Why the F*** Are You Measuring CTR for Brand Awareness?
Let’s be honest — building brand awareness often feels like shouting into the void. I’ve run B2B marketing campaigns that looked great on paper and in pitch decks... only to hear crickets when it came to real engagement.
But things changed when we stopped throwing spaghetti at the wall and started aligning our early-funnel channels with what buyers actually needed at that stage.
Here’s what we learned when we reworked our top-of-funnel strategy at Folloze — the good, the bad, and the high-CTR ugly.
This is the first in our series diving deep into the ABX Masterclass: Channel Tactics for ABX. We're breaking down the tactical, channel-specific strategies that turn engagement into pipeline.
Let’s tackle the foundation: top of TOFU tactics that actually build brand awareness and drive initial engagement — without burning through your budget on CTR benchmarks that don’t matter for brand awareness.
Getting Real with Top of Funnel: Building Brand Awareness That Drives Engagement
The Hard Truth About Early-Stage Engagement
If your leads only find you when they’re ready to talk to sales, you’re already too late. The real buyer journey starts in the messy middle — way before someone hits your website’s demo button.
Biggest mistake I see? Serving product-heavy content to people who don’t even know they have a problem yet. We did it. Metrics flatlined. Budgets burned.
A Framework That Actually Worked
We stripped things down to a four-part rule:
- Illuminate a pain point (even if they don’t know they have it yet)
- Teach them something they didn’t know
- Give them a frictionless way to lean in
- Watch for signals and scale accordingly
Sounds simple, but implementing it meant completely rethinking our channel strategy.
Content That People Actually Engage With | OR Content That Doesn’t Suck (or Sell Too Hard)
What worked:
- Explainers that demystify industry jargon
- Quick quizzes to help prospects self-identify a challenge
- Visual explainers and “no BS” trend posts
- Titles that speak human (our best-performer: "What is a Buyer Experience Platform?")
- Not to mention this type of content is better optimized for AIO (see our “Is SEO Dead” Blog for more info)
What flopped:
- Feature-led videos
- Dense whitepapers with zero context
- Gated ebooks that felt like a trap and didn’t actually measure how ready a buyer was
Channel Mix: Where to Spend When Budget Is Tight
Display Advertising
We found success by:
- Creating simple, clean ads that highlight problems, not solutions
- Keeping frequency caps reasonable (3-5 impressions monthly)
- Targeting broadly within our industry without over-segmenting
- Tracking view-through rates instead of obsessing over clicks
We saw VTRs around 70-75% when properly optimized - meaning people who saw our ads visited our site within 30 days even without clicking.
Paid Search
For search, we:
- Focused on problem-based keywords, not just our brand terms
- Created ads that answered questions rather than promoted features
- Used broad match modifiers to capture related searches
- Monitored branded search volume as an indicator of awareness
The goal here isn't immediate conversion - it's making sure you show up when people start looking for answers to problems your solution addresses.
Organic Search & SEO
Your website is often the first impression prospects get of your brand. We revamped our approach by:
- Building topic clusters around key industry problems and keywords
- Optimizing meta titles and descriptions to focus on educational value
- Creating a resource center structured around buyer problems, not product features
- Tracking organic keyword rankings for problem-focused terms
Remember: Monitor trends over at least a one-month period since search results fluctuate, and focus on optimizing content for better click-through rates rather than just rankings.
Organic Social
We stopped treating social media as just another conversion channel and started approaching it as an education platform:
- Participated in LinkedIn conversations instead of just broadcasting our content
- Focused on commenting and adding value to existing discussions
- Shared third-party content that helped define industry problems
- Tracked engagement metrics (comments, shares) over direct clicks
B2B engagement rate benchmarks for organic social hover around 5% - calculate yours by dividing total impressions by engagement actions (clicks + shares + likes + comments).
Stop Measuring the Wrong Things
The biggest mindset shift? Accepting that the right metrics for top-funnel aren't leads or form fills. We started tracking:
- How many target accounts we were reaching (not just clicks)
- Whether our branded search volume was increasing
- If our content was being shared internally at accounts
- The time spent on educational content
When we presented these metrics to leadership instead of just lead counts, we could finally show the value of brand building.
A Real-World Example That Surprised Us
We had been completely ignoring early-stage accounts, focusing all our energy on the 25% who showed active buying signals. Our reach was pathetic - only about 9% of our target market.
When we expanded our approach to include those early-stage accounts with educational content, our reach jumped to 56%. Within three months, many of those previously ignored accounts started showing real buying intent signals.
Simple Next Steps Anyone Can Implement
If you want to improve your top-funnel strategy:
- Map your educational content to specific problems, not your product features
- Set up basic tracking for brand awareness metrics - even imperfect data is better than none
- Give your campaigns at least 30 days before making major changes
- Start with broad targeting and refine based on engagement patterns
- Look at what content actually gets engagement, not what your team thinks is impressive
This isn't revolutionary stuff, but it's easy to forget when we're pressured to show immediate pipeline impact.
- Organic Social Media Optimization Guide
- SEO and Organic Search Optimization Guide
- Google Ads Campaign Optimization Guide
- Display Ads Optimization Guide
The Bottom Line
Your top-of-funnel strategy doesn't need to be complicated or expensive. It just needs to help people understand their problems better.
Stop TRYING so dang hard at this stage. Start helping. The sales will follow when prospects are ready.
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What top-funnel tactics have worked for your team? Hit me up on LinkedIn.
Want to dig deeper?
Are you enrolled in Folloze Academy? All Folloze users have free access.
>> Check out the full Channel Tactics course in Folloze Academy with downloadable optimization guides for each channel, with our newest ABX Masterclass available for Folloze users.
>> Or get started by browsing our Transform to ABX Now webinar series to hear from customers just like you who've transformed their operations.
