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How to Identify TOFU Content Ideas for Your Content Strategy?

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In the world that we live in today, buyers make purchase decisions that are highly strategic and informed. Marketers need to educate, nurture and maintain relationships with prospects to actually convert them into paying customers now.

To get your content strategy to perform effectively for  you, you can use a combination of tactics including social media marketing, SEO and more. But if you are into marketing, we are sure you have heard and have extensive knowledge of the merits that a marketing funnel has to offer.

Brands can benefit greatly by leveraging different kinds of content targeting customers at different stages of the marketing funnel — TOFU, MOFU and BOFU. 

Let us now take a deeper look at what TOFU content is, and all you need to know about it.

What is TOFU Content?

Taking a funnel-based approach to content is quite the prudent way to structure your content strategy. With that in mind, TOFU (Top of Funnel) Content is any piece of content that is produced with the goal of targeting customers who are at the top of your sales or marketing funnel.

TOFU content takes a highly informational direction and aims to educate the target audience more than anything else.

While approaching TOFU marketing, you want to ask yourself questions such as:

  • What interests my audience?
  • What kind of information would prove valuable to my audience?
  • What kind of challenges does my audience face and want to solve?

Seeking answers to these questions will help you identify your audience’s points, and the kind of problems you can solve for them. So keywords that portray an informational search intent, and address the aforementioned questions, are termed TOFU keywords.

What is the Purpose of TOFU Content?

Now that you know what TOFU content is, we identify and understand its purpose in the overall content strategy.

When we strip down the layers and talk about the primary goals of TOFU content, they are as follows:

Addressing the Problems of your Buyer Persona

One effective way to position yourself firmly in the minds of your buyers is to show them that you have the expertise required to solve their problems.

What’s more, when you are targeting TOFU customers, giving the typical sales-y tone a wide berth may be a good idea. Instead, focus on educating your target audience by identifying their pain points and creating content that addresses them

Do not blindly rely on your own experience or expertise and presume the kind of challenges that your buyers may be facing.

To get expert insights into customers and their pain points, conduct interviews with your customer-facing teams and distribute surveys. Remember, this research is not only to inform your content strategy but also valuable in the creation of strong buyer personas.

Driving Traffic and Engagement

Driving traffic to your website and engaging your customers once they are there, are two separate animals to tame. But you can have a win-win situation simply by creating the right TOFU content.

Top of funnel content tends to be informational and answers the “what” and “why” queries that customers may have about your industry or product niche. At TOFU, your customers want to be educated enough to make purchase decisions.

Here’s where keyword mapping is your best friend.

Ensure that you target the right keywords in your TOFU content to maximise your incoming traffic and drive engagement through complementary high-quality research. You can also use keyword research and social listening tools such as AnswerThePublic, and BuzzSumo to inform your keyword mapping process.

Generating Leads

Let’s not forget one of the primary reasons why brands like yours want to leverage TOFU content — for generating leads. When you get it right, TOFU content will help you funnel a broad audience into interested leads. Needless to say, you can generate sales by nurturing these leads effectively.

So, when you are creating a lead generation strategy, make sure that you do not undermine the importance of TOFU content in the mix.

To ensure that your top of funnel content generates leads, ensure to add relevant CTAs and opt-in banners throughout the content. These will be vital tools since it is most likely that for most of these users, this would be their first encounter with your brand.

Also, ensure that you create valuable content assets and convert them into lead magnets to seamlessly integrate within your content.

Most Popular TOFU Content Formats

With us so far? Awesome!

Now, if you are wondering where to begin your TOFU content creation journey, we are just about to get into that. Let us explore some of the top TOFU content formats used by successful brands across the world.

Blog Posts and Guides

We start from the basics. Blogs and Guides — needless to say, you have read them, gotten lured in by them and are in fact, reading one right now. Why?

Simply because this content format is quite powerful in being able to answer user queries quite comprehensively.

If you are able to produce high-quality blogs in this format, it is quite easy to position yourself as an expert on the topic. If you are wondering how to do that, well, we have got a few tricks you can use.

