TOFU, MOFU, BOFU, the words surely do not sound like an insult, but you will be shocked to know they are not. Adding to it, these words are also not some new teenage slang or a social media hashtag. Well, surprisingly enough, they are solemn worlds that hold a stern position in the market. These words are relevant to the customer journey in inbound marketing. 

What are TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU content types?

Marketing Funnel Stages - "TOFU, BOFU, MOFU" Marketing Strategy

TOFU (top of the funnel), MOFU (middle of the funnel), and BOFU (bottom of the funnel) are three central words used as shorthand for the process of the customer journey. As your clients move from fostering an expansive familiarity with your product and services before settling on their buying choice, they have various inquiries and shift into various outlooks about the product. This whole stage is the customer journey. 

Search conducts changes as individuals drop down the conversion funnel. In this way, in the event that you don’t improve for each stage, you can’t draw in customers from the full funnel. This can result in cash left on the table as customers can ricochet to a contender prior to arriving at the following stage – or worse, never visit your website in the first place. When you embrace the full-funnel venture SEO methodology,  you will draw in and hold expected clients at each progression, thus expanding your advertising ROI.

How does Inbound Marketing coincide with every stage of the Conversion Funnel? 

What is Inbound Marketing: Definition, Video - Definition | SendPulse

Conversion funnel assists sales executives with marketing tactics. There are numerous ways in which conversion funnels aid inbound marketing; some of the most common are:

  1. Driving traffic to the site: Keywords, SEO methodology, quality blog posts, etc., help you attract traffic to your site. 
  2. Converting your traffic into leads: Once you attract visitors to your landing page, your motto is to tempt them with compelling TOFU offers. These offers will pave the way for your visitors to turn into leads. Your visitors are acknowledged as leads when they show interest in CTA and submit their details via registration forms. 
  3.  Nurturing your leads: Once you convert your visitors into leads, you open a chamber to nurture them through the three stages of conversion funnels until they become a sale. When the buyers are in their initial customer phases, you need to ease their way into the funnel through relevant and tempting TOFU offers. And when you have nursed them through TOFU offers, they move down the funnel, and then there come the MOFU offers, which handle case studies. 
  4. Converting the nurtured leads into sales: When the leads are deep down the funnel, the last stage of their buyer’s journey, they are welcomed with BOFU offers that ultimately convert them into a customer. The BOFU offers are famously known to cover assessments and consultations. 

How are TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU different?

Inbound Marketing Examples: 10 Companies Doing Inbound Right

The marketing funnel is known to comprise of three stages:

  • Awareness 
  • Consideration 
  • Decision 

And all these three stages are interchangeably used with the marketing terms TOFU: Top of the funnel (awareness), MOFU: Middle of the funnel (consideration), BOFU: Bottom of the funnel (decision)

  • Top of Funnel (TOFU): TOFU holds content that focuses solely on common issues faced by individual people. The content here is knowledgeable, educational, and informative. The motive of this stage is to educate your target audience regarding your brand without explicitly mentioning it. 

Example: If you are an HVAC company, your TOFU content would be about guides to check furnace damage or how to work with the thermostat, etc. 

  • Middle of the Funnel (MOFU): The MOFU content revolves around brand solutions and brand identity. Here you will try to sell your slyly insinuate to your leads that your product or service is the best in the market. You will, however, not speak ill of your rivals but wisely string words that will indicate that your brand is superior to theirs. You will also convince your leads that choosing you would serve them the best possible service they could have imagined. This section is where you conduct the building process. 

Example: If your brand sells a product X, then MOFU content would be: Brand X vs. Brand Z or Why choose brand X? 

  • Bottom of Funnel (BOFU): This is the final stage where your content directly addresses the buyers. Here you connect your product to your prospective buyer’s requirements and convince them that they align. BOFU content focuses on consultations that help you get insights into your prospects. These offers help you connect with your buyers and recognize their unique situations, which further can assist you in landing them as permanent customers. With in-depth knowledge of your buyer’s situation, you can help them realize how well your product or service caters to their needs. 

How do the TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU approaches impact the business?

What Is Inbound Marketing?

As customers and clients become eager for more substance in content, conversions become less straight. They presently occur across various touchpoints, channels, gadgets, and ranges of time along these lines. Therefore there is no need to battle those phenomena by pushing for a deal too early. All things considered, you need to utilize a full-funnel advanced advertising system to interface with your intended interest group, leads, and target audience in a persuasive, positive, and powerful way. 

Make Connections

Think as far as connections instead of monetary exchanges. Clients and customers will start to trust your reputation as a brand and consider your brand to be an industry chief. All the more significantly, they’ll start to evaluate your fit for their necessities. This has a huge business sway. As per the Demand Gen Report, 95% of purchasers picked a merchant that gave content to each phase of the purchasing system. Advertisers additionally revealed to Forrester Consulting that a full-funnel SEO system further develops client lifetime value (CLV). 

Nurture Leads

Nurtured leads make 45% bigger purchases than non-nurtured leads. Funnel streamlined sites don’t simply convert every individual lead; rather, they convert more individuals who tend to have higher average order value (AOV). 

Implement Full-funnel SEO

Full-funnel SEO lead generation systems engage a higher number of audiences. One HubSpot review found that organizations with a refined MOFU methodology tend to witness as much as  10 times more response rate as contrasted with generic and non-exclusive email blasts. Advertising and sales teams presently work more intently together than at any time in recent memory. They help one another – and their customers and clients – all through the business interaction created by the sales funnel. A full-funnel approach to deal with website streamlining represents this fundamental change in jobs. Along these lines, begin thinking in TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU terms, and you’ll think in the customized, customer-first way that works whenever it comes to current customers and clients. 

Takeaway

The takeaway here is that we cannot at any point in time successfully predict what kind of content would be the most appealing to our audience. However, we can effectively market our content by matching and aligning it with our audience’s needs and desires. And this is what the conversion funnel allows us to do; helping you target traffic and generate leads through an elaborate scheme. And in order to make this work, you need to ensure what type of content goes where, so before your content creation, consider these points:

  • TOFU: The focal point of this content is common issues 
  • MOFU: This content slyly puts in brand identity and brand solutions to your prospective customers’ problems. 
  • BOFU: This content directly acknowledges your customers. The point of BOFU content is to tell your customers how your product or service specifically meets their needs. 

This was all about the differences these three marketing strategies had. The differences are minor yet significant and the content these three segments contain mold the future of a brand. However, if you wish to explore more about the website funnels, you can skim Saasworthy’s blog about real-time funnels, which briefly explains everything from pricing to technical details about the real-time funnels. 

Author

Snigdha Biswas is a seasoned professional with 12 years of experience in Content Development, Content Marketing and SEO across SaaS, Tech, Media, Entertainment, and News categories. She crafts impactful campaigns, adapts to market trends, develops content strategies, optimizes websites, and leverages data analytics. With a track record of driving organic growth and brand visibility, Snigdha's passion for storytelling and analytical mindset drive conversions and build brand loyalty. She is a trusted advisor, helping businesses achieve growth objectives through strategic thinking and collaboration in the competitive digital landscape.