4 Steps To Optimized Top-of-Funnel (TOFu) Content Creation
Whether you’re in sales, marketing, finance or part of the senior management team, closing business is a goal that’s on everyone’s mind. But to close more business, you need to create better awareness among people who may not know your company or why to choose its products.
As was mentioned in our previous blog post, 3 Common Content Strategy Problems – and How to Solve Them, most marketers have a wealth of materials that are product-focused—addressing the “preference” phase of the buying cycle—but often lack enough “awareness” phase assets. Why is that? Best practices dictate that about 50% of your total content library needs to be “awareness” content.
Crafting strong TOFu assets is, for the most part, harder than creating product brochures and data sheets. That’s because in order to do so, you need to step away from your inside-out perspective (product focus), and step into an outside-in viewpoint (your customer’s mindset). And that requires ongoing research to understand:
- What and Why: Having a clear understanding of your customers’ key issues, what problems they’re trying to solve, their challenges and priorities—today and in the near future
- How and Who: Understanding how purchase decisions are made, and what role different stakeholders play in the decision, is key to knowing who leads the charge at the start of the buying process
- Where: Knowing where your buyers go to learn about available solutions to their problems
Creating the best “awareness” content
Once you’ve completely immersed yourself in your customers’ pain points, buying process, and where they go to get help, you’re ready to begin the process of creating great TOFu content.
- Address customer pain points: Start by creating content that addresses your buyers’ key issues and pain points at the early stage. This is true thought leadership—content pieces, which should focus on customer issues, not your company or products.
- Provide insights that matter: In conjunction with topic-focused content, you want your “awareness” content to provide strategic insight—engaging and surprising nuggets of information that key decision-makers are looking for—that will make them want to learn more, and hear from you again, as a respected authority on the topic.
- Make it easy: While some of your TOFu content may be take the form of an eight- to ten-page white paper, be mindful of making this content easier to digest (and share), or “snackable.” Your customers are overloaded with information and short on time. Consider chopping a long-form piece with multiple take-aways into many shorter pieces, each with a single take-away.
- Coordinate and share: Don’t forget to share and incorporate your marketing “awareness” content with your sales team, incorporating the results of your research into battlecards and playbooks. Your customers will appreciate the clear, consistent messaging from both sales and marketing sources.
Successful marketers today recognize the need and value of having high-quality TOFu content, while understanding the investment involved in creating such content. Activate specializes in both doing the customer research, and creating the “awareness” content you need to drive your firm’s reputation, awareness and sales funnel. Contact your Activate sales rep to learn more.
