In any business, lead generation is extremely vital since it gets potential customers and users to take interest in and buy your product or service. Without generating leads that ultimately convert, business setups cease to exist. The first step of this process is to create awareness about the brand and what it offers, and it is called top-of-funnel marketing.
The process of lead generation usually involves six stages and the journey goes as:
Awareness > Interest > Consideration > Intent > Evaluation > Purchase
For people to purchase your product or service, it is very important to pull a large pool of visitors to your website that might eventually end up being your customers. As the journey progresses, those who are interested continue further while those who are not interested leave the funnel. Therefore, marketers focus heavily on the top of the funnel marketing step in order to acquire maximum visitors who are relevant and would likely convert into customers.
In order to understand this further, it is important to take a look deeply into the idea of the top-of-the-funnel marketing approach and how exactly it works.
What is Top of the Funnel Marketing?
Top-of-the-funnel marketing is the approach to focus on lead generation and target audience. With the help of this approach, marketers increase the target market and take on the conversion of leads into clients by automating leads. This is the primary stage of sales. Once a lead is generated through the top of the funnel marketing, brands proceed to the next stages, like the middle of the funnel approach and the bottom of the funnel approach.
During this stage, marketers focus on getting people to like your brand as a thought leader. The right way to do this is by publishing content around buyers’ needs and wants. Hence TOFU stage is more about establishing good communication with the audience rather than adopting a hard-sell approach.
Few ways to do that are:
- Publishing blogs and articles on general topics that people want to read about.
- Post informational and useful content on your social media.
- Using influencers to create engaging campaigns around social issues.
- Running paid ads for awareness on social media platforms.
Examples of Top of the Funnel Marketing
Let’s also have a look at some of the examples of top-of-the-funnel marketing.
eCommerce Upselling: 7 Best Practices
In the above article, we see that a digital marketing agency is sharing useful and informational content about eCommerce. A lot of people interested in reading about this topic will search for this and end up reading the article. While they benefit from this guide, they also get to know about the agency and what services they offer.
Gear Guide To Camping In The Back Of A Truck
This is another great example of TOFU marketing. A lot of people want to know how to camp in their trucks. They never heard about DECKER before now they get to know about the brand along with getting some useful information.
Goals to Achieve with top of the funnel marketing
In order to make a business successful, TOFU marketing achieves a number of goals. Some of the main goals are:
Attract Traffic
What marketers aspire to achieve through TOFU marketing is to attract the masses and convert more potential clients into definite ones. Top of the funnel marketing approach is one of the most productive approaches in this regard since it utilizes various components of digital platforms and puts them into good use.
Generate Marketing Qualified Leads
Generating a lead is not an issue in the current era when marketers have access to numerous platforms and mediums. Using TOFU marketing, the goal is to acquire leads that can potentially convert into customers.
Brand Awareness
Spreading awareness regarding the brand is exceedingly significant for any business to flourish. TOFU marketing in this regard can turn out to be a great help. It has the potential to reach the maximum audience and promote brand awareness like never before.
The top of the funnel approach involves communicating with your audience about their interests and likes, which ultimately helps in building a healthy connection between the brand and people. In return, more and more people get to learn about your brand.
Promoting awareness regarding brands is what every business setup wants. This is what leads them towards success. If you want your business to achieve this goal, hiring a successful lead generation company would be a perfect choice for you.
Providing Helpful Content
It is not easy to find marketing approaches that provide informative and helpful content too. TOFU marketing is a great deal concerning this since alongside dealing with marketing and promotion, it provides incredible content too, which helps businesses amazingly. The top of the funnel approach is exceptionally lucrative when it comes to content.
7 Benefits of Top of Funnel Marketing
Top funnel Marketing has several benefits that pave the path to success for the brand. 7 most noticeable benefits are:
Creating a re-targeting market
A brand invites traffic through content with top-of-the-funnel marketing. This traffic may not convert into customers or consumers of products being offered. However, it starts building a potential audience that can be retargeted and converted into customers. This helps the brand to assess the audience and plan further strategies accordingly.
