Too much TOFU is bad for you

From a very young age, we have been taught the importance of a balanced diet in maintaining a healthy lifestyle.  Ensuring we regularly consumed a certain amount of fruit vegetables, protein, and dairy – in a balanced fashion – has largely dictated dietary habits around the world (give or take a few exceptions). Conversely, focusing too much on one type of food group or completely excluding others – yes carbs I’m talking about you! ­­– is generally seen as sub-optimal over the longer term (I’ll expect the call from Pete Evans any minute now).

Marketing is the same.

From early in our careers, marketers have been taught about the importance of a marketing mix – that balanced diet of activities that work together in harmony with distribution channels to produce the end result we want (the sale). These activities could include advertising, emails, events, webinars, merchandise, SEO, PR, product collateral, sales support, and various others, in both analogue and digital forms.

Of course, in marketing, there is the extra overlay of the sales funnel, or the buying journey, those stages customers pass through as they evolve from prospects to full-blown advocates or promoters. In this context, a balanced diet is about ensuring all stages of the funnel – top, middle, and bottom – are given appropriate focus, and supported by the right activities.

And, just as it is with food, if we get our marketing mix out of balance – or prioritise some parts of the funnel and neglect others – then the health of our business can suffer.

Top, middle, and bottom of funnel activities

The concept of the sales and marketing funnel is as old as marketing itself, and, despite the proliferation of fancy new models and names, the concept remains equally relevant today, graphically representing the fact that no matter the product, buyers go on a journey, from the first time they are exposed to your brand, through a period of becoming familiar with your offering, to the point that they agree to hand over their money and become a customer. The shape of the funnel reflects the fact that, generally, far more people enter the funnel than emerge from the bottom.

Simplistically, the marketing job at each stage of the funnel could be summarised thus:

• Top of Funnel (TOFU) is about awareness – introducing your brand/offering to new audiences and broadening your reach
• Middle of Funnel (MOFU) is about creating interest and desire – staying front of mind’, educating prospects on your offering and nurturing relationships
• Bottom of Funnel (BOFU) is about action – converting prospects into sales

Of course, depending on the type of product, the shape of the funnel and the length of time buyers spend in each stage can vary differently, from minutes through to months and even years for more complex, higher-value buying decisions, or for B2B propositions.

(Some experts have proposed a four-stage funnel, where the bottom stage is focused on turning customers into advocates, but for the purposes of this article, we will stick with the traditional three).

The best tactics at each stage of the funnel can also differ:

Why the mid-funnel is so important

The middle of the funnel – where prospective customers get to know your brand and offering more deeply – is an absolutely critical stage, especially for a high-complexity, high-value category like financial services. Getting this stage right can have several benefits, not only helping convert prospects into customers, but ensuring those customers are the right customers, and thus more likely to be sticky.

There are cost and efficiency benefits too, with Google research suggesting that mid-funnel activities were actually responsible for 16x more sales than they previously thought. To the extent that mid-funnel activity can be a lot more targeted, there is generally less wastage, meaning dollars spent on mid-funnel activity can deliver a better ROI than broad reaching top of funnel content (I will leave the whole phenomenon of ‘banner blindness’ for another blog).

In an article I read recently, the author claimed that well-executed mid-funnel marketing can create 50% more sales-ready leads, with 33% less investment required.

Experts from Gartner have put forward the idea that B2B buying today has become so complex and overloaded with choice (as one member of our Ensombl community summed up, there are a ‘bajillion’ fund managers to choose from), that buyers really need someone to guide them through the buying process.

They measured the benefits of such an approach too, identifying that customers who found a company’s content helpful in navigating this process were three times more likely to sign a bigger deal, with less regret.

And yet the mid-funnel is often the most overlooked

As obvious – and financially compelling – as mid-funnel marketing seems, many organisations seem to prioritise TOFU and BOFU activities over MOFU.  I’ve seen multiple sources suggest upwards of 97% of marketing budgets are generally directed towards the top of the funnel, and whilst I suspect this is much lower in a financial services B2B context, I’ve no doubt that the middle of the funnel probably gets far less love than its importance warrants.

I suspect there are a few reasons for this.

Structurally, many teams are set up – often in a siloed way – with a focus either on the top or the bottom of the funnel.

I think that the metrics at the very top and very bottom of the funnel often attract more interest. Achieving tens of thousands of impressions for a digital advertisement can be far more seductive than 350 research paper downloads (even though the latter is likely to be more valuable). Similarly, the dollar value of sales is generally one of the most celebrated metrics in any business, and the money spent at the point of closing the deal will always be seen as a sensible investment.

The top and bottom of the funnel can be more exciting places too. As a corporate marketer from way back, I can’t deny that hanging out at the ad agency was often way more interesting than getting a PDS signed off.

But in my opinion, perhaps the biggest reason the middle of the funnel doesn’t get the focus it deserves is that it is so heavily reliant on content, especially long-form content. And content is hard.

Content is hard

According to one study, the average time taken to write a B2B blog in 2019 was around 4 hours, up from around 2 hours in 2014. (Using this post as an example, I can certainly attest that 4 hours is way closer to the truth!). One explanation given by the researchers is that blog posts themselves are getting longer – a 2000 worder isn’t uncommon – reflecting reader demand for longer content. Whitepapers are also an effective tactic at this stage too.

This reliance on long-form content is problematic for many businesses, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, many lack the bandwidth to create such content with any regularity. The ideation, the writing, and the signing off can be very resource intensive. Secondly, crafting content that resonates with the intended audience can be hit and miss without genuine market insights, the gathering of which can also suck bandwidth Without these insights, content can fall flat.

Our community is an unparalleled source of insights and content

One of the many factors that drew me towards Ensombl, is our 8,500-strong advice community of platform users. Rarely have I seen a community so engaged, so curious, and so willing to share. As the facilitators of the community, we get a real-time view of the many conversations advisors are having all over Australia, on thousands of topics. As a source of rich advisor insights, I have no doubt it is without parallel, and it enables us – and our valued corporate community members– to create content which is solving genuine advisor problems, and is built on genuine advisor experiences.

As a marketer, a genuinely unique selling point (USP) is the Holy Grail.

It’s so exciting to be working with one!