Bottom-Funnel Marketing: What It Is and How It Works

November 25, 2022 (Updated: May 4, 2023)

A Sticker with sign reading bottom funnel marketing. BOFU. Concept for bottom funnel marketing content.

Whether you work in marketing, sales, or somewhere in between, you’ll eventually need to convert leads into sales—this is business, after all. Changing a prospect into a paying customer can be challenging, as you must increase brand awareness, drive interest, find high-value clients, and persuade them to buy your product. As you navigate this complex process, you’ll need to understand how it works to ensure your marketing efforts are successful. In this article, you’ll learn all about bottom-funnel marketing so you can maximize your campaign initiatives like a pro.

What Is Bottom-Funnel Marketing?
Benefits and Drawbacks of Bottom-Funnel Marketing
Types of Content for Bottom-Funnel Marketing
7 Strategies for Bottom-Funnel Marketing
Bottom-Funnel Marketing vs Mid- and Top-Funnel Marketing

What Is Bottom-Funnel Marketing?

Image via Flickr by Underway In Ireland

Bottom-funnel marketing (BOFU) is the last step in the marketing funnel when you’re left with a high-quality lead who is close to buying your product but needs that extra push to seal the deal. Sometimes called the ‘decision stage’ within a buyer’s journey, this is often the narrowest stage because any disinterested leads who won’t do business with you have already left the funnel. Therefore, the remaining prospects are heavily considering their final decision through a combination of your sales tactics and their careful weighing of the pros and cons.

Once you reach the bottom of the funnel, you can see the fruits of your marketing efforts take shape, often making it the most rewarding stage when done right. The key, however, is nurturing their decision-making process before they come to a conclusion you don’t want—choosing someone else. After turning the lead into a conversion, what’s left is maintaining a positive customer relationship to encourage loyalty and retain their business long-term. When a customer willingly advocates on your behalf because they are satisfied with your service or product, you know your efforts were truly successful.

Benefits and Drawbacks of Bottom-Funnel Marketing

You can’t avoid the BOFU phase if you want to convert leads into sales successfully. So it’s important to understand the pros and cons of bottom funneling so you can make more informed decisions regarding your marketing initiatives. You’ll be better prepared to take on new challenges too.

Benefits

Increases profits: Converting leads into buying customers means an increase in your profit, especially if you keep up sales consistently. You can use the additional funds to scale your business, invest in more resources, and hire experienced professionals to help drive your goals.
Promotes organic growth: One of the best ways to achieve rapid and healthy growth is through customer referrals. This is when customers authentically and voluntarily share their positive experiences with others, helping drive traffic to your website, products, and brand.
Encourages loyalty: Successful bottom-funnel marketing tactics provide a positive experience for first-time leads turning into paying clients. Continued initiatives to maintain a good relationship with your customers help drive their loyalty and satisfaction toward your products and services.
Supports new marketing initiatives: There are many marketing tools, resources, and methods you can use to find leads and make sales conversions, but they can be costly. If your bottom-funnel marketing strategy is profitable, you can invest in more sophisticated marketing approaches to reach a larger and more diverse audience.
Boosts your competitive edge: Customers who are content with your business’s products are less likely to switch to someone else, even if your business costs more. This gives you a competitive edge in a