towards your lead magnet. This is more of a direct sales pitch rather than providing content with value as you see in inbound lead generation. Outbound lead generation is not organic and is also more expensive than inbound lead generation. 

A Simple Lead Generation Funnel Example

If you’re getting confused with all this talk about funnels and lead magnets, it is only natural. Let’s look at these concepts with a practical example that will help clarify the lead generation process and some of the tools you will need to accomplish it. This example can be applied to almost any business or agency out there. For the purposes of this example, let’s use an ebook as the lead magnet for prospective customers. 

Step 1 – Create an Ebook as a Lead Magnet For Your Audience

If you run an agency or provide services, there will be an aspect of your business and service where you are the expert. Take the time to answer questions from your target audience and present them in the form of an ebook, which will serve as your lead magnet. Use infographics to make things visually appealing and easily digestible for your target audience. 

If you lack the resources to design your own custom ebook, there’s a library of templates available on Canva. Just find the ebook style that works for you, enter your copy, and don’t forget to add your company’s branding. 

Step 2 – Build a Landing Page For Your Ebook

Build a simple but attractive landing page for your ebook. This is your chance to convince visitors that they need this ebook. If the visitor is here, they’re already interested in this topic. Now show off your knowledge of the subject using the landing page copy. Don’t give all the information away; explain the value this ebook provides and what users can get out of it. The more convincing you are, the more leads you will generate. 

Make sure your call to action is clearly visible and that visitors can easily navigate the landing page to access the ebook. You might even want to use anchor links in multiple places throughout your copy so that readers can click on them whenever they want to. 

Step 3 – Lock Your Ebook Behind a Form

On your landing page, visitors that want to access your ebook will need to fill out a form. Once they submit the form, they will be able to view or download the ebook. This ensures that the hard work you put into your resources is rewarded and you generate leads in return. If you’re using WordPress to build your website, then the Fluent Forms plugin is a great tool to integrate the customer information form onto your landing page. 

Through this form, you get to collect information on the people that visited your landing page and showed interest in downloading the ebook. You can get their name and email address, which will allow your sales team to follow up with them later. This is called lead nurturing. 

Step 4 – Send Your Ebook To Your New Lead

Your form should be integrated with your email marketing tool so that as soon as a visitor submits the form, it acts as an opt-in, and their information is added to your email list. You can set up an email marketing platform such as Enchage to be triggered when this form is received by your website. It will then validate the email address submitted in the form to filter out bots and spam addresses. 

You can set up this part of the lead generation funnel so that after your lead’s email has been verified, an email will be sent out containing the download link, and your sales team will receive a notification about the new lead. All leads that have filled out this specific form are either tagged or added to a specific segment in your email list. This is a great way to keep track of potential customers and their interests during the lead generation process if you’re offering a variety of services. 

Step 5 – Provide Value and Continue to Nurture

Set up an autoresponder for all leads that have submitted the form, and this is where you provide your valuable resource. This auto-generated email will include the download link to the ebook. To make a great impression on your potential customers, you can upload the ebook to a platform such as Publitio. 

Since Publitio allows you to use your own subdomain, you can yet again utilize your branding for a very professional look that will impress your potential customers. You can use Google Drive too, but then your leads will notice. Make sure you set up a ‘thank-you’ page and redirect users after a successful form submission so that you can track conversions. 

You may have noticed that this lead generation funnel example is for nudging leads from the middle of your funnel to the bottom. You still need to use content marketing techniques such as blog posts, social media posts, and YouTube videos to drive traffic toward your lead magnet. After your leads download your ebook, it’s up to your sales team to continue to nurture them. Reach out to your potential customers and guide them into the next stage of your lead generation funnel to turn them into loyal customers.

Optimize for an Effective Lead Generation Funnel

Once your lead generation funnel is completed, your work is still not done. You need to learn how everything flows down it to find what’s working and what needs improving. Listen to feedback from customers that have accessed your lead magnet to learn how useful they found it or if they had any issues accessing it. Check your conversion rates on the lead magnet landing page and lead to customer conversion rates. 

Experiment with software tools such as Encharge for email marketing, Fluent Forms to obtain customer information through opt-in forms, and Publitio to share your ebooks. Remember that these are just examples, and there are many alternatives that you can try out. Find what works best for your budget. For a truly effective lead generation funnel, you’ll need to optimize it and also focus on qualified leads. 

How to Qualify Leads

Not all leads are the same. You should prioritize your marketing efforts on ‘qualified leads’, which are the customers who are most likely to make a purchase decision. You can qualify leads by observing how your target audience interacts with your content in the lead generation funnel. Lead scoring is the process of assigning a score for how your leads engage with this content. Users that have downloaded your ebook, shared your content on social media, or subscribed to your newsletter, will rank higher in the lead scoring than the general visitors to your website. 

Apart from lead scoring, comparing leads to your ideal buyer persona is another way to qualify leads. If you’re a B2B company, take note of your leads’ organization size, industry, and reputation. Concentrate your marketing efforts on qualified leads to push them along the sales pipeline, and you’ll definitely have a better chance of success in converting them. 

If your lead’s level of engagement indicates interest, they are a marketing qualified lead (MQL) and can be handed over to the sales team to follow up. When a lead displays an intention to purchase, they become a sales-qualified lead (SQL). Sales and marketing teams need to work together to qualify leads and guide them through the sales process. 

A Video Walkthrough of an Effective Lead Generation Funnel

If you still have any questions about designing an ebook as your lead magnet, what your landing pages should look like, and how to use all the backend tools at your disposal to carry out an effective lead generation strategy, check out my video walkthrough of Lead Generation Funnels for your Marketing Agency below.