All right. Welcome to today's episode of Barely Shipping. Today, we are going to talk about a few terms you probably know: TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU, top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, and bottom of the funnel, the roles that they play in an overall go-to-market strategy, and how you can drive more inbound traffic to your website and convert more prospects into buyers.
But we're also gonna talk about how AI has changed the way that you should approach thinking about each of these buckets of content, especially with the rise of AI being used to make text-based articles, how you can really make sure that you're making the best human quality that still ranks with the algorithms, makes you AI visible, also searchable on channels like Google.
So SEO, AEO, and where all three of these fit, along with the different source materials that you should be thinking about using that you might not be, to inform each of these strategies. So what is TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU? TOFU meaning top of the funnel. If you go to systemsledgrowth.ai/blog/tofu-mofu-bofu, you will see here this little funnel graph, and if you click the top one, you can see how I typically like to break these down.
Now, I try not to overcomplicate this. There are a billion different definitions, each with their own little nuances, but the way that I've always seen this is top of the funnel is the current state of things, and by that I mean it's very high level and informational. So if somebody wants to learn about your product, they usually won't just go in and type your product's name.
They're gonna start with an informational topic around your product. So if you are, let's say a social media agency, they might start Googling something like social media strategy, something very high level. They wanna know how they can improve their followers. They wanna know how they can accomplish something, but again, at a very high level. They're not looking to purchase something right away.
Now, top of the funnel is interesting because in the past, what a lot of people have done in the SEO world, and this is before AI came along, was the idea was, can you get a top of the funnel article. A top of the funnel article usually has higher volume. Again, because it's higher level, you have more people who are searching for that term in Google.
So if it was, let's say, content marketing strategy, for example, you have more people searching for that as a blanket term than you would, say, how do you write a good thought leadership post, which is a more niche topic within that larger umbrella. So top of the funnel typically has higher volume, and because of that, you'll see these companies will go for volume plays with organic content marketing.
They're trying to bring as many people to their site as possible, and there's nothing wrong with that as long as you're bringing in the right audience. So one thing at Copy.ai is, up until 2023, we were a B2C, meaning business to consumer, platform, and we were mostly self-serve. Once we moved in 2024 to a B2B or business to business type market, and we were going for more enterprise contracts, it meant our audience fundamentally changed, which meant a lot of our content needs changed.
So a lot of the people we had been attracting to the site with those top of the funnel tools and articles were no longer relevant to who we wanted to engage with. Because if someone was typing in a phrase like Instagram caption generator, which would get like forty to fifty thousand organic clicks a month, it wasn't going to be the people that were going to start having an enterprise demo or deal with. They weren't really our target buyer anymore.
So one of the things with top of the funnel traffic, especially with AI, is this idea of attracting the right audience instead of just going for a volume play. Now, in the past, the way that you would do this is by getting ranked through SEO. You would take a really highly informational topic, content marketing strategy, and you would break down all of the different things that the top-ranking articles hadn't broken down yet. You would add more and make a more informative, more helpful guide. This is very traditional SEO, and that has shifted a bit.
The reason that shifted is because text-based assets like blog posts, like white papers, like different informational guides that you might create, are now very easy to make with AI. So you can go into ChatGPT or Claude and write, write me a really good SEO blog post on content marketing strategy, and you'll get something very generic but informational back. Now, as more companies do this, it's very obvious that so can your competitors. So it is harder to get ranked, which means you need to add different things to the recipe when you're creating this, which we will touch on in just a moment.
Before we do, though, I wanna talk about middle-of-the-funnel content. Middle-of-the-funnel content I like to think of as your thought leadership content, and this is, if people were going to top of the funnel with what is the current state of things for that informational piece, they're coming to middle of the funnel content to understand where things are headed and what is evolving right now.
They want expert opinions on how things are changing within their field or the best way to accomplish certain things, and they're starting to figure out kind of how they would put together a formal strategy to solve their specific problem, but they're not necessarily ready to buy a tool yet. They're still making the blueprint with all of the concrete ingredients that they'll need to solve that problem, but they don't necessarily care that your brand does it better, faster, or cheaper than the other people yet.
What they wanna know is, are you credible? Are you somebody that they can read, trust, and come back to to find more of that information, either at the TOFU or MOFU? And usually this happens through thought leadership. They wanna hear from experts on what is changing and where things are headed with this problem so they can get ahead of it.
Now, I like to think of this as a trust-building phase. So whereas top of the funnel, you are equipping your prospects with different information so that they can begin their research and start to understand all the nuances of their problem, middle-of-the-funnel content is more about building trust, credibility, and brand awareness with your prospects.
