When you start your inbound marketing program, it is important to discover and support your target audience’s’ needs, starting at the top of the sales funnel. Starting at the top of the funnel, or TOFU, you can guide your target audience through the buyer’s journey from beginning to end.
At its heart, top-of-the-funnel marketing focuses on driving lead generation, finding new customers and building awareness of your brand. This phase of the marketing process allows you to cast a wide net that can extend your reach in significant ways. If you want to achieve true marketing success, you must start seeking and nurturing top-of-the-funnel leads using the following best practices.
The Value of TOFU Leads
Top-of-the-funnel marketing helps your target audience develop awareness of your brand through various marketing campaigns and customer research activities. You can reach these TOFU leads through a wide range of tactics, including social media campaigns, blog posts, online advertisements and radio. By offering access to content (like an eBook or white paper), events or webinars, you can collect users’ contact information in exchange for these TOFU leads. Once you have the contact information in your database, you can start offering the support they may need to become loyal, paying customers.
With this process jump starting your sales process, you must focus on quality over quantity to achieve the best results. As you seek out quality leads on a consistent basis, you can rapidly increase your customer base and keep your sales pipeline full of promising prospects. With a full sales pipeline, you have more opportunities to improve your conversion rate and optimize your sales practices. Your efforts can result in increased annual revenues and a positive return on investment (ROI) for your marketing program.
The Next Steps for TOFU Leads
Once you have your TOFU leads coming in consistently, you will need to nurture them through the sales funnel to complete each conversion. You can effectively manage your leads by adding them to a lead management system, such as a customer relationship management (CRM) system. This tool allows you to track each potential customer through the sales funnel and offer them the resources and support they need to complete their purchase with confidence.
Email marketing campaigns are particularly effective in delivering targeted content to your TOFU leads during this nurturing phase. These campaigns drum up interest and motivate them to consider purchasing your products or services. At this stage, you’ll want to continue providing value through content that educates prospects and solves their problems, differentiates you from your competitors and persuades prospects to take the next step. This content may include webinars, case studies, FAQs, checklists, videos and much more. For excellent results, build the content around the pain points of your audience and position your products and services as the leading solutions to the problems.
As you nurture your top-of-the-funnel leads, you will help them move through the later stages of the sales process to the conversion stage. You will need to utilize different tactics at the middle-of-the-funnel (MOFU) and bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) stages to continue priming your leads for conversion.
Leveraging Top-of-the-Funnel Leads to Improve Your Marketing Success
When you embrace the power of capturing and nurturing top-of-the-funnel leads, you can effectively maximize the success of your marketing program. Your business will thrive as you learn how to bring in TOFU leads in droves and provide the support each lead needs to complete their transactions. Commit to producing the highest quality content and delivering it using proven methods to capture the interest of TOFU leads, and ultimately boost sales and conversion rates. Your efforts will also help to build awareness of your products and services along with boosting loyalty to your brand.
