The Beginners’ Guide to the Inbound Marketing Funnel

TOFU, MOFU and BOFU – this has nothing to do with curdled soya milk, yet everything to do with attracting visitors, capturing leads and nurturing them with highly targeted communications and offers. Read our basic introduction to the three-tiered Inbound Marketing funnel and learn how it shapes online marketing campaigns. 

Why a funnel?

Most marketing and sales people will have come across a funnel visualisation of some kind. There are different interpretations – especially between marketing and sales methodologies – but generally it describes a progression from having lots of potential customers at the top of the funnel, to ending up with far fewer, yet more highly qualified, sales prospects and customers at the bottom.

The further along the marketing and sales processes we go, the fewer people we deal with. However, each tier gives us with more sales intelligence and further qualifies those individuals.

Explain the three tiers, please? 

In Inbound Marketing there are three general tiers, though each can of course be divided up further. For the sake of this beginners’ guide, let’s stick with three:

• Top of Funnel (TOFU) – In online marketing terms, the top of our funnel consists of website visitors that have been attracted to the website by our social media, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM / PPC) and content creation activities. TOFU offers and content – ebooks, white papers, videos, webinars and introductory offers – are very general, have mass appeal and give us shareable material we can spread on social media, announce on our blogs and create Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads for. 

• Middle of Funnel (MOFU) – We ask visitors to fill in a form and provide their contact details in exchange for a resource or offer, and those that do download or sign-up become our leads. We might also provide new MOFU offers and resources to further qualify and filter visitors – these offers would be more specific to our business activities, such as case studies, product reviews, buyers’ guides and testimonials, and would serve to explain our services and build brand and customer loyalty.

• Bottom of Funnel (BOFU) – Quite simply, we use automated email marketing to stay engaged with our growing lead database and move, or “nurture”, individuals towards a final sales offer, such as a free consultation, extended trial or discounted price. Understanding how and why a person became a lead, plus other form data, allows us to send highly focused, and therefore more effective, communications. 

How does the funnel shape our campaigns? 

It’s all about the journey of an individual from making first contact through to securing a sale. 

Let’s look at one example of a TOFU/MOFU/BOFU compliant campaign. For this example, imagine that we are a school wishing to increase annual enrolment numbers: 

• TOFU – We seek to build a large social media community where we share our weekly blog articles, many of which link to an offer such as an education white paper or video of life at our school. All our articles are written for search engine visibility, so we can be found easily when people search for certain things. We also try to share our content with other websites, blogs and write regular guest blogs too, all with links to our landing page offers. 

• MOFU – Our landing pages have pictures of the school and wording to make our offers and resources attractive, so we can generate more leads. Our second-tier MOFU offers are more specific to the school – a brochure pack, for example. At this stage we know that anyone that takes up these offers are highly qualified and ready to be nurtured.

• BOFU – We create lead nurturing emails to keep leads engaged, with interesting blog articles, other offers and a final sales offer, such as a private tour and chance to meet students and staff.

Read more about how Inbound Marketing actually helped one school client of ours double its traffic in just four months, establish an active social media community, and achieve a high lead generation rate on its landing pages with one in five visitors converting – read Inbound Marketing Case Study: Swiss International School.