Modern marketing is often described as a funnel. The bottom of the funnel is the stage where prospects are first becoming customers, or continuing to buy or subscribe to your product or service. Top-of-funnel (also known as TOF or TOFU marketing), is the earliest stage in this journey, and it’s essential for any company casting a wide net to attract potential customers or paid users and move them down the funnel toward sales.
Top-of-funnel marketing describes the awareness phase of audiences becoming familiar with your company or product at a high level. From there, the journey down through the funnel stages includes interest, consideration, intent, evaluation, and finally the purchase phase. During each step of the journey, marketers must stay in contact and keep their leads engaged and interested.
While the goal is to move leads to the bottom of the funnel, that cannot happen without dedicating time and energy to TOF. What is top-of-funnel marketing, exactly? Let’s take a look.
How Does Top-of-Funnel Marketing Work?
Top-of-funnel marketing refers to the first stage of the buyer’s journey. Marketers strategize content and tactics to help spread brand awareness about their products and services to generate leads that will hopefully, eventually, become customers.
Marketers and media buyers should target the top of the funnel when attempting to bring in new leads to nurture. At this point, potential customers will be gathering as many leads as possible, and then narrowing them down as they go through the funnel.
Top-of-funnel marketing is useful when trying to find new consumers who haven’t discovered you before. It’s not for targeting repeat customers who are already aware of what your company does and sells.
Why Is Top-of-Funnel Marketing Important?
A top-of-funnel marketing strategy can make the rest of your funnel work that much more efficiently. Without an extensive pool of top-of-the-funnel prospects, the middle and bottom will be much smaller and less lucrative.
Today’s buyers are primed to see your top-of-funnel efforts, too. At least 47% of buyers view three to five pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep, according to Hubspot. Internet-savvy users expect brands to create content across all channels and formats, whether it’s a company blog or TikTok video.
Top-of-Funnel Marketing Benefits
Dedicating time and resources to building a strong top-of-funnel marketing strategy can yield many benefits, particularly in the long term. This is where marketing teams can build strong brand awareness, giving down-funnel teams more to work with.
Top-of-funnel marketing is focused on getting the attention of your target audience so that they think positively about your brand and start to understand the value your company provides. Potential buyers will be more willing to hear from you once they have a positive impression of your brand, helping to build goodwill for later interest and purchases.
Top-of-funnel marketing can help achieve these goals:
- Boost brand awareness.
- Generate qualified leads.
- Improve engagement rates.
- Provide long-term advantages.
- Educate potential customers.
- Educate the broader market on your industry and offerings.
- Drive awareness about your products and services.
Types of Top-of-Funnel Marketing Content
Top-of-funnel marketing is heavily content-driven in the modern market, in contrast to formerly traditional advertising like billboards or TV commercials. Instead, inbound content can both be more targeted to the right potential customers and show its value more readily.
There are multiple paths to finding and developing leads these days with top-of-funnel efforts. Those paths will vary widely based on your audience, your industry, and your team’s creativity and appetite for experimentation.
A potential customer may do a Google search and come across your educational, search-optimized article, then click the call to action (CTA) to get details on your products and services. Another person may see your content on social media or through paid native advertising, and end up entering their email address to download a useful, timely ebook. These readers become leads to nurture through the funnel.
Consider any and all of these content types when you’re building a top-of-funnel marketing strategy:
- Blog posts.
- Native advertising posts.
- Infographics.
- Videos.
- Whitepapers.
- Social media posts.
- Research studies.
- Industry reports.
- Guides.
- Direct mail.
- Webinars.
- Events — virtual and in-person.
- Ebooks.
Always keep your audience in mind. A B2B (business-to-business) audience might engage with detailed blog posts and case studies, while a B2C (business-to-consumer) audience could engage with fun, social-first videos. Research your audience and do some testing to see which content resonates best.
Top-of-Funnel Marketing Tactics
Marketing tactics at the awareness stage should vary from tactics at the sales stage. At the top of the funnel, you’re providing value to potential audience members. This stage is all about them — educating and entertaining and helping to make their job easier (for those in B2B) through your content.
Research and analyze what kind of content your audience wants and create content accordingly. Start with users and their problems, not your sales or leads goals. A consumer tech company might produce related but light, entertaining content, while a B2B tech company could conduct and publish industry research or surveys. In exchange for the value you’re providing to these prospects, you can ask for an email or phone number to generate leads.
Always include relevant, clear CTAs in your content, such as links in a blog or social post, to guide readers to product pages, demo offerings, or other mid-funnel content. That’s when you can open up more of a dialogue with a prospect and start proving your company’s particular value in products or services.
Top-of-Funnel vs. Bottom-of-Funnel Marketing
At the top of the funnel, you’re introducing your company to prospects in engaging, entertaining ways. You’re saying hello and asking readers if they’d like to learn more, all while keeping their problems and needs top of mind.
Further into the funnel, you’re having a more direct conversation, offering more details about how your product or service might help. Middle-of-the-funnel content should include content like customer testimonials, case studies, free trials, demos, and live webinars that show your company is knowledgeable — an industry leader that brings results for your customers.
The end of the funnel is when a salesperson will make a hard sell to a potential customer. You might offer free in-house demonstrations, limited time promotional codes, or one-on-one consultations. The goal is to sweeten the deal and make the sale in this stage, whether a one-time purchase or a multi-year subscription or commitment.
