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- Week 1: The marketing funnel
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Welcome back!
August is here, and while the Olympics are in full swing, it’s time to get your marketing strategy on a winning streak with a new theme! This month, we’re zeroing in on each stage of the marketing funnel— starting with awareness.
Just as a sprinter needs a strong start to dominate the race, making a powerful first impression is essential for your business’s success.
Ready to get your marketing strategy on the fast track to victory?
Let’s dive in! 🏃♂️🚀
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Strategy
Meatless Mondays: ToFu
Love em or hate em, in the marketing world— acronyms are everywhere. In terms of the sales/marketing funnel, we’ve got three big ones:
For this week, we’re zooming in on the beginning of the funnel, or the ToFu (“top-of-funnel) stage. This is where you initiate the customer journey by capturing attention and generating interest.
There’s a delicate balance between targeting a broad audience to draw in as many people as possible from the start, while also targeting quality customers for high chances of converting them later.
The targeting part comes from knowing your detailed buyer persona:
or ICP for B2B products:
Exercises like customer “day-in-the-life” mapping can help uncover challenges prospects face and help you spot opportunities competitors might overlook.
With a crystal-clear ICP, you can focus your ToFu marketing efforts on the most effective channels where the highest quality leads can find you.
Houston, we have a problem
At the top of the funnel, starting by pointing out your target customer’s problem is more important than offering solutions.
At this stage, prospects don’t know you too well, and it’s easier to get attention by pointing out they have a problem in the first place than selling your product with limited brand awareness.
Problems and needs aren’t always obvious— especially without brand awareness. That’s why pointing them out is a great ToFu advertising strategy.
If you’re selling a product to help people quit smoking, like a nicotine replacement, highlighting the problem means highlighting the negative impacts of smoking:
This strategy is frequently applied in the public sector, for example, to promote paper bags over plastic:
But who’s to say you can’t this technique to promote your business?
Say you’re selling an eco-friendly household cleaner. Your advertising could spotlight the harmful chemicals in conventional cleaning products and their impact on the environment.
Starting with the problem you’re solving in your advertising creation is especially effective in catching people’s attention so they care enough to learn a bit more about your brand.
It’s also worth mentioning that at the top of the funnel, you should be addressing a variety of pain points tailored to different potential customers to avoid over-filtering in this catch-all stage.
If you’re selling a blender, your customers could range from professional chefs to busy parents, but the pain point you highlight through advertising would be different.
High-end features and ease of use are pros for both customer segments, but which aspect is most important (and worthy of highlighting) depends on who you’re selling to.
A restaurant would probably prioritize features like heavy-duty motor power and advanced blending capabilities for high-volume use, while busy parents might appreciate a quick-clean function and user-friendly controls for everyday convenience.
By tailoring your message to address these specific needs, you make sure your marketing hits the right note for each audience.
The right content
Different types of content are best used at different stages of the marketing funnel. The goal at the ToFU is brand awareness and high-quality lead generation, so getting yourself out there with paid ads, sponsored social media posts, and SEO is the name of the game.
You wouldn’t send demos or MoFu-tailored emails to prospects who don’t even know you yet. Your content mix at this stage might include:
Social media posts highlighting pain points
Guest posts on industry-related blogs
Pay-per-click ads on Facebook or Google
Once you have the content part down, follow these best practices within the content you put out:
Educate: at this stage, pushy sales language is likely to push customers away rather than toward you, so messaging should be focused on education & brand awareness instead.
It may seem counter-intuitive, but this Black Friday Patagonia ad aimed to build awareness and solidify the outdoor clothing brand as a leader in sustainability.
The point was to capture customers’ attention, get them to read the full ad, and then take the Common Threads Initiative Pledge to reduce fast fashion consumerism— subtly positioning Patagonia as a producer of high-quality, long-lasting, sustainable clothing.
Educating can also happen through influencer partnerships, being a guest on an existing podcast, or a well-optimized blog feature.
Through these channels, you already have the prospect’s attention via the influencer/podcast’s established audience, which gives you more space to explain your product’s value.
Action: every piece of content should have one loud & clear CTA— the logical next step in your ideal customer’s journey, whether that’s a newsletter sign-up or landing on a product feature page.
In this example, the call to action is entering your email to (presumably) get information of value (rather than buying something). From there, though, it’s easier for Tim Ferris to guide you down the marketing funnel to sell his products.
This is also a prime example of leveraging lead magnets, which are carrots you can dangle in front of a prospect to turn them into a lead.
These ‘carrots’ should be genuinely useful and maybe even exclusive, something Ferris emphasizes with the wording of “Get Access.”
eBooks, webinars or events, templates, calculators & other interactive tools (see below) are popular lead magnets you can use:
Reduce friction: at this stage, you haven’t built the brand loyalty necessary for customers to tolerate speed bumps— avoid multiple CTA buttons or complicated form fields that could confuse.
The message here is simple, and isn’t immediately pushing a sale but rather a deal:
Scan initiating…
Just like content, different metrics are better aligned for different layers of the funnel. When we’re talking brand awareness, these are the key metrics to track ToFu performance and set goals for improvement:
Website Visitors
Time on site
Bounce rate- % of visitors who navigate away after viewing one page
A third-party brand lift study
Social media impressions
Social media reactions
Social media followers
Attribution in a time-decay or position-based model (look out for next month’s newsletter theme!)
Following brand awareness, the next big goal of your ToFu marketing efforts is lead generation. Once you’ve got a prospect’s attention, the aim is to get them to share their email to become marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) and guide them further down the funnel.
To track performance here, you’ll want to look at:
Cost per lead
Total MQLs
Lead-to-conversion ratio (to measure the quality of the leads you’re attracting through ToFu marketing tactics
Average lead score (assigning points to each lead based on factors like engagement level, demographic fit, and interactions with your brand— another, more controversial method of tracking lead quality)
Looking Ahead
The awareness stage builds the foundation for every part that follows in the customer journey— the quality and quantity of results by the BoFu are directly tied to the health of your ToFu.
Stay tuned for next week’s edition, where we’ll dig into the MoFu. See you then!
the Marketing Funnel
Week 1: Awareness (TOFU)
Week 2: Consideration (MOFU)
Week 3: Conversion (BOFU)
Week 4: Retention & Advocacy
Stay tuned!
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