You’re underestimating the value of top of funnel marketing

Think about the last song that got stuck in your head. You didn't hear it once and immediately buy concert tickets or add the album to your cart. You probably didn't even think about the artist in that moment at all. But a few weeks later, when a friend asked what you'd been listening to, that song was the first thing that came to mind, and you probably went looking for more of it.

That's the entire logic behind top of funnel marketing. It's not built to sell you something on the spot, although occasionally it does that, too. It's built to make sure your brand is the one that surfaces later, when the person you reached is ready to buy.

The top of the marketing funnel tends to be underestimated because it isn't associated with immediate purchases. But brands that discount it do so at their own risk. The top of funnel plays several critical roles in a full funnel strategy, and you'll only realize its value when you measure it correctly. Marketers who judge top of funnel campaigns by the wrong stage's metrics end up cutting the exact spend that's filling their sales funnel with potential customers, then wonder why their bottom of funnel campaigns start running dry a few months later.

Key takeaways

• Top of funnel marketing (also called upper funnel or awareness stage marketing) introduces your brand to a broad audience that, many times, isn't ready to buy yet.
• The goal is to create brand awareness and a positive association, not necessarily an immediate sale or a qualified lead.
• Common tactics include content marketing, blog posts, social media ads, video ads, and search engine optimization for broad, informational search engines queries.
• Most top of funnel content doesn't show up as a conversion in your ad platforms, which makes it easy to undervalue during budget reviews.
• Top of funnel spend tends to show up later as direct traffic, organic traffic, branded search, a sale on your Amazon storefront, or a broader lift in website traffic, not as a click you can trace back to a landing page.
• A full funnel marketing strategy needs upper, middle, and bottom of funnel efforts working together across your digital marketing funnel, since none of them perform well on their own.
• Prescient's marketing mix model is built to measure the delayed, indirect impact that platform-level attribution and Google Analytics typically miss.

What top of funnel marketing actually means

Every marketing funnel starts somewhere, and the top of the funnel is that starting point. Some people call it the awareness stage, others call it the top of the funnel of the customer journey (or buyer's journey, if that's the term your team uses). Either way, it's the moment someone first learns your brand exists, long before they've thought about a final purchase.

At this stage, you're usually not trying to close a sale. You're trying to earn a place in someone's memory so that when they do start their decision making process, your brand is already on the list of potential customers they'll consider. That's a different job than the consideration stage in the middle of the funnel or the bottom of funnel, and it calls for a different marketing strategy and a different way of measuring success, which we'll get into shortly.

The key characteristics of top of funnel marketing

A few traits separate top of funnel content from the rest of your digital marketing funnel:

• It targets a broad audience. You're reaching a large audience based on general interests or demographics, not narrowing in on a small, highly qualified group.
• It's educational, not promotional. The best top of funnel content answers a question or solves a small problem for someone who isn't thinking about your product yet. When done right, this build authority and expertise for your brand in the space, keeping you top of mind when the person is ready to buy. Sometimes the education leads to realization of immediate need, which is how even top of funnel campaigns can create converting customers.
• It builds a positive association. The goal is for people to feel good about your brand before they ever need what you sell.
• It plays a long game. Although some conversions can happen right away, results mostly build over weeks and months.

Good top of funnel content earns trust with relevant information before it ever asks for anything in return, which is exactly why it's so easy to misjudge on a spreadsheet built for bottom of funnel numbers. Building it into your marketing strategy from the start, rather than treating it as an afterthought, is what makes the rest of the customer journey easier to earn.

Common top of funnel marketing tactics

Most brands build their upper funnel marketing efforts to create brand awareness through a mix of the following:

• Content marketing, blog posts, and thought leadership that answer broad, informational questions your target audience is already searching for.
• Social media marketing, including organic social media posts and paid social media ads aimed at a large audience rather than a narrow retargeting list.
• Video ads, especially on platforms built for reach, like YouTube, LinkedIn ads, or Google ads' video network.
• Display and connected TV, which puts your brand in front of people while they're doing something else entirely.
• Search engine optimization for broad, top of the funnel search engines queries, the kind someone types when they're still researching, not ready to buy.

A quick note on paid ads here: some marketers push back on running paid campaigns this high in the funnel, since the direct conversion rate is usually low. That's fair, and it's also kind of the point. A top of funnel campaign that isn't converting at a bottom of funnel rate isn't failing; it's just being read with the wrong yardstick. It's also possible that you don't know where to look for the conversions it is driving. CTV is a great example of this since it absolutely drives conversions, but you need to look elsewhere to measure CTV effectively since there's rarely any action a viewer can take.

Top of funnel vs. middle and bottom of funnel marketing

A full funnel strategy treats each stage differently, since your audience's pain points and readiness to buy change as they move from upper funnel through the middle of the funnel to bottom of funnel content.

Middle of the funnel marketing is where lead magnets, in depth content, and email marketing start to matter more than broad reach. Once someone's paying attention, tools like a gated guide, a webinar, or a well-timed email marketing sequence help generate leads and move your target audience further down the funnel. Email marketing threads these together once someone's given you an email address, and a landing page usually anchors the offer. Bottom of funnel content leans on social proof, like reviews and case studies, to close the deal, which is a different job entirely.

