Marketing Funnel Goals: Let’s Begin at the Top

Marketing Funnel Goals: Let’s Begin at the Top

Whether you have a strategy in place or not, every organization has its own marketing funnel that prospective clients work through before making a purchase. The various marketing funnel stages are the steps your business wants users to take to convert into sales.

There are three main sections of the funnel: the top awareness stage, the middle lead generation stage, and the bottom conversion stage. At the top of the funnel, most people don’t know about the dilemma they are facing. It is up to your marketing team to inform these individuals so they become either problem-aware or solution-aware.

Top of the funnel marketing tactics differ from those used during the two other stages, so it’s imperative to learn the difference so you can implement programs successfully.

Top of the Funnel Marketing Goals

At this stage in the marketing funnel, you are simply working to educate users, not sell them anything. So as you create a strategy for the top of the marketing funnel, your goals include:

• Engaging cold prospects (someone unaware of the problem, your brand, and/or the solution) to move through the rest of the funnel,
• Increasing awareness of your offers,
• Growing retargeting lists,
• Improving engagement, and
• Increasing website traffic.

Keep these goals in mind as move you on to the task of creating content.   

Top of the Funnel Content Types

Content inspires the users in your marketing funnel. Without content, there’s nothing to grab their attention, educate them, and eventually, convince them to buy. Therefore, it’s up to you and your marketing team to generate media your prospects can consume.

• Blog: This platform is an imperative throughout the marketing funnel. During the awareness stage, you will publish blog posts that raise awareness about products and services or problems and solutions.
• Social media updates
• Infographics
• Photographs
• Digital magazine/eBook
• Audio and/or video podcasts
• Microsites
• Print magazine/newsletter
• Primary research

Consider your blog the home base for the majority of your content. Outposts, i.e., sites where you publish content but do not own, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram, are the digital locations where your target audiences gather. To drive these users to your home base, you must publish content on outposts. Solely posting on outposts without maintaining your blog will fail to help you achieve your goals.

Top of the Funnel Marketing Metrics

How will you know if your top of the marketing funnel content is performing well? You want to measure the following metrics:

• Offer awareness: With Google Webmaster Tools, it’s easy to measure direct site visits from every platform where you publish content.
• Retargeting list growth: Retargeting allows you to segment people so you can deliver relevant content to them throughout the rest of the marketing funnel.
• Site engagement rates: Again, using Google Webmaster Tools, you’ll want to track site visits, bounce rates, average session length, pages per visit, and the number of comments you receive.
• Inbound links: While this won’t happen right away, you do want to measure the number of people linking to you from other sites with the help of tools such as SEMRush, Ahrefs, or Open Site Explorer.  
• Traffic by channel: On a weekly or monthly basis, depending on your bandwidth, you’ll want to gauge how much traffic is coming to your site from email, paid search, organic search, referrals, direct traffic, and social media.

Creating Your Top of the Funnel Marketing Plan

To execute a top of the funnel marketing strategy, you have to make a plan for doing so. The easiest way to do this throughout the funnel is to use the following outline:

• I am responsible for:
  • Top of Funnel
  • Middle of Funnel
  • Bottom of Funnel
• My marketing goals
  • Top of the Funnel Goals
    • Increase offer awareness
    • Grow retargeting lists
    • Increase engagement
    • Grow website traffic  
• Content Types
• Technology needs: Especially important if you are creating infographics, podcasts, and photographs.
• Metrics

Every person working on your marketing funnel strategy should utilize the above outline, so the entire team is clear on their directives. The more details you add, the easier it will be to execute your plan. It’s also helpful to assign deadlines on a shared calendar so you can ensure assignments are completed on time.

Next month, we will get into the goals, content types, and metrics for the middle of the marketing funnel. If you are thinking, “Wow! There’s even more work to do to convert prospects into leads,” it’s time to consider working with a marketing agency that knows how to improve your marketing funnel. Alt Creative’s staff of experienced content professionals are available to assist you. Contact us today!