What are the best top of funnel marketing strategies to increase lead flow?
How would you improve a marketing funnel? From developing content that answer your prospects’ questions to asking and rewarding customers for referrals, here are 11 answers for the best top-of-funnel marketing strategies for more leads.
- Develop Content that Answers Your Prospects’ Questions
- Balance Brand Awareness and Urgency for Lead Flow
- Offer Giveaways and Contests
- Send Automated Handwritten Thank You Notes
- Develop a Unique Value Proposition that Sets You Apart
- Create High-Ranking Content for Your Target Audience
- Map the Customer Journey
- Embrace the Most Recent Social Media Trends
- Have a Strong Understanding of the Audience
- Generate New Content Ideas That are Relevant
- Ask and Reward Customers for Referrals
Develop Content that Answers Your Prospects’ Questions
To increase lead flow, you need to increase your content production while always maintaining a high-quality level in your content. By creating top-of-the-funnel content that answers your prospect’s questions, you will get found more easily in search, have content to share on social media, and have new content to promote through paid advertising.
A great place to start for these ideas is with your sales team. Connect with your sales reps who are communicating with your prospects daily and hear their questions as they evaluate your company and competitors.
Then you can create top-of-the-funnel content such as a checklist, guide, eBook, whitepaper, and more. Think of this content as a way to capture your prospect’s attention by giving them helpful information while they provide their contact information. From there, you can start to move them through the buyer’s journey with other types of more targeted content.
Elyse Flynn Meyer, Prism Global Marketing Solutions
Balance Brand Awareness and Urgency for Lead Flow
At the top of the funnel, it is best to have a balanced blend of brand awareness and urgency to increase lead flow. The top of the funnel is always wider, meaning that we do not know the experience of the customer, or how familiar they are with your brand, products or services.
Therefore, make sure you focus top of funnel marketing tactics on educating consumers about your products and your brand narrative. If you are encouraging leads to visit your website, try personalizing the experience to where the shopper is in the consumer journey by leading them to a specific landing page curated to the ad that was viewed. To create a sense of urgency on-site test prominently displayed promos ort countdown timers at check-out. By making certain that you interject urgency along with your brand messaging, you will reinforce the motivation of previous customers while stoking the fire to buy with newer ones, and increase lead flow.
Greg Gillman, MuteSix
Offer Giveaways and Contests
Lead generation through giveaways is still an under-the-radar marketing strategy. You can offer a gift card or discounts to any lead that goes through the sales funnel. It can offer you a chance to go viral and decrease the cost of acquiring one lead. Giveaways can help you to gain enough traction to obtain the number of prospects you were hoping to attract. It will drive more traffic to your website and create a buzz for your business. People will rush for a chance to win a prize.
Aviad Faruz, FARUZO New York
Send Automated Handwritten Thank You Notes
A great top of funnel marketing strategy to increase lead flow is to automate handwritten thank you notes. Thank you notes are a great way to show your appreciation for someone’s time and also put your company in their mind. Automating the process makes it easy and ensures that everyone who visits your website or attends an event receives a thank you note.
Adding a personal touch can help make your company stand out and help to create a positive impression. Handwritten notes also show that you took the time to personally connect with the person, which can help build trust and encourage them to work with you in the future.
Rick Elmore, Simply Noted
Develop a Unique Value Proposition that Sets You Apart
The best top-of-funnel marketing strategy to increase the lead flow is to use a unique value proposition to set yourself apart from your competitors and capture your target audience’s attention. The key to this is finding your target audience, doing research on them and figuring out what they want or need, and then creating content that speaks directly to them in a way that makes them feel like you understand their problems or goals.
You can do this by making sure that your content is clear and well-written, with an eye toward making it easy for people to understand what they’re getting out of reading it.
After all, if you can’t get people interested in reading your content, they won’t bother clicking through to your site. Once there, if they don’t find something useful or interesting enough to keep their attention long enough to fill out a form on the site (at which point they are now “leads”), then they might not even bother filling out the form at all!
Ishu Singh, Starting to know
Create High-Ranking Content for Your Target Audience
Your SEO strategy for increasing awareness will target low-intent keywords from users who may not even be aware they are interested in purchasing anything. A business owner, for example, who plans to invest in marketing software in the near future may only search for “marketing tips 2022” or “how to generate more B2B leads” right now.
So, your goal here is to create a collection of high-ranking content for your target audience’s topical interests. You may mention your product/service or subtly promote the need for something similar in this content, but it’s best to keep the sales talk to a minimum. The goal here is for relevant audiences to discover and value your brand name.
Samantha Odo, Precondo
Map the Customer Journey
Mapping the customer journey has improved our customer turnover and loyalty. As a manager for over 5 years and now the founder of my own company, people management has been a core part of my role. The mapping of the customer journey is particularly useful because it utilizes this skill.
The purpose of a customer journey is to understand at what point your customers are at each point. The journey has 3 key elements – awareness, consideration, and decision. We prefer to be specific and break the journey elements into sections.
For example our social media platforms are the points of awareness, whereas our website is the point of consideration and our cart is the decision. Doing the mapping in detail has assisted us in understanding where a customer chooses to either purchase a product or not. It has also assisted us in pinpointing moments that move a customer from one section to the next on the ‘map’.
Daniel Forstner, Mailbox Empire
Embrace the Most Recent Social Media Trends
To raise awareness about your products, it is best to the most recent social media trends. Short, entertaining videos, for example, have recently been trendy on social media. You can hire a team that specializes in content creation and social media marketing. If you want to market to youngsters, consider Instagram and Tiktok, whereas if you want to market to middle-aged and older people, consider Facebook.
Michael Woods, Uniwide Formations
Have a Strong Understanding of the Audience
In general, top-of-funnel marketing is awareness where a customer becomes aware of the fact that they have a need and starts looking for resources that connect them to the brand or data that can help them. In my opinion, successful top-of-funnel marketing is to have a strong understanding of who the audience is and what they are looking for in a brand and what their trials and tribulations are. By doing so customers know that they are with the right brand that understands their needs and they are more likely to stay and turn in becoming a loyal customer to the brand.
Brigid Davey, Nimble
Generate New Content Ideas That are Relevant
Our #1 tip is to use Google’s ‘People Also Ask’ suggestions in search results to find out what questions people are asking in your industry. This works in Ecommerce, B2B, and most other markets. This strategy gives you a lot of new content ideas which are perfectly relevant to your market.
Simply search Google for some of the main keywords related to your product or service, and look under the People Also Ask search suggestions. There are usually 5-8 questions you can create content around for each search term, and you’ll get more suggestions by clicking the Related Searches at the bottom of the page.
This is one of our favorite ways to bring in targeted top of funnel traffic for our Ecommerce agency – we know these people are actively researching topics related to Ecommerce marketing, so we want to get in front of them. Answering the questions with useful blog posts is a great way to do this.
Ryan Turner, EcommerceIntelligence.com
Ask and Reward Customers for Referrals
A great way to increase the lead flow is through referrals. Ask your happy customers if they know anyone else who could benefit from your products or services, and offer a referral bonus or discount for any new leads they bring in. For example, you could offer a free month of service for every three new leads they refer.
You can also reach out to other businesses in your industry or niche and offer to exchange leads. This is especially true for businesses that complement each other well, such as B2B service providers. For example, if you’re a web design company, you could reach out to a content marketing agency and offer to trade leads. This can be a win-win situation, as it allows you to tap into a new market while also getting rid of any leads that aren’t a good fit for your business.
Maxime Legardez, Maki
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