A Cheat Sheet to Middle-of-the-Funnel Content

Sales funnels drive sales ferociously in today's digital media, and with good reason. These highly versatile mechanisms for attracting and captivating your audience can be used for almost any niche through any social media, content and advertising platform. This is important too, because currently, 87% or more of buyers begin their search for solutions on digital media, and you having the right content ready is what makes them click.

When you build your own sales funnel, it will likely be a complex, multifaceted structure of content that first attracts, then later convinces your viewers. Because of this, the content that you add into it will change as your funnel progresses.

The middle of the funnel (MOFU) is a crucial part of this selling procedure. It’s where you convince and convert your remaining audience before moving onto your final call-to-action section in which you ask them to act. Because of its importance, your middle-of-the-funnel content has to be optimized for maximum persuasion and conversion power. This is what we’re going to show you now with this handy strategy cheat sheet.

What happens at the MOFU

The middle of your sales funnel is where you give your viewers room for consideration about what you’re offering. By doing this, you begin the deeper conversion process before moving onto a call-to-action. In other words, you present the information they need to persuade themselves that your specific offer can help them with their niche-specific problem. By the time they reach your MOFU, your viewers are already interested, but they still need to be convinced about you with more detail.

In other words, the MOFU is where the meaty interior of your sales funnel is. This part avoids emotion-driven marketing. Instead, it should contain the content that your audience needs to first see before buying from you.

The main part of the MOFU is about persuasion and displaying your expertise in a practical, informative sense. Toward the end of the middle-of-the-funnel, you can start gently but firmly guiding towards the call-to-action that comes at the end-funnel stage.

What your goals should be for content at the MOFU

Because the MOFU is where you persuade interested viewers to trust your qualifications at solving their problem, your middle-funnel content has to be as detail-rich as possible. This means that what you place in this part of your sales funnel should be light on quickly digestible advertising and heavy on specific sources of useful information.  

You want your MOFU content to really showcase how well you understand your viewer’s problem, and how much expertise you can deliver in the solution (product or service) that you’re offering. It’s important not to insult your audience’s attention at this point by only offering marketing jargon, empty promises or promotion without substance.

Your MOFU should contain useful offerings that will not only define your expertise but also help your viewers inform themselves without committing to anything quite yet. You can do this by offering solid tools and information that they can act on right away without compromise.

What kind of tools and info are we talking about? These are all useful things to offer in your MOFU:

• Brief but information-dense eBooks and white papers

• Reports on key trends for your audience’s niche

• DIY guides to specific parts of your audience's niche problem

• Detailed case studies that resonate with your target viewers by offering examples similar to their story

• Templates and toolkits

• Lists of valuable contacts and resources

• Brief, easily digestible and actionable email courses

• Detailed webinars and podcasts

The above are just some examples of what your MOFU can contain. You should aim to offer at least one or two different options and invest a solid amount of quality production into them. This production quality should not just be in their presentation but also in the richness and genuine value of their content.

On the other hand, keep things as simple as possible in the middle. Your offerings should come packaged together with minimal steps required to access them, and you shouldn’t offer too many different free information products. Instead, focus on delivering just one or two that contain plenty of quality.

For example, let's say you’re offering audience members a major multi-part course on cryptocurrency investing. Your MOFU could offer a white paper on the state and latest trends in the cryptocurrency and industry along with a bonus section with several specific trading tips. With this you’ll first establish your deep knowledge of the niche and secondly, your ability to deliver value.

What is your target person like at MOFU

Your target MOFU audience is going to consist of viewers who are interested in your offer but not yet sure about trusting you in particular. This is something you should keep in mind at all times when creating the middle of your sales funnel: You’re no longer convincing them that the subject is relevant and interesting to them, because if it wasn’t they wouldn’t have reached this far. You’re now persuading them to trust you specifically to deliver a worthwhile solution to their source of pain.

Moving and converting viewers through your funnel

The MOFU isn’t only about offering your viewers free but densely valuable information. It should also be about retargeting them towards the end of the funnel where you can offer them even more if they’re willing to invest in your product/service.

This means that your entire mid-funnel should be geared towards having your viewers move onto the next step of engagement for the sake of obtaining something more.

Giving them access to free information should include the need for an email opt-in or subscription and once they open this to obtain the free information you sent, you should present them with specific, easily actionable reasons to invest in getting more from your funnel.

At every step of your MOFU, from where you present your audience with your expertise to where you offer and deliver them your free information products, you should also open a proposal for obtaining more.

This proposal should gently but clearly lay out why your further offerings have deep additional value. This will cause a certain percentage of your MOFU audience to keep moving until they reach your call-to-action and payment pages.

Analyzing your MOFU

Building and operating an entire sales funnel is a complex undertaking that works most effectively if you never stop analyzing and refining it. It’s important to see how your audience enters your funnel, how they engage with it and what choke points cause some of these viewers to drop out.

If certain ad links, pages or posts have high bounce rates, you need to know which ones they are and recalibrate them to see what might make them become more effective. This means analyzing not just your MOFU but the whole of your sales funnel from start to finish.

You can do this on your own with easily available online analytics software tools, or you can call in trained marketing specialists that know exactly what sales funnel pain points to focus on the most.

As a basic additional step, you should run through your whole funnel yourself to ensure that every piece of media, download link, opt-in button and sales page works and formats for maximum usability.

Don’t forget to include a run-through of your sales funnel’s performance on both mobile and desktop devices. Your MOFU won’t be any use to your audience or to you if the wonderful ebook you’re offering in exchange for a simple email subscription doesn’t load at all. The same applies for your entire sales funnel.

Investing time and effort into creating a high quality MOFU can make the difference between high sales and a dead sales funnel. Give this section of your funnel the attention to detail it needs, and don't be afraid to ask for professional help if you want a truly professional end result.