If you’re looking to grow your audience, a strong top-of-funnel marketing strategy is critical. Potential customers at the top of your funnel need to understand what you offer before you can move them deeper into your funnel (and start converting those leads into customers!).
Top-of-funnel leads are very early in their buying journey, and are just beginning to research their specific business need – and there are myriad ways to show them the value of what you offer and entice them to learn more. Using content assets like white papers, testimonials and webinars show potential customers what your business is all about and what you can do for them. But of course, you need to use those assets strategically.
Below we’ve outlined 7 steps to help accelerate your top-of-funnel audience growth strategy.
#1: Establish Specific Goals & KPIs
It’s important to establish goals and KPIs up front to determine what’s working and what could use some tweaks. Be specific: Incorporate growth percentages and numbers into your goals to track progress. For example, your goals could be to increase newsletter subscribers by 10% in 12 months or to generate 50 white paper downloads in 30 days.
#2: Consider Your Target Audiences
Your list of anonymous visitors is a high-quality resource that likely needs to be segmented and nurtured in unique ways. At the top of the funnel, separating the repeat anonymous website visitors from all anonymous visitors matters because repeat visitors are more likely to convert.
To start, pull queries to understand how many anonymous visitors you have during specific timeframes. For example, someone who has visited three or more times in the last week is a much hotter lead compared to someone who has visited once in the last month.
#3: Identify the Best Marketing Tactics to Develop Leads
Simply put, choose your best content and strategies to generate conversions. If you’re not sure what type of content will generate conversions, try using Omeda’s Web Behavior & Email Reports, as well as Google Analytics reports to see what content is driving the most engagement.
Across B2B publishers, newsletter offers are one of the most common approaches to use. Content assets – from videos to reports to infographics – can also help set you apart and can be used strategically based on the audience and your goals.
#4: Implement Your Top-Converting Tactics & Tools
Once you know the content you want visitors to convert on, you can start targeting them while they’re on your site. The best way to do this is through onsite pop-up and/or metering modals that allow you to collect information from website visitors. You’ll have to decide what information is necessary to collect up front. Collecting minimal information, such as a name and email address, will help keep subscribers on your website, vs. asking them to fill out all of their contact details.
#5: Develop a Strong Visual Identity & See What Resonates
When setting up your onsite pop-ups, you’ll need to do more than just set up one and be done. Try out different images, fonts, buttons and more to see what’s converting the best. For ideas, check out some of our personalization HTML templates. You can even use Omeda’s marketing automation platform, Odyssey, to run an A/B test to see which personalization generates the most conversions.
#6: Measure the Results
Before you can make optimizations, you’ll want to measure the results of your initial setup. Make sure you read our blog post, How are you Tracking Metrics and Conversions? 4 Key Items to Consider When Building Your Plan. Omeda has several reports to analyze metrics, including:
- Promo Code by Product Attribution: Provides the number of conversions for a product such as newsletter or magazine.
- Behavior Analysis Report: Provides both a summary and in-depth view into customers that have behaviors associated to their record.
- Form Submit Report: Provides the number of submissions on a specified Omeda form.
- Personalization/Metering Summary Report: Provides metrics for individual personalization and metering jobs.
#7: Optimize, Optimize, Optimize
Sometimes, pop-up/meter messages do not perform as well as we hope. There’s a lot of trial and error that goes into how to best target and communicate with your online audience. Check out our blog post, Refresh Your Website Targeting Strategy, and try some of these tactics to optimize conversions:
- Adjust the audience (hyper target or broad target)
- Change the content/lead magnet
- Test using a button vs. an iframe
- Adjust the display frequency
- Change the visual presentation
- Adjust the wait time
- Test different personalization/meter types (inline/scroll trigger/standard)
- See if using an Article Limit drives performance
- Test out using hard vs. soft gates
- Change up your copy & CTA
Keep in Mind…
Setting up a top-of-funnel strategy should be a steadily run effort that is optimized over time. Because it plays into the overall, long-term approach to audience growth, it needs to be continuously nurtured and refined. Putting in this effort does pay off: By focusing on the top of the funnel, you can help improve metrics around getting new leads, increase conversion rates across products and services, and improve retention of those potential new customers.
Fueling your top of funnel strategy can lead to tremendous audience growth. Omeda has the tools to help. To learn more and to start making gains, reach out to your Client Success Manager. Or, if you’re new to Omeda, please contact sales@omeda.com to see our CODiE award winning solution in action!
