What is ToFu, MoFu, and BoFu? [Example+Research]
Imagine you have a website and you sell a product or a service. Let’s just say you sell headphones.
Your website is all about different kinds of headphones. The blog on your website is great as it provides all the information about buying a great pair of headphones or earphones.
But there’s one problem.
Even though your E-Commerce website is fully optimized, you aren’t converting customers to buy your products.
And this is the problem every marketer should have faced.
Whether you sell a physical product (like headphones), a service, software, or anything, everyone is going through the same problem. Not be able to CONVERT users into paying clients.
So what are those magic words which will help me covert those users, Preeti?
Well, I don’t know about that.
But what I know is that there’s one strategy that can help you win those customers (If implemented correctly). And that’s ToFu, MoFu, and BoFu.
I asked Sanjay Shenoy, Founder of Tractionn, what he thinks about this funnel technique, whether or not it works, and what advice he would give to someone starting on this technique. Here’s what he said.
“Yes, of course, it works. It doesn’t matter whether you like it or not because it already exists. It is your job to engineer it to meet your needs. My advice to anyone trying out setting up a funnel would be to start at the bottom and build it to the top.“
— Sanjay Shenoy, Tractionn
But what is this technique? How does it work? How long does this take? And What impact will it have on your business?
We will find this, and more down below. But as we are learning about sales funnel (ToFu, MoFu, and BoFu), we should have an understanding of what a sales funnel is.
Table of Contents
TL;DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read)
The top of the Funnel, Middle of the funnel, and Bottom of the funnel are the journey a visitor takes to become a buyer or paying customer. The basic steps involved are awareness, consideration, and decision. We ensure that we are providing content and nurturing them at every stage so that they become our customers.
What is Sales Funnel?
Before anything, let’s just look at the official definition of the sales funnel.
According to Wikipedia, “ The purchase funnel, or purchasing funnel, is a consumer-focused marketing model that illustrates the theoretical customer journey toward the purchase of a good or service.”
Now imagine the same scenario. You are selling headphones on your site and not many people know about your brand.
It’s not necessary that your ideal customer would just go to the search engine and type your brand name, click on the website and purchase your product in one go. This can only happen in a parallel universe.
In the real world, your customer goes through a journey while purchasing a product that can take many steps, but the three main steps are:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Decision
These are the main 3 steps any customer takes.
So we can say that “a funnel is a kind of marketing model that depicts how a user becomes a paying customer.”
In the first step, aka the awareness stage, the leads you collect are mostly unqualified (they don’t know their problems or your solutions).
The main goal of the sales funnel is to sort through these “unqualified” leads to find the one who can become your customer. And various strategies/funnels can help you with that.
Now let’s start with ToFu.
What is ToFu?
Let’s get back at our headphones E-commerce business. Now, in the Top of the Funnel or ToFu stage, your potential customer needs headphones and is aware that they need a new pair of headphones.
They are looking on the web, for different kinds of headphones, and are trying to find more information about that specific product. This information will later help them make the best purchase decision.
Basically, at this stage, they don’t know you exist, and that you offer a different variety of high-quality headphones. They are just being informative.
They may enter keywords like “best headphones under 20000” or “types of headphones”. Their intent is informational, and they’re looking for different headphones.
But here’s your chance to get found. How?
What is ToFu Content?
The Top of funnel content gives the user the answers to their questions.
You might agree that content is the one that helps attract and convert customers. Hubspot did research and found out that companies that blog get 55% more website traffic than those that do not.
So why don’t take up that opportunity and generate leads and convert them?
In this stage, you will provide educational and informational content that connects with your target audience. Some content types that work best include:
- Blogs
- Videos
- Podcasts
- Infographics
- Ebooks
Optimize your content (like blogs) for SEO by doing proper keyword research, Writing catchy but original Titles and Desc to hook your readers, and of course, writing great copy.
ToFu content is the one that can get your name out there, and you can introduce your product as a solution to their problems. Don’t expect any leads and conversions here, as this stage represents a very broad audience.
