Sona assigns buying stages for each visitor and account profile to help you identify where they currently are in your sales and marketing funnel.
The different buying stages that Sona implements are defined as follows:
Awareness - indicates an initial interest or need for your product
Consideration - prospects are actively searching for solutions to their problem
Decision - prospects are shortlisting and evaluating their available options
Purchase - prospects are on the verge of converting
These buying stages are determined by analyzing multiple data points, such as pages visited, total active time, intent signals, ICP fit score, and, in the case of accounts, the number of tracked visitors.
You can leverage buying stages to split up prospects and leads into different audience segments. You can then target each segment with campaigns that are tailored to address their specific needs and influence them to move to the next stage.
This is especially helpful in the B2B space where sales cycles tend to be longer because it allows you to identify and re-engage leads that have dropped off or are stuck at a particular stage of the funnel. It can also help you identify and address gaps in your content marketing and outreach efforts.
Let’s take a quick look at how this all works using the Sona Platform.
Step 1: Add Filters
Step 1: Add Filters
Configure a new filter for the Buying Stage that you want to address. The Buying Stage filter is available in the Web Visitors, Accounts, and People pages.
Add more filters to further refine the dataset so that it only lists qualified leads.
Experiment with various combinations of filters to better understand the different types of leads found in each buying stage, which can help guide your go-to-market strategy.
Step 2: Create an Audience
Step 2: Create an Audience
Once you’ve settled on a set of filters and are happy with the resulting dataset, you can save it as an Audience segment.
You can create multiple audience segments for each buying stage, allowing you to target them with more personalized offers and impactful messaging that addresses their current needs.
Audience datasets are automatically updated whenever new visitors or accounts match your filter criteria.
Step 3: Sync Where You Build Your Campaigns
Step 3: Sync Where You Build Your Campaigns
Sync your buying stage audience segments to other platforms using Destinations.
Destinations are designed to automatically sync and push data into the tools you’re already using, ensuring you’re always working with the freshest data and the warmest leads.
You can further analyze or enrich an audience segment once it’s synced to other platforms to make the lead data more actionable.
Build targeted campaigns using your marketing automation tools and email sequencers with the help of the data-driven insights you've gained while creating and analyzing different audience segments.
Final Thoughts
Final Thoughts
Categorizing and segmenting leads by buying stage helps you identify the characteristics of the audiences that you're attracting and gives you a clearer picture of what needs to be done to get them through your sales funnel. This allows you to create more effective targeted campaigns across multiple channels, ensuring better returns on ad spend, content marketing, outreach, as well as other sales and marketing activities. Buying stages are a very powerful metric because they bring to light insights that are often obscured by the overwhelming amount of raw data that needs to be analyzed.