Usually, this happens through webinars, podcasts, e-books, more high-leverage materials that take longer to make and can only come from an experienced or a subject matter expert's, often known as SMEs, opinion and view that's backed by their real-world experience. So this has always been a little bit harder to make. It's more time-consuming, and it's often where people spend the least amount of time. You'll see all of these webinars and podcasts, but people tend to kind of throw those topics together.
A lot of people, because it's hard to attribute any ROI to this phase in particular, let's say you're doing last attribution, which means you're tracking the last thing somebody clicked. Usually, that's gonna be a bottom of funnel article. But a lot of trust gets built in this middle-of-the-funnel area, which is, again, like webinars, good conversations, podcasts, different conversations that you're having with those experts. And often it doesn't get direct attribution even if it impacted a sale at the end.
Now, bottom of the funnel is where your prospect understands that they have a specific problem, and they're starting to look for the right solution to solve that problem, usually in the form of a tool or a service. And this is when they are starting to figure out which, either you or your competitors, would be the best solution. The easiest way to say it is to take their headache away. Who is going to take away their headache most consistently, most reliably, and something that they can fit into their budget?
So they're wondering why you and why right now. They're not wondering where your product's headed. They wanna make sure what you can do is solve their problem and do it reliably and consistently. And then obviously they'll go back and, as those problems evolve, they'll wanna make sure, and you can add those feature requests that they have as your customers. But the big question is, are you the best fit right now? And usually they need enough to talk to their CFO, especially in B2B, on how they can justify that cost now.
So bottom of the funnel usually appears in the form of listicles, in the form of battle cards maybe that you make for sales reps. They come in the form of third-party research and case studies, your first-party case studies, hearing from other customers and your social proof. And this is often where you're going to close a deal.
But you'll notice that there's less people in this part of the funnel. So if, again, we're talking about content marketing strategy, so systems-led growth, content marketing is one umbrella of that, there are less people who are going to make it all the way down through the middle of the funnel and the bottom of the funnel than there are just curious about content marketing in general.
So you have less and less, but if you build this correctly, what we're doing is not building it as a linear process. It is very rare that someone will just read a top-of-the-funnel article, then say, "Hey, that's very interesting. I'm gonna go check out this webinar," sit down and watch the webinar, and then in that same sitting, check out a case study or a comparison article, and then hop on and become a customer.
Typically, you want to build this in the form of a system that is going to meet people where they are, no matter how they found you. So top of the funnel, we're often going for organic search results in the form of SEO or AEO, which means you are writing for two parties, both the human who is going to read this, but also the algorithms, because the best article that's never seen is not gonna do you a lot of good anyway.
Then you have middle of the funnel, which is typically done through social media. You might add some SEO and AEO components to this in thought leadership articles, but this is usually gonna be a PR play, and you're going to try to get an article linked somewhere from a trustworthy source like Forbes. You are going to try to start building credibility in different social media circles or Slack groups.
And then you have bottom of the funnel, which are typically also sales enablement assets that, once a prospect is starting to discover and you're doing cold outreach or you're talking to somebody, you can start to supply the prospect with enough to prove that you are the right person to take away their headaches.
Now, one thing that has changed around all of these is how AI is impacting the way that they are created. Now, the systems-led growth approach to this is to not simply go in and start to rank for everything under the sun that you possibly can. In an e-book that I have called Pipes Before Chocolate, I talk about certain SEO tools that were ranking really high volume keywords around adult websites, and they would take the adult website name, and that would lead somebody to a page that talked about how that adult website was ranking in terms of traffic or SEO.
There was nothing inappropriate on the page itself. It was just talking about how they were ranking, different backlinks and a little SEO audit on that page. But people who were typing in that term might accidentally click through there and traffic would get registered. They weren't bringing in the right audience, but it looked really cool on a graph if you had over a million people in traffic coming from those sources, if nobody investigated the sources. It looked really cool and made you seem more credible as a brand.
But as we are talking about what should and should not be used within each bucket of the funnel, you can head over again to this post. And I believe that at a very basic form, this is the minimum of what should be used. So everything is connected, and I believe that your top-of-the-funnel content now needs to have proprietary product data and your middle-of-the-funnel POV with quotes and insights.
And by that, I mean your middle-of-funnel should start informing your top-of-the-funnel content. The reason being is right now, again, anyone can generate highly informational content at the click of a button. You, your competitors, everyone else. The only way to make top-of-the-funnel and informational content unique is to embed things that only you can say.
