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12 Effective Top of the Funnel Content that Will Get You Leads and Buyers

top of funnel content

Have you ever felt like you’ve done everything possible to raise your conversion rate, but no one is buying? You’re following the right procedures like using enough whitespace and having only one call to action.

 You’ve broken down your top of the funnel content into relevant segments for easy scanning, and your words are captivating. Your style only seeks insignificant necessities and no results yet.

Worry not; you’re on the right track.

The main aim of the top of the funnel content is to educate potential customers, encourage them to visit again, and create a strong connection with them by encouraging them to either join an online course or subscribe to a newsletter.

However, before clients reach out to a sales rep, they check out 3 to 4 content pieces; therefore, you need to offer captivating top of the channel content that should also be entertaining besides solving a problem.

What is Top of the Funnel Content?

Top of the funnel content refers to content that aims to educate, help, and answer common questions and not sell a product or service to a customer.

ToFu content mostly targets potential clients in the awareness phase of the online buyers’ journey. This is the phase where one identifies a gap they need to fill and are finding solutions, probably through search engines.

Top of the funnel marketing strategy may sound overwhelming; you can break it down into several stages of discovery.

Attracting Customers

After creating awareness, and potential clients start identifying with your brand to solve their problems and want to learn more, you should have it in mind that quality of your top of the funnel content matters more than quantity. Here, you need to focus more on ToFu content marketing, creating offers, and coming up with solutions that align with your leads to raising your conversion rate. It would help if you met your customers’ expectations for you to succeed.

Connecting with your Clients

An emotional appeal to create a compelling top of the funnel marketing strategy is not enough to win your potential customers’ hearts. You have to prove to them that you can deliver something worth their time and money.

The basis of connecting with potential clients is specifying exactly how using your website will benefit them. Also, don’t forget to mention your free captivating offer at this point. Chances are, they will be open to your offer.

12 Types of Top of the Funnel Content

When it comes to top of the funnel content marketing, the one size fits all tactic is not applicable. Different types of ToFu content attract different customers:

Blog Content

If you don’t have a blog, it’s high time you get one. Besides keeping you relevant, attracting site visitors, and bringing about conversations, blogs also increase your ROI by 13%.

No doubt creating and maintaining a blog requires lots of sacrifices.

But creating a ToFu content post or two per week could be all it takes to prove to clients that your business is up to date with current trends and information relating to your industry. Here are a few top of the funnel content ideas:

Skyscraper/Cornerstone Content

Skyscraper blogs refer to those top of the funnel content that your audience will want to refer to frequently. The same way you pin posts you would like to revisit on your social media pages, cornerstone ToFu content is reliable and significant.

An excellent cornerstone blog consists of:

  • At least 2500 words ( should be three times longer than an average blog)
  • Several links that lead clients to your other top of the funnel content
How-to guides

How-to guides are quite reliable when you want to save time. These top of the funnel content involve giving a quick and straightforward tutorial on how to do something.

To make your top of the funnel content post more captivating, you need to include some images or screenshots of the procedure and mention items or services your company offers to simplify the exercise.

Comparison posts

While most clients want to use the best services and products, an average client may not have time to research the best products and services. Creating a comparison ToFu content post saves your customers time. You can simply:

  • Pick at least two popular companies.
  • Compare and contrast their services and product features.
  • Jot down the reviews
  • Mention how easy they are to operate and the customer support.

Industry Trends and Analysis

Here, you can write top of the funnel content about frequently searched topics in your industry. It will attract other clients who are curious to know why people paid attention to specific topics.

Guest Posts

Guest posting involves publishing your business’ ToFu content to a third party media. It is a top of funnel content marketing strategy that reaches out to the audience that isn’t familiar with your brand and prompts them to learn more.

Interviews and Webinars

Interviews offer maximum visibility. Stretch your corporate side by recording an interview with a colleague or someone in the same business network. Also, seek out opportunities to have an interview with other companies.

Webinars offer room for interactions and learning. Your potential customers will have access to live top of the funnel content sessions and get to ask questions and get feedback. More interactions mean more opportunity to showcase your products and services value.

Podcasts

Podcasts are rapidly gaining popularity. You can use them to share lots of top of the funnel content in an easily digestible format.

Quiz and Surveys

Nothing is more engaging than an interactive top of the funnel content post. Make sure you include a survey or a quiz in your next blog. Here are some ideas to make it enticing and fun:

  • Keep it short and captivating with at most ten questions.
  • Add a text box on surveys for your audience to ask questions.
  • Make it easily readable by adding images on text responses.
  • Include a call to action

Press Release

A press release can help draw the attention of media outlets and media personalities. They can help spark curiosity in the vast audience and prompt them to read your ToFu content.