One misconception worth clearing up: some marketers argue that "top of funnel conversions" aren't really a thing, since a true conversion, a sale, only happens at the bottom of the funnel. That's not quite right. Top of funnel campaigns can generate leads and drive real sales; the catch is that the person often finishes that conversion somewhere else, like a different platform, a direct visit to your site, or a branded search a few weeks later. Because that sale never gets credited back to the original campaign, it looks like nothing happened, when really the value just moved to a channel your top of funnel report isn't watching. That disconnect, more than any real difference in what these campaigns can do, is what fuels so many funnel strategy debates.

How top of funnel marketing shows up in your tracking

Here's where most marketers run into trouble: the platforms running your campaigns at the top of the funnel are built to report on direct, in-platform conversions, and top of funnel marketing was never built to produce those.

Instead, upper funnel spend tends to show up in places your ad platforms aren't watching:

• Direct traffic, from people who remembered your brand name and typed your URL straight in.
• Organic traffic and branded search, from people who saw your ad, didn't click, and later Googled you by name.
• A broader lift in website traffic, even on pages that have nothing to do with the original campaign.
• Conversions on other storefronts, like your Amazon storefront or within retail stores.
• Better performance from your retargeting and bottom of funnel campaigns, since the audience they're reaching already has some brand recognition to work with.

Prescient calls this a halo effect: revenue a campaign drives indirectly, through a different channel than the one it ran on. It's worth noting that halo effects aren't exclusive to top of funnel campaigns. A retargeting ad someone scrolls past without clicking can still lead to a purchase later, just like an upper funnel video ad can. Top of funnel spend just tends to generate more of it, since its entire job is introducing your brand to people who weren't looking for it yet.

If you're only measuring online behavior inside a single ad platform, you're missing most of this picture. That gap—the space between what your dashboard reports and what your top of funnel spend is actually doing—is exactly where good campaigns get cut for the wrong reasons. Add it up over a few quarters, and today's upper funnel spend is often responsible for a real share of next quarter's new customers.

How to measure the real impact of top of funnel marketing

Google Analytics and platform dashboards are useful for a lot of things, but they're not built to connect a video ad someone saw in January to a purchase they made in March. Prescient's marketing mix modeling was built to fill that exact gap.

Instead of trying to track an individual person across every touchpoint, Prescient's marketing mix modeling looks at your marketing efforts and your revenue over time and works out how much each stage of your marketing funnel actually contributed. That means an upper funnel campaign that's driving branded search, direct traffic, and halo effects across your bottom of funnel campaigns finally gets credit for all of it.

That matters for a simple business reason: brands that only trust in-platform numbers tend to cut their best top of funnel ad spend first, since those numbers make awareness spend look like the weakest link in a full funnel marketing strategy. It's usually the opposite, and without a clear-eyed funnel strategy that accounts for the lag, it's easy to keep making that mistake quarter after quarter.

Where Prescient comes in

Prescient's marketing mix model gives omnichannel brands a clearer read on every stage of their marketing funnel, top of funnel included. Instead of relying on last-click data or a pixel that can't see half of your customers' journey, our model works backward from your real revenue to show how each channel reaches your target audience and contributes, from upper funnel awareness spend to bottom of funnel search campaigns, both on its own and through halo effects on the rest of your marketing.

If you've ever had to defend an awareness budget with a dashboard that wasn't built to measure it, that's exactly the conversation we want to have. Book a demo to see how the Prescient platform reveals what your top of funnel spend is actually doing.

FAQs

What is the top of the funnel?

The top of the funnel is the awareness stage of the marketing funnel, the point where someone first learns your brand exists. It's the widest part of the customer journey, aimed at reaching a large audience before narrowing down to the people who are actually ready to buy.

What is considered top of funnel content?

Top of funnel content is broad and educational, built to answer a question or solve a small problem rather than sell a product outright, unlike the lead magnets and gated offers you'll see further down the funnel. Blog posts, social media posts, video ads, and search engine optimization targeting broad, informational queries all fall into this category.

What is top of funnel vs. bottom of funnel?

Top of funnel marketing introduces your brand to people who aren't ready to buy yet, while bottom of funnel marketing targets people who are close to a final purchase decision. The content, tactics, and success metrics look completely different at each stage, which is why judging one by the other's standards causes problems.

What are examples of upper funnel marketing?

Common examples include YouTube and other video ads, display and connected TV campaigns, broad social media ads, influencer partnerships, and content marketing aimed at general, top of the funnel search queries rather than product-specific ones.

Why don't my top of funnel campaigns show conversions in my ad platform?

Ad platforms are built to report on direct, in-platform actions, and top of funnel marketing rarely produces those. Instead, its impact tends to show up as direct traffic, organic traffic, branded search, or better performance from your retargeting and bottom of funnel campaigns, none of which your ad platform will credit back to the original campaign.

How long does it take for top of funnel marketing to show results?

Top of funnel results typically take weeks or months to show up, since they depend on someone remembering your brand and coming back once they're ready to buy. Judging these campaigns against a short measurement window will almost always make them look weaker than they actually are.