How to use bottom of funnel content to convert readers into buyers

Buyers will enter your funnel at various stages. Some may become attracted and engaged via top of funnel (TOFU) and middle of funnel (MOFU) content, while others may experience their first touch-point with bottom of funnel (BOFU) content.

Creating compelling BOFU content as part of your strategy enhances the customer experience and ultimately drives more traffic to your value proposition.

That’s because it caters to your customer’s needs, pain points and intent-driven searches. By producing value-driven content that answers specific questions, you can quickly become a thought leader in your space.

BOFU content is chock full of low volume, long-tail keywords, which account for 70% of all web searches. If done right, there’s a big opportunity to reach your target audience with solutions-driven value propositions.

In this article, we’ll dive into why bottom of funnel content is important, how to uncover the most effective BOFU strategy for your business and outline what content formats work best for the BOFU strategy.

Why is bottom of funnel content important?

People make purchasing decisions when they’ve conducted research, weighed their options and fully understand their problems. Bottom of funnel content centers around guiding potential customers to invest in your product or services.

The marketing funnel is under scrutiny in today’s landscape. But it still acts as a strong model to guide the customer and provide them with the right information. Traditionally, marketing funnels look something like this:

While TOFU content aims to drive traffic and demand, BOFU content exists to ignite customer acquisition, provide support for sales teams and fuel your lead generation efforts.

Done right, BOFU content:

• Makes prospects and customers feel like they’ve learned something invaluable,
• Is full of supportive data-driven facts that validate your statements and build trust, and,
• Motivates the reader to take action (i.e. by making a purchase or signing up for a trial)

Here’s why a strategic BOFU strategy can help you drive traffic to your value proposition:

It helps your audience overcome a specific problem (better than any other piece of content out there on the topic)

In order to position your value proposition as superior to your competitors, you need to inspire confidence in your brand. The best way to do that? With content that’s better than anything else out there.

But the key is to create content around a topic that is highly relevant to your audience’s needs. It must align with your customer personas and compel them towards making a purchase decision.

You can uncover these needs, pain points and desires through a four-point strategy that we’ll explore in a later section.

Most importantly, by positioning your product as a powerful solution, you’ll subtly lead customers towards choosing your product without needing to make a hard sell.

If you let your audience know you are there to help and clearly define your product’s benefits, your content will do the work for you.

By creating the best piece of content out there, you can dramatically lift conversions and solidify your reputation in the marketplace.

It is highly relevant to your value proposition

With BOFU content, you can specifically explain how your product addresses a pain point. The challenge (or part of the challenge) that your prospects face can be easily solved by using your solution.

Rather than broadly stating that your product is better than the rest, BOFU content gets into the nitty-gritty and specifically examines why and how it’s the best choice on the market.

Load up your content with value bombs, insights and data to validate your arguments. Don’t just talk about why you’re the best, show it. Prove your declarations by citing customer success stories. Outline how exactly you solve comparable problems for similar customers.  

It can help sales and customer success teams close deals and increase retention

Customer success and sales teams thrive when they are armed with relevant marketing assets. BOFU content can be an invaluable asset for sales enablement and customer retention. It’s the perfect tool to persuade customers to invest in you.

These materials help your teams easily highlight specific features or services that resolve issues. It also helps them save time they would otherwise spend collecting this information via their own research or internal communications.

By keeping a library of effective BOFU content in your wheelhouse, you enable your teams to more easily build trust with prospects. The faster your team can build trust, the more deals they’ll close and the happier your customers will be. A win-win scenario.

Further, it helps to standardize messaging, which makes your business look more professional and authoritative. This helps to increase brand awareness and boost retention.

It has high conversion rates and attracts qualified leads

People at the end of their buying journey are motivated to find helpful answers. In this case, they often use long-tail keywords in their quest to find specific answers. This means the more long-tail opportunities you uncover and utilize, the better chance you’ll have of reaching these motivated buyers.

But while optimizing your content with targeted keywords is effective, it’s most important to create highly-valuable, authentic content. Where long-tail keywords help get your content in front of your ideal audience, a solutions-driven focus helps you improve conversions.

For example, if a person searches for “business start-up costs”, they’re much farther along in their customer journey than someone who searches for “how to start a business”. This long-tail keyword tells us that they’ve already formed an idea, validated it and are now looking for how to materialize their business.

By optimizing your content for keywords relevant to your customer’s challenges, you improve your chances of Google serving it up. And by packing value bombs into your content, you will be able to nurture leads until they convert into customers.

How to uncover an effective bottom of funnel content marketing strategy

In order to strategically market your value proposition using BOFU content, you must have a unique understanding of your customer’s pain points and needs. This will help you to decipher how to best position your solutions and what keywords to use within your content.

What’s the best way to uncover these pain points? Through a four-pronged approach:

1. Talk to your customers

Your customers are your best resource. They’ve interacted with your brand first hand and are often willing to talk about their experiences, both positive and negative.  

You can learn invaluable information from your customers. They can help you better understand what does and doesn’t work well, where improvements can be made and where you can fill gaps in service.

