Four Top-Of-The-Funnel Strategies To Attract New Customers
Attracting new customers is always a complex task, particularly for companies that sell products where the competition is strong and that compete heavily on price and value-added issues.
This article focuses on four strategies to help businesses acquire new customers while targeting the best cost per acquisition possible.
1. Educate top-of-the-funnel consumers.
First-time buyers always debate which are the best solutions for them. This is where education becomes a key component in acquiring new prospects.
Let’s imagine for a moment the purchase journey of a consumer who is planning to purchase a new laptop without any major expertise in electronics. There are a lot of brands that sell laptops, and their products are likely to have many comparable features. How are potential customer supposed to know the right choice for their needs?
The answer is research. Users will start searching on Google using terms including words like: “best,” “what,” “why” and “how.” These terms indicate that they are trying to educate themselves.
You can educate users by providing detailed descriptions of your products or services, putting together case studies, writing whitepapers, showing comparisons with similar products, publishing testimonials and more.
Educating users can establish your brand as a top-of-mind choice, and businesses can then advertise to the users they have previously educated by providing more specific information about their products or services, eventually (hopefully) converting those users.
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This leverages the principle of reciprocity, which is a basic psychological law: We always try to pay back what we receive from others. If we translate that into business language, it means that if you educate consumers and provide them with value first, they are more likely to remember you. And ideally, they’d be more likely to choose your products or services for that simple reason.
2. Align your content throughout the whole funnel.
Creating a top-to-bottom funnel strategy requires a lot of content creation such as ad content, landing page content, social media posts, emails and banners. The most important element of all of these strategies is to create one powerful communication strategy that will establish a consistent message across all traffic sources and levels of the funnel.
For instance, if your business is promoting a 15% discount for first-time customers, this message needs to be communicated across the whole funnel and should be the same across the different content elements we previously mentioned.
Failure in doing so could result in extreme confusion with potential customers, which could cause them to eventually lose interest and thus, exit the funnel.
3. Know what customers to exclude.
Top-of-the-funnel prospect acquisition will inevitably generate users that are not interested in your product. This is one of the reasons businesses should continue to target only users whose behavior on their site indicates interest in what they are reading.
Typical audiences to move down the funnel are those with high time on site, high page depth, those who have added to their cart, written product views, filled out form submissions, clicked in the in-site chat box and similar events.
This is an essential step in the generation of new prospects because it prevents businesses from investing money in users that aren’t likely to convert into customers which, consequently, increases the overall return on ad spend (ROAS).
These exclusions can be implemented in Google Ads by using Google Analytics and on Facebook by creating custom audiences through the Facebook pixel tool.
4. Create customer personas.
Not all customers behave the same. They have different needs and pain points that need to be addressed throughout the funnel. This means that creative landing pages and any other piece of content cannot be simply standardized to be used with all of your customers/personas.
While the funnel structure can be similar across potential consumers, the content needs to be fully customized to maximize the overall conversion rate. Focus on the personas that are going to contribute to the majority of sales at first and then keep increasing your reach based on success.
Conclusion
Take the time to carefully design your strategy, considering the above top-of-the-funnel strategies. By smoothly running your marketing efforts throughout the funnel, you can work on increasing and improving your conversions and retention rate and also cut costs.
Typically, as you pick up better leads, you will start experiencing a knock-on effect, eventually leading to a higher quality nurturing stream as well as better conversions and retention rates. With this, when done right, comes more first-time customers who will likely buy from you again or become brand advocates in the future.
