What is Middle of Funnel Marketing? Everything you need to know

You’re on your first date. You like each other A LOT! But are you really ready to commit to each other and build a life-long relationship? To make it happen, you need to spend time with each other and nurture the relationship! 

Middle-of-funnel marketing is much like your first date, where you’ve already established an initial connection with a prospect, but, you need to nurture the relationship before the prospect actually decides to do business with you. The potential customer needs more information and reassurance before signing the deal.

Like a first date, middle-of-the-funnel marketing involves:

• Building rapport and trust by having meaningful conversations
• Addressing concerns
• Highlighting the benefits of your offering
• Making a strong case for why you should be chosen

It's an important step in the relationship-building process that can determine whether or not the customer will take the next step toward a long-term commitment to your brand.

What is Middle of Funnel Marketing?

Middle-of-the-funnel Marketing (MoFu) is the consideration stage in the marketing funnel when the prospect evaluates the company's product or services to understand if it can solve their pain points. In this stage, the marketers educate their prospects through informative content, thus nurturing the relationship and increasing their likelihood of liking and purchasing the product.

Middle of Funnel Marketing: The Importance

While the top of the funnel and the bottom of the funnel get the most attention from marketers, the middle of the funnel often gets neglected.

Ignoring your middle-of-the-funnel marketing is like building a house but only focusing on the foundation and the finishing touches while neglecting the crucial structural components in between. The house may not be functional or comfortable without proper attention to the walls, wiring, and plumbing.

Similarly, suppose a business only focuses on attracting new leads at the top of the funnel and closing sales at the bottom of the funnel but neglects to nurture leads in the middle-of- the funnel. In that case, it may miss the opportunity to build a strong and sustainable customer base.

Neglecting mid-funnel marketing can leave a business with a weak customer acquisition strategy that is prone to falling apart over time, as your prospects can quickly lose interest in your brand.

Even worse, they can move to your competitors.

Goals for Middle of Funnel Marketing

Lead Nurturing

Mid-funnel marketing helps you to engage with leads and provide them with relevant mid-funnel content to move them further down the funnel.

Establishing Trust

One of the main goals for MoFu is building trust and establishing yourself as an expert in the industry. You achieve that by addressing potential customer concerns through product demo videos, informative content, and sharing social proofs.

Encouraging Consideration

The more you share and highlight your product’s unique value proposition, the more likely the customer will consider and buy your product.

Upselling

If a potential customer has already made a purchase, middle-of-the-funnel marketing can be used to upsell or cross-sell additional products or services.

Types of Content for Middle of Funnel Marketing (with Examples)

Educational Content

This can include how-to guides, tutorials, and case studies demonstrating your product's or service's value and benefits. HubSpot is a great example that creates educational content like how-to guides. 

Email Campaigns

Email campaigns can provide personalized communication with potential customers, share exclusive offers, and guide them toward purchasing.

Salesforce, a cloud-based CRM platform, does this pretty well. They use email campaigns to provide personalized communication with potential customers, share case studies and success stories, and provide access to exclusive content and events. It helps build trust, establish relationships with potential customers, and provide value through educational resources and expert insights. 

Webinars and Workshops

Webinars and workshops are a great way to provide in-depth information on your product or service, answer potential customer questions, and build trust through expert presentations.

Here’s an example from Pipedrive. Pipedrive has a dedicated section for webinars and events to educate prospective customers.

Testimonials and Case Studies

Sharing customer success stories and testimonials can build trust and provide social proof that your product or service delivers value. Here’s an example of how Storylane does it.

Product Demos

Providing a live demo video or free trial of your product or service can help potential customers better understand its features and benefits. Here’s an example from groundswell, which uses an interactive product demo powered by Storylane.

Interactive Content

Interactive content, such as quizzes, calculators, image sliders, and infographics, can provide a personalized experience that helps potential customers better understand how your product or service can meet their specific needs. Here’s an example of one such interactive quiz by Expedia.

8 Middle of Funnel Marketing Strategies

1. Invest in Email Marketing

Email marketing works great as the middle-of-funnel marketing strategy only when you do it right. Getting too sales-y can push the prospect to click the unsubscribe button, which you certainly don't want! Sending curated product emails works well to show what you have in an offer without pushing it too hard to sell your product.

2. Use Social Proof

Social proof can be incorporated into your content through customer reviews, testimonials, industry awards, case studies, media reviews, accreditations, etc. You can choose any of these or a combination of all to nurture your leads and push them further down the funnel. Social proofs can be used on your website, emails, social media channels, etc. Here’s an example from Postmark. The brand has cleverly used social proof on its homepage to gain trust!

3. Competitor Comparison 

Competitor comparison can be a powerful tool to showcase your unique value proposition. This can be in the form of a comparison blog post, an infographic, or a product comparison page on your website. Here’s an example from Postmark; we like how the brand has done it. Have a look.

4. Create How-To Guides and Explainer Videos

Explaining your product and how it works is extremely important in B2B marketing and a no-brainer. Unless buyers know how your product works, they won’t be interested in it. Create how-to guides and explainer videos to describe how the product will solve their problem. Focus on creating evergreen content that will have value for a lifetime.

5. Offer Solution-Focused Content

At this stage, the prospect is exploring different options and doing their research to make a decision. This is the time when you should be offering solution-focused content. In-depth guides, customer success stories, white papers, and ebooks are some of the content you should create at this stage.

