Tips For Top-of-the-Funnel Marketing
Marketing is a process that includes many, often times complicated, steps. These steps build upon each other and go through the marketing “funnel”, with customer retention being the end of that funnel. How do we bring people into our funnel though? That is what we will be discussing today. The stage of the marketing funnel that we are focusing on is the top of the funnel, or TOFU. Unfortunately, measuring the effectiveness of your TOFU marketing efforts is very difficult. This will require faith in your expertise and reliance on data from past marketing campaigns.
What is TOFU?
TOFU is the first stage of the marketing funnel. This stage is focused on attracting consumers to your business. This includes, but is not limited to, creating awareness of the issues, problems and needs for a specific industry
How do you create awareness?
Creating awareness of a particular subject or issues is the best way to get your company’s name and purpose out to the world. You will want to use any avenue that appears to be appropriate for the demographic that you are trying to attract to your industry.
Some suggested methods are:
- PR
- Social Media Engagement
- Conferences and Events
- Casual Encounters (ex: Coffee meetings)
- TOFU Content Marketing
- Brand Awareness
How will I know that this stuff is working?
You won’t, at least not right away. That is the most difficult part about TOFU marketing, the results are not immediately apparent. This can be rather frustrating, but one tactic you can do to try quantifying your results is by focusing on a particular product or demographic. Test a particular marketing strategy on that product or demographic and see how their responses compare to those of your currently existing methods.
How much time should be invested into TOFU?
There really is no right answer to this question. One method you can use to really hone in on results would be to limit the time of you invest in your TOFU content marketing, but that is not recommended because it takes time for these things to show their value. By limiting yourself, you are leading yourself to negative results. Allow flexibility in your time investment and allow your efforts to build upon each other.
Should I try out successful PR and marketing efforts on other demographics and products?
You certainly can do this and it may prove to be successful, but keep in mind that not all marketing tactics will work the same way each time. Something that was effective for one target group may not produce the same results for another group. You do have statistics in your favor though-if your marketing awareness is working, you are generating traffic and those metrics can, to some extent, be measured. Those metrics are the closest thing you will have to proof, so you will just have to believe that what you are doing will continue to attract and retain customers.