How to Measure Top-of-Funnel Marketing Campaigns
You’ll need to measure your top-of-funnel marketing efforts on an ongoing basis to see how they’re working. Top-of-funnel metrics are often quite different from mid- or bottom-funnel measurements, since they don’t directly result in a sale or even a qualified lead all the time.
Start with setting your top-of-funnel key performance indicators (KPIs) based on audience research and market knowledge. These are some common top-of-funnel marketing campaign KPIs:
- Impressions: How many times your content or ad was viewed.
- Click-through rate: An engagement measure for how many people explored your brand further by clicking on a link.
- Bounce rate: The percentage of people who leave a website immediately, indicating a mismatch in audience expectations vs. reality.
- New visitors: How well your top-of-funnel efforts did to drive net-new traffic.
- Social media engagement: The increase in likes, shares, reposts, comments, and followers due to top-of-funnel work.
- Audience reach: Shows the number of prospective customers exposed to your message in a period of time.
- Brand sentiment: Helps show brand awareness and the impression audiences have, plus comparison with competitors.
- Newsletter signups: May overlap with middle-of-funnel work, but can reflect increased interest in the company and influence of top-of-funnel work.
- App download: Depending on industry, downloading your app can be an indicator of increased interest and activity to continue nurturing.
Combining these insights can be incredibly valuable for your team to understand what’s working and what isn’t in order to adjust strategy and tactics accordingly.
Examples of Effective TOF Marketing Campaigns
Lots of companies infuse creativity and audience understanding into their top-of-funnel campaign work to drive great results. Here are a few we’ve worked with at Taboola.
NASCAR
With the longest season of all the major sports, NASCAR has to publish timely stories to keep fans engaged week to week. NASCAR digital media’s senior director of content rights and partnerships Sarah Davis talked about why NASCAR branched out into sponsored content in a Q&A. Davis discusses the value of sponsored content for her brand and how she uses content to reach NASCAR fans — a great example of how to leverage branded content to make noise around a customer base.
AM:PM
This popular market used cartoon branding videos that advertise some of the products available in their store. Publishers advertised their videos in-feed, and AM:PM saw incredible results from the campaign, with potential shoppers educated and entertained by the videos. See how their locally targeted marketing ultimately helped boost sales.
Check out Taboola’s case study library for lots more top-of-funnel marketing stories.
Challenges of Top-of-Funnel Marketing
Top-of-funnel marketing brings its own challenges, primarily figuring out if and how it’s working. You’ll want to gather all relevant metrics to understand your company’s particular challenges and be able to educate teammates as well.
Here are some common top-of-funnel challenges:
- Reaching a large audience with low brand awareness.
- Creating/publishing valuable content that isn’t sales-oriented.
- Creating content for a wide range of potential customers with varying levels of topical knowledge.
- Distinguishing your brand and content from competitors in a busy digital landscape.
- Identifying the right potential customers early in their journey.
- Measuring how well awareness building is working.
- Navigating trends in marketing and online to make sure your efforts are in line with audience needs.
- Aligning marketing and sales to make sure leads are transitioned correctly.
- Low conversion rates and other typical sales metrics; educating sales teams on the specifics of TOF marketing.
Best Practices for Top-of-Funnel Marketing
Success in modern, digital, top-of-funnel marketing requires authenticity. Savvy readers and users know when something is sales-y, and they won’t respond to it. Your prospects are also moving quickly, so catching their attention early will be key to your efforts.
There are also so many types of content, formats, and channels available to marketers. With all these options, it’s essential to choose the right combination to ensure that your content is useful, high-quality, and authentic.
Here are some tips and best practices for top-of-funnel content marketing:
- Focus on education. Audiences will respond to valuable, informative content that addresses needs and pain points.
- Do not make a hard sell. It can be difficult to resist making a sales pitch or talking too much about your company in TOF content, but remember the goals of this stage.
- Use a mix of channels. Social media, SEO, content marketing, email marketing, and paid ads can all be part of the top-of-funnel mix.
- Include clear CTAs. Always provide a user with a desired action, like a newsletter signup or the opportunity to follow on social media.
- Track the right metrics. Choose and capture the right metrics for TOF work, like web traffic, brand mentions, social engagement, and influenced leads.
- Develop strong brand messaging. Your brand identity is only as good as your messaging — make it clear and consistent to establish trust and recognition.
- Don’t let leads linger. Ensure that there’s a solid handoff from top- to middle- to bottom-funnel efforts so that prospects don’t go cold.
Key Takeaways
Top-of-funnel marketing is its own particular discipline of marketing, and content marketing specifically. Make sure to create a strategy for top-of-funnel work that fits with the rest of the funnel, and use the right metrics to gauge success. Because what is top-of-funnel marketing for if not to entice people all the way to the bottom?
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What is the top-of-the-funnel marketing CTA?
The right CTA for top-of-funnel marketing content will depend on your business, your TOF goals, and what action you most want a prospect to take. Common CTAs at this stage include website links, social media accounts, a free download, or a newsletter signup.
What are the common top-of-funnel marketing pitfalls to avoid?
Avoid thinking of this stage of the funnel as strictly a sales function, and don’t overwhelm or turn off prospects with too much company or product information, or anything that feels like a straight sales pitch. Make sure to advocate for the top of the funnel as an essential part of growing the business, not an add-on.
What are the best tools for TOF marketing?
TOF marketing can include many tools, and the mix will depend on your business and industry, plus budget. Top-of-funnel marketing tools include social media platforms, with both paid and organic posts; a well-organized and engaging company website; native ad solutions; and a brand awareness or brand listening tool, in addition to multimedia formats like a podcast or video platform.
