Brand Building and Awareness Strategies (ToFu Marketing)

Brand building and awareness strategy refers to ToFu (or top-of-the-funnel) marketing. This is the art of attracting customers to your brand at the awareness stage – those who may not know about your brand, or to customers who may not even know the products or solutions they need yet.

As with all levels of the marketing funnel, this should form part of an ‘always on’ strategy, not just a focus for the start of a brands life cycle as customer acquisition should form part of a continual tactic. The idea of brand building or awareness strategies is to inform and provide answers to customers. Ultimately it should encourage trust to move the customer onto the ‘engage’ stage, (where they will interact and evaluate a potential purchase) and ideally move to the ‘convert’ stage to become a customer.

Content marketing is a key part of this part of the marketing funnel, providing quality educational and entertainment the customer wants to see/hear/read.

ToFu can also include PR (articles/features in both consumer and trade press), influencers, SEO efforts, blog posts, social media adverts, display adverts, sampling, award nominations/wins.

Keep in mind, this stage aims to capture a wide audience, some of whom may not be your exact target audience and will not move forward to the next stage of the funnel, however the customers who do engage at this stage, can then be retargeted with relevant MoFu (middle-of-the-funnel) content.