The last episode of Peak Ace on Air was part two of our content marketing funnel series. In part one we talked about getting your brand known among your target audience with the help of top-of-the-funnel content marketing. The next step is to offer them more in-depth and promotional content. In this blog post, we’ll be entering the middle-of-the-funnel and telling you about creating content to fit that stage of the buyer’s journey.
What is MoFu content?
The main goal for MoFu is to gain interest among your target audience and to encourage them to make a purchase. By this stage, the potential customer knows your brand and has already engaged with it in some way. The next step is to convince them to become a customer. In order to achieve that, the brand needs to offer more in-depth content compared to the ToFu stage.
In the middle stage of the buyer’s journey, the potential client is considering different products and solutions to their problem. They are not yet ready to buy but are collecting knowledge of different providers in order to make a decision later on. The brands need to answer the potential customers’ questions and address their pain-points with educational and personalised content.
You thus need to have enough information about your target audience in order to truly offer them the content they need and to target them in the right channels. Or you can employ a trial and error approach, finding out as you go along by creating different formats and keeping an eye on what your competitors are doing.
MoFu content formats
Like in ToFu content marketing, different content formats can be used in MoFu, such as:
- Promotional content such as product demos or guides to answer a question or compare products
- Educational content to build trust e.g. case studies
- Audiovisual content such as webinars and tutorials
Content marketing for the B2B audience is all about creating trust. Case studies or client testimonials are great formats for convincing potential clients to buy from you. People trust other customers and want to know that what they are about to buy has already been positively reviewed by someone else. Webinars are also a popular format – their popularity has grown over the past year, as we all know.
When using either of these formats it’s important to make sure that they are not too product-focused. Nothing is worse than signing up for an interesting webinar or downloading a case study and just getting a sales pitch.
For the B2C audience the content needs to be more catchy but still informative. Checklists or tutorials on how to use the product in question are great formats.
Mixed strategies for ToFu and MoFu content
The same content piece can work for different audiences in different parts of the sales funnel. This is especially sensible if you’re working towards multiple goals, such as leads and organic traffic.
You can, for example, offer an article for free and attach an interactive tool to it. The results from the tool can then be sent to the client via email. Hubspot is well known for this approach. They write a blog post about a topic and if they have a downloadable element regarding the topic (which they often do), they link to it in the blog post. This lets you generate SEO traffic from the article and later benefit from leads who are interested in finding out more.
You can also use your most popular ToFu content to create more in-depth MoFu content. If a certain blog post topic is very popular and gets a lot of traction on social media, then it makes sense to either create a webinar or a more in-depth e-book about it – and link to it from the blog post, of course.
How to measure MoFu content marketing
For measuring your MoFu efforts you should count leads, consumption and engagement metrics. Webinar or email sign-ups or case study downloads are the most common leads. Consumption metrics are basically website quality signals such as bounce rate or CTR. They determine how long people are spending with your content. Engagement can be measured via social signals or referral traffic, showing how your content resonates off your website as well as on it.
And that’s a wrap! In the middle of June we will finally get to (what is probably) the most interesting phase of the sales funnel for most companies: the bottom. Carina will talk us through how, after writing tons of articles and hosting webinars and e-books, you can start creating content which has only one goal: to make a sale. Catch you then!
We’ve also created another in-depth blog article about MoFu content marketing, to go further into the topic of convincin the potential buyer with your content efforts. Do check that out if you feel you still want to brush up your knowledge before moving on to the final stage.
