Understanding the Content Funnel

Technical audiences demand content that demonstrates genuine expertise and addresses their specific challenges. Yet many companies struggle to create cohesive content strategies that both rank well and build credibility with developers and technical decision-makers. Being aware of your content mix and understanding where each piece fits in the funnel helps significantly when attempting to orchestrate user behavior and engineer for a journey from the top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel, towards a product signup or a conversation with your Sales team.

Orchestrating Content Through the Funnel

The content funnel is a concept that can be used to understand the readiness and intent of a reader. It consists of multiple stages.

Top of funnel (Awareness)

High up, in the top of the funnel (TOFU) we have readers that are "far away" from your product (in terms of intent). They have yet to become aware of your actual product, they might not even know yet that they are facing a problem that they'd want to resolve. This stage is called the Awareness stage.

Middle of funnel (Consideration)

In the middle of the funnel (MOFU) your readers have started to understand the fundamentals around your space and product. They are realizing that they might have an inefficiency or a challenge within their business that should be resolved and that there are good ways to actually do that. They start considering the different ways, among those is your product/service. This stage is called the Consideration stage.

Bottom of funnel (Decision)

In the bottom of the funnel (BOFU) readers realize that your product/service is the best solution to the challenges they are facing and they start to understand how to implement and use your product. This stage is called the Decision stage.

The logical next step after leaving the bottom of the content funnel is to either get in touch with your team about a demo/discovery call, or to give your product a try, which means the readers are then turning into users of your product starting their journey in the product funnel.

In short: Early on when running your content engine, you will probably want to raise awareness about your product offering. The best way to raise awareness is to produce high quality content, based on keyword research, for the top of the content funnel. This content will attract a wide array of people that don't have high intent. Yet.

Yes, this still works in the age of AI Overviews and zero-click content. Certainly, a significant amount of traffic that previously would have gone to your website is now not arriving there due to AI Overviews on search engine results pages, or the search happening directly within an AI chatbot (or Google's "AI Mode"). That being said, if you conduct your keyword research well and you adhere to on-page SEO best practices, the explained approach will still drive consistent traffic to your website.

At the beginning, it's about reeling in as many people as possible into your net. How to nudge them further down the funnel and how to monetize them is a challenge you will tackle later.

First things first: People need to become aware of your product offering. Over time, you will want to build content pieces that nudge people downwards the content funnel towards the product funnel. But, at the beginning you'll want to have a predictable production of awareness-level content to drive consistent traffic from search engines to your blog.

In the following sections, we'll offer an overview of content funnel stages and the types of content, how and why you should utilize them, and how you can produce enough of each type of content to predictably generate new leads that drive your business forward.

Content Mix Strategy

Balancing funnel stages

When starting with content creation, you might focus on producing awareness-level evergreen content that brings people into the top of your content funnel (more on evergreen content vs. spiky content in the upcoming sections). Let's assume you are working for a business in the data warehouse space. Your awareness-level articles will likely be high-level overviews and definitions of key industry terms like:

• "What are the different types and benefits of data integrations"

In the era of AI, searchers will likely consume too basic top-funnel search queries directly in the AI overview or within the chatbot results. So try to find a good mix of "generally interesting" topics for your audience that are not too basic that a simple AI overview delivers all the information the reader needs.

For example, instead of "What are system integrations?" we pick the above "What are the different types and benefits of data integrations". This is not as vague, and also written exactly like a search query in an AI chatbot might be written. In this article, you could write about ETL (Extract, Transform, Load), Reverse ETL, ELT (Extract, Load, Transform), streaming, application integration, and more, covering many important keywords.

Next, you might focus on consideration-level evergreen content. This type of content represents the middle of your content funnel and can be described as content that makes your readers realize they actually might have a problem they were not aware of that warrants solving. This could be content like:

• "How data warehouses help you run your business more efficiently"
• "How connecting information from different data sources helps you understand your users better"

Last, you could focus on longer-tail keywords by writing decision-level evergreen content. These pieces will help guide customers who are already aware of the problem and have decided they'd like to resolve it, so they represent the bottom of your content funnel. Examples might include:

• "How to integrate Salesforce with <our product>"
• "Setting up your first data pipeline using <our product>"

When looking at these three stages, you might realize that generating a significant volume of traffic is harder the deeper you are into the content funnel. Getting lots of readers for awareness pieces is easier because the content covered is more "generic" - the topics relate to a multitude of audiences - but the more specific our content gets, the fewer people are searching for it.

This is why having a good content mix is key. You should regularly monitor the performance of your content (especially traffic and time on page) in its respective funnel stages by running content audits to identify "gaps" in your funnel. This also means you need to be able to define where each piece you publish falls in the content funnel.

What we have been seeing with more early stage clients of Draft.dev: Early on, the founding team - working on the technical product itself - creates a few product tutorials, which end up being bottom funnel content. They do this because they need to write product documentation. Out of this product documentation they create product tutorials.

Once they have some of these bottom funnel articles live, they approach Draft.dev to flesh out the rest of the funnel. We set up content plans, conduct research, and present them with suggested articles fitting to their current needs in the content funnel. This way, we slowly start orchestrating a journey that leads readers from top funnel pieces towards the bottom funnel product tutorials the founding team created.

Analyzing your content and content mix

Let's revisit the example of the data warehouse company mentioned earlier. After auditing your published content and seeing where it fits in the buyer's journey, you might realize that you are lacking content aimed at the consideration phase (the middle of the funnel).

You brainstorm a few ideas that fit into that stage, run keyword research, define headlines for a few articles, and start producing and optimizing these pieces for your target keywords. This leads you to create middle-of-funnel content like:

• "Why your traditional data warehouse is not good enough anymore"
• "Why Reverse ETL is taking over"

You publish these pieces, and now you have a way to move customers through the consideration phase of the funnel.

Intent mapping

This process works, even with completely anonymous visitors, because you know that a reader has "dropped into your funnel" at a specific stage with a specific intent in mind. They entered a search term into their search engine of choice and ended up on one of your blog posts. You know which stage of the funnel that blog post is in, you have other relevant content pieces that you link to from it (ideally pushing the reader further down the funnel), and you can use those pieces to teach users about your product and eventually help them convert into a paying user.

As mentioned earlier, creating a content engine is a science, not an art. Each piece of content you create should be aimed at a specific stage in the funnel. You have the power to orchestrate the journey your readers take and meet them with links to other content pieces and the best calls to action (CTAs).

Creating evergreen content helps you maintain consistent output, establish your authority around a set of specific keywords, and gives you a collection of articles that can be transformed into your first gated asset. This process of content audit, keyword research, strategic content creation, internal backlinks, and intentional CTAs allows you to create a predictable content engine for your business.