B2B Marketing Campaign Ideas for the Bottom of the Funnel

The perfect B2B marketing campaign looks different depending on where your prospects are in their buying journey. From helping them understand that they have a problem at the top of the funnel, to offering solutions in the middle of the funnel to convincing them that you are the right man for the job to at the bottom of the funnel.

Welcome to the bottom of the funnel: By this point you’ve poured blood, sweat, and dollars into getting leads through the door and ready to buy.

But you need to make sure that your campaigns at this point are able to clearly position yourself as the right decision over your competitors, and that’s where the expertly crafted BOFU campaign comes in.

Bottom funnel campaigns are designed to tip leads and opportunities over the edge and become paying customers, and use case studies, fact sheets, demos and other material geared towards getting leads to open their wallets and say “ring me up!”.

Need some inspiration? Here are 4 killer bottom funnel campaign types to test.

Case study Campaign

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When buyers are evaluating your solution, one question in their minds is “what can you do for businesses like mine?”

Case studies answer the “what” by providing data on real success stories, and make it relevant to a certain industry or business size by zeroing in on one specific example.

As with most bottom funnel content, the performance is measured in paid conversions.

The goal here is to make it easy for the potential buyer to bridge the gap between features and benefits, while clearly communicating the potential ROI.

Example: Lever

Lever’s case studies are cleanly-formatted masterclasses in creating logical, high-converting content like this.

Rather than settling for the easy way out — a blog post or PDF — Lever uses custom pages on its site to make the case studies pop.

The three core segments of B2B case studies — the challenge, the solution, and the results — are all broken down underneath an eye-catching header that features the client’s logo.

Rather than trying to use the data to appeal to a wide range of company needs, Lever targets this case study at businesses trying to grow with employee referrals.

“The SHYFT Analytics team has hired 50 percent of all employees through referrals, and 76 percent of SHYFT employees are active Lever users. In total, the team has grown by 5x since in investing in Lever – hiring 110 new employees to date.”

It also agitates any pain the reader might be feeling with their current solution, calling SHYFT’s former platform “non-intuitive” and noting that they “absolutely dreaded” using it.

Since 2012, Lever has raised over $72m from investors such as Y Combinator and Matrix, tackling the tricky tasks every startup faces when breaking into an enterprise market.

Demo Campaign

Sometimes all a lead needs to convert is a hands-on session with your product. Consider this: 99% of people will not buy a vehicle without driving it first. And, according to AE Magazine, 80% of the buying and selling is done in the demo stage.

Over four fifths of salespeople believe an in-person or phone connection with a customer is a vital part of closing the deal:

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From this, it’s clear that you should be using any means you have at your disposal to push middle funnel leads towards a demo, whether that’s with email marketing, AdWords, or social retargeting ads.

Example: LinkedIn

This highly-targeted Facebook ad from LinkedIn goes after bottom funnel leads that are one demo away from conversion. It uses hard data to seal the deal, and the visuals make it clear that you can quickly enter the dashboard and get to work, which could reduce a buyer’s resistance if they associate social selling with something difficult or complex.

From the relatively low public engagement, you can tell this ad went out to a very select number of leads — it’s not like LinkedIn doesn’t have the budget to regularly reach millions of leads, it’s just that in this case they didn’t want to.

Instead, LinkedIn targeted the demo offer to a small segment of bottom funnel leads that have expressed interest in the past.

Customer Referral Campaign

You might think your advertising strategy is killer, but…

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Studies show that prospects are uneasy with the claims made in ads, instead preferring recommendations from individuals they perceive as unbiased.

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Your happy customers are more effective at selling than your best sales or marketing copy.

Why not leverage that to help close deals with leads at the bottom of the funnel?

Example: LevelEleven

Today’s B2B buyer does a lot more research. Up to 90% of the buyer decision is complete before a prospect ever talks to a sales rep:

This makes optimizing for the bottom of the funnel by creating content that aids that research process so important.

However, don’t overlook the importance of review sites like G2 Crowd, Capterra and GetApp. Customers will be using external comparison sources heavily, so it’s important to use your existing base as a resource to generate favorable reviews.

In 2014, LevelEleven decided to double down on the emerging user reviews trend by emailing a link to existing satisfied customers requesting them to leave a review.

“Fast-forward 10-days later, and we now have 65 reviews…up from a meager 4 just 10 days prior! And these are real, genuine reviews from our actual customers. The key to it all was getting our team rallied behind putting a little extra attention on asking for reviews.”

Now boasting over 200 reviews, the company says they hear leads are finding them through G2 Crowd reviews, and that it has made a powerful addition to their sales funnel.

Bonus tip: For a lot of B2B SaaS companies, review sites like Capterra and G2 Crowd dominate the search results for high value search terms:

Rather than trying to compete for the #1 spot, at least in the short term, you can focus on profile optimization or paid placement in those directories to get immediate visibility on a third party review platform.

Upsell Campaign

A customer arriving at the bottom of the funnel is really only at the start of their journey. It’s all about retention, cross-selling, and upselling to maximize customer value.

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An upsell can be delivered through many channels — email marketing, support, as a banner inside your app — but a good way to retain momentum and stay top of mind is to make the upsell offer in a place where the customer is already about to spend.

Example: Dropbox

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Your pricing page is the ideal place to prompt a buyer to spend more than they were intending to by highlighting the extra benefits of a more expensive premium package.

After Dropbox’s thunderous entrance and sustained growth in B2C, the company turned its attention to the B2B enterprise space in 2015. And, by 2016 had netted around 150,000 enterprise customers.

Here, the upsell is in the enterprise-specific features such as granular permissions and device approvals. Dropbox has obviously found the key needs of enterprises, and then set up a more expensive plan to capture enterprise leads ready to make a purchase.

Master the bottom of the funnel

This critical point in the buyer journey requires specified campaigns that make your buyers choice clear, and empower your buyers to choose a solution that is right for them — yours of course!

If you missed the other posts in this series, we have B2B marketing campaign ideas to keep your funnel flushed with leads at the top and the middle as well.