How to Create an End-to-End Digital Marketing Funnel for Your Tech Company

John Himes

October 21, 2024

If your tech company wants to use digital marketing to get leads and turn them into customers, you need to start thinking in funnels.

An end-to-end digital marketing funnel is an easy way to visualize how customers interact with your brand online. By understanding how to structure this funnel, link the parts together, and move people through it, you’ll create a mechanism for attracting new eyeballs, nurturing leads, and closing deals.

Looking at a fully fledged digital marketing funnel can be overwhelming. There’s so many moving parts that all need to work together in harmony, and if you’re just getting started, it can be difficult to know where to begin.

That’s why we recommend starting small. Pick one or two elements and focus on building them out before you go back for another bite. Things get more complicated (and more profitable) once you start integrating marketing channels together into a coherent funnel.

But focusing on one thing will let you test, learn, iterate, and optimize faster, and you’ll get better results from doing one thing well than from doing ten things poorly.

Now let’s dive into how to build a digital marketing sales funnel for B2B tech companies.

The structure of a digital marketing funnel

So, why’s it called a funnel?

The idea is to bring people in at the top and then lead them further and further down until they convert to a lead or a customer.

The top of the funnel is wide and shallow. It has the largest audience, and the content is usually small and snackable. That’s why we see things like social media and digital advertising here at the top.

The middle gets narrower and deeper. The content starts becoming longer and more informative as the audience becomes more engaged. Not everyone who enters the top of the funnel is going to make it to this part, and that’s okay.

What’s more important is that the right people are clicking through. For instance, they’re seeing a post on social media and then clicking a link to learn more on a blog post.

The bottom of the funnel is where the real magic happens. This is where someone fills out a contact form, enters their email address into a signup sheet, or makes a purchase. Bottom-of-the-funnel content is usually the most valuable and in-depth.

Once someone goes out the bottom of the funnel and becomes a lead, our work is far from over. Especially in B2B, where sales cycles are long and complicated, we need to stay on top of those people, keep marketing to them, and keep them moving cyclically through the funnel.

Content and channels for top of funnel: Creating awareness

The top of the digital marketing funnel is where people start interacting with your brand to begin with, and it’s also where your existing audience first learns about new content, features, promotions, or other messaging that you want to get across.

The key element of top-of-the-funnel content is that it’s shorter and for a wider audience. This material is going to get more impressions than content anywhere else. It’s about getting eyeballs on your brand, planting a thought, and sparking curiosity for people to dig deeper and go down the funnel.

The channels most brands target at the top include:

Social media (especially LinkedIn for B2B)
Search engine optimization (SEO)
Paid media (digital advertising)
Sales outreach

What all of these have in common is that the messaging needs to be short, sweet, and to the point. If you’re running pay-per-click (PPC) ads on Google, you only get up to 90 characters for the description. While your social media posts should probably be a little longer than that, you still want to make sure the content is snackable and mobile friendly.

Don’t stop at text alone, either. Adding visuals like infographics or, for even better engagement, short 15–30 second videos can go a long way toward bringing people into your marketing funnel.

The goal at the top of the funnel is to get people to click through and enter the middle.

Middle of funnel digital marketing: Nurturing a relationship

So a prospective customer has viewed your ad or your social media post. They’ve clicked a button. What happens next?

Welcome to the middle of the digital marketing funnel.

This is where we start to engage with visitors at a deeper level. We’re focusing on answering their questions, providing them with as much value as we can, and building a genuine relationship based on trust.

Common examples of middle-of-the-funnel content include:

Blog posts
Landing and services pages
Webinars
Case studies
Longer videos, such as what you may find on an “About Us” page

This kind of content could specifically be about your products and company, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be. What’s most important is that it’s educational and high quality.

The key word here is “nurturing.” Not only are you beginning to introduce the customer to your offering and its value, but you’re also creating a relationship between them and your brand. You’re showing them that they can trust your company, that you have the expertise they need, and this familiarity is then brought into the purchase decision.

For committee-based B2B buyers, this has some other interesting implications. This content can help you win a champion, the person in your buyer’s organization who’s going to sell the solution internally. Once you have that champion, you also need to make sure they’re equipped with content they can share with their colleagues to back up their case.

The bottom of the digital marketing funnel: Getting leads

This is where the magic happens. The bottom is where website visitors turn into leads.

The key word in this stage is “conversion.”

You’re going to need a conversion mechanism that includes two parts: the bait and the hook. The bait is something so valuable, people are willing to give you their email addresses in exchange for access. We also call this gated content or a lead magnet.

The bait needs to be enticing. Here are some common examples of bottom-of-the-funnel content:

Reports based on original research
White papers
Ebooks
ROI calculators
Product demos
Checklists

This content will reinforce the groundwork laid above and give the customer even more relevant information for making a purchase decision. At the very least, this primes the pump for a sales call.

The hook is the UI elements that facilitate that transaction. For instance, it could be a call to action (CTA) button that leads to a landing page, it could be a signup banner, or it could even be a popup. If you’re going to invest in user experience and graphic design at any point in the digital marketing funnel, this is the first place to prioritize.

If the conversion mechanism doesn’t work, then you’re never going to get the results you’re after—no matter how well the top and middle of your funnel are working.

Remember, though, that not every customer will want or need to go through this process. They may read a couple blog posts, check out your product page, and decide they want to cut to the chase. Make it easy for these people to get in touch by filling out a contact form, requesting a quote, or scheduling a call.

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What happens next? Keep marketing to people who have passed through the funnel

Your customer saw your social media post and clicked a link. They landed on your blog, where they read a couple more posts and saw a CTA banner for a white paper with tons of useful information. They clicked a button, filled out a form, downloaded a PDF, and went on their merry way.

What now?

Ideally, you want automated integrations between your website, your customer relationship management system (such as HubSpot or Salesforce), and your automated mailing tool (such as MailChimp). This helps you stay organized, gives sales a lead to follow up with, and lets you start marketing directly to their inbox, either through regularly scheduled newsletters or through a more personalized drip campaign that sends a series of pre-written emails over time.

Regardless of whether sales is able to turn that lead into a customer, you’re going to want to stay in touch. Your goal is to put them back into the funnel, keeping them engaged with your brand. For instance, you can take a blog post or case study, summarize it in a newsletter format, and then send it out to your audience with a link back to your website.

Work with an agency that specializes in digital marketing and media production for tech companies

We get that there’s a lot of moving pieces. Not only do you need to pick the right channels and create the right content, but you need to be able to take measurements and analyze the data to keep optimizing. Just like developing a tech product, creating an end-to-end digital marketing funnel is an iterative process.

If you want help, get in touch with Dynamic Tech Media. Our team of experts specializes in targeted content creation for B2B tech. We strategize and implement end-to-end digital marketing funnels that provide innovators with market penetration.

Do you want to close more deals, generate more revenue, and grow your technology business?

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