In the simplest possible terms, the know-like-trust-buy funnel is a reference to each stage involved in a person’s journey towards buying a product or service. Each segment represents a fundamental factor that ultimately combines and leads to a successful sale.

The first step, know, is all about discovery and brand awareness—someone getting to know your business for the first time. No matter which industry you operate within, initial impressions are often make-or-break, so developing a strong and memorable marketing strategy is an absolute must.

For people to begin progressing through the funnel, your impact must be both instant and meaningful—without this, you run the risk of simply fading into the noise.

Next is like. You’ve caught the eye of a potential customer, now you need to give them a reason to stick around. This is where having a clearly-defined story and ethos for your brand proves invaluable.

Why should this person choose you over one of your competitors? The consumer needs to hold some kind of affinity towards not just your product, but to your organisation and what you stand for.

The third stage is trust—it’s here you need to form a meaningful connection with the person which means authenticity becomes key. It’s also at this point you must be able to clearly convey that you’re an expert within your field, and that your knowledge or offering is superior to those around you.

Finally, we reach the stage of the funnel where the consumer is ready to buy—even at this last stage, there is still much to be done. Given the work that’s already gone in by this point, it can be easy to overlook and see this final hurdle as a given.

The buying process should be as straightforward as possible—you’ve brought them this far and the last thing you want is for a complicated checkout or signing-off process to throw a spanner in the works at the very last minute.

How Air Marketing streamline the customer journey

Right throughout the journey we see essential touchpoints contribute to the process from both a marketing and sales perspective. When both of these elements are properly aligned, the customer journey becomes significantly smoother, which in-turn will naturally benefit your business in terms of both resource and ultimately, revenue.

Ensuring both elements are optimised to truly complement each other is something we have found a lot of businesses struggle with. Whether it be due to a lack of resource or knowhow, many organisations we’ve encountered have had notable gaps where their sales strategy should intertwine with their marketing strategy.

That is why, since 2018, Air Marketing, who are experts in outsourced sales, we’re able to create high-value campaigns that harmoniously blend both marketing and sales.

The benefits of outsourcing your whole sales funnel to one supplier

When it comes to the know-like-trust-buy funnel, our Marketing services department specialises and flourishes in the initial know and like stages. Our approach to marketing hones in on creating genuine ROI, meaning we begin building the foundations for eventual sales right from the very beginning.

We craft creative campaigns that help grow brand awareness, reputation and demand, meaning by the time the consumer reaches the latter stages of the funnel—trust and buy—a huge chunk of the work has already been done, and we can easily hand things over to the Sales department team, who are able to use their in-depth knowledge of sales generation to consistently convert and deliver genuine results.

That ‘handing over’ portion of the funnel is so often where customers are lost. Even if you have the best marketing strategy in the world, that work can be undone in an instant if a separate sales team isn’t on exactly the same page—or vice versa.

A slight miscommunication or misunderstanding as the consumer enters the final stages of the journey can be detrimental. Unsurprisingly, those errors occur far more frequently if different parts of the funnel sit with different suppliers who have minimal knowledge of one another’s operation.

The results we’ve seen

This collaborative approach was something we utilised in a recent campaign for one of our clients within the SaaS industry. Specialising in helping UK businesses apply for Series A funding and prepare for periods of growth through intense, expertly-led training programmes, they had found it difficult to market and sell their services.

Within the Air Marketing Group, we formulated and implemented a full marketing and sales strategy, which combined SDR outreach, email marketing, social media marketing and CRM user journey consultancy.

We ensured all messaging was consistent across social and digital channels, generating high-value leads through an education-focused email campaign, targeted content marketing and HubSpot integration. The results of these efforts were then immediately fed back to the Air Marketing team, whose specialist expertise in sales meant we were able to capitalise and convert the necessary numbers that meant our client could run their next cohort.

These results included:

• 40% average email open rate
• +14 marketing qualified leads
• 58,000 reach on Twitter
• 300% increase in website traffic from email
• 20% increase in direct website traffic
• 95% increase in website traffic from social
• 5% minutes on average spent watching video content on Twitter

Want to learn more about how Air Marketing Group work as a full-stack marketing agency to optimise the customer journey? We’d love to chat. Give us a call on 0345 241 3038.