Ask them what they find the most useful about your product or service. What’s the biggest problem you’ve helped to solve?

Conversely, what do they find erroneous or unhelpful? Based on their responses, you’ll discover ways to improve and enhance your service, and content, to better serve their needs.

Reach out via surveys, emails, phone calls, in-person meetings, and more. Come armed with only a handful of broad questions to start. Some examples are:

• “What problem were you having that led you to find our product?”
• “How has our product or service enhanced your day-to-day?”
• “Can you think of any enhancements that would provide even more value?”

From there, ask detailed follow-ups to uncover more deep-seated details. For example:

• “What features do you use the most, and why? And what features do nothing to help you solve your original problem?”
• “Knowing that our product has helped you automate tasks to free up time, what tasks do you still do manually and what features could we build to help you with this?
• “We agree that creating [ENHANCEMENT] could add value to the product and are thinking of building it. Why is this your biggest priority and how exactly will it make your life easier?

The gold is in the answers to these follow-up questions. This is where you can dig deep into exactly how and why your customers gain value from your product. You’ll get candid feedback that helps you understand their intent and better solve their problems.

2. Gather audience insights via social media channels

You know where your customers hang out online. Whether it be LinkedIn or Facebook groups, or subreddit threads, analyze the conversation and look for patterns in their challenges and needs.

Note if anything has changed from the original insights in your go-to-market (GTM) strategy. Evaluate your existing customer personas and focus on any new or emerging trends.

If necessary, build new customer personas and segments based on shifting needs and behavior. Then, create content that shows them exactly how your product or service will solve their problems.

Repeat this step often. Shifts in how we work, use tools and communicate with our customers happen often. This leads to previously unheard of pain points and needs. It’s crucial to stay up to date with the latest trends in order to continue to position your brand as an authoritative presence.

3. Collaborate with other teams

Check-in with customer support, sales and account teams to hear what your customers relay to them. These team members can help you better understand overarching needs and narrow down customer intent and expectations.

As they are on the front-lines speaking with customers at every stage of the buying process, they can help you uncover a strategic content marketing approach for each stage of funnel.

When it comes to BOFU content, focus on the specific questions that prospects and customers ask in the purchase phase. After they’ve learned about your product on a broad scale and talked with sales reps, what questions remain unanswered?

The intent behind these questions is your BOFU sweet spot. If you can create content that addresses these needs in a way that motivates purchasing behavior, you’ve mastered the art of effective BOFU content.

4. Study your competition

Peek at what your competitors’ customers are saying. What kind of questions are they asking? What types of conversions are taking place in their online forums? What pain points are they discussing most frequently?

Compare and contrast those questions and needs with the data you uncovered when researching your own customers. Highlight both the topic overlaps as well as any new threads.

You may find that these insights help you to uncover new pain points that relate to your own audience’s dilemmas. If so, you can capitalize on this discovery by optimizing your content to present a solution to this previously undiscovered need.

Then, study your competition’s BOFU content to identify any gaps that you can fill. How can you position your content to add more data, insights and value than your competitors?

Note the places they fall flat and outperform them at every turn.

Which formats work best for bottom of funnel content?

Now that you’ve identified the common pain points and needs as well as the long-tail keywords that align with them, it’s time to build your BOFU content.

You can do this in many ways, but we’re going to highlight the top five:

1. Blog posts

Create value-loaded blog posts that go into more detail about your value proposition than anything else on the market.

Blog posts give you a chance to explain not only how your product works, but who it helps. Both short-form, long-form and 10x content work well for BOFU content.

Provide tons of examples, data and statistics to back up your claims. Add quotes from influencers and industry leaders to set your content apart from the crowd and gain authority.

Reference successful companies who have done well at positioning their own content as the ultimate solution to a problem. Further, include original quotes and your own unique insights.

This blog post from Pipedrive provides actionable advice on how to create sales dashboards effectively. It digs deep into how sales teams should set themselves up to make the most out of their sales data. It then follows up with why these steps will help sales teams thrive.

It’s loaded with examples, explanations, step by step instructions, best-practices and influencer insights in the form of unique quotes. Further, within the content Pipedrive strategically places CTAs to draw attention to their product.

When analyzing competitor content using Clearscope, we see that the typical content length and grade is a B-. Pipedrive’s blog post ranks much higher at an A+.

Done right, blog posts will be shared consistently and help drive organic traffic to your value proposition.

2. Video content

Video content is successful because it’s easy to digest. It also presents an opportunity to pull back the curtain and show your customers the people behind your brand.

This method helps you to build more meaningful relationships while simultaneously boosting brand visibility. As video is incredibly easy to share across multiple platforms, it can be a significant workhorse in driving organic traffic to your value proposition.

Unsurprisingly, 97% of marketers report that video helps customers to better understand their products. That is the most valuable asset that BOFU content can deliver.

Video comes in many formats, but the best BOFU video content is product reviews and demos. Save the explainer videos for the top of funnel education phase of the buying journey.

