Marketers are always talking about the use of content marketing. This can probably be categorized as marketing 101 stuffs, but not all online marketers have put deep thoughts into it. The one obvious prerequisite to do content marketing is to build your top of funnel for marketing. You will have a funnel that spans across three levels: Top of funnel, middle of funnel, and bottom of funnel. You need to have content at each of the three levels in the funnel i.e. At top of the funnel to facilitate awareness, at middle of the funnel to facilitate evaluation, at bottom of funnel to facilitate conversion.
Why? The one simple reason is that you often would have an ice-cold prospect arriving at the top of your funnel who could not find what he/she wanted in first place, and then departed your website (or landing page). But what you need your prospect to do is to travel through all three levels of your funnel, which is how he/she would complete a purchase on your website, regardless of what products you’re selling. Let’s go through the topic of top of marketing funnel.
Why is top of funnel marketing important? Top of funnel marketing refers to activities and/or campaigns that focus mainly on lead generation. This means you focus on targeting consumers in the upper most portion of the marketing funnel. Traffic sources (in which some often are regarded free traffic sources) that fit into the top of marketing tactics include email, social media, blogging, SEO traffic, paid search advertising, white papers, free trials, etc. The objective of all these top of marketing tactics is to generate leads that you can have them fed into your business/brand’s lead nurture program. The end goal has always been one thing – Convert the leads into paid customers i.e. who must buy from you regardless whether it is your products or your services.
The top of funnel (or the most upper part of your funnel) serves to spread awareness, educate prospects, and cultivate brand buzz for your products or services. When you set up the top of funnel marketing, it is not all about the traffic sources (or channels), but you must also implement the performance tracking for all your channels. One great tool which is free to use has always been Google Analytics. It does not cover all areas of performance tracking, but it is one tool that tracks very well with the most of the top of funnel marketing channels including email, social media, blogging, SEO traffic, paid search advertising, white papers, free trials, Only after you have implemented all the performance tracking, you will start to understand how each channel contributes to the success of your marketing efforts. Subsequently, you should use this information to make further decisions, and/or strategic decisions that would make progressive differences to grow your business for the long run.