What is MoFu?
The Middle of the Funnel is the part where the prospects know that they have a problem that needs to be solved. Like they know they need to buy headphones, now their next aim is to decide where should we buy the headphones from.
In simple words, they are judging different brands and considering different options. This is the place where you can get leads and you can nurture them with different kinds of content.
I asked Jason Wilson, Growth Director at Infintech Designs what he thinks about this strategy and different content strategies for each stage, here’s what he has to say:
“Now I dont think these are actually marketing funnels on their own, but they are parts of the marketing funnel. When you’re looking at the overall marketing funnel and thinking about the steps that people go through right? You have things like AIDA (Attention-Interest-Desire-Action) or you could do ACDC (Attention-Consideration-Decision-Conversion). All of these are different formulas, but they’re essentially the way of moving people through the marketing funnel and giving them content at whatever stage they’re in. People at top of the funnel are not aware of your solution they’re searching for solutions to their problems, but they don’t know about yours. Middle of the funnel, they might know about solutions, and they’re searching for specific solutions that may align with what you have, or they closely align with your offering. So it could be something like “CRM Optimization” if that’s something you’re offering, and someone searching that, they don’t know your solution necessarily, but they know they need CRM optimization. The bottom of the Funnel could be more so they know your solution, and they’re searching for keywords related to your brand like pricing keywords, comparison keywords, etc. Those could even be considered MoFu. But essentially, suffice to say that, all of these Top, middle, and bottom of the funnel are just meeting the consumer at different stages of their journey, and providing content that matches. You can do ToFu, MoFu, and BoFu content for one single journey.
Top of the funnel content is typically the broadest, you’ll have the highest search volume but you’ll have the lowest conversions because people are not solution aware yet. The middle of the funnel gonna has mid-range volume and somewhat decent conversions. But these top two layers you gonna have to remarket more to actually convert users into customers or paying customers or members depending on what kinda site you have. And then the bottom of the funnel’s gonna be really low traffic but really high conversions because they’re searching for keywords related to your brand or you know, really specific solution-oriented searches that are close to converting. So, definitely from a conversion standpoint, the Bottom of the funnel is best, but from a traffic standpoint, the top of the funnel is best, and that’s what broad articles touch on ToFu and never forget to remarket.
So the bottom line is, you can really target a single user, a customer profile with all three levels or layers as they move through their customer journey you’re targeting them with content from the top of the funnel all the way to the bottom of the funnel to ultimately convert them. So, I don’t think there’s one way to do marketing or you’re only doing top of the funnel. I mean you can, but you’re not gonna get the best results. The best results you’re gonna get from a blend of a strategy where you map out what your customer profile is. Let’s just say that these 4 types of customers are coming to our site looking for solutions then once you have that then you can kind of map out keywords at each stage of the funnel, your top, middle, and bottom that align with your customers. So there you can develop a really strong content strategy if you’re building our content at all levels”
— Jason Wilson, Infintech designs
Basically, in MoFu, you need to build trust and nurture your leads so that they can get the push to the BoFu stage.
The leads we get from the MoFu are pretty good because they are one step closer to making that purchase. So it’s important to give them the correct content.
Speaking of which…
What is MoFu Content?
The ToFu content aims to inform and educate the user on how you can solve the problem they have, but in MoFu, you tell them why your products or services are the best.
Here, we need more than just blogs, something that is on a personal level, like email.
Here’s a fact you might not know, the average Email ROI is £42, that’s almost $50!
That means, that for every $1 you spent on email marketing, you will get $50 ROI. That’s shockingly high for any platform.
So why not use it to your advantage? Gate your content (like ebooks, and webinars) in exchange for collecting emails, or you can get the emails through contact forms.
You can then use these emails and make lead nurturing campaigns and try to personalize those emails a bit.
Apart from email, you can use different content formats like:
- Webinars
- Case Studies
- Comparison blogs
- Guides or How-to blogs
Once you know they moved from MoFu, it’s time for a great BoFu strategy.
What is BoFu?