Aiding in improving Sales Team Performance
The content generated for top-of-the-funnel marketing acts as a helping hand for the brand’s sales team. It makes it easier and less time-consuming for the sales team to get leads and convert them into customers. Also, the content, e.g., quick answers, keeps the sales team well-informed and directed and allows them to give concrete and proper answers to the potential clients.
Introducing your Product/Brand
Not everyone that visits your services or products is aware of them. Top-of-the-funnel marketing helps the brand introduce and give an insight into the product to people. This helps create an understanding of the brand, explain its idea, and make people more familiar to become associated and buyers of the product.
Gaining the Trust of People
TOFU helps your marketing strategy by providing specific, direct, and informative content about your brand, product, or services to your target audience. It allows the audience to remove the cloud of vagueness surrounding them about your content.
There are different strategies like Facebook ads and email marketing that will help the brand build trust between them and their audience. By building confidence, you gain more customers or clients.
A lot of businesses struggle in this domain. Gaining trust is what guarantees ultimate victory. If your business is facing a challenge in this regard, you might want to hire a lead generation company before it’s too late.
Ruling People’s Minds
Every brand desires to be on the mind of people as soon as a thought of the product arises in their mind. Top-of-the-funnel marketing helps the brand to imprint its existence through educational content provided by them for the audience.
Augmenting Email Marketing
A building of connection with people to grow customers and brands is essential. The top of the funnel piece of marketing provides a way to procure the email addresses of people and connect with them by informing them about the latest updates and discounts. This benefit helps you remain visible to people, and your brand can ring a bell in people’s minds when they are looking for the required product or service.
Engaging Clients through Targeted Content
Top-of-the-funnel marketing allows you to engage with potential leads. The subscribers move to the consideration stage, and it gets easier for the marketers to provide targeted content and highlight the main points. The targeted content makes subscribers aware of the benefits and potential of the product in the audience’s life.
5 Top of Funnel Marketing Strategies
A lot of tools and mediums are used for TOFU marketing. Infographics, videos, and social media posts play a major role in attracting and gaining leads for your brand. Events, guides, and eBooks also come under the umbrella of tools used for top-of-the-funnel marketing.
Top funnel Marketing has a number of strategies that contribute to the growth of a brand. 5 of the TOFU marketing strategies are:
Search Engine Optimization
In this strategy, search engines like Google provide content to consumers. Buyers come looking for products and services, and with the help of search engines, they reach their desired sellers. Marketers need to analyze what buyers actually search for and tailor the keywords accordingly. With this strategy, sellers can enhance their target audience disproportionately. As per HubSpot, search engine optimization generates 1000%+ more traffic than organic social media does. That’s the real power of SEO strategy.
Account-Based Marketing
This marketing strategy focuses on particular targets for marketing efforts. It might not bring more leads, but it guarantees success in the set targets. This way, Account-Based Marketing (ABM) targets the audience very smartly and effectively.
Despite being extremely productive, some marketers find it difficult to work on Account-Based Marketing (ABM). To maximize the benefits of this strategy, it would be wise to outsource lead generation to a company that can help your business with it.
Organic Social Media
With a growing number of users every year, social media has become a massive platform for marketers. What is required is a smart marketing strategy to make moves as effective as possible. In this TOFU marketing strategy, sellers must know the appropriate tone and the way to present their posts, which will take their businesses to unattainable heights of success.
Interesting Fact: A study in 2019 found out that leads are 9x more likely to convert when businesses follow up within 5 minutes.
Paid Advertisement
In B2B marketing, paid advertisement plays an important role. There are a number of platforms available for paid advertisement. The most successful options are paid social media posts, programmatic advertisements, pay-per-click marketing, and display ads. With the help of paid advertisement strategy, marketers can maximize the prospects of TOFU marketing.
Content Promotion
This strategy utilizes the power of content to attract clients. Content promotion involves sharing informational and helpful content and then promoting it through traditional and digital means of marketing, which helps businesses attract traffic and get more consumers. However, what is required is a team of professional content producers who know what the audience wants.
To Sum Up
With the help of various digital tools, the top-the-funnel marketing approach improves an enterprise’s lead generation. What makes TOFU marketing so incredible is the fact that it is highly organized and proper. Every move is sorted, and the only thing that is required is the proper execution, which makes lead generation easy
