Maintaining a steady pipeline of qualified, interested business loan prospects has always been a bit haphazard. There is a better way. 

The Buyer’s Journey

A central concept of inbound marketing is the buyer’s journey. It’s an idealized path, a model to enable you to visualize how a prospect evolves from being a stranger to your business to becoming a delighted customer of your business.

The journey has three steps, or phases: awareness, consideration, and decision. Each step is characterized by a search for information about solving a specific business problem. The kind of information sought during each phase is different. And, in today’s world, the first two steps – about 70% of the process - are typically completed online. Or, more accurately, via the smart device in the palm of your hand!

Awareness

The awareness phase describes the state of becoming aware of a potential problem or opportunity. It involves online research for relatively neutral information related to typical issues of the immediate problem. At a high level, the prospect may begin to form high-level opinions about different options available to address the problem. Specifically, the researcher is looking for a name to coincide with the problem they're experiencing.

Consideration

The consideration phase follows after the prospect has clearly defined and named the problem or opportunity. Now, activity turns to more deeply researching and understanding available options or potential approaches to resolving the problem or taking advantage of the opportunity. The researcher is looking for an idea of solution options to solve the problem.

Decision

Finally, we reach the decision stage, the endpoint. Now, the preferred solution or approach has been selected, based on some combination of research, supporting documentation, industry data, best practices and benchmarks, and trusted professional recommendations. During this stage, the researcher is choosing top contenders as solution providers. It's time for your top-notch sales team to take over and relate your solution directly to solving the problem that your potential customer is experiencing. 

Does this help you understand when a business owner will seek a bank loan?

Consider that the majority of big financial decisions, both B2B and B2C, are governed by timing more than anything else. In reality, none of us can clearly and accurately assess another person’s motives, fears, goals, or dreams, regardless of the external signals we can see. This may be particularly true of a business owner considering a loan.

And this is exactly why an intelligently-crafted inbound marketing program makes so much sense in a financial environment!

Inbound marketing offers a better solution.

Since you’ll never know for certain when a business owner is about to begin actively considering a new loan and searching for information, the better approach is to publish content with a purpose: appropriately crafted blog posts, downloadable pieces to convert visitors to leads, and other educational online content. And do it consistently! In other words, implement a program of inbound marketing built to attract, convert, and close potential business loan customers.

If you’ve published consistently enough to become a respected thought leader for business lending, when the prospect searches for information about a potential loan, perhaps for a capital purchase or to expand the business,  they'll find your information, along with a call to action, like this one:

The call to action leads to a landing page, where the prospect can download a whitepaper, eBook, financial calculator, or marketing kit. Or, request a fact-gathering meeting.

Remember, two-thirds of an average prospect’s buyer’s journey is carried out online. So, make sure you have the answers available when that search happens. Further, if you’ve published in the proper online environment, you’ll know exactly when this prospect has acted. He’s now become a qualified lead, and you can follow up to nurture the lead to become a genuinely delighted customer.

Trending Up's Inbound Marketing can partner with you to do precisely this!

We'll even give you a tool to help you make the decision.

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