Complement your content with visual aids and use simple, concise language to enhance its readability. Use images and videos in your blogs to successfully retain your audience’s attention. Break up huge chunks of text frequently and add CTAs throughout the content piece to effectively engage your audience (read: leads).

Infographics

Next, we have the most prominent visual element you can leverage in your content — infographics.

They do what your complex research reports and highly technical blogs often fail to do — make your content easy to comprehend. Beware: creating impactful infographics requires extensive hard work and creativity. But the great thing is that they offer the additional benefit of being great for your SEO performance.

Infographics also make for great linkable assets and can potentially generate a ton of backlinks for your website. As a result, you will enjoy a higher authority and increased traffic to your website.

Social Media Posts

Social media marketing when used right offers you the perfect platform to engage with your target audience and even generate leads. Contrary to popular belief, all kinds of brands can use social media for that extra traction, not just the ones with a younger audience.

Identify the social media networks that your target audience uses the most. Once you create your brand account, all you need to do is create and post engaging content consistently. If you thought visuals were important in blog posts, know that they are the lifeblood of a strong social media presence.

But trust us — it is going to be worth it in the end! TOFU posts with attractive visuals often get the right traction when timed and pitched right.

Videos

In 2020, 90% of viewers said that they want to see more videos from brands and businesses. Even without this statistic, it is impossible to avoid the rise in video consumption all around us.

Be it on your social media channel, website or even your budding YouTube channel, videos can prove to be a great tool to bring in extra traffic. The key is to share your videos across platforms. So, if you have a highly insightful video on your website, share it on social media, and vice versa.

TOFU content and videos come together beautifully.

Say, if you are a brand that specialises in women’s makeup products, creating videos on basic skincare, and self-care tips may be a great way to go.

Depending on the industry you operate in, you have multiple kinds of videos to choose from. You can create long explainer videos on topics related to your niche, how-to videos and tutorials, or even bite-sized videos that tackle a small topic.

Podcasts

Combining the advantages of multiple content formats such as videos and blogs, podcasts have been all the rage for the past few years. Brands and individuals who have a wide range of topics to share with their audience can truly leverage all the advantages that podcasts have to offer.

No wonder, there are over 850,000+ podcasts out there today.

Podcasts are the perfect platform for distributing top of funnel content simply due to the casual tone that they are able to take. Plus, podcasts are easy to start and consistently maintain making them the perfect content format for growing brands.

You may have come across hundreds of podcasts talking about SEO, content marketing or just topics from an educational standpoint. These are the typical examples of TOFU content that you as a brand may want to invest in and start creating.

Since people tend to listen to podcasts along with other activities such as commuting, cooking or working, you can command the attention of a wider audience.

Ebooks and Research Reports

Let’s be clear — positioning yourself as an industry expert is a proven way into your audience’s hearts. And producing eBooks and well-researched reports are the perfect ways to go about it.

The fact they make for excellent downloadable content is just the cherry on the top!

In the process of creating a blog post, if you find yourself going deeper and extensive with highly detailed chapters, you are probably looking at a potential eBook. Not just this, but if you find topics that your audience would love you to discuss more, creating an eBook or a detailed research report might be a good idea to capitalise on the popularity.

Of course, to promote these eBooks and research reports right, you need to rely on highly impactful and conversion-focused landing pages. These landing pages can complement your downloadable content asset with a contact form and offer valuable knowledge in exchange for contact details.

Free Tool or Kit

Since we are talking about downloadable content and assets — we would be amiss if we do not talk about tools and kits.

Depending on the kind of business you run, you have the opportunity to truly leverage your skills and expertise to generate leads. Such assets are known to act as highly effective lead magnets and catalyse conversions.

You can also add links to your eBook or research report in your blogs, in order to have more people discover it simply through the power of internal linking.

How to Identify TOFU Content Ideas

Now that we have talked extensively about content creation, let us back up and talk a little more about ideation. Coming up with fresh and effective content ideas is no small feat, especially if you do it every time you sit to write fresh content. It can quickly become time consuming and even inefficient.

Instead, focus on coming up with a bunch of content ideas at once. Devote time specifically for ideation research and list down a bunch of ideas that you think may be helpful in the future. When you are focused on just the ideation part, it becomes easier for you to brainstorm a large list of ideas easily.

