Bottom-of-Funnel Marketing Explained: Tactics, Metrics & Campaign Examples

Founder of Cooler Insights, I am a geek marketer with almost 30 years of senior management experience in marketing, public relations and strategic planning. It helps you to clearly identify what content pieces are needed at each stage of your customer’s buying journey, and establish the goals that they need to fulfill. Creating and mapping out your content marketing funnel is one of the best things you can do. Now that you’ve put together a couple of content types and ideas for each stage of your content marketing funnel, you’ll need to measure how successful you are at each stage.

You can test this by using holdout groups (e.g., show ads to 90% of your target audience but withhold them from 10% as a control, then compare behaviors), or by pausing campaigns and seeing if sales dip. Start by defining key performance indicators (KPIs) for upper-funnel campaigns that tie to your objectives. This is why measuring the impact of upper-funnel campaigns is crucial to determining the right budget allocation (and getting organizational buy-in to maintain and/or scale that spend).

When you can show your depth of knowledge in a digestible way, you are more likely to convert to sales. Further, MOFU content includes how-to guides, case studies to show customer success stories, webinars, video tutorials, Email newsletters, or comparison guides. Your MOFU content is where you get to explain in depth what your company is about and the services or products you provide.

Best TOFU Content Types

Stage-focused approaches work better for startups or companies with limited resources who need to perfect one area before expanding their marketing efforts. Full funnel marketing becomes essential when you have sufficient resources to manage multiple touchpoints and need comprehensive customer journey visibility for complex sales processes. HubSpot CRM funnel analytics provides comprehensive visibility across all stages, enabling teams to identify conversion bottlenecks and calculate return on investment for each marketing channel. Top-of-funnel metrics should focus on reach and engagement including traffic volume, content consumption rates, and lead generation numbers. Building an effective marketing funnel strategy requires mapping your customer journey from initial awareness through conversion, then aligning content and touchpoints to each stage.

Middle-of-funnel keywords tend to be more focused on a specific problem, solution, opportunity or activity. But the people searching for them probably aren’t ready to buy anything yet. Which will match up with different parts of your content marketing funnel. But your content can get lots of traffic without bringing in a single customer, if it doesn’t fit the intent of what people are searching for. Part of what makes content marketing so powerful is the organic search traffic it can generate.

Awareness Stage Content That Attracts the Right Audience

This will allow you to bring even more prospects into your content marketing funnel. Instead, only target people who have engaged with your middle-of-funnel and bottom-of-funnel content, didn’t end up converting, and haven’t come back in a while. That’s why it’s so important to capture email addresses in the top and middle of your funnel. Because they let you reach the people who have already entered your funnel, email and retargeting are your best weapons for hitting effective frequency and the rule of seven. And the two best tools for direct distribution are email and retargeting. Meaning, nudging the specific people who are already in your funnel.

• To conduct a content marketing funnel audit, you need to categorize your content by funnel stages – top, middle, and bottom.
• TOFU sparks curiosity, MOFU builds trust, BOFU converts, and loyalty content sustains.
• While programmatic, out-of-home, TV, connected TV, PR, and other channels can all be effective for upper-funnel advertising, they fall outside the scope of this piece.
• I’d still like to see the traffic channels, so I’ll add it as a secondary dimension.
• By watching these metrics, you’ll learn exactly which parts of the funnel help or hinder performance, enabling you to adjust your content strategy as needed.

It’s also important to address common objections and provide detailed product information, ensuring that potential customers feel informed and reassured during their decision-making process. Furthermore, include clear calls-to-action (CTAs) and limited-time discounts or exclusive offers to create urgency. Utilize persuasive techniques, such as offering free trials or demos, allowing prospects to experience your product firsthand. Tailoring content to resonate with your audience’s specific needs improves their experience and supports their process toward making an informed choice.

This group of reports will show you the different traffic sources and pages of your site that are contributing to your conversions… Well, the problem with most Google Analytics reports is that they give all the credit to the last page and traffic source that led to a conversion. My other favorite way to see the conversions from your content marketing funnel is the Multi-Channel Funnels report group.

Before you try to apply the knowledge in this post, make sure you claim your free content marketing funnel template so you can plan and create content that will delight your audience. At the BOF content funnel stage, car manufacturers will use more targeted methods to convert potential buyers into customers. This data will be used to create email lists for bottom-of-funnel campaigns.