Get More Traffic and Leads at the Top of the Funnel
How effective are you at attracting the right kind of visitors to your website and generating qualified leads? You need more than a healthy PPC budget and a website to generate high-quality leads online. You need to become an expert at TOFU marketing.
In inbound marketing, the Top of the Funnel (TOFU) is the area dedicated to making sure that you create online buzz and awareness of your brand, and more importantly, that your future customers find your product and services online. Activity at the top of the funnel helps your prospects become familiar and connect with your brand and come to the realization that they *need* your product(s) or services.
While the Internet has fundamentally changed the way in which people find, discover, research, share, shop, and connect, it’s important to understand that getting in front of your customers requires you to master the top of the funnel. If your business is not ranking well for the words that describe your products and services, then you’re not getting found for them by potential customers either.
So, what’s the solution? Turning your website into a lead generation asset through inbound marketing tactics like SEO, blogging, social media and then nurturing those leads is far more cost-effective than traditional forms of outbound marketing. Marketers are shifting their budgets, and seeing results — and you can to — as long as you rock the TOFU:
- Start a blog. This is one of the most important things that you can do. Period. Prospects, customers and search engines all love the content generated through blogging: prospects because it helps them understand what you do; your customers because it helps them stay up to date with your offerings and thought leadership; and search engines because each post represents another page that they can index for a specific topic and feed to others searching that phrase.
- Get social. Get started with using social media, or if you already have profiles but haven’t been using them to their potential, get serious about it or get help. Promoting your content, answering questions and sharing your ideas on social media help to increase your reach (the number of people you can touch with your message). It also helps people to get to know you, like you and trust you. Three critical elements you must do before you close any deal.
- Create calls-to-action. Do you have call-to-action buttons on your website that link to great offers? Content offers on a website should educate your prospects, and help them get smarter about what they need. By providing them with thoughtful, helpful, relevant advice, they will come to understand how your goods and services could potentially fill that need.
It’s critical to map that content to the different stages of their buying process (and your sales process) so leads generated can be nurtured accordingly. We’ll discuss that in more detail in a future post.