The marketing funnel is a fundamental marketing concept. It depicts the process of a prospect turning into a customer.
Like a funnel, marketers use a broad scope to capture as many prospects as possible, and then nurture them through the funnel with relevant, tailored information to the point where they are at the bottom and ready to take action.
Top-Of-Funnel (TOFU) marketing, therefore, refers to efforts that are focused on spreading awareness and capturing the attention of prospects who possess minimal awareness or salience about your brand.
Every organisation needs prospective buyers... Even the greatest sales team can't close a deal if they don't have leads. No action can be taken, without awareness first.
So, how can you fill the top of your funnel? Here are 3 targeting options you may not know about
Lookalike Audiences
Your relationship, your job, your political stance and that embarrassing weekend are some of the things someone might typically share on Facebook. But, what most don't realise, is that Facebook actually knows more information than what you are willing to share. In fact, Facebook collects roughly 52,000 data points from each user.
Facebook uses this information to fuel their powerful targeting feature, 'Lookalike Audiences'. What if you could find more people who share the same characteristics as your loyal and most profitable customers?
Well, now you can.
Right now, you can upload a list of your best customers (in a csv file) onto Facebook and create a Lookalike audience of them. I.e., instruct the algorithm to find thousands of other people who closely resemble these top customers - based on the 52,000 datapoints that Facebook collects.
It's an amazingly effective and easy way to top-up your Top-Of-Funnel audience.
In-Market Audiences
In-Market Audiences, is a powerful Google Ads targeting tool used to reach users that are researching for, or are in the market for, a particular product.
In-market audiences use Google's powerful machine learning to analyse account clicks, previous online conversions, along with the content of the sites & pages they visit (which includes the recency and frequency of these visits).
For example, if someone recently started visiting Domain.com and started learning about auctions and moving-in tips, Google Ads would place them in an In-Market audience such as 'Real Estate'.
With this information, you can ad an additional layer over keyword targeting. By adding relevant In-Market Audiences as Observations in your Google Ads Search campaign, you can increase (decrease) your bidding for high (low) converting audiences. You can see a table of some of the 'In-Market' audiences below.
For an advertiser, like Realestate.com.au, they would likely be prepared to pay more for those clicking their ads if they are placed in Google's 'Real Estate' In-Market Audience.
These behavioural signals are incredibly important for advertisers, when setting up search campaigns and provide another great way to top-up your funnel with ideal prospects.
Targeting By Post Code
Picture this... You work for an affluent school as their Marketing Co-ordinator and Open-Day is coming up. Your KPI is to attract high income families to the event. Thanks to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, you have identified the top postcodes where these wealthy families are likely to live - but, you don't know how to reach them.
Sure, you can try a letterbox drop! - But, did you know that Google Ads can also target locations at the post-code level? In fact, you could target a radius around your school's recruitment area, and increase your bids for those post-codes that you desperately need to reach.
Or conversely, you could simply be marketing for a business with generic, Australia-wide location targeting and you're wondering where you can attain the lowest cost-per-conversion.
By being able to view campaign performance by post-code, you can optimise campaign results at a more granular level, to improve performance and reduce ad spend wastage.
With Lookalike Audiences, In-Market Audiences and with Targeting by Post Code, you will easily be able to find new prospects to fill your Top-Of-Funnel.
If you would like to learn more about each of these targeting options, please get in contact with our team for more information.