Company News

Your business could be accomplishing great things that are making you stand out from your competitors. Press releases are the place to show your achievements off.

Recognize your efforts and discuss challenging decisions as well as your growth and long term goals

Images

As they say, an image is worth a thousand words. A single glance at your company’s image communicates a lot.  You can post the images on:

Pinterest

Pinterest helps you get multiple visibility when you repost your ToFu Content images.

Infographics

Infographics save your audience the confusion of reading through detailed procedure descriptions that involve efforts to visualize complex statistics.  They make your customers want to learn more.

Video Content

Besides educating through video content, you can use ten minutes or less video to demonstrate the problems your business solves, showcase a product or service as well as a combination of testimonials.

You can also engage prospects through long videos in the form of vlogs, a case study or a success story, or footage of behind the scenes.

To maintain your audience’s attention, ensure your top of the funnel content is more attractive as it progresses.

Free Website Tools

This involves free microsites, online calculators, and a free subscription to newsletters and email lists.

Product Pages

Does your site offer different pages for each product or service? This can help you expand your top of the funnel content significantly and increase your chances of being found online.

Ads

 Ads is another great top of the funnel marketing strategy. It involves reaching out to people through paid advertising techniques. When using an ad, make sure your ToFu content is captivating and motivates leads to action. It could be signing up for a newsletter or purchasing your products and services.

Landing Page

The primary purpose of a landing page in the top of the funnel marketing strategy is to convert visitors into potential clients with an excellent call to action.

Make sure your text is simple and straightforward.

How to create the right Top of funnel Content

Top of the funnel content marketing aims to attract leads attention and expand your brand awareness.  It also involves building connections by meeting your customers’ needs.

Here are some ways you can create a great top of the funnel content:

Building your Buyer Persona

Buyer personas refer to virtual representations of your actual clients based on research and analysis. They help you concentrate more on qualified leads, develop your products to meet your target customer needs, and delegate duties in your organization, from marketing to selling to servicing.

Buyer persona also involves creating ToFu content, following up on sales, and doing whatever it takes to acquire and retain customers.

Personas are a significant top of the funnel marketing strategies as they attract high-value leads who you’ll be in a position to retain for a long.

Understand your Keyword and Search Intent Target

How do you know what people are searching for on the web? Moreover, how do you make sure your products and services are a click away from a potential buyer?

 It’s all brought about by understanding your target keyword and search intent. It helps create top of the funnel content that leads visitors to your site.

You can use tools like Google Keyword Planner to develop a list of keywords in your top of the funnel content that can do well when it comes to your products and services.

Create Content that Educates, Entertains, or Inspires

How do you create top of the funnel content that cuts through and gets noticed?

Most created top of the funnel content consists of semi-baked articles that make an appearance. Sadly, it only serves as an audience attention grabber without asking them to purchase your products.

Great ToFu content depends on a tested and tried approach of creating content that is also entertaining and inspiring besides creating awareness.

Most digital sites choose quality top of the funnel content over quantity.

Agitate potential leads to the problem and present your product as a solution.

Since you know your products and services better than anyone else, you’re the best fit for giving advice and suggesting what offers will be more valuable to customers. Regardless, you have to listen more and talk less.

Most of the time, your customers share their disappointments with you. This allows you to improve and fill in the gaps causing frustrations. In the end, you both win.

If you’re facing a customer disconnect due to pricing, then it shows you haven’t illustrated the value of your products or services to them well enough.

Don’t Bare All; Provide more value in your Lead Magnets to Incentivize Prospects.

After winning your customers’ hearts, you ought not to relax. You might not focus much at this level.

If you desire to create a top of the funnel content with numerous referrals coming your way, you need to develop an attractive offer that even you, the giver, cannot resist to motivate your clients.

You can check out Dropbox for the best referral programs. This top of the funnel marketing strategy has significantly contributed to their desirable growth.

Measure your Content Engagement

The key objective of every marketer is their top of the funnel content engagement. Despite having several comments and DMs from readers telling you they enjoyed reading your ToFu content, you need to measure your ToFu content engagement.

You can use several metrics, including qualified leads, organic rankings, brand market share, and the number of new backlinks or social shares.

Conclusion

Setting up top of the funnel content is not an easy task. It is not something you’re going to achieve in a day. It is a pursuit you will address actively as long as your business is operating. While it may be challenging, effective and efficient closure of deals will propel significant improvements.

About Vivian
Vivian is an anthropologist lost in the world of digital marketing. She has an interest in learning about the science of marketing and the creativity that businesses use to transform themselves into purple cows.