6. Pay Attention to Your CTA Structure

CTA or call to action are the most powerful words in your marketing strategy. Remember, we’re still at the MoFu stage and your CTA needs to be different from a BOFU funnel when the prospect is ready to buy. So A MoFu CTA needs a bit more persuasion; a “Buy now” or “Add to card” is unlikely to work here. Let’s take a look at this example from Drip. The brand is not trying to sell anything here. Its CTA is meant to engage and educate its prospective customer. 

7. Lead Scoring is Important

Use a lead scoring tool to evaluate leads by assigning scores to them. This will help you to weed out unqualified leads and spend time on leads who are more likely to buy. Use an implicit lead scoring model that considers the prospect’s email activity, demo calls, website visits, free sign-ups, webinar attendance, trade show attendance, social media interactions, downloads of free resources, etc.

8. Mid Funnel Advertising

Focus on creating ads that have a clear, attention-grabbing design

• A headline that can hook the audience
• Crips and to-the-point copy
• A strong CTA
• A/B tested and optimized

Additionally, have a mix of gated and un-gated content on the landing page and have the CTA with the offer placed at the end of the ad.

Middle of Funnel Marketing: Best Practices

Create Solution-Oriented Content

The mid-funnel audience expects content that directly addresses their queries as they seek a solution. It's not the moment to elaborate on the problem; rather, it's the time to offer solutions. When creating mid-funnel content at this stage, don't shy away from using testimonials, product demo videos, customer success stories, product comparisons, whitepapers, etc. Your audience craves substantial and informative content —- feed them that!

Spend Time on Content Creation

Creating MoFu content is more time-intensive than churning out ToFu content. MoFu content is packed with information and typically requires the input of several internal subject matter experts (SMEs) and customers. Since content creation involves multiple individuals, it should be planned well. So, set aside time for it.

Leverage Customer Validation

When creating content for MoFu, striking a balance between discussing your products or services and keeping them informative and educational can be tricky. Rely on your customer experience, as this can help validate potential buyers' decisions both during their consideration phase and at the point of purchase. Incorporating customer validation into your content can help to educate and persuade buyers at the same time.

Measuring the Success of Middle-of-Funnel Marketing Campaigns

Measuring the success of middle-of-funnel marketing campaigns is important to understand how effectively you are guiding potential customers toward making a purchasing decision. Here are some metrics that can be used to measure the success of middle-of-funnel marketing campaigns:

Engagement Metrics

Engagement metrics such as click-through rates, email open rates, and time spent on-site can provide insights into potential customers' interest in your content and whether they are engaged with your brand.

Conversion Rates

Conversion rates can be used to track how many potential customers are taking the desired action, such as signing up for a free trial or scheduling a demo.

Lead Nurturing Metrics

Lead nurturing metrics highlights the number of leads that move further down the funnel. It can help track how effectively you guide potential customers toward purchasing decisions.

Social Proof Metrics

All the positive customer reviews and testimonials you receive can help build trust and establish credibility with your potential customers.

Sales Metrics

Sales metrics involve several sales-related metrics like the number of new customers acquired, the average deal size, and the lifetime value of a customer, which can help track the overall impact of your middle-of-funnel marketing campaigns on your bottom line.

6 Examples of Exceptional Middle of Funnel Marketing

1. Customer Story by ClearVoice

We love this short-form customer story by ClearVoice because it meets the buyer’s search intent and helps the marketing team at ClearVoice to lead the prospect further down the marketing funnel.

2. Airtable’s Story Blog

Airtable’s story blog features real customer experience stories. This works well because prospects can see if other brands have the same problem, how they’re using the product to solve the problem, and if they’re successful at solving it. It’s common for human psychology to seek validation — if it works for them, it will work for us too! Airtable has leveraged that idea beautifully in its story blog section. See here!

3. Pricing Page of MailChimp

The price page of MailChimp communicates well with the prospects at the MoFu level. It lets prospects try the product for free to help them make a purchasing decision. It also shows various plans depending on how many contacts you have. ( MailChimp is a tool for email automation). 

4. Blog by CoSchedule

‍CoSchedule is a MarTech brand that offers tools for Marketers. Their blog post is a great example of MoFu content, where they share useful content for marketers to nurture the relationship before converting them into paid customers!

5. Learn Through Shopify

‍Learn through Shopify is an excellent resource for anyone who wants to start their own business. The program offers various useful courses for first-time business enthusiasts. It works because Shopify slowly and consistently nurtures the relationship with valuable content that builds trust and establishes Shopify as an expert. So, when the person is ready to start their business, Shopify will be the first brand to come to their mind!

6. Product Comparison by Podia

Podia uses product comparisons that are honest and comprehensive, making it easier for buyers to make a purchasing decision.

Conclusion

The middle of the funnel is an important stage in the marketing funnel when qualified leads get nurtured and nourished with helpful content that pushes them down to the marketing funnel. Ignoring the middle of the funnel can affect your customer acquisition strategy. If you’re noticing 2that your customers are not moving from the ToFu to the BoFu stage, it’s high time to address your MoFu. 

You can start with creating interactive demos of your product using Storylane coupled with the other mid-funnel content strategy and ideas we have discussed above and reinvent your MoFu strategy.