What is a marketing funnel?
A marketing funnel is the process someone goes through from becoming aware of your business all of the way to buying a product from your business.
This process CAN happen all at once, but it is usually a more drawn out process over multiple interactions.
Marketing funnels are often broken down into steps based on customers’ behavior.
The most common breakdown is known as AIDA, which stands for: Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action.
But almost every marketing expert comes up with their own version of this.
For example, another way it’s broken down is UPSYD, standing for, Unaware, Product aware, Solutions aware, Your solution aware and Decision.
To simplify this, marketers usually bunch everything into Top of Funnel, Middle of Funnel and Bottom of Funnel.
What is top of funnel marketing?
Top of funnel marketing refers to the first stage in a marketing funnel (not to be confused with a sales funnel).
This is where people are first becoming aware of your business and your product.
In 90% of cases this is either through content or advertising.
With advertising it’s possible to move someone from the top of funnel to bottom of funnel in one smooth process and ultimately make a sale.
This can be a quick win with a lower priced product, but can be more difficult for high ticket products.
The best form of top of funnel marketing is content marketing.
It doesn’t matter as much which type of content you’re making, whether it’s YouTube videos, blog posts, or podcasts…
The most important thing is that it’s something that’s valuable to your dream customer.
If it’s not valuable, those visitors probably aren’t going to be coming back.
On top of that, they aren’t going to trust that your products will be worth their money.
The flip side of that is if you’re putting out great, valuable content, they’ll keep coming back AND trust your business more…
Which will make your bottom of funnel marketing MUCH easier.
The bottom line is top of funnel marketing is just about getting attention.
Top of Funnel Marketing vs Bottom of Funnel Marketing
The two parts of a marketing funnel that people care about the most are top of funnel and bottom of funnel.
Mainly because these have the most short term, measurable data.
Middle of funnel marketing is mainly relationship building and lead nurturing…
Which very few people get excited about.
While top and bottom of funnel marketing are both measurable and important, they do have some differences.
The most important difference between them is their goals.
Top of funnel marketing is focused on reaching a broader audience and generating awareness for your brand and products.
It is heavily focused on education and content.
Bottom of funnel marketing on the other hand is all about converting visitors into sales.
All of the messaging at this stage is talking to people who already know about your brand…
And only has the goal of helping them commit to making the last step into a sale.
With all of the detailed tracking pixels available to marketers on most ad platforms, bottom of funnel marketing can be almost entirely retargeting ads.
How do you target the top of funnel?
The very first step to targeting the top of funnel is to know who your dream customer is.
Not figuring this out is one of the biggest mistakes marketers and businesses make…
Usually because they argue that everyone can use their product or service.
While that may be almost true, that doesn’t mean that everyone is their DREAM customer.
The idea of a dream customer builds off of the 80/20 principle and the idea that not every customer has the same lifetime value to your business.
At the end of the day there are some customers who are going to buy MUCH MORE than others.
These are your dream customers.
Focusing on providing THEM value is going to not only give them a better experience with your business, it will help improve your average order value.
Once you have your dream customer figured out, then you can start to see where they are congregating online.
What’s the one thing the whole group has in common?
Do they have a similar interest?
Is there a forum they tend to be on?
Figuring this out is critical!
Once you’ve figured out where they all hang out, then you can go there and see what their biggest pain points are.
What are they struggling with?
Or better yet, why do they want to fix it?
Once you figure all of that out, then you know what to make your top of funnel content about.
You know what they talk about, what problems they want solved…
And most of all you have the information you need to relate it back to your products so you can eventually tie in the bottom of your funnel.
P.S. Learn more about how to find your dream customers, when you grab your FREE copy of DotCom Secrets (just cover shipping).
What is content for the top of the funnel?
Since top of funnel marketing is focused on people who don’t know your business at all, the best way to provide value to them and start building trust is with content.
Once you have an idea who your dream customer is, you’ll have a better idea what your content needs to be about.
In many niches and industries, the first place to start is answering questions like “What is X?” or “How to Y”.
These are often the lowest hanging fruit that you can target.
After that, you can start going into questions that someone with better knowledge of the niche will know.
This content in this second step is going to use much more industry specific terms and solve problems that someone actively in the industry will have.
One question that comes up around this topic is what TYPE of content should someone make.
“Is making a blog better?”
“Are YouTube videos the best for top of funnel?”
“Can I just do a podcast?”
All of these are great options and part of the answer depends on you personally.
There’s obviously going to be a learning curve with each of them, but there’s probably a type of content you like making better than the others.
And if you like making that content more, you’ll probably make more of it…
And if you make more of it, you’ll probably get better at it faster and get more awareness with it.
But there are limits to this idea.
At the time of this writing, YouTube is the king of content.
YouTube and blogs both have high traffic potential, especially when compared to podcasts.
But a piece of content can grow faster on YouTube.
Blog posts usually take up to 8 months before they are fully mature and bring in high traffic numbers.
The downside is that it takes much more skill to make videos and stand out on YouTube.
If you can stay committed to YouTube long enough to get good at it, then that’s the best content platform.
Blogs are the next best content platform and podcasts (not on YouTube) are third.
Everything else falls below these unless you’re in a business to business niche.
