stage 01 · demand generation
Top-of-Funnel Marketing: The Attract Stage
The attract stage is top-of-funnel marketing: becoming known by the people your positioning was written for. The work is showing up where they already look, in search results, social feeds, podcasts, communities, and increasingly inside AI answers, with something genuinely worth their attention.
By The Marketinque TeamReviewed June 2026
Why this stage decides so much
Attraction compounds. One pillar article becomes ten posts, a podcast pitch, and a data study, and each asset keeps working after you stop pushing it. The trap is thinness: most teams pick the two channels they enjoy and starve the rest, not because the others lack demand but because drafting for nineteen channels is a full-time job.
Attract plays you can ship
- Publish a teardown series: audit a real site or product in public.
- Turn one pillar article into ten social posts and one video script.
- Pitch the niche podcast your ICP actually listens to.
- Run a co-marketing webinar with an adjacent, non-competing brand.
- Ship a free tool that ranks for one high-intent keyword.
Ready-to-run attract plays
Step-by-step plays from the library — open one and tailor it to your product.
- Build-in-public origin story in a niche subreddit
Post your product’s honest build-in-public origin story in the single subreddit where your buyers already gather. Open with the problem and what you learned, not a pitch. Mention the product only when a commenter asks. Genuinely useful, transparent founder posts earn upvotes, comments, and durable referral traffic without tripping self-promotion rules.
- Contrarian founder take with a concrete example
Share a sharp, specific contrarian take on a widely held belief in your market, grounded in one real example or metric from your own experience. Open with a one-line hook and keep links out of the post body. Opinionated, experience-backed founder posts earn reach and position you as a credible voice buyers remember.
- The definitive how-to guide for a task you solve
Write the definitive, genuinely complete how-to guide for a task your product makes easier, targeting “how to [task]” searches. Answer the question fully and for free; mention the product only where it honestly removes a step. Comprehensive how-to content ranks, earns links, and gets cited by AI for the underlying task.
- Build-in-public metric thread
Post a short thread built around one real, specific number from your work — a milestone, an experiment outcome, a surprising metric — and the lesson behind it. Concrete, transparent numbers earn reshares and replies on X, while generic growth claims are ignored. Pair the data with a takeaway your audience can apply.
- Publish an original data study from numbers only you have
Turn data only you can see — product usage, order patterns, or a 100-person survey — into a published study with charts and a methodology note. Original statistics become the citation other writers need, earning backlinks and AI-answer mentions passively, and one solid study can outrank years of opinion posts.
- Pitch ten niche podcasts one specific story each
Pitch yourself to ten niche podcasts your buyers hear, each pitch carrying one specific story only you can tell, with the takeaways promised up front. Podcast audiences are small but parasocial — an hour in their ears builds more trust than a quarter of posting — and episodes keep converting for years.
How marketinque runs the attract stage
The agent works these channels on a loop. Drafting runs on autopilot; every publish, send, and dollar of spend waits in your approval queue, and every action lands in a tamper-evident log.
Autopilot drafts here include seo audit, draft x post, draft pr pitch, draft podcast pitch, generate social ad creative, draft community reply, and 13 more.
The numbers that tell you it works
- Qualified organic traffic (visitors who match the ICP, not raw sessions)
- Non-branded search impressions and their trend
- Mentions inside AI answers for your category queries
- Cost per qualified visit on paid channels
Key terms: TOFU / MOFU / BOFU, Dark Funnel.
Free tool for this stage
- ROAS Calculator
Turn ad spend, impressions, CTR, and conversion rate into clicks, revenue, ROAS, and CPA.
Attract stage questions
- What is top-of-funnel marketing?
- Top of funnel (TOFU) is the awareness layer of the funnel: the content and channels that make future buyers notice you exist before they have any intent to purchase. Search, social, PR, podcasts, communities, and AI answer engines are the typical surfaces.
- How many attract channels should one team run?
- Traditionally two or three, because drafting is the bottleneck and thin presence everywhere loses to depth somewhere. An agent changes that math: drafting cost stops scaling with channel count, so coverage can widen while humans only gate what actually publishes.
- Does the agent post to social automatically?
- No. Drafts run on autopilot, but every publish to a public channel is classed REQUIRE_APPROVAL and waits in the approval queue. Public publishing is a permanent human gate in the policy matrix, not a setting you can fat-finger.
Sources
- Chris Walker, Demand creation, demand capture & the dark social funnel (Refine Labs)
- Gartner, The B2B Buying Journey
Compiled by The Marketinque Team to our editorial standards.
Put the attract stage on autopilot
marketinque drafts this stage alongside the other seven and holds everything that ships for your approval. Join the waitlist and we will email you when it opens up.
One email at launch. Unconsented blasts are BLOCK-classed around here.
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