And usually, that means adding a little bit more nuance to your top-of-the-funnel content in the form of quotes from conversations in your webinars or podcasts or YouTube videos, and adding product data that only you have access to. Again, under the right legal conditions that you're not naming anybody who didn't wanna be named, but adding your product data, your surveys, different things that you own in terms of data that you can embed in that top-of-the-funnel content.
You also still need third-party research from reliable sources, and you're saying, "Hey, look, it's not just our company that found this. These other companies found it too." So in content marketing, maybe we'd point to a HubSpot article, for example, and we'd wanna say, "Not only are we finding this, other people are finding this as well." And you would do all of the traditional SEO play, and you would have those good internal links leading to other sources that you've written, and you'd have good external links to show that you've done your research and you have these high-quality, very fresh statistics either supporting your argument or taking a contrarian view, depending on how you're structuring that informational article.
You also, though, might want to consider starting to glean through your customer and sales call transcripts for ideas on what you should be writing about. Typically, people miss this part because, in the past, if you were a content marketer, you were so busy trying to figure out what to write about that you would sit in a dashboard like Ahrefs or Semrush, start brainstorming keywords that you think would make a lot of sense, and then you would try to figure out what would be most relevant at the highest level for your customers.
But often, your customers or your prospects are telling you what they need to know about in order to be more informed. Now, they are gonna be more at the bottom of the funnel, but there still might be topics that you haven't discovered, problems that they have that you haven't thought of, that you can now use AI to find trends across all of those different calls to figure out what your content calendar should look like at the top of the funnel.
And once you've identified the right topics to talk about, you can do your keyword research as the human in the loop, and then you can build the right system in place to build these really SEO and AEO-friendly articles that also help the human at the end of the day learn more about your field or your niche.
Now, as you move to the middle of the funnel, you still wanna do the same thing with those customer sales calls, those transcripts. You want to figure out what are people struggling with that our thought leaders have a unique perspective on? What does our brand have a unique perspective on? What nuance can we add to this conversation about where things are headed, where things are changing, and why we are at the forefront of all of this?
But then you also wanna look at industry trends. So again, in that third-party research, you might notice that there are different shifts happening that you want to address, and you can start to create webinars around those topics, podcast episodes around those topics, educational videos around those topics, and you'd wanna do the same with social posts and social listening.
So what are people talking about on social media? What questions keep coming up in your feeds that you want to address? You can use different social listening tools for this, but AI is uniquely suited for going through all of this data that frankly was just too long for any one person to sit through without over-indexing on one call. Meaning if you have 300 sales calls, you likely couldn't just sit down and listen to all of them and then handpick the common threads. AI is uniquely good at pulling out all of these trends across different channels in your industry, on your social feed, in your customer calls and transcripts, and it can help you inform what conversations you need to be having that then inform everything else in your content strategy.
And in the bottom of the funnel, same thing, customer and sales calls transcripts, you absolutely wanna be using those. What objections keep coming up in these sales calls? What feature requests keep coming up from our customer calls that we should probably inform the product roadmap with? Where, when we make an update, we should really reach out to those prospects and say, "Hey, we solved this problem. We wanna make sure it's there."
Any product releases in your change log that you want to add to battle cards to help your sales team move deals forward, and then any of your competitor research and battle cards that you're creating as you're looking at how you stack up to the competition, whether you're building systems that pull the RSS feeds of your competitors' product logs so that you can keep track of what they're doing and make sure that you're not falling behind. Anything that you can do in terms of research and building out those systems to make sure that you have the right bottom of funnel content that makes your sales reps' lives easier.
Now, the other aspect of this is your bottom of the funnel content has to be accessible to those sales team. So those listicle articles, those sales decks or battle cards, they have to be done in a way that they're not asking you to go retrieve them on every single deal. And that is a topic for another time.
But for today, I wanted to make it clear what top of the funnel was, the current state of things, very informational, high level, what middle of the funnel is, where your industry is headed, and something only your thought leaders can provide in terms of perspective built on unique experiences, and bottom of the funnel, why you and why right now.
Again, if you head to this blog post, systemsledgrowth.ai/blog/tofu-mofu-bofu, you will be able to see at a high level, there's more nuances than this, but at a very high level, what pieces should inform every stage of the funnel at TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU, along with some helpful resources on how you can start to think about this in the world of AI and build the right systems in place so that everything's connected and you're not splitting this up into one person's taking this section of the funnel, one person's taking this section of the funnel, one person's taking this section of the funnel.
We have different editors at each phase. If you want consistency, the entire funnel should be fed through the same sources. It should all be connected. And again, we will talk about that in a later episode on how you can do that. So if you have any questions, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn, you can shoot me an email, it'll all be linked in the show notes here. But we will talk about how to connect these systems at a later date.