Anyone who has been around marketing for more than ten minutes knows about the marketing funnel. It illustrates the wide pool of prospective buyers gradually being directed through a narrowing space until your ideal customers emerge – informed and ready to engage with your services or products. The concept took hold at the beginning of the 20th century and has been refined and adapted to suit evolving markets and practices.
But does an idea that’s a hundred years old still hold in the age of AI? In this article, we’ll take a deep dive into the marketing funnel, and uncover exactly how you can create content that delivers the right result at every step along the customer journey.
First, a definition!
Marketers use content marketing funnels as a strategy to guide potential customers towards a specific end goal, like a purchase, download or sign up. The funnel broadly represents the various stages a buyer passes through: awareness, consideration, conversion and loyalty. As a marketer, you need targeted content for each phase to attract the right people, build trust in your business and drive them to take the next step – whether that’s signing up, booking a demo or making a purchase.
The funnel is top heavy because people at the awareness stage are scattered across different channels and have different levels of interest and intent from those who continue through to the lower funnel stages. As only a small percentage of people who first noticed your business will go on to become buyers, you need eye-catching and engaging content at the top of the funnel to get the most attention from the broadest possible range of people.
After attracting the interest of potential customers, the information provided in the final stages of the funnel is more in-depth and refined. By this stage, your aim is to give customers confidence in your business by making your offering irresistible. You want to persuade them to buy and keep them coming back for more.
B2B funnels are unique
At Engage we mainly work with B2B clients so have a good understanding of the distinct characteristics and challenges that impact on B2B marketing funnels.
- Sales cycle: The B2B buying journey is likely to be complex, with research, negotiations and custom proposals stretching over weeks, months or years.
- Decision-making: B2B funnels involve numerous decision-makers and longer approval cycles, requiring consensus across teams.
- Relationship building: B2B marketing relies heavily on relationship-building, often using personalised outreach and account-based marketing to nurture leads.
- Success indicators: B2B funnel success is measured by lead quality, account engagement, and pipeline velocity.
- Communication channels: B2B buyers often expect direct interaction with sales representatives, especially in the later funnel stages. Though this practice is changing as more business transactions move online.
Those longer, more complex sales cycles require tailored content at each stage, including content that supports decision making.
Full-funnel content approach
A full-funnel approach means creating the right type of content for each stage of the buyer journey – from awareness through to loyalty – while keeping messaging and measurement consistent. This ensures you attract attention early, build trust as prospects evaluate options, and retain customers after purchase.
TOFU or awareness stage
Think of top of the funnel (TOFU) stage as if you were meeting someone for the first time. They don’t know you, what you do or how you can help them – and pushing for a sale too early will turn them away. Your goal here isn’t to sell but to spark interest.
Here, it’s important to create eye-catching and useful content that conveys information about your brand. Focus on building out your brand and attracting traffic with articles about common issues that prospective customers may find interesting. At this stage, concentrate on generating awareness and use different types of content to attract a broad audience.
- Blog posts and social media posts
- Landing pages optimised for discovery
- Ebooks and illustrations such as infographics
- Educational videos, podcasts and webinars on industry topics
MOFU or consideration stage
You’ve got your audience’s attention by the middle of the funnel (MOFU) stage. Now it’s time to help them figure out if your product or service is the right fit for them. This involves educating leads so they can evaluate different options and understand the value of what you are offering.
The aim here is to ensure you produce content that highlights value, answers objections and positions you as the best choice. to help the right people move closer to purchasing.
- Whitepapers and case studies
- Personalised email campaigns
- Product or service comparison guides
- Product demos
- Webinars and detailed how-to resources
BOFU or conversion stage
Those who make it through to the bottom of the funnel (BOFU) stage are ready to buy – but they may still be comparing options, weighing costs or looking for final reassurance. Your content here needs to support that final push to convince them and eliminate any remaining doubts.
You might think those in this part of the funnel will be moments away from purchase, but the truth is this final stage can take months, weeks or minutes, depending on the customer’s engagement and investment. That’s why this stage is so crucial for growing the trust and authority that will make your leads convert.
Leads at this stage may still be doing research off your site and evaluating your offering against competitors. Ensuring information is presented in a form that addresses the needs, concerns or objections of those who are ready to buy is vital. Now is the time for specific information that can be provided in different forms.
- Reviews and testimonials
- How-to guides and video walkthroughs
- Product spec sheets
- Competitor comparisons
- Pricing pages
- Sign up and checkout flows
- Free trials
OOFU or loyalty stage
The fourth and final, out of the funnel (OOFU), stage is the post-conversion experience. Basically, it’s about what you do to ensure your new customer remains loyal. Encouraging advocacy at this stage can pay dividends in the long run as it fosters brand loyalty.
