Top of funnel
The widest stage of the funnel — people who now know you exist but have not asked you for anything yet.
Top of funnel is the awareness stage: everyone who has encountered you but has not yet raised a hand. Search results, a talk, a post that travelled, a neighbour's recommendation. It is the only stage where the audience is strangers, which changes what belongs there.
The mistake that defines it is selling too early. Top-of-funnel work is judged on whether it reaches the right strangers and leaves them able to describe what you do; a stranger who cannot describe you will not remember you when the need arrives, and the need arrives months later. Anything that asks for a decision at this stage converts the small fraction who were already ready and burns the rest.
The second mistake is measuring it like the bottom. Impressions are not the goal and neither is same-week revenue. The honest measure is how many people entered the next stage — enquiries, subscribers, saved contacts — and how much it cost to put them there.
Worked: a monthly article reaches 3,000 readers and produces 4 enquiries this month. Read alone, that is a failure. Read over a year, the same articles produce a compounding library that generated 61 enquiries, 43 of which arrived from posts published more than three months earlier.
Also known as
- TOFU
- awareness stage
- demand generation
Relevant for
- Creators
- Top-of-funnel content earns the right to be remembered, not the right to sell — anything that pitches at first contact converts the ready few and costs you the rest.
- Business owners
- Local awareness compounds and takes months to show up as enquiries; judge this quarter's visibility work on next quarter's calls, or you will cancel it just before it pays.