Kara Stanford
Strategic Marketing Consultant with over 25 years of experience.
CEO & Founder of The Marketing Spaces.
Kara Stanford
Strategic Marketing Consultant with over 25 years of experience.
CEO & Founder of The Marketing Spaces.
These days, businesses need more than just traditional marketing tactics to stand out. That’s where pipeline marketing comes in—a smarter approach that gets your marketing and sales working together to focus on what really counts: bringing in revenue.
Instead of chasing loads of random leads, pipeline marketing is all about quality over quantity, nurturing the right prospects and guiding them towards becoming loyal customers.
By aligning your marketing and sales efforts, pipeline marketing helps you work more efficiently, understand your customers better, and make decisions that actually boost your bottom line.
In this article, I’ll break down what pipeline marketing is all about, why it’s so important, and how it can help your business thrive in today’s competitive world.
What is pipeline marketing?
Pipeline marketing is a comprehensive approach that focuses on the entire sales process, from initial lead generation to closing the sale and beyond.
Unlike traditional marketing strategies that often concentrate primarily on top-of-the-funnel activities like lead generation, pipeline marketing considers the full customer journey, integrating sales and marketing efforts to guide potential customers through each stage of the sales funnel.
When we share how to design and run your pipeline marketing, we always talk about the three key principles of pipeline marketing:
- Flow – your audience should feel that they are on one smooth, easy journey – aware through to loyal
- Holistic – you have planned and implemented every marketing activity at each stage, always looking at the whole journey and how they all link up
- Nurture – developing and maintaining positive relationships with your audience is at the heart of your pipeline marketing
As well as always having these three principles underpinning it, successful Pipeline Marketing is different to other approaches to marketing because:
- It takes a ‘whole picture’ view of your marketing and sales activities.
- You can see how your marketing creates sales.
- It focuses on the middle of the funnel onward.
Let’s look at each of these areas in turn and see where those key principles fit in.
The ‘whole picture’ view of your marketing pipeline
Pipeline marketing is a way of planning and delivering marketing which empowers businesses to look at marketing holistically – rather than in separate parts.
When we look at the Buyer’s Journey our audience takes from being ‘Unaware’ we exist all the way through to being ‘Loyal’ customers, we can see that it’s one journey with different stages and steps.
But too often marketing is approached and done as if these stages are totally separate to each other.
Typically, there’s a huge focus on ‘Aware’ marketing, as this is the very visible marketing we all see e.g. social media, advertising, networking, events, PR etc.
Planning and delivering your marketing by focussing on each area separately, or just on Aware marketing, leads to ineffective marketing.
An easy way to spot that marketing isn’t being joined up is by the lack of real results your marketing delivers.
You might notice things like:
“We’re doing our socials and getting loads of likes but no-one gets in touch about our services.”
“We have enquiries but very few people actually buy our products.”
“People visit our website but don’t take action.”
Often, it’s because the organisation is focused on one stage of the Buyers’ Journey and not thinking about the flow through to the next step.
Pipeline marketing solves these problems.
When we use Pipeline Marketing in our businesses, we design the whole journey as one continuous thing.
You become obsessive about:
- ‘What happens next’,
- ‘Where do they go next’,
- ‘What do they get’,
- ‘How to we follow this up’
You know that your prospective clients taking just one, or even two or three steps, on this journey isn’t enough. Until they are loyal customers, who’ll make referrals to you and give you repeat business, your marketing can’t stop.
You can see how marketing creates sales
Before I start, let’s be clear – marketing and sales are different skill sets but there’s huge overlap between them.
Broadly speaking, marketing pulls prospective customers towards your business and sales nudges along the decision to buy. Marketers may never meet prospective customers and actual customers. Salespeople typically have direct contact with them.
Too often, businesses don’t know how their marketing is contributing to bringing money in.
They have a vague nagging feeling that their marketing is a waste of money – but they aren’t sure. Pipeline Marketing puts an end to that. You can see the link between marketing and revenue.
Let’s explore how that link is designed into pipeline marketing.
Traditionally, marketing is responsible for attracting the right kind of prospective customers (prospects or leads) to your business via Awareness Marketing.
Through a process of offering relevant marketing material based on what those people are doing on your platforms e.g. offering them an Info Sheet once they have been to a webinar, marketing then gets your audience to a point where they identify that they are ready to solve their problems and are considering your products / services as a solution.
At that point, they are known as Marketing Qualified Leads – MQLs.
MQLs are people who show the intent to buy (you may hear marketers talk about ‘Intent’ marketing or ‘unmasking the intent’).
These MQLs should then be handed over and nurtured by a skilled Salesperson – sometimes known as a Business Development Manager– to become a sale or not (win/lose).
In small and growing businesses, the Marketing and Sales roles are often be occupied by the same person. If that person is able to learn both skill sets, this can work really well.
(But you have to either hire a marketer who then learns sales skills or a sales person who learns marketing skills. This is a whole other topic – which I have a lot to say about as I’ve seen it done badly too many times. If you’re looking to make your first marketing or sales hire, please get in touch with us – we can give you advice that could save you a tonne of hassle and money.)
What pipeline marketing does is remove any bumpy handovers and hand-offs between marketing and sales because we set your pipeline activities up on the assumption that your prospective clients are on one journey and have to be looked after consistently all the way through.
This is where flow comes in. We put in place the right systems so that, from the point of view of the prospective customer going through our pipeline, it feels like they are dealing with one organisation all the way through.
There’s no mention of:
“Well, it was all friendly and helpful until I got handed over to Dave”
or
“Their marketing was really quirky and fun – but their website was a nightmare to navigate and actually pay them”.
With Pipeline Marketing, from the minute your prospective client engages with your marketing and reveals themselves, through to speaking to a member of your team and moving to being a loyal customer, they feel like they never have to repeat themselves or explain themselves again when talking to ‘another person’.
As well as making this an exceptional customer experience, you have set your marketing up so that it is very clear how marketing creates revenue:
Your Marketing generates MQLs.
These are nurtured into Sales.
Sales brings in money.
Therefore, your marketing has brought in revenue.
There’s nothing fluffy about pipeline marketing – the connection to revenue is crucial.
It focuses on the middle of the funnel onward
Pipeline Marketing is about relationships – which is why it makes you focus on the people who already know, like and trust your business. Those who are in the middle of the funnel at ‘Interested’ and ‘Considering’.
Too often, marketing focuses on the top of the funnel – that fun, funky awareness marketing which we see every day.
It’s gratifying because we can see the likes and clicks immediately – but it’s only the start of a long journey. The magic is when you get to the middle of the funnel.
Why?
Put bluntly, you could have hundreds or even thousands of people who love your awareness marketing and none of them will ever buy from you. It’s called Vanity Marketing for a good reason – it makes you feel good, ‘Look how popular we are!’ but it does nothing for your revenue.
Spending the majority of your marketing spend and time on Aware Marketing is like going to the gym and focusing your training on looking ripped and skinny – not much good if you are damaging yourself in the process and preventing long-term good health.
Pipeline marketing is all about nurturing relationships which means the majority of your time and budget should be spent on the middle of the funnel.
Top tips
Once someone in your key segment audience has clearly shown that they’re ‘Considering’ your solution to their problem, focus on them.
If they’ve Adopted i.e. bought from you before, focus on them.
If they’re Loyal ie they have recommended you, referred you, or given you repeat business, focus on them.
I’ll say it again – the majority of your marketing budget and time should be focused on the middle of the funnel onward. This is how you successfully grow a business.
