Before you can nurture leads and turn them into customers as they move down the marketing funnel, you must attract them at the beginning of the customer journey. At this point, the top of the funnel, your content should hook new potential customers, grabbing and holding their attention.
In this blog post, Danny Conlon, Ignite Visibility’s VP of Product and Marketing, will explore top-of-funnel marketing and show you how to develop a strategy that fuels your brand awareness and acquisition efforts.
What You’ll Learn:
- What Is Top-of-Funnel Marketing?
- Strategies for Effective Top-of-Funnel Campaigns
- Measuring Success in TOFU Marketing
- Common Top-of-Funnel Marketing Challenges and How to Overcome Them
My Expert Opinion on Top-of-Funnel Strategies
I’ve found top-of-funnel (TOFU) marketing to be absolutely essential to any complete marketing strategy. Even if your middle-of-funnel (MOFU) and bottom-of-funnel (BOFU) efforts are at their best, effectively nurturing and converting leads, they won’t get anywhere if you’re not grabbing valuable prospects at the top of the funnel.
At this stage, it’s all about boosting brand awareness and engagement. This process will involve using tactics like search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, content marketing, and social media marketing, along with offline marketing efforts. By creating high-value content and targeting the right audiences, you can capture people at the beginning of the buyer’s journey before your competitors.
I recommend looking deeply into what your audiences want from your business. What kinds of pain points can you address? Are there any content gaps that you can fill to capture new leads? Maybe you can do something that your competitors aren’t doing, such as touching on certain features or challenges or targeting more informational keywords with your content. Ultimately, the right approach will make all the difference in reaching and attracting valuable potential customers.
What Is Top-of-Funnel Marketing?
These marketing strategies entail capturing new leads at the top of the marketing funnel, focusing on people who are unaware of your brand or the solutions you offer. The goal is to draw them in and introduce them to your business and offerings.
For example, someone searching for “how to increase my website traffic” may not yet know about SEO services. A well-crafted top-of-funnel campaign can educate this audience about SEO, helping them realize it as the solution to their problem.
The purpose of these campaigns is to connect with the right audiences and turn them into leads who are likely to become customers. Top-of-funnel strategies will make more people aware of your business, drive engagement, and educate them about your offerings and company. From these top-of-funnel touchpoints, audiences will then ideally move along the funnel to the middle and bottom as they come to trust you over competitors.
Every business needs these strategies to target its audiences and initiate the buyer’s journey.
Strategies for Effective Top-of-Funnel Campaigns
If you want to get the best results from your top-of-funnel strategies, you’ll need to implement the following top-of-funnel marketing tactics.
1. Create Valuable Content With Content Marketing
One of the main steps you’ll need to take is to create valuable top-of-funnel content.
This content will include:
- Main web pages
- Blogs
- Guides
- Articles
- Ebooks
- Videos
- Images
- Infographics
You should target all of this top-of-funnel content to inform audiences and establish your business as an industry authority. Remember, this stage is about building awareness, recognition, and trust among your target audiences, enticing them to continue their journey to the bottom of the funnel.
Before writing your content, develop a top-of-funnel KW strategy. In the process, you’ll want to learn about your audience’s pain points and figure out how to address them. What information can you provide to bring real value to your audiences, and how can your products or services resolve your customers’ challenges?
You can look at trending topics in your industry using tools like Google Trends, which will help you identify top-level opportunities to cover with your content. Conducting competitive research can also help you determine what kinds of topics generate the most engagement among competitors.
With the right combination of text and visual informative content, your website will attract more valuable leads.
2. Leverage Social Media Marketing
In addition to your website, you’ll want to target the social media channels your audiences use. Social media is particularly crucial for top-of-funnel marketing tactics, as 50% of B2B marketers find it to be the best way to achieve their goals at this stage.
Start by determining where your audience spends its time. You can achieve this by looking into your audience and seeing which platforms they’re most likely to use by demographic. For instance, you might use platforms like Facebook and Twitter to target younger and older users, while visual platforms like TikTok and Instagram are better for targeting Gen Zers. LinkedIn, on the other hand, is great if you’re marketing to professionals.
Again, you can conduct competitive research to see which platforms they use to engage with audiences, and take cues from them.
Once you’ve built your social media profile, you can begin building a presence through consistent engagement.
Here’s some ideas to get you started:
- Be sure to post regularly! Focus on creating educational top-of-funnel content. This would include top-level blog posts and guides.
- Leverage social media to amplify TOFU content you’ve already created, helping you reach new audiences. Don’t forget to engage with users in the comments.
Short-form video content is often your best bet when engaging audiences on social media, such as Instagram Reels, which 78% of one survey’s respondents plan to prioritize. People enjoy short videos that quickly relay information, which you can elaborate on with other content, such as blog posts or longer videos on other platforms.