For example, you can create a demo that outlines the specific use cases that your product or service excels at. Write the narrative in a way that explains what problems these use cases help to solve, and dive into the details with dynamic examples.

This video from Headspace does just that. They’ve created a one minute, mini-meditation that shows you exactly what customers experience when using their product. It’s simple and doesn’t try to do too much. And it works because it’s shareable, attention-grabbing and demonstrative.

Pipedrive goes a bit deeper in this five minute video that explains how to turn a sales objection into an agreement for a meeting. They outline common reasons that salespeople might hear objections and provide actionable tips for how to overcome them.

This video is attention-grabbing because it addresses a common pain point amongst sales teams. It’s effective because it goes on to explain exactly how to combat these common issues with expert advice and tons of examples. At the end, they provide a subtle CTA that drives readers to their blog.

No matter what type of BOFU video content you choose to create, make sure it’s visually appealing, demonstrative and speaks directly to your target audience.

3. Webinars

Webinars go a step further than video as they provide interactive formats.

They are designed as a public forum where you can address your target audience’s pain points in real-time. This highly valuable process allows you to keep your audience engaged while getting instantaneous feedback.

Webinars serve a dual purpose:

1. To deliver tremendous value-adds and boost engagement and interest in your value proposition, and,
2. They allow you to tailor your content in real-time to better serve your audience and address their needs

This evergreen webinar from Later is effective because they’ve commissioned an expert influencer to explain how to run a successful influencer marketing campaign. It targets their ideal audience because their product helps clients plan, schedule and analyze social media posts. Who cares the most about effective social media tools? Influencers.

The webinar digs deep into how to maximize reach on social media platforms. Greta, the commissioned influencer, gives invaluable advice about how to create effective marketing campaigns.

The best part? She boasts about her relationship with Later, adding social proof to the webinar.

Successful webinars both show and tell your audience why your product is the best solution on the market. By the time your webinar is finished, your audience should comprehensively understand your product and service and be ready to make a purchase.

4. Ebooks

Ebooks are similar to a blog post but vary in format and distribution channels.

Ebooks often expand on a blog post by offering more product or service-specific details and use cases. Where a blog attracts an organic audience, ebooks often require an action, such as a newsletter signup, in order to gain access.

Ebooks are successful because they’re easy to share and are often formatted with tons of data-driven graphics. They act as a mini-research paper explaining what your product does and why and how it succeeds.

Tide is a fintech company that makes it easy to create a modern business current account and register your business in the UK. Their target audience is entrepreneurs, freelancers and small business owners.

They know this audience needs actionable advice on how to start a business. While they create valuable blog posts that address this intent, they also take it a step further with detailed ebooks:

In this example, they require a newsletter subscription in order to get free access to the ebook. For many budding small business owners, this advice is invaluable and worth the subscription.

From there, Tide can continue to drip valuable content to these subscribers that strategically answers their questions and moves them down the funnel. Ideally, the reader will glean worthwhile insights from the ebook and feel inclined to take further action.

Most often, ebooks are shared internally amongst decision-makers at prospective companies. They are an invaluable asset for sales reps to share with prospects at the end of their buying journey and sales funnel.

5. Case studies

Case studies are the most effective way to outline your audience’s pain points, put forth various solutions and prove your point with impressive results.

They help to answer the exhaustive questions that prospects ask right before making a purchase decision. As these are important questions, they deserve thorough answers.

Your meticulous customer research will help you produce a case study that resonates with your ideal audience.

At Grizzle, we use case studies to show our target audience, marketing teams, how we’ve helped existing clients enhance their content.

Our case study is titled “How to Increase Organic Traffic by 269.98% in 90 Days (Using Content You Already Have).” Immediately, you’re hit with enticing data that shows proof of concept.

We open with more data and statistics from existing customers, showing that our proven methodology isn’t a one hit wonder. Showing consistency helps to boost authenticity and gain trust.

We then dive into our content optimization methodology in detail, showcase the tools we use and explain why this process matters. We show you how to add originality to your content, optimize for conversions and identify core distribution channels to drive more traffic to your value proposition.

As an added bonus, it works as a standalone blog post to drive traffic while also acting as a tool for sales enablement. If you can find creative ways to double the impact from your BOFU content, go for it.

Not only do case studies give you an authoritative advantage, but they also help you provide social proof. They show that you aren’t the only person who thinks your solution is better than the rest.

With high-value references that act as testimonials, you can boost your credibility and drive more conversions.

Conclusion

Effective bottom of funnel content drives customers to make a purchase.

The best BOFU content addresses your customer’s pain points and needs by positioning your solution as the answer to their problems.

The best way to uncover those pain points is by talking to your existing customers, surveying the places they engage online and studying your competition.

Once you understand the motivation behind their intent, you can create a strategic BOFU strategy. This entails producing value-heavy content that answers detailed questions head-on and effectively serving it up at the ideal moment in the buying process.

Finally, promote BOFU content through effective content formats that motivate your audience to make a purchase decision.