Ask your Customer Interaction Teams

As discussed earlier, one of the most effective ways to come up with TOFU content ideas is through primary research. As a brand, be more willing to learn from your customer facing teams — these are the people who can give you expert insights about your target audience.

Identify the key persona for your brand and work on satisfying this demographic by informing your strategies with insights from teams that interact with these customers. They are most likely to have the clearest understanding of their pain points and preferences.

Social Media Followers

While having your customer facing teams inform your strategy is a great idea, you can also let your prospective buyers take the lead. Social media platforms can serve as great listening tools that your brand can use to gauge customer expectations.

Work on building a social media presence, and coming up with content ideas will become as easy as asking your followers. For instance, you can post topical content and ask your followers what they would like to see you post about.

You get ideas, and your followers get their answers. Win-win!

Interview your Customers

When it comes to asking your customers for ideas, feel free to reach out to your customers directly. Sure, your customer interaction teams will have a lot of data for you to go with. But by conducting surveys and interviews with your customers, you can elevate the quality of information that you base your strategies on.

To do this effectively, ensure that you:

  • Plan out the questions that you want to ask your customers comprehensively
  • Offer incentives to customers in return for their input and participation
  • Try to conduct live interviews with your customers so that you can get a deeper idea of their pain points and preferences

Check Blog Comments

Apart from the means that we have discussed so far, the other great way to discover new content ideas is through blog comments. As a brand, it bodes well to keep your eyes and ears open for comments on your blogs and videos.

This is one of those places where customers are most likely to express what kind of topics they would like you to cover, going forward.

Analyse Competitor Content

You saw this coming — we know!

Since no brand today operates in a silo, it is important to keep a track of what your competitors are getting right and wrong. When it comes to TOFU content, you can not only generate a ton of ideas by going through competitor content, you can also find effective short and long tail keywords.

These keywords can then further help you come up with new content ideas for the different content formats you have included in your strategy.

Conduct Content Gap Analysis

Another important exercise that you want to do while analysing your competitors’ content and your own is carry out a content gap analysis.

Take a hard look at your existing content and find gaps that you are yet to fill. It helps to look at your content from a pillar-cluster perspective. So, if you have a detailed guide on your blog, consider the various sub-topics that you can delve deeper into through blogs of their own.

Do the same thing for your competitors and you will have a ton of ideas to work with.

Use Keyword Research Tools

It is important to complement your content ideation and creation process with the right kind of tools. Keyword research tools will undoubtedly be your best friend in this regard.

Keyword research tools such as AnswerThePublic, BuzzSumo or Ahrefs can help you generate an extensive list of keywords which can then translate into winning content ideas.

Explore Google Search Suggestions

More often than not, you are likely to generate a significant list of ideas simply using your good ol’ Google Search. Start typing a related keyword and you will see a list of topics related to those keywords that are just waiting to transform into fresh content ideas.

Something like this:

Sign up for Industry Newsletters

The other prominent way to generate content ideas for your brand is by staying abreast of what is happening in your industry. And how do you do that? You leverage newsletters.

Subscribing to industry newsletters helps you stay updated with the recent news, trends, and topics belonging to your industry which can make for amazing content ideas. Ensure to keep updating your list of content ideas based on the topics you derive from newsletters.

The best part is that you will generate ideas that are more current and relevant to your audience.

Get the Audience into your Marketing Funnel

Winning your customers over through your content has always been a good idea, and especially if your customer is right at the top of the marketing funnel. You have the perfect opportunity to educate and make your audience more aware of all that your brand has to offer. What’s more, you can use a wide range of content formats to accomplish distribution of your TOFU content.

If you are still wondering how to navigate this part of your content strategy, get in touch with us so that we can discuss more.

Authors
Hardy Desai
Hardy Desai

Hardy is the visionary founder of Supple Digital, a boutique SEO agency based in Melbourne, Australia. With a profound understanding of the digital landscape and a deep passion for innovation, Hardy has steered Supple Digital to become a leading name in the SEO domain.

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