What is Top of the Funnel?
Top of the Funnel or TOFU in marketing is a term that refers to the first stage of the buyer’s experience.
In this first stage of the Marketing Funnel or awareness stage, the largest number of consumers pass through, and an introduction of a product or service is made. The main objective is to orient consumers, generate leads, create awareness of a brand and stay connected with them to take them to the next level of the buying process.
Why is Top of the Funnel important in marketing?
Top of the Funnel marketing campaigns serves to promote, educate and maintain interest in a product or service brand. Among the benefits of marketing at this stage are:
- Brand awareness: if your brand educates and delivers valuable information frequently, it will become a place where potential customers will go when they require it. This will grow its popularity, and, over time, they will tend to become customers.
- Increases trust: publishing quality content gives an image of expertise to your company and generates trust in the new people who are part of your audience.
- Adds value in the future: if quality content is created, constantly updated, and improved, over time, an effect known as the snowball effect can occur, which is nothing more than a way of comparing the abrupt arrival of many new customers and visitors with an avalanche of snow.
- Little competition: focusing efforts on the top of the Funnel will make you get less competition because most companies concentrate on the bottom of the funnel, leaving aside this inexhaustible source of potential customers.
- Feed your contact list: this first scan serves as an opportunity to increase the list of contacts that can be used in your email marketing.
- Supports the sales team: if you add links to your content that direct users to a page with quick answers to sales questions, for example, you can save the sales team time.
- Improve your retargeting marketing: when you get a lot of traffic and at the same time potential customers who quickly abandon your page, you can create a pixel and retarget them to come back to it.
What type of content should go in the Top of the Funnel?
Top of the Funnel (TOFU) content is vitally important when it comes to grabbing potential customers’ attention and will depend on the audience you are targeting because, for example, developing content for a B2B scheme is not the same as developing content for a B2C scheme.
Among the most commonly used inbound content strategies today are the following:
- Publications on social networks.
- Videos.
- Infographics.
- Blogs, articles.
- Native Advertising.
- Webinars.
- E-books.
- Events.
- SlideShare presentations.
- Research studies.
- Direct mail.
Top of Funnel content example
HubSpot
It is noted that this well-known CRM (customer relationship management) program develops its content in the Top of The Funnel to educate users on what it means to work with such a program and how its use will grow their business without comparing itself to the competition or highlighting the qualities and renown that the company currently has.
Netflix.
The popularity of Netflix has grown so much that it has become a sensation for lovers of digital content, and it has achieved this by applying the marketing funnel to the fullest, effectively guiding consumers.
The masterful execution of Top of the Funnel marketing is done through buzz that informs new programs, showing short clips with a clear synthesis of a sample of what they will see if they subscribe, enthusiastically suggesting that they watch the program when it becomes available.
These are widely disseminated through social networks such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, among others, to multiply the effect. It also uses word-of-mouth marketing that is disseminated among friends, family, and acquaintances.