The TOFU’s, MOFU’s, and BOFU’s of Content Marketing
Photo by Niklas Ohlrogge on Unsplash

The TOFU’s, MOFU’s, and BOFU’s of Content Marketing

Let’s assume product marketing has performed our jobs well, and delivered an awesome narrative that nails all the key messaging layers needed to effectively bring your business and solutions to market. All your key stakeholders across sales, product, marketing, and senior leadership love how you’ve differentiated the business and created a compelling story. Now they’re chomping at the bit to share high value content promoting this story with customers and prospects.? Congrats!? It’s time to build a prioritized content plan to determine what types of assets should be created to influence the most critical stages of your customer’s journey.?

There is a wide variety of content that your business should create, and all should be considered to support your go-to-market. But for this article I will NOT be focusing on:?

  • Internal communication and enablement documentation.?These will be created in collaboration with your revenue/sales enablement team .
  • Webinars and event speaker presentations.? These are driven by your regional marketing or events marketing team.
  • Release notes and implementation documentation. These are driven by your product and support teams .
  • Articles published by 3rd party media outlets and press releases.? These are driven by your public relations/corporate communications team.

For this article, I’ll focus on assets that are typically driven by a content marketing team. Some product marketing leaders will manage the content marketing team and budget directly, while others will collaborate closely with this team to help guide their content priorities and investments (as I discussed in my article, Spending other people’s money ).

TOFU, MOFU, BOFU - What’s WITHU?

As I mentioned above, your content plan should align with what’s known as a customer journey, buyer’s journey, or marketing funnel, among other terminology. Commonly used stages of this customer journey include Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Retention, and Advocacy. ? Both Google and ChatGPT failed me because neither could help me cite who actually named these specific five stages - so let’s just go with the Universe.? Thanks for the framework, Universe!

It’s critical for a PMM and content marketer to understand each of these stages, because each stage may require distinct information targeting different roles to help influence how they can move from one stage of the journey to the next. ? In fact, these crazy acronyms in the header are used to align the GTM activity with the stage of the funnel a customer is in:

  • TOFU, aka Top Of FUnnel.? ? This stage assumes the customer or prospect is in the awareness phase of their journey.? They feel they might have a problem, and are feeling some pain around it, but don’t necessarily know what solutions or best practices are out there to solve it - if any. ? Your TOFU content is all about building a case for why your market and category are relevant to build demand - it’s not about you yet.
  • MOFU, aka Middle Of FUnnel.? Awareness starts to move into Consideration here.? The customer has identified that there may be a variety of potential solutions to their challenge, and need to analyze the pros and cons and best practices associated with each alternative so they can short list a number of products or services to evaluate. ? Your MOFU content is focused on sharing best practices and approaches to solving a problem.? But it’s still not about you!
  • BOFU, aka Bottom Of FUnnel. ?The customer has now narrowed down how they want to solve the problem, and are fully focused on where to spend their budget.? They are in the Purchase phase where they need to understand how the different solution providers differentiate from one another, and which will provide the fastest time to value with the best business outcomes.? Your BOFU content is finally all about you!? If you reach this stage, you have confidence that the customer has an identified need - with budget to spend - and it’s time to convince them that your brand, company, solution, platform, products, features, and services are exactly what they need to solve it.
  • You’ve landed, time to expand.? Note the other two stages of the funnel include Retention and Advocacy.? Sure, you landed that customer with their initial purchase. And hopefully if they get value from your product they’ll want to continue to use it and renew.? But content marketing wants to help your company grow - not just keep the lights on. ? So a big part of a cross-sell, upsell motion may include restarting your customer on a brand new journey with a healthy dose of new TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU content to promote the value of them investing even more into your portfolio! ? And customers that you’ve been able to continuously deliver value to year over year are the ones that would want to participate in any number of forms of customer advocacy on your behalf .?

Match the right content at the right stage with the right audience

I’ve found that certain types of assets are most valuable when attracting a specific stage of the customer journey. ? There are exceptions to this, especially if you’re selling into very small businesses with only 1-2 decision-makers involved in a short or even self-service sales cycle. ? But as your deals and target organizations get larger and more complex, it’s more likely that you’ll be influencing a broader number of individuals holding different roles within the organization to win their business.??

As an example, let’s imagine you market software used by Product development teams with a six-figure price tag, and you target large enterprises. Your holy grail would be to first get the attention of the Chief Product Officer (CPO) or Chief Technology Officer (CTO) in the TOFU stage to validate that there’s an important technology trend or risk that they need to prioritize. But then perhaps you want to target a Senior Architect or VP of Engineering role for the MOFU stage, who the CPO/CTO has tasked to propose the best solution and perhaps recommend a short list of vendors.? And then you may want to target the end users, for example DevOps, developers, or other front-line teams when promoting BOFU because they are the key influencers to help determine which vendor will best fulfill their requirements.

And yes, there are circumstances where you may want to merge TOFU/MOFU messages or MOFU/BOFU messages.? But be careful when you do this if you’re not 100% sure you’re targeting the same audience for each stage.???

In the table below, I summarize different types of content assets that PMMs and content marketing teams can consider, and what stage of the customer journey I’ve found them to be most useful.? ? As a rule of thumb, I also think of the three stage categories aligning with the following roles:

  • TOFU Content: Executive or senior-level roles accountable for solving a business challenge
  • MOFU Content: Mid-level leaders who need to propose solution alternatives to leadership
  • BOFU Content: Front line decision-makers and influencers who need to recommend the final solution

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Aligning the right type of content with the customer journey stage

There are many other asset types that content market teams also have in their arsenal including ROI calculators, business case templates, jointly developed partner content, podcasts, community forums, and many more.?Product marketing and content marketing should work closely together to brainstorm what types of assets and channels would be most valuable for the personas, industries, and regions you’re targeting.

Any favorite content types that I’ve missed or have a different perspective on how to tie content to the customer journey? Share in the comments!

Joel Primack

Community Consultant & Content Creator | Ex. Community @ Lattice | Podcast Host @ The Community-Led Growth Show

1 年

Such a great post, Rob! Healthy mix of strategic & tactical ??

Mark B.

PMA’s Top 50 Product Marketing Influencers. GTM & PMM expertise that jumpstarts projects, getting them moving and obtaining the results you need. What could you achieve with PMM expertise and an extra set of hands?

1 年

Great piece!

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