Want to attract more potential customers to your business? Top-of-funnel (TOFU) marketing is the key to grabbing attention and building brand awareness before people are ready to buy.
In this guide, we'll explore 12 powerful TOFU marketing tactics to help you generate leads and turn strangers into engaged prospects.
What Is Top of Funnel Marketing?
Top-of-funnel (TOFU) marketing is the first stage of the customer journey, focused on attracting and engaging a broad audience. It aims to create awareness about a brand, product, or service by providing valuable content that educates, entertains, or solves users' problems.
TOFU marketing tactics include SEO, social media, content marketing, and paid ads to capture potential customers’ attention before they show intent to buy. The goal is to build trust and guide prospects toward deeper engagement in the marketing funnel.
Top-of-Funnel-Content
Content that targets prospects at the top of your digital marketing funnel is called top-of-funnel content. Its purpose is to bring traffic to your website, increase brand awareness, and establish your business as an expert and trusted source of information for your industry.
Because the objective of this stage of the marketing funnel is to raise awareness and create interest, top-of-funnel content should focus on informing your audience, not selling to them.
Create content that provides real value to your audience
To create meaningful top of the funnel content, you need to understand your audience and their unique challenges.
Ask yourself: What are your audience’s interests? What information would be of value to them? What challenges do they need to solve?
Knowing your audience on a deeper level will enable you to create content that your audience actually wants and is willing to exchange their information for.
Before creating top of the funnel content for your audience, you must discover their pain points. The most effective way to do this is to find the search terms they are using.
This will provide direct insight into the problems your audience is looking to answer.
Search terms related to these ideas are considered top of the funnel keywords. You can use the following techniques to identify top of the funnel keywords:
Keyword research: Use your favorite keyword research tool to look for keywords around your area of expertise. Note down any search terms you feel would be good for creating content.
Google suggests and people also ask: On search results pages, Google will often show a list of questions related to the search query that users are also searching for. Run searches for queries related to your industry and note any related questions. These can create more relevant ideas for the top-of-the-funnel content.
Once you have some ideas for the topics on which to base your content, you can begin deciding what type of content to create.
Let’s examine the content marketing tactics that work best for getting the attention of new customers.
Top of Funnel Marketing Tactics
1. Listicles
A listicle is a blog post that lists items. It normally has a number in the title, like "7 ways to do X."
The structure of a listicle is simple: an introduction, a list of items, and a conclusion.
Listicles are great for businesses and their audiences because they are easy to create and digest. They are a perfect match for our brain's inclination to categorize information.
The most common type of listicles is "best of" posts. You have undoubtedly seen plenty of them on the web.
In fact, you're reading one right now. Take a second to consider the experience this article is creating. Hopefully, the simple and easy-to-follow structure will help you retain the information we have provided.
Chances are, your audience is frequently in the market for different products and services to help them grow their business. They will want to find the best solutions or ways to do something, but may not have the time to do extensive research.
This is where you can provide value to your audience by creating a comparison or “best of” blog posts in which you review different products or services.
2. Landing Pages
Landing pages are the first page your prospects will see when arriving at your website.
Landing pages tend to have a different layout than normal pages and are designed to get a visitor to complete a specific action. They can be used for lead generation or to provide visitors with an overview of your products or services and the ability to make a purchase.
Your homepage often serves as a landing page, as it is the page visitors will arrive on when typing your website in the browser.
For example, you can make a page around a specific search term and use it for the target page of a paid ads campaign.
Landing pages work hand in hand with other types of top of the funnel content. If you want to provide your audience with a webinar or free tool you’ll need a page to give customers details about the offer and the ability to claim it.
3. Paid Ads
Paid Ads are one of the most effective ways to drive traffic to your website.
When you are looking to attract new leads for your business, you should focus on two types of ads: search ads and social ads.
Search ads will display on search engines like Google or Bing. They are triggered to display when people search for TOFU keywords.
Social ads are a little different because users are not searching for anything related to your business. Instead, you are running the ads to appear in their social feeds while they are using different platforms.
With social ads, you can target users based on their interests to ensure that your ads only appear in front of relevant prospects.
Ads are often the first point of contact with prospects. To be effective, they need to highlight the value of your business while being engaging enough to encourage prospects to click through to your website.
4. Webinars
Webinars are video presentations hosted over the internet. They are a dynamic form of content and are great for engaging prospects at the top of your digital marketing funnel.
When you host a webinar, it is a great opportunity to position yourself as a subject matter expert and begin to build trust with your prospects.