The Bottom of funnel prospects is the most high-quality and qualified leads for your product/service. They are the ones who want to give it a shot, but they just need that extra push.
The number of prospects will be very less compared to ToFu, but these are the ones who are most likely to convert.
Here, the prospect searches keywords related to your brand like “JBL headphones”, “Apple AirPods max”, or “Sennheiser headphones”. You need to stand out from your competitors here.
As Anthony Gaenzle says,
What is BoFu content?
Some marketers and sales representatives even say that in the BoFu stage, you are hard selling your product to potential customers.
Some type of content that can help you is:
- Free trails
- Schedule a meeting
- Coupons
- Product demos
- Product comparisons
- Testimonials
- Case studies
These can help your customers to convert, but even though some leads are in this step, they are nowhere near buying your product/service.
That’s when it’s best to combine MoFu and BoFu content and offers, and it will be a win-win for both you and your users. It’s best to focus on the channel that provides you with more conversions (like email) than other traffic, like social media. Because sometimes, marketers can get away with more traffic when they should be focusing on getting more conversions (where the traffic is less).
How does SEO help ToFu, MoFu, and BoFu?
SEO can play a major role in attracting new and existing visitors through organic search traffic with the help of proper keyword research, content marketing, and SEO optimization.
At the ToFu stage, you can do keyword research to find out informational keywords, analyze search intent, frame your content, and then optimize the content for SEO.
This includes (but is not limited to)
- Finding keywords that are educational and informational. Like “how-to”, “what is”, “tips”, and more.
- Target and find long tail keywords from sources like Answer the public, People Also Ask boxes, social media (like Quora, and Reddit), and more.
- Create content around those long-tail keywords and be sure to educate and inform the visitor as much as possible. (It’s the first time the visitor has come to your website, and it may happen that they won’t come again, so make sure to send a strong first impression so they pass the ToFu stage)
- When optimizing your blog, as yourself these questions:
- Are we using long-tail keywords?
- Do we have catchy titles and meta desc?
- Are we using our keywords in the titles, desc, copy, and headings?
- Are we providing value through this content piece?
- Make sure your website architecture is simple and easy to navigate.
See, content is the king in all of these stages, and for you to rank in search engines, you need SEO.
Pretty simple.
Research on ToFu, BoFu, and MoFu
I ran a poll on Reddit asking if the ToFu, MoFu, and BoFu marketing works or not. 32 people have answered this poll.
Let’s look at what the results say:
- Out of 32 people, 15 say that this technique works.
- Out of 32 people, 4 say that it doesn’t work.
- Out of 32 people, 1 says that they haven’t tried it yet, and
- Out of 32 people, 12 say that they don’t know this technique.
There are also interesting comments, like:
And this,
I also asked about the sales funnel technique on Packted’s server on Discord, here are some amazing responses:
So it’s safe to say that majority of people in this poll agree that this technique works, and at the same time, 12 people (which is almost half) people say that they don’t know what ToFu, MoFu, and BoFu are.
moving on…
How do ToFu, MoFu, and BoFu influence business?
This sales funnel technique can vastly impact your business because you are targeting your potential customer and new visitors through content.
You have something for everybody. And when you begin to build trust with your customer, they will think of you as an industry leader.
This can lead to them buying from you even more because they are nurtured leads.
When implemented correctly, this sales funnel technique can give you tremendous results.
Final Words
The ToFu, MoFu, and BoFu strategy is a great one, considering it can provide you with a fresh new audience, nurture them and get them to convert seamlessly.
As Jason said, the ideal way to convert your prospects is to create a perfect blend of all three levels.
Enjoyed reading this post? Disagree with any of my points? Then you can shoot me a mail or chat with me on LinkedIn! Also, Packted has a new Discord server. We are a welcoming community, and here you can talk about SEO, PPC, Email, Social, Content, and more. You should definitely join!
P.S.- If the server’s link gets expired, then you can email me (email is on the contact us page) with the subject “Want to join Discord Server”. I’ll give you the link.
I would love to read your queries and answer them.
