Inexpensive Ways To Get Bottom Of The Funnel Leads For Your Website

Trading time for money is common in marketing. You often need to execute strategies to reach your marketing goals. At times, these strategies will be free or very low cost, but they will take time to come to fruition. Other strategies like PPC or ad retargeting may cost you a lot of money, but they give you quicker results.

These strategies will help get new leads into your business, though not all leads will convert. And, if you have been struggling at this phase, it can be quite draining to keep attracting leads that don’t add to your bottom line.

Traditionally, you would reach out to your target audience with a lead magnet, to acquire leads, use email drip sequences to nurture them, and convert them over time.

However, if you are looking to improve conversions quickly in your business, focusing on some inexpensive ways to get to the BOFU (Bottom of the Funnel) leads in your marketing funnel can help.

BOFU leads have many qualities that make it easy for you to convert them into customers. That’s one reason to target BOFU leads, reach out to them, and create content targeting them.

Let’s look at some of these ways.

1. Why do you need to target BOFU leads?

Typically, your marketing funnel comprises of three lead funnel stages–TOFU (Top-of-the funnel), MOFU (Middle of the funnel), and BOFU (Bottom-of-the-funnel).

At top of the funnel (TOFU), traffic enters your funnel. But not all traffic will be active leads. At this awareness stage, some will want to know what you do, how your business aligns with their business, or save the information to get in touch later. Because they are not actively looking into your products or services, take time to keep them engaged enough to move them along to middle of the funnel and bottom of the funnel.

MOFU (mid funnel) allows you to control the traffic, qualifying them based on how they interact with your business. It could be making your free product sample guide readily available, making your website simple, interactive, and yet easy to navigate, or making customer support easily accessible to nudge them to the BOFU stage.

When your leads are actively searching to work with you, they have positioned themselves as BOFU leads. They are motivated and are ready to know how your business can work for them. At this stage, the decision-making can also include other stakeholders who have a say in buying your product or service.

There’s also the case of exploring BOFU leads beyond one sale. Once a sale is complete, you can get their attention by up-selling, presenting them with the relevant training material, and suggesting customer surveys to get their feedback.

Doing so means your sales team is not awkwardly pushing your products, and your marketing team is focused on improving conversions by promoting your products or services in the best possible way.

2. Strategies to reach the bottom of funnel customers

a. Finding your ideal customer

BOFU customers are already present online. They have a problem and are actively looking for a solution. They could be in community forums, checking for reviews or competitors prices, or actively posting online searching for the right fit. This means you need to position your products or services in a way that meets their needs and provide valuable content.

Once they know your product well enough to buy, creating an excellent after-sales experience to nurture the relationship is the key to more sales.

There are two ways to do so – inbound and outbound.

In inbound marketing, your content naturally addresses your audience’s questions without being invasive. On the other hand, outbound marketing is about disrupting their attention and drawing their attention to your brand. While some might debate the impact of inbound versus outbound marketing, both work well when they are aligned to what you want to achieve with your campaigns.

b. Inbound marketing

Inbound marketing and inbound lead generation is about attracting your audience by answering their priority questions. It could be by using content marketing to target keywords like “X vs. Y comparison” or “X alternatives”

Here, the audience is actively searching for these queries and is warmed up to the product category. It’s an indication that the audience is researching specific products in the industry.

In this case, reaching out to them via SEO is a great way to attract a steady stream of highly targeted buyers. However, SEO might take time to give you results, so as an alternative, if you have a budget, consider spending on PPC (Pay-Per-Click) to target these keywords on search to get quick results for lead acquisition.

As a new entrant or young business, you’re looking to grow quickly to make a mark. Here, SEO might be the way to get ahead. With SEO, you need to search for the right keywords, understand the buyer persona, and write data-driven posts and product pages that resonate with your audience. It is an extensive process and can take a lot of your time.

Instead, you can focus on guest posts. Guest posts are spreading the word about your business by writing on similar topics on already established websites. By doing so, you can rank faster for the exact keywords.

Guest posts allow you to get good backlinks, generate interest in your business, and let people know how to work with you. It is an excellent way to establish authority and reach your audience with each guest post.

c. Outbound marketing and outbound lead generation

With outbound marketing, you’re focusing on getting BOFU leads by reaching out to websites already talking to a targeted buyer group.

Websites with a large following have built a bond with their readers. Their readers know and trust the website. Here, you can offer these website owners an affiliate marketing partnership to get paid for driving customers to your business.

For example, if you’re a SaaS company that needs a larger audience for your SaaS product, then reach out to:

• SaaS product review sites__
• Websites where SaaS communities meet
• Sites that can convince your readers to sign up for your high-value free case study or ebook.

For BOFU leads, it’s also about creating a trust factor that makes it easy to close the sale without friction. Two ways to do so are email and social ads.

Emails: With emails, it is easy to attract your BOFU customers because, unlike other tactics, you have segmentation and personalization for your audience that visits your website. Based on past data, you can personalize your message and offerings to make them more appealing for your lead contacts.

It also makes a compelling case when your buyers are multiple entities rather than one owner.

Social Ads: Social ads are a great place to attract your audience. The best way to begin is to understand the end goal of your ads, identify where your audience is active, and set your campaign.

Of course, these are basic steps to attract leads to your website.

Other best practices that can attract BOFU leads are choosing the most appropriate platforms, using great visuals, and creating good CTA (Call-To-Actions) that can drive up click-through rates. Most importantly, interacting with your audience once the ad runs enables two-way communication with your audience.

3. How to get bottom-of-the-funnel marketing leads for enterprise products

Appealing to enterprises is a challenge. Your users and buyers are not the the same as they are for a straightforward ecommerce business, and many product issues need quick resolution at the cost of stretching your bandwidth and resources.

Such BOFU customers are challenging to find and then convert. In this case, if you have an enterprise product, then partner with other businesses targeting the same audience and participate in their webinars.

You can also take part in interviews on relevant podcasts and offer special discount codes for show listeners. The other way to work with them is to tie up with these partners or podcasting companies, so you pay them a commission for referrals sent.

Cold email marketing lead generation is another way to reach out with your offers. The response rate will depend on how targeted the offers are, whether your email copy accurately addresses their pain point and if the CTA clearly expresses what they should do to take up the offer.

Conclusion

If your business is new, then TOFU and MOFU content could be one way to interact with your target audience and to warm them up to your product or service.

With time, getting them to convert can happen by finding your ideal customers online and taking them through a series of strategic content aligned to their needs. Funnel management and optimization can help you to do this more strategically.

It also means using inbound and outbound marketing to spread the word about your business, its impact, and the transition of active leads to customers.

As a small business owner, SEO can work in the long run. However, for quick results, paid campaigns can quicken the pace of growth. It could mean you spend your marketing budget on customer acquisitions without spreading yourself thin. Then, use the power of guest posting to build authority, backlinks and convert passive audiences to active customers.

Without spending too much time on social media, you can also strategically use one or two social media channels for targeted reach bringing leads into your funnel and creating a strong sales pipeline for conversions.

Anand Srinivasan

Anand Srinivasan is the founder of Hubbion, a suite of business tools and services. He is also the author of “How We Did It: 100 Entrepreneurs Share The Story Of Their Struggles And Life Experiences”