How To Create An Effective Top-Of-Funnel Marketing Strategy

It’s not sustainable to use only acquisition strategies in 2024. There, I said it!

Although that seems obvious, you would be surprised how many brands only focus on lower-funnel tactics and techniques to drive conversions and results. This, in part, is due to the attribution and measurement options in use. By running only lower funnel activity, there is a direct return on investment which makes it easy to justify as a marketing tactic.

However, filling the top of the funnel is an integral piece of a long-term marketing strategy. As in real life, in order to have output from the bottom of a funnel, you need to create input at the top. In the case of marketing and sales, your input is awareness. To generate consistent and sustainable results from the bottom of your funnel, upper-funnel awareness activity is a must-have.

What is top-of-funnel marketing?

The top of the funnel (or TOF) marks the first few interactions between your brand and a potential client or customer. As such, this stage of the funnel is usually called awareness. 

However, some brands still get confused about what awareness means. Awareness doesn’t mean that a user needs a full understanding of your brand, products, and services – this comes later down the funnel in the consideration phase. Instead, awareness is simply the knowledge that your brand, product, or service exists, and may be able to help them!

While your audience doesn’t need a deep understanding of your brand at this early stage, it’s important that they trust you enough to move further through the funnel. Trust can be built by demonstrating social proof via UGC and influencers, credibility via customer reviews, testimonials, and awards, and by generating helpful content on the topic of your brand, product, and/or service to position your brand as the expert.

What is my audience doing at this stage in the funnel?

To create an effective upper-funnel marketing strategy, you need to understand user behavior. Start by researching your target audience, and where they spend their time online. Is your buyer persona spending hours a day scrolling through Instagram, Reddit, LinkedIn, TikTok, X, or a combination of these? And what behavior do they exhibit? Are they more likely to turn to Google search for answers to a problem, to TikTok search, to create a post in a Facebook community group or all of these?

For search strategies, you’ll rely on your target audience searching for an answer to a problem using a search engine. They may not have a specific solution to their problem or unmet need, but they are looking for answers. Using tools such as Keyword Planner, Google’s autocorrect function (in Incognito mode!) or AnswerThePublic will show you the questions people are searching for related to the topic of your product or service.

Using the formula “[product/service/brand] what/how/are etc.” will show you a range of relevant questions that people ask in relation to your topic.

For social media or video strategies, the user may not be aware that they have a need or problem before seeing one of your ads for the first time! Consider how you can bring that problem to life for them in your ad creative, and then present your product or service as the solution.

By understanding where your target audience spends time online, their potential problems, and their user behavior, you can create a tailored strategy to meet them in the right place, at the right time, with the right messaging on their journey.

Top-of-funnel marketing tactics

In traditional marketing, TV, radio, and billboards were the best methods of generating awareness. Although these strategies involve mass reach, unfortunately only a low percentage of viewers are the exact target audience, leading to wastage. It’s also tricky, if not impossible, to accurately measure and attribute such activity to conversions, or to calculate a real ROI from it. 

Today, common TOF tactics in digital marketing include video advertising on platforms such as YouTube, display advertising, and social media advertising. While this may sound similar to more traditional methods such as TV or print, there are a few crucial differences. 

First of all, TOF strategies via digital marketing have more targeting options, making a higher proportion of impressions gained likely to be members of your target audience. Secondly, even with widespread video marketing and programmatic campaigns, there are accurate reporting and measurement insights available. Finally, there is a greater deal of flexibility with digital advertising; instead of booking a TV commercial spot months in advance, you can create, pause, and adjust your advertising campaigns in minutes!

Top-of-funnel marketing tactics for B2B brands

Within B2B sectors, some more traditional or offline methods of advertising can still generate awareness. Events, industry publications – most of which are now digital – networking, and cold outreach are all effective ways to get your brand in front of your ideal customers or clients. Some of these approaches such as in-print publications can be replaced by programmatic advertising efforts, combining topical reach with the attribution and measurement tools of today.

There’s a lot of value in using digital marketing to drive B2B awareness, too. YouTube, for example, offers the opportunity to target business owners and decision-makers with engaging video content such as explainer videos and product or service demonstrations efficiently at scale. 

Top-of-funnel marketing tactics for B2C and D2C brands

For B2C and D2C brands, digital advertising has a lot to offer: in particular, social media marketing and video advertising are must-haves for driving consumer awareness. B2C and D2C brands are spoilt for choice with the wide range of demographics, behaviour and interest targeting options available. 

For both B2C and B2B brands, potential customers may also discover your brand through organic content, guest blogs, podcasts, webinars, thought leadership pieces, or organic social media content.

How to turn top-of-funnel tactics into a strategy

Now you have your desired channels and tactics in place, let’s shape this into a strategy. 

Your strategy should begin with an overarching goal, and several smaller goals. For example, your main goal could be “Increase awareness in the US market by 25% in 2025”. Your smaller goals – that should be stepping stones to help you achieve your ultimate goal – could be “Increase monthly reach on Meta by 30% by Q2” and “Improve video ad recall from target audience by 10% in 2025”, etc.

You may find having smaller KPIs and check-in points along the way useful: “Increase monthly reach on Meta by 30% by Q2” may have a sub-goal at the end of Q1 with a smaller KPI of increasing reach by 10-15%.

With these goals in place, you can go deeper into the tactics - specific actions - that will help you to achieve each of these goals. For each platform that forms part of your strategy, go into detail by month or quarter on the tasks that you’ll be doing to achieve those goals. To increase reach on Meta, you could run paid awareness and consideration campaigns, create new organic video content, or run a nationwide competition and supplementary campaign. For ad recall, perhaps you’ll run a brand lift campaign on YouTube, or use Demand Gen campaigns via Google Ads.

By combining your overarching marketing goals with tactics and tasks for specific platforms, a top-of-funnel strategy is born!

Final thoughts

Brands and marketers alike in 2024 can no longer afford to ignore awareness-building activity and tactics. Hone in on your goals and KPIs, and combine this with the specific actions you’ll take to achieve your goals to create a comprehensive and measurable top-of-funnel marketing strategy.