According to Forbes, 90% of start-ups fail in their first few years, and the biggest underlying reason is a lack of proper product and market research, popularly known as Product-Market fit.
And if they choose the right product, they are unable to take their offer to their potential prospects in the right manner. This mistake starts from the initial stage of your business i.e. top of the funnel.
Having a proper funnel helps direct the prospects in the right way, which makes them your loyal customers. Read on to understand the concept of top-of-the-funnel marketing. The article even covers the mistakes you should avoid when creating and implementing a funnel.
Having a clear understanding of the optimum motive of the top of the funnel marketing shall set the stage for a more conscious approach towards the desired outcome and its success.
The first and foremost purpose of the top of funnel marketing is to attract a likable audience by offering content that’s relevant and persuasive enough to catch their attention.
Secondly, identify as many marketing angles as possible to broaden the horizon and scope of your overall marketing campaign.
Once you have people landing on your site, your objective transforms to optimize your landing page for better engagement.
The aim is to turn your cold audience to warm prospects and then finally into a hot lead in the future.
The crux of the top of the funnel is creating your brand awareness and subsequently generating leads optimally. But, you need to identify the target audience first.
Today’s buyer is smart and well-informed too, but still unaware of all the options available in the market, so before they decide to finalize their purchase they will be visiting numerous brand sites, to compare, analyze and then select the one which fits into their interest frame.
This pattern of their research journey needs to be understood strongly. The ones entering the funnel need to be nurtured well to be taken to the next part of the sales life cycle.
For any business, digital marketers or marketing consultants, the buyer’s behavior – their pain points, their needs, their desires, and their beliefs need to be focused on before beginning with marketing.
Beginning Meaningful Relationships With The Right Ones
Any customer will go through various stages, from taking a look at your site for the first time to later subscribing to your email or booking a call, of course, if you prove to be impressive.
We can understand the top of the funnel marketing by breaking it into the below-mentioned aspects:
This aspect focuses on informing your target audience with content that carries topics that are brand relatable and doesn’t focus on sales at all initially.
For increasing your brand awareness you should go through a process of proper research, later on analyzing the topics and designing content that surrounds only the user’s interest.
For Example – If you have a fashion brand then you should produce content related to the latest trends by designers, showcase forthcoming items, product tutorials, case studies on fashion, and more.
Collecting contact numbers and email addresses is your goal at the top of the funnel of marketing.
At this point, you can use channels to outreach people. Remember this will be cold outreach which can be worked using various social media platforms:
It is absolutely your research that will help you to decide which social media platform proves worthy and thereby should be opted for.
For Example: If your target audience is more Reddit users than Twitter, then creating awareness on such a medium will prove more fruitful. In short, focus on social media platforms where your audience hangs out.
Pinterest and Instagram are great platforms when your brands show more relatability to visuals. Using trending topics and hashtags also works well
Lastly, You should be convincing enough to portray yourself as a thought leader and could ask for an email from the one who visits your site in exchange for an eBook or a valuable whitepaper. But along with awareness your message and site should be attractive enough.
The first aspect of awareness and the second one attract goes hand in hand. Just keep in mind one thing many prospects will still be in the awareness state on top of the funnel while you begin to attract them.
So, the aim of your content would be to touch on their pain points and offer an impressive solution.
You create content and related conversation using your expertise to establish connections with the right people.
Over here, superior-level educational content is what the buyer is looking for which gives them the answers they were seeking for. The best marketing channels which will be useful here:
All the above should be used with the idea to add value to their knowledge otherwise the content will not show usefulness and there will be fewer chances for you to carry them further to the middle of the funnel.
Now if the reader is quite attracted then this filtered audience will show more interest in your site and may visit some of your blogs. They might get some credible solutions to the problems which they were trying to discover.
Yes, the top of the funnel is designed and streamlined to educate the cold prospect, and later more engagement starts when the prospect enters the middle of the funnel after you have managed to grab their adequate attention.
You are in the process of nurturing the lead and building trustworthy relationships between your brand and the audience offering useful solutions & insights targeting their pain points and aims.
The perfect channels at this point would be:
After this is the bottom of the funnel where your warm prospect will turn into a hot one while initiating the final purchase decision. If you have the content that’s perfect and offer that’s appealing then boosting and lifting your conversations becomes super easy.
The final dig is a perfectly compelling call to action for optimizing your sales outreach, best explained in the blog focusing on the bottom of the funnel.
Content marketing is about thinking unique and creating something that’s out of the box.
Through contextual marketing and personalization, you can always continue with customer engagement as this is not a one-time task but progressive work.
The qualified prospects should always be taken great care of by you and the best channels for this would be:
Whatever is mentioned in the write-up is not just simply to be followed in a linear pattern as you may excite some customers just after the awareness aspect.
The crux is to capture the attention of all those likable prospects who enter the top of the funnel and then try to engage them in the best possible way.
All stages could be on your radar while you aim at attracting buyers through their journey.
Many funnels fail…Avoid this!!
As I mentioned above also that marketing is not a one-time task but a process that should be iterative.
Funnels are similar to a procedure that require the functioning of all the components in synchronization. The system will collapse if any single part doesn’t work properly.
So, what should you do?
The key to making a funnel successful is to attract the right traffic initially i.e. top of the funnel.
If you are unable to do so then I am worried your product or service isn’t doing well. How great your copywriting or design is, the likable future prospects need to be captured at the first stage for further filtration for your ultimate goal – “SALES”.
Conclusion:
We hope you are now all set to create a successful funnel for your business. Make sure to follow the tips mentioned in this article to target the right audience using the right marketing strategies.
Additionally, the success of your funnel marketing campaign depends on A/B testing, so spend some time determining what works well for your business. Stay tuned with Rank-Jacker SEO for more insightful posts about SEO, link-building, and more.
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