Now that your new buyers are onboard, they might have questions about how things work, so make sure your content covers FAQ type queries. It’s often possible here to reuse content produced for other stages of the funnel, like how-to guides, blog posts or video walkthroughs. But you’ll also want content crafted specifically for your existing customers to ensure the best outcomes.
Ultimately, your goal is to make your solution indispensable. You want your customer to get the maximum value from your service, so they’ll become an advocate. Tutorials, gamification to improve engagement and follow up emails are a great example of the types of content that can support this tactic. Here you can incorporate a number of ways to support new clients.
- Tutorials and onboarding guides
- FAQs and help centre articles
- Customer success stories
- Gamification and engagement campaigns
- Regular follow-up or check-in emails
How to build a marketing funnel
Building and refining your content marketing funnel is a process of identifying target audiences, tracking attribution and using automation to help produce content effectively. If you want to stay organised, create a content plan to detail exactly what content you want to produce, its objective, target keywords and when (and where) you plan to publish it.
Check out our free content plan template
1. Know your customers
To optimise your content funnel, you first need a clear picture of your audience and how your offering fits their needs. Start by analysing your product or service and unique selling points (USP). Investigate how they compare to your competitors. Next, research your target audience. You’ll need to have a deep understanding of their needs, behaviour and pain points so you can distribute your content effectively.
- Gather data about your audience from reviews, surveys, interviews and online analytics.
- Create buyer personas to help understand customer goals and behaviour.
- Map out the customer journey to see where people interact with your brand.
A solid understanding of customers and the market helps inform content that resonates at every marketing funnel stage and guides people toward conversion.
To create useful content, it’s essential to fully understand your market and ideal customer. Only then will you be able to deliver the content that will keep them engaged and moving toward conversion at each touchpoint.
Once you’ve got a strong understanding of your customer, start building out lower funnel content and then work your way backwards to awareness content. This ensures you already have content that helps with conversion straight away, rather than acquiring leads who have nowhere else to go.
2. Plan a strategy
Content marketing should be underpinned by a search and AI optimisation strategy, since both play a role at every stage of the funnel. Focus on the following aspects when creating your keyword strategy.
- Choosing keywords with good traffic potential.
- Analysing competitor traffic and keywords used by competitors.
- Matching the search intent (informational, commercial, navigational or transactional) of the keyword to each stage of the funnel.
- Selecting keywords that your business has potential to rank for.
Keep in mind that search volume is usually smaller for more focused keywords, so expect BOFU keywords to have lower traffic potential.
For a real-world example of how content fuels growth at different stages, see our case study on supercharging Adobe’s growth through SEO and localisation and other case studies illustrating successful strategies and outcomes in various industries.
3. Measure and optimise
In our recent article on how B2B buyers research, we show that a buyer’s journey is rarely linear. Leads will often dart back and forth between different stages of the funnel. Making sure you thoroughly analyse every stage for potential drop-offs can streamline your content funnel performance, no matter how your leads engage with it.
- Content audits continuously check the effectiveness of your content and identify any gaps.
- Analytics tools and reports allow you to monitor your goals on a regular basis.
- Engagement metrics and feedback from your audience help identify where content is delivering as it should, when it should.
Key indicators for each stage of the content funnel.
- TOFU: Number of visitors, time on page, engagement conversion rate (e.g. webinar attendance or ebook downloads), keyword rankings.
- MOFU: Number of leads, click-through rate (CTR), content conversion rate (e.g. newsletter signups or whitepaper downloads), engagement metrics.
- BOFU: Sales conversions (e.g. sales contacts or signups), total number of sales, return on investment (ROI).
10 best practices tips for content marketing funnels
- Learn what your competitors are doing well and do better.
- Double down on content that works by repurposing and scaling.
- Deliver valuable, useful and authoritative content at all times.
- Use CTAs to encourage action, even at the top of the funnel.
- Rectify any poor on-page user experience that could deter potential leads.
- Be consistent with messaging and branding to encourages trust.
- Conduct A/B testing at all stages of your funnel to optimise results.
- Create a sense of urgency with time-sensitive promotions to help conversion.
- Embrace the power of reviews and social proof to strengthen credibility.
- Make sure every page has one prominent, purposeful next step.
Want to create a content marketing funnel that actually works?
That’s what we’re here for. Get in touch today and let’s help you with a strategy to convert those leads into loyal customers.
