Modern marketing tactics require you to have a strong understanding of your customers, the journey they take to make a purchase, and the goals and pain points they have along the way.
This customer journey is also referred to as a digital marketing funnel.
Understanding the different points in your marketing funnel allows you to know which types of tactics, content, and approaches are going to resonate with your audiences.
It also allows you to learn more about the behavior and decisions of your customers, which can foster strong connections, communication, and relationships.
But what is meant by top-of-funnel marketing, why does it matter, and how does that play into a well-rounded digital marketing strategy?
Find out in this article.
Why Does Top-of-Funnel Marketing Matter?
Top-of-funnel marketing is extremely important to the success of your overall sales and marketing efforts.
It’s the step that encourages prospective customers to engage with your brand.
By casting a wide net and trying to bring in the most leads as possible, you help increase the number of qualified leads that your sales team can work with.
In addition, top-of-funnel marketing is often the first touchpoint a customer has with your brand, meaning that it needs to create a great first impression and bring them back for more.
Finally, top-of-funnel marketing increases your brand awareness and reputation among new leads, which can also help build more trust, authority, and credibility in your business.
People tend to buy from brands that they are aware of, and the more people you get through your funnel, the more recommendations your brand can get from happy customers.
All of that makes your brand seem more trustworthy to new prospects.
10 Top-of-Funnel Marketing Best Practices
Now that you know what top-of-funnel marketing is and why it matters to your brand, let’s take a look at some of the best practices that you should employ while creating a top-of-funnel marketing strategy.
1. Know Your Audience
Successful top-of-funnel marketing requires you to have a strong understanding of who your audience is, where they spend their time online, and what their pain points and frustrations are.
That will allow you to create content that appeals to them personally.
When a customer knows that they are working with a brand that understands their needs and wants, they are more likely to stay and convert through the marketing funnel to become a loyal customer of your brand.
Try creating a buyer persona to really identify who you are selling to.
A lot of marketers skip over the audience research, thinking they already “know” their customer. But people change. Habits change every year—2025 isn’t 2015, and your target demo may have shifted without you noticing. Spend time revisiting, or even re-interviewing, your actual users once in a while. You’d be surprised how easy it is for assumptions to sneak in and steer your messaging in the wrong direction.
It doesn’t hurt to dig into competitor reviews, too. Sometimes, the way people complain (or praise) a competitor’s product or service can hand you insights on a silver platter. They’ll flat out say what’s missing, what they can’t find, or why they bounced from another brand altogether. You’ll uncover the kinds of problems they’re itching to solve or features that get them genuinely excited—stuff that rarely shows up on the glossy product pages. Plus, this approach gives you a sort of backdoor to understanding shifting expectations in the market—without a huge research budget.
7. Improve Your SEO Strategy
Getting found by prospective customers is part of your top-of-funnel marketing efforts, and it requires you to have a strong SEO strategy.
If leads can’t find your top-of-funnel marketing content, they aren’t going to become a part of your marketing funnel and will instead move to find one of your competitors.
Using SEO tactics and best practices can improve your brand’s reach and reputation.
8. Reduce Overwhelming Factors
Online users want to find information quickly and don’t want to feel overwhelmed or stressed by the process of researching a brand and finding a product or service that fits their needs.
Reducing the friction in your marketing funnel will help you attract customers and move them down the funnel to make a sale.
Too many fields, forms, and on-page advertisements will push a lead away.
9. Partner with Influencers
Sometimes it can help to use the influence of others to fill your marketing funnel.
If you partner with an influencer, you can tap into their audience and encourage them to learn more about your brand, products, and services.
Influencers have extremely loyal fan bases, which can help you gain credibility and trust in your top-of-funnel marketing efforts.
10. Measure the Success of Your Efforts
If you aren’t measuring the effects of your top-of-funnel marketing efforts, you aren’t going to know whether the tactics you implement have any effect.
Setting goals, tracking the right KPIs and metrics and creating reports to see the impact of your marketing efforts will help you discover what in your top-of-funnel marketing strategy works and what still needs improving.
Top-of-Funnel Content Ideas
Your top-of-funnel content needs to resonate with new audiences who might not be familiar with your brand and encourage them to come back and learn more about your products or services.
While not every content type is going to be ideal for top-of-funnel marketing, there are thankfully many types of content ideas that can help in your efforts, including:
- Videos
- Social media posts
- Blogs
- Infographics
- Native advertising
- Paid advertising
- Interactive quizzes
- Checklists
- Kits and packaged interactive tools
- Email marketing
- Press release
- Retargeting
Wrap Up
Top-of-funnel marketing helps you bring in new customers, increase your number of leads, and improve your brand’s reach and reputation.
It also helps you determine what types of content ideas are going to be the most effective for bringing in new customers to your digital marketing funnel.
If you are a marketer who wants to improve your brand’s overall content strategy, you need a reliable team of writers to create your content on demand with a seamless workflow.
You can count on WriterAccess for that. With our freelancer base of thousands of professional writers, you’ll be able to scale your content production and ensure high quality at the same time.
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