The top of the funnel provides an excellent opportunity to contact and connect with your target audience. Improving the top of the funnel helps you to turn viewers and readers into leads. But how can you improve the top of your funnel to perform better?
You can improve the top of your funnel by tracking the right metrics, evaluating your traffic sources, and optimizing your content to be more engaging and fresh. You can also revise your content distribution strategy in order to distribute your content to as many potential leads as possible.
In the sections below, we’ll discuss various tactics you can use to improve your top-of-the-funnel marketing. If you follow these tips, you’ll be able to generate better-quality leads.
How To Optimize The Top Of The Funnel?
The top of the funnel is a critical part of any sales funnel because it determines the number of leads generated. It can also filter the leads and identify the high-quality ones.
Unfortunately, if the top of the funnel is not doing well, the rest of the funnel suffers. Below are some strategies that will help you improve the top of your funnel for higher conversions.
1. Track The Right Metrics
The first step to improving the top of your funnel performance is identifying the areas that need improvement. And the best way to do this is to track the right metrics and gain valuable insights.
This section covers some important top-of-the-funnel metrics that you should pay attention to.
Impressions
Impressions are one of the fundamental metrics that illustrate the level of awareness your brand is receiving. Therefore, it is critical to measure and track the impressions that your ads get.
Impressions show you the number of times your ad or post was presented on the user’s screens. To improve your brand awareness, target low CPM impressions.
Once you get the results, compare them to your cost-per-click and click-through rates to gauge the performance of your ads and posts. Once you know the metrics, you can make the necessary adjustments.
Average Time On Page
Tools like Google Analytics help you determine how long a user stays on your page. This metric is important because it shows whether users are engaging with your content or not.
Users who spend longer on your page tend to engage more than those who spend shorter durations.
If readers spend short periods on your page, consider optimizing your content to be more engaging and valuable.
Bounce Rates
The bounce rate shows the number of readers who viewed your page but left without taking any meaningful action.
Much like the average time on page metric, bounce rates can also indicate if your content is engaging or not.
The bounce rate varies depending on the type of content, but generally, a bounce rate below 70% is tolerable. A higher bounce rate shows that something is wrong with your process.
Some causes of high bounce rates include irrelevant or boring content, poorly designed pages, and a negative user experience.
2. Evaluate Your Traffic Sources
The top of your funnel is responsible for the traffic coming into the funnel. The first step to optimizing the top of your funnel is knowing where your traffic is coming from.
Most funnels utilize several sources to drive traffic to the top of the funnel.
The most common mistake committed by marketers is attempting to attract as much traffic as possible without considering the quality of the leads.
Unfortunately, more traffic does not always mean more conversions, especially if you attract the wrong audience.
To improve how you generate traffic, you need to divert your attention to where your traffic is coming from and their level of engagement with your content.
In addition to helping you track engagement rates, evaluating traffic helps you identify the sources with the highest potential.
Use these insights to improve the underperforming traffic sources and invest in traffic sources that perform well.
When you single out the traffic sources that generate the best leads, you can determine the type of content that will resonate with the audience.
3. Optimize Your Content
Creating content for the top of the funnel is fundamental to the success of your digital marketing strategy. It helps buyers launch their customer journey while also creating brand notoriety for you.
Additionally, top-of-the-funnel content can help you build credibility, create connections, and eventually generate leads.
Below are some ways you can optimize your content to ensure that it grabs your audience’s attention and keeps them glued.
Know Your Target Audience
The first step toward creating great content is knowing who you are writing for. It’s essential to perform research before you start writing.
Many marketers fall short of this because they create content they personally prefer. But, as a rule of thumb, you should always write for your audience, not yourself.
Creating content with the wrong audience in mind will not only waste your time and resources but will result in dismal results from your sales funnel.
So, before you begin creating content, you must research and understand who your audience is, their pain points, and the kind of solutions that interest them.
This way, you’ll be able to create content that resonates with your target audience. In turn, your readers will feel that your brand understands their pains and interests.
Hence, it’s more likely that they will stay in the funnel and convert. The best way to define your audience is by creating buyer personas.
Consider factors such as age, location, occupation, gender, and income (among others).
Once you create the buyer personas, you can figure out where potential customers hang out, their language, and some of the more granular details.
Ensure Your Content Is Informative And Engaging
It is not enough to just create content. You need to create high-quality content that provides value to the reader. Readers need varying types of content depending on where they are on their customer journey.
The top of the funnel should have content that addresses readers’ pain points. In general, people at this stage may not be interested in product descriptions and pitches.
No one likes to read boring content. In addition to making your content value-laden, ensure it is engaging.
When you deliver content that engages your audience, it becomes easier to draw them in and keep their attention.
Shallow blog posts, poorly written content, and off-topic articles will repel your audience and damage your SEO ranking.
This is because search engine algorithms dislike content that does not satisfy the needs of the reader. Ultimately, you should aim to deliver quality content to help you capture more leads.
