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Attribution basics

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Top of the Funnel (TOFU)

TOFU is short for Top of the Funnel, it is part of the theoretical customer journey also called a “buyer’s journey”. Top of the Funnel marketing refers to the first stage of the buyer’s journey. TOFU is part of a larger marketing concept that includes two more stages down the funnel, middle of the funnel (MOFU) and bottom of the funnel (BOFU). The latter concepts are focusing on later phases of the customer journey.

In this first phase, the customer is undecided about what to do and mostly does research into their options. At this point, the customer might even still be unaware of the products and services you offer. Therefore, TOFU is the brand awareness and demand generation stage.

Content examples

Top of the funnel content is a marketing strategy that attracts a larger audience that is interested in topics related to your products or services. That way, it is generating leads (potential customers) for your product or services.

Questions TOFU customers ask that should be addressed:

  • Who is this company?

  • What does this brand stand for?

  • What can this product or service do for me?

  • Am I interested in this?

The content should be both catchy, easily understood, and useful to your potential customers. Make sure your content is:

  • Attention grabbing/eye-catching

  • Educating

  • Visually appealing

  • Exceptionally engaging

  • Entertaining

  • Inspiring

Most marketers publish content at the top of the funnel to reach a wide variety of potential customers. You are recommended to make it readily available using content types like:

  • Blog posts

  • Custom landing pages

  • Marketing campaigns / advertisements

  • Social media posts

  • SEO

  • Video marketing

  • Influencer promotion and outreach

Main goals of TOFU

Customers at the top of the funnel have not heard of your brand, don’t know about your company, and are just becoming aware that you exist. A marketer’s job in this stage of the buyer’s journey is to make a solid, clean introduction. Convince the potential customer that they should be interested. The two main goals of TOFU that will help you with this are brand awareness and demand generation.

  • Brand Awareness: How familiar and visible is your brand? Brand awareness begins with nurturing brand trust among your potential customers and allows them to make direct links to your brand when dealing with a problem that your product or service solves. You could also call this the awareness stage.

  • Demand Generation: Top of the funnel marketing programs that get the target audience excited about your product or service. Demand generation allows you to lay the foundation for long-term customer relationships through multiple strategic, targeted touchpoints. These include aforementioned pieces of content like blogging, hosting webinars, email marketing, or responding to potential customers on social media.

How do you know if your TOFU is working?

It is important to have key metrics identified for measuring your success of marketing tactics at the top of the funnel. For example, the more relevant potential customers you attract to your website with engaging content, the more effective your efforts will be lower down the sales funnel.

Fortunately, there are a few metrics you can monitor that will help you understand the value of your top of the funnel strategy. These include:

  • Impressions: The easiest way to measure brand exposure. Impressions are the total number of times your content or post is served to users. For example, if your ad got served to potential customers a total of 100 times on Facebook, Instagram, or Google, that would mean it received 100 impressions.

  • Reach: Refers to the total number of unique people that your content has been served to across various digital platforms. Like impressions, reach can be used to understand the performance of your marketing campaigns. If your ads reach a wide audience but don’t convert any users into customers, that’s a sign that you’ll want to make changes to improve performance.

  • Website Traffic: See how many people visit you. Be aware, though, that based on measurement and attribution, an increase in web traffic linked to upper-funnel marketing may be attributed to other lower-funnel marketing.

  • Bounce Rate: Bounce rate shows the percentage of visitors who viewed one page of your website and then left without performing any further action. Bounce rate can be a good measure of how your potential customers are engaging with content like a blog, landing page, or product description page on your site. If your pages are uninteresting, provide a poor user experience, or aren’t relevant, users will likely exit your site.

Odyssey vs Google Analytics for TOFU analysis

The most used analytics tool, Google Analytics, focuses more on the bottom of the funnel with their last non-direct click attribution model. This means that they give all the credits to the last click before the conversion happens.

While Odyssey takes into account all the touchpoints, giving credits to all the touchpoints of the customer’s journey which is mostly relevant for the top of the funnel analysis. So it excels in keeping track of how effective your TOFU is. Interested? Get in contact!

Want to learn more about attribution or attribution models?

What to do after TOFU?

As mentioned above, TOFU is followed by the Middle of the Funnel (MOFU) and Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU). Each of these reflect a different stage of the buyer’s journey, therefore also needs to be addressed with different actions.

  • Middle of the Funnel (Informational): At this stage of the funnel, potential customers are already familiar with your products or services and they have an understanding of how it works. They are interested in your offer and they have engaged with your brand. But you shouldn’t expect them to convert the moment they land on your site once again, you have to answer their questions in order to convince them to make a purchase.

  • Bottom of the Funnel (Where Conversions Happen): This is where you convert potential customers. potential customers at the bottom of the funnel have come a long way, they have passed the awareness and interest phase. They are ready to become your paying customers.

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