In addition to posts, be sure to use ads to further reach audiences at the top of the funnel. Platforms like Facebook make it easy to hyper-target your ads based on demographics, interests, and other factors.
3. Implement SEO Best Practices
Dominating search engines is extremely important in a digital top-of-funnel strategy. You can do so organically and cost-effectively with good SEO.
An SEO strategy will begin with keyword research using tools like Google Keyword Planner. Look for keywords with informational intent, meaning people enter them to learn more about surface-level industry topics.
For instance, a home services company might target keywords like “when to renovate vs. rebuild,” “how to remodel a bathroom,” or specific issues pertaining to the home that might call for home services. You can then develop content around these keywords, incorporating them naturally into your content to help with rankings on search engines like Google.
Make sure your content is of the highest quality, as this content will engage readers and subsequently signal to Google that it’s worth ranking. Also, high-quality content will move people farther down the marketing and sales funnel.
There are many SEO elements to consider beyond basic keyword content optimization to help you achieve high rankings, such as:
- Optimized title tags and meta descriptions that appear in search results
- Keyword-rich headers and sub headers within your content
- Internal links using relevant keywords as anchor text
- Link building campaigns that lead back to your site from others
- Image alt text
- Technical SEO strategies
Also, don’t simply target traditional search results. Today, AI Overviews on Google and other generative engines summarize information while citing various sources. Ranking for these with generative engine optimization (GEO) can supplement your traditional SEO tactics.
4. Run Targeted Ads Across the Web
To supplement your SEO and other top-of-funnel marketing tactics, you need to run top-of-funnel ads on various platforms.
These campaigns will involve:
- Paid Search: These include paid search engine results that appear alongside organic results, potentially taking traffic away from organic competitors.
- Display Ads: These ads are visual image or video ads that show up on other websites, targeting users based on their specific demographics, with retargeting ads potentially following people who’ve visited your website in the past without making a purchase.
- Paid Social: All social media platforms allow you to build ad campaigns to target users using visual and text ads, depending on placement and the nature of the platform.
With hyper-targeted campaigns and strategies that reach the right people on the platforms they use, your ads can significantly boost awareness and engagement. Ads that continually appear across platforms will also make your brand more recognizable and trustworthy, encouraging more people to click through.
Measuring Success in TOFU Marketing
You won’t be able to gauge the success of your efforts without measuring the results. You’ll need to track the right metrics and measure them against your goals.
Key Metrics to Track
The goals you set will dictate which metrics to track. At the top of the marketing funnel, your goals will likely include building brand awareness and engagement, in which case you’ll want to track metrics like:
- Search engine rankings
- Ad impressions
- Website traffic
- Engagement on social media, such as likes, shares, and comments
- Lead generation and conversion rates that indicate the quality of leads moving down the funnel
Tools for Tracking Performance
You can track the above metrics using a variety of analytical tools, including:
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- Social media analytics tools
Common Top-of-Funnel Marketing Challenges and How to Overcome Them
There are some challenges you may face when developing your strategies, but there are some solutions to keep them working the way they should.
Creating Consistently High-Quality Content
Businesses may struggle to develop great content on a regular basis, especially when there are many topics and platforms to cover.
Creating a strict content marketing plan and schedule can help mitigate this as you build your website and external presence. If you need help with this, vetting top content marketing agencies can help you find a marketing agency capable of handling your content development and optimizing it for peak performance on search engines, social media, and other channels.
Balancing Organic and Paid Strategies
SEO and paid media need to work together to be really effective. It can be tricky to balance your budget and strategies, but allocating resources to each will ensure you enjoy the benefits of both worlds.
Here is also where an agency can help you. The right marketing company will work with your available budget to develop balanced SEO, PPC, and other strategies to reach top-of-funnel audiences and move them along the customer journey.
Measuring and Adjusting Strategies Based on Performance
You must also consistently measure the results of your efforts and use any valuable insights gained to inform your strategy. You can do so by performing quarterly, monthly, or even weekly performance reviews to see where you’re at against your goals. If you identify any weak areas, you can make any necessary adjustments to continually improve your campaigns.
An agency can work with you to monitor your strategy in real time, using the insights gathered to perfect your strategy over time.
Reap the Full Benefits of TOFU Marketing With Ignite Visibility
With effective top-of-funnel marketing tactics and all-encompassing strategies, you can get the results you want and ultimately see more conversions and sales. For help with your strategies, consider working with the team at Ignite Visibility.
Using our comprehensive approach to marketing, we’ll help you:
- Identify your target audiences
- Conduct in-depth keyword research targeting top-of-funnel terms
- Build high-quality, optimized content to educate and gain the trust of your audience
- Engage audiences with a strong social media presence
- Harness the power of SEO and paid media
- And more!
Reach out to us today to learn more about what we can do for your TOFU strategy and the rest of your marketing funnel.
