Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Build and Grow: Top Of The Funnel Marketing Strategy
The very first stage of a customer's journey is the most crucial one for any business. Marketers plan to increase the number of prospects that enter the business pipeline and then push to trickle them down. Top Of The Funnel (TOFU) is where the prospects become aware of your brand…
The very first stage of a customer's journey is the most crucial one for any business. Marketers plan to increase the number of prospects that enter the business pipeline and then push to trickle them down. Top Of The Funnel (TOFU) is where the prospects become aware of your brand and get ready to establish a connection with your brand.
Let's dive deeper into how you can tweak your TOFU marketing strategies effectively to create brand awareness and generate demand:
Understand your Marketing Funnel
The marketing funnel is a mechanism that helps you visualise the path of a prospect, from an introduction (awareness) to a lead (consideration) to a client (conversion) and hopefully beyond (advocacy, loyalty & retention)! The marketing funnel provides measurability. It shows where you're losing customers to help pivot your strategy. You can predict sales volume through the funnel, improvise existing strategies and develop new ones. Funnels help in boosting conversion rate optimisation. Non-targeted visitors will be filtered out; the ones who stay are more likely to pay for your offerings or are going to engage more. By deploying checkpoints and scoring parameters, you can classify the levels for segmenting your funnel and customise subsequent outreach for maximum efficiency.Significance of Focusing on TOFU
Marketers can assure that potential customers are in the pipeline by consistently generating new hits at the top of the funnel. TOFU content fits into the first three phases of the consumer decision-making process — need recognition, search for information and product evaluation. They are the essential steps in the decision process to convert consumers from leads to actual customers. Putting tactics for TOFU in your content marketing mix allows you to widen your prospect base and future proof demand. Creating TOFU conversion points (like bumper ads, infographics, webinars, blogs) immediately widens the audience pool, generating a dialogue between your brand and customer earlier in their journey. TOFU keeps new leads in the pipeline and offers the chance to nurture and guide them through the marketing funnel, so they become qualified for sales outreach. Saving the time of your sales team decreases the time taken to convert a lead and therefore brings you even more ROI. Content created for TOFU are also assets a sales team can link to.Upgrading TOFU Tactics
The objective at the top of the funnel is to simply tickle your visitor and pique their interest just enough to engage further. There are several ways you can implement effective TOFU strategies. Predictive data analysis makes a marketer smarter, being able to identify your ideal customer profile on three levels- digital footprint, firmographics and tech stack. Automatically adapt the journey for each consumer along a predefined funnel based on their tendency to take the action you desire. Improve targeting precision by gaining access to visitors' social data and UGC, putting your brand's offering into a consumer perspective, which is great for building credibility. It is an effective way to harvest prospects relevant to your product/service. Data-driven content assets are a great format to build solid authority. Creating gated content will give you a more citable version to host on your site while also retaining the incentive for anonymous visitors to become leads.Content Ideation for TOFU
TOFU content helps quench a potential customer's thirst for knowledge by doing one simple thing well: Educate. It is the first touchpoint that sets the tone specifically in the 'awareness' stage of the buyer's journey. The most preferred way of finding TOFU content topics is to use Google Autosuggest. By speaking to the customer's pain point, you can optimise content to your buyer persona, and the search will aid in attracting leads you want. Survey customers, find out what questions or issues your ideal customers have, notice trends in these questions, and collect ideas on creating the most helpful content for potential customers. Using Keyword Research tools, you can identify a lot more data around content topics with organic demands and how competitive those terms are to rank for.Measuring Success and Outcomes
Key metrics for measuring the success of TOFU marketing provide you with actionable insights into how to identify and address issues that may be hindering prospects throughout the marketing funnel.- Assessing owned media: Encompassing all social media platforms, brand PR and websites. Gathering stats (like reach, visits, opens) from these media to assess performance creates awareness for your brand.
- Assessing earned media: Measuring shares and RTs, unsolicited comments about the brand, etc., and monitoring influencers who share brand content as it matters "who" shares about your brand, not just that it is being shared.
- Assessing paid media: Evaluate the performance of TOFU marketing efforts by measuring reach, frequency, CTR and CPC. Metrics like brand mentions can calculate the execution of 'word of mouth' efforts.