You can use webinars as a lead generation tool and require participants to provide their email addresses in exchange for access. Alternatively, you can make them open to everyone without the need to provide contact information.
Live webinars naturally generate the most engagement, but you can also record your webinars as videos and make them available on-demand after the event.
5. How-to Articles
How-to articles are incredibly valuable to prospects because they provide an in-depth solution to a specific problem — which is why they interact with your business.
Like listicles, how-to articles tend to employ a clean and easy-to-follow structure. Instead of laying out a list of ideas, they provide a step-by-step guide on how to do something. The steps do not necessarily need to be numbered, but the process should be clear for the reader to understand.
How-to articles are great for generating traffic, as the title is often an exact match to a query made by a TOFU searcher.
Make sure to provide a thorough answer to the question the article is trying to address. This will leave your readers feeling satisfied and help you establish your business as an authority on the subject.
6. Downloadable Free Guides
In-depth guides are another type of written content you can use to reach the top of the funnel. These can come in a downloadable format that can be given away for free.
The content comprising your free guides will be similar to your how-to posts. The difference is that the guide will be much more thorough. These work well for subjects that might be too complex to explain adequately in blog posts.
Free guides can work in tandem with your landing pages and are an effective tool for lead generation. Look to create your free guides around the search queries and topics you find in your keyword research.
7. Explainer Videos
Building explainer videos are another great type of top of the funnel content.
There is no shortage of the type of content you can use for your explainer videos.
Repurposing some of your other content into explainer videos can be effective. This works especially well for long-form blog posts.
Here are some of the types of explainer videos you could use for top of the funnel content:
- How-to videos
- Demo videos
- Features videos
- Testimonials videos
Explainer videos are a solid fit for the top of your marketing funnel as they are used in multiple places.
You can add explainer videos to your landing pages or blog posts, use them on your social media profiles, and even your YouTube account. This can help expose your videos to more prospects, as they will be visible to searchers on the platform.
8. Free Tools And Templates
If you want to make your business stand out, consider offering free tools to your top of the funnel prospects.
Some useful free tools are calculators, such as an ROI calculator, or programs that can run a technical SEO audit of a website.
Templates are another great form of content to offer your audience for free. Examples include a financial model in an Excel spreadsheet or a WordPress plugin or theme.
9. Survey Tour Existing Customers
Surveys are effective at all marketing funnel stages, particularly at the top. When you ask your audience how they came into contact with your business and what they want to gain from the interaction, you make them feel valued.
Surveys are especially valuable for your business as they can provide useful information about your audience. You can then use this information to refine your user experience and send more relevant messages to your customers.
Surveys work well in unison with some of the other forms of TOFU content on this list, consider embedding your surveys to appear with:
- Blog posts
- Free downloads
- Checklists
Some example questions you can ask in your surveys:
- What topic are you interested in learning about the most?
- What is the biggest challenge for your business?
- What information is the most valuable to you?
10. Checklists
Checklists are a great tool for lead generation and an effective type of content for the top of the funnel. They are easy to create, easy to consume, and viable across any industry.
With a checklist, you can provide your audience with a step-by-step process for addressing an issue they are looking to solve. Not only do checklists allow you to give actionable guidance, but they are also engaging and highly interactive.
If a prospect downloads one of your checklists, they will likely have to return to it repeatedly as they go through the items on the list.
There are plenty of topics you can use for checklists. For example, you could provide an SEO checklist for someone creating a new website or a business startup checklist for someone launching their first company.
11. Case Studies
Case studies are reports or stories that detail how a customer overcomes problems with the help of your business.
They are great for building authority and are highly relevant to your audience as they provide a real-life example of the value your business can bring.
Look through your results for previous customers to see if any would make for a good study. You can contact them for testimonials about how they benefited from your business.
12. Whitepapers
Whitepapers are in-depth reports where you outline a specific problem and then supply a solution. They are pretty helpful when creating content around a subject that may be too detailed for a blog post.
Whitepapers are generally more formal in tone and require much more research and time to create than blog posts.
Because whitepapers provide extensive information about a specific subject, they make excellent top-of-the-funnel content for prospects who are just starting to research a particular problem.
Key Learnings
Marketing funnels segment your audience based on their position in the buying process.
The awareness stage, or top of the funnel, is the first part of the marketing funnel. During this stage, prospects become aware of your business for the first time.
The purpose of the top of the funnel is to attract new prospects and engage them so they can be moved further down the funnel. This is done through various forms of top-of-funnel content.
Understanding your audience and performing keyword research on the topics they are interested in can help you generate ideas for TOFU content marketing.
