Grab your funnel cake: Great American State Fair kicks off

While programmatic, out-of-home, TV, connected TV, PR, and other channels can all be effective for upper-funnel advertising, they fall outside the scope of this piece. Think YouTube or GDN campaigns serving ads to in-market, affinity, or custom audiences, again, all while excluding your current customer base. Think Meta or Pinterest campaigns serving ads to new users as part of broad audiences, interest-based cohorts, or lookalike lists, all excluding your current customer base and/or users who have interacted with your brand. Upper-funnel campaigns plant the seeds by reaching new audiences and generating interest in audiences who may not yet be familiar with your brand.

I’d still like to see the traffic channels, so I’ll add it as a content funnel secondary dimension. Or to add it as a secondary dimension (alongside the traffic channels), click the “Secondary dimension” dropdown menu. To add it as a primary dimension (replacing the traffic channels), click either the “Other” dropdown menu in the Primary Dimension row. Now you can see how your landing pages are performing, including all the same conversions data you had for traffic channels.

Companies like Later often use Instagram content to start conversations and route qualified leads to demos or trials after intent is clear. This method combines public engagement with private follow-up and is widely used by creators and brands running educational funnels. Instagram users are already in a conversational mindset. On Instagram, the highest converting funnels minimize exits. For example, many service-based marketers use multi-frame Story sequences that explain a problem, show proof, then ask a simple question like “Want the framework? These posts attract people already thinking about monetization and performance.

Top-of-funnel content types for the awareness stage

These proof points demonstrate how creators are already using full funnels to transform reach into income—and you can too. At the same time, audience behavior is shifting—fans don’t just want content; they want deeper access, exclusive offers, and trusted voices guiding their decisions. At this stage, your goal is to introduce your brand and provide value—without immediately selling. Their hefty captions start with a hook, build suspense and save the resolution for the final lines.

• That’s what makes repurposing content one of the best ways to expand your content marketing funnel.
• There are various analytics platforms to choose from, but these platforms were primarily built for e-commerce, not to measure content and its impact on business goals.
• For example, a new market entrant or a brand in a highly consideration-driven category (like automotive or B2B tech) may need to invest heavily in awareness and education since customers won’t convert without multiple touches and trust-building.
• At this juncture, often called “conversion,” customers are ready to make buying decisions.
• Furthermore, maintaining a consistent content strategy is important; irregular postings can disrupt engagement and diminish brand trust.

The goal isn‘t pushing — it’s making decisions feel like no-brainers. I‘ve run both live sessions and pre-recorded ones, and what works well is that people join expecting to learn something practical— they’re not there to be sold to. Simple tools or templates help them get started faster, and that utility builds brand trust. If you‘re trying to reach people who don’t know they need your product yet, how-to videos are great starting points. By understanding how different personas research and evaluate, you can build content for every funnel stage that supports their journey from start to finish. Typical searches might be “Asana vs. Trello vs. Jira” or “best project management software for startups.” The buyer isn‘t browsing — they’re choosing.

Build SEO funnels that convert

The content marketing funnel comprises four primary stages, each requiring distinct content strategies and formats. Organizations using content marketing funnels generate more qualified prospects, achieve higher conversion rates, and build stronger client relationships than those creating content without strategic alignment. Educational content, for instance, should reach decision-ready buyers who need validation; while sales-focused content should reach awareness-stage prospects who need education.

Step #2 — Creating content for middle of the funnel (MOFU)

They also give you a clearer view of where social can influence the customer journey, from first discovery to post-purchase conversations. Before you create anything or choose distribution channels, use social intelligence to understand what your audience cares about, where they spend time and what they need from brands like yours. A stronger social media marketing funnel starts with better listening. Building a flywheel-style funnel starts with changing how your team listens, creates, distributes and measures social content. Comments, questions, shares and peer conversations reveal what people believe, what they doubt and what they need next, starting each cycle with better insight than the last.

Adapting your funnel to those differences determines how effectively content converts. Use Semrush’s Position Tracking to group keywords into TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU lists and monitor visibility trends. Adjust based on what your data tells you — if your TOFU is already strong, shift effort downstream to where conversion and revenue impact are easier to prove. Open Organic Research to see which keywords and pages drive the most traffic for your top competitors. The five steps below outline how to build and refine it using Semrush tools.

Some of the examples are— Ebooks, white papers, case studies, webinars, email newsletters, and product demos. Here, the key metric of success is—website traffic, social media reach, and engagement. The specifics of content marketing strategy might vary depending on your industry and business model, most content marketing funnels are structured around three core stages— Smart Insights reported in their B2B marketing guide that 86% of marketers have used content marketing to achieve brand awareness goals. You need to build a content marketing funnel​ strategic approach to guide potential customers through their journey, from initial awareness to final conversion. The content marketing funnel is a process we always follow before completing a digital marketing campaign.

BOF ads drive conversions by targeting people who have already shown interest in a product or service. It should speak to people who are already interested in your brand. By this stage, prospects have already interacted with TOF and MOF content, which aims to educate and build trust. The goal is to help guide people over the finishing line to conversion.

A simple spreadsheet logging weekly funnel metrics can be more valuable than an overwhelming suite of graphs. Use free tools like Google’s Campaign URL Builder or Bitly to make UTMs manageable and less intimidating. When done right, each piece of content doesn’t just pay once—it drives traffic and sales across your whole stack. One of the most famous creators is Austin Li (also known as the “Lipstick King”) on Taobao live (part of Alibaba’s ecosystem). This is where creators move from “posting for likes” to building genuine businesses. TOFU sparks curiosity, MOFU builds trust, BOFU converts, and loyalty content sustains.