Develop A Robust Content Marketing Strategy
Many marketers often fall into an endless rut of producing random pieces of content—sprinkling pieces of blog posts and ebooks without a clearly defined objective.
Without a strategy in mind, such marketers often lose direction and become demotivated when their efforts fail to bear fruit.
A strong content marketing strategy ensures that every piece of content you create aligns with your goals. A predefined strategy will define your audience, KPIs, goals, and more.
If you follow the plan, it can help you nurture your leads and eventually convert them into paying customers.
In addition, a content strategy keeps you in check by ensuring your content stays consistent with the outlined standards.
This consistency shows your audience that you are an expert who knows what they are doing. As a result, this boosts their confidence in your brand.
Review Your Competitor’s Content
When improving your content, it is wise to examine what your competitors are doing. Check their content quality, what performs well and what doesn’t.
These insights will equip you with the information you need to improve your own content. Try to make your content ideas better than those of your competitors.
Create irresistible content assets that your audience finds authoritative, informative, and credible.
Diversify Your Content Formats
Your audience is not homogenous. Although they may share some similar demographics and qualities, different types of content will speak to each person differently.
As such, it is wise to cast your net wide to cover all your audience’s needs. Each reader is unique; hence they each have different preferences.
For instance, while one person might enjoy reading long-form whitepapers, another would rather watch a video.
Understanding your audience enables you to deliver the type of content they love through their preferred channel(s).
The mighty blog posts stand out as the most widely used form of content at the top of the funnel. But there are some other effective forms of content to consider. You might want to create:
E-books: E-books are an excellent content format for covering topics that require in-depth explanations. E-books can satisfy user intent while also establishing yourself as an expert.
For maximum impact, ensure your books are relevant, concise, and compelling.
Email sequences: These are a great way to engage new prospects by sending them relevant information in bits, so they don’t feel overloaded.
Many readers visiting your site are not ready to buy, so emails are a good way to nurture those readers.
Infographics: Research shows that content that is backed by visuals gets greater levels of engagement.
You can turn your company’s data into an infographic, add it to your content and use it to boost engagement levels. Infographics also help readers remember more of the content.
Other effective formats for the top of funnel marketing include:
- Guides
- Images
- Polls
- Reports
- Webinars
- Videos
- Checklists
- Whitepapers
All these formats are great for helping build credibility, form connections and demonstrate to your target audience that you understand their needs.
However, you must tread cautiously lest you overwhelm your readers with excessive details they do not need at this stage. Keep it short, sweet, and relevant.
Regardless of the content format you choose, you should end it with a powerful call to action. The goal is to keep the prospect interested in your brand.
They will leave your funnel if you fail to direct them toward their next step. For instance, if you offer a blog post, you may ask a prospect to subscribe to a community to access similar content.
Or, you could offer a “related to” section to encourage the reader to keep reading similar content.
4. Revise Your Content Distribution Strategy
Unfortunately, creating awesome content that resonates with your audience’s needs is not enough. Your great content will die in obscurity if no one knows about it.
So, if you are not getting enough traffic, it may be time to improve your content distribution strategy. Consider using multiple channels to distribute your content and get it in front of the right audience.
Once again, knowing your audience helps you to determine the right channels to use because you know where they hang out.
Below are some ways to improve your content distribution strategies.
Optimize Your Content For SEO
One of the best ways to get your content in front of the right eyes is through the use of SEO strategies and best practices. Incorporating these tactics into your content helps it rank higher on the SERPs.
In turn, your prospects can easily find your content and consume it. For instance, if you understand your audience, it becomes easy to figure out the kind of content they are seeking.
You can then incorporate vital keywords and search terms into your content.
Leverage Social Media Marketing
Social media is a great and cost-effective way to distribute your content. This powerful marketing tool also helps you to form meaningful connections with your audience.
To get started, check the platforms where most of your audience spends time. Create content and publish it regularly on such platforms. Remember that consistency is key.
If you do not post regularly, consider developing a calendar to keep you in check. You can also leverage social media management tools to help you stay ahead of your game.
In addition, you can connect with influencers and ask them to promote your brand. Using influencers is a powerful way to get your audience to trust you.
It also gives you access to the followers of influencers. When it’s done well, you will generate more traffic to your funnel.
Invest In Paid Ads
While SEO helps you get your content out there, it can only take you so far. The competition is stiff, and you still have thousands of potential leads to reach.
Paid ads are great for directing large amounts of traffic to your funnel. Consider methods such as social media ads, Google Ads, banner ads, and retargeting ads.
The best part is that paid ads have targeting options that help you reach the right audience, even if you only have a small budget.
Wrapping Up
The top of the funnel is the point where cold leads enter your funnel.
These leads can be nurtured and turned into paying customers if you draw them in with great content and a well-thought-out marketing strategy.
As such, the top of your funnel needs to perform at its best to ensure the rest of the funnel converts.
To improve the top of your funnel, track important metrics such as bounce rates, impressions, and time on the page.
Additionally, ensure your content is always fresh and relevant, then distribute it widely to reach the target audience.