In today’s highly competitive ecommerce landscape, attracting new customers and expanding your market is critical to the success of your business.
That’s where top of funnel content comes into play.
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at what top of funnel content is, why it’s so important for ecommerce sites, and provide some tips and strategies for creating effective top of funnel content that will help you grow your customer base
What Is Top of Funnel Content?
Before we look at what top of funnel content is, we first need to look at the wider marketing funnel as a whole. A marketing funnel is a visual representation of how businesses can turn strangers into customers.
A marketing funnel can be split into 3 main stages: Awareness, Consideration and Conversion.
Top of funnel content sits in the awareness stage as it’s designed to attract and engage new customers with a brand and its products.
Users would read top of funnel content to gain awareness and understanding of a topic, product or service, and to find solutions to their problems or needs at the beginning of their decision-making process.
In the given hypothetical example, a customer is looking for a garden office building to improve productivity while working from home. At this stage, they might not be aware of the various types of garden buildings available, the features they offer, or even how a garden building can improve their productivity. This is where top of funnel content comes in.
A garden building website can create articles that provide useful information and educate the customer about the benefits of garden buildings, particularly garden office buildings, in improving productivity.
Some example content ideas in this scenario can include
- 10 Tips to Help You Stay Focused When Working from Home
- How To Boost Your Productivity With A Garden Office Building
By providing valuable and informative content at the top of the funnel, the site can attract potential customers to our website and build trust and credibility with them. The customer is likely to spend more time on the website, read more of the content, and eventually be more likely to consider purchasing a garden office building.
Top Of Funnel Content Types
Top of funnel content is not just limited to blog articles. Naturally, top of funnel content is present across many Digital Marketing channels such as
- Social Media
- Paid Ads
- Videos
- Infographics
- Podcasts
For the purpose of this article, we’ll be focusing purely on web-based content.
So without further ado, here are some top of funnel ideas that you can use for inspiration as part of your content marketing strategy.
Idea 1: How To Articles
How to articles are one of the most popular content pieces as part of a top of funnel marketing strategy. There are many reasons why these particular pieces work so well for example. They offer information that people are actively seeking out, they establish credibility and expertise, and they position ecommerce brands as a helpful resource on a topic.
A successful how-to article should provide valuable and accurate information in a clear and organised way that resonates with the target audience and matches their level of knowledge on the topic.
A good example of a successful ‘How To’ article that ticks all the above criteria can be found on the Loop Earplugs site.
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One of the key benefits of creating ‘How To’ content is that it can be repurposed into different mediums such as videos, infographics, and social media content.
An example of this can be found when looking at the SERPs for the keywords ‘How To Put Up A Tent’
The top results for this phrase are YouTube video results. In this scenario, it would make sense to create a How To Video on putting up a tent given that the search results mainly contain video results before any blog articles.
Idea 2: Tip Posts
Sharing valuable tips on a topic or in relation to a specific topic is a highly effective top of funnel content type. By providing valuable tips and insights, tip posts can help nurture leads and move them down the sales funnel towards making a purchase as well as showing an ecommerce brand’s expertise which builds trust and authority.
Top 10 Study Tips For Effective Learning
As tip posts are a popular content type, you may often create posts on the same topic as your competitors. With this in mind, the key thing when creating a tip post is to share your expertise and any tips that are not commonly shared by competitors. This can help differentiate your brand and make it stand out in a crowded market.
Idea 3: Lead Magnets
A lead magnet is a piece of content created and offered to potential customers in exchange for their contact information, such as their email addresses.
Lead magnets can take many forms, including e-books, white papers, case studies, checklists, templates, webinars, and more. The key is that the content is valuable and relevant to the target audience and that it provides a clear benefit in exchange for the user’s contact information.
Lead magnets can help to increase conversions and sales on an ecommerce site. By providing a targeted lead magnet, ecommerce sites can attract leads that are already interested in their products or services, which can lead to higher conversion rates and more sales.
Many fashion retailers produce in-depth guides on the top emerging trends for example a men’s spring/summer fashion guide for 2023. This article could contain products from the said retailer as a way to drive awareness and traffic to them.
This post would work incredibly well as a downloadable guide. By converting the post into a downloadable guide, readers can easily download and save the document for future reference, making it a more tangible resource than a regular blog post.
In the context of this example, upon downloading a lead magnet, the user can receive targeted emails that showcase the products highlighted in the post and offer further guidance on how to style and wear them.
Create Your Top Of Funnel Content Strategy
To sum up, creating top of funnel content for ecommerce sites is an essential strategy to attract potential customers and build brand awareness. With these examples you can create a thorough strategy that drives new eyes and new customers to your business.
If you want to learn more about how to optimise your ecommerce content strategy, don’t miss the Re:commerce SEO conference, where you can network with experts, attend informative sessions and discover the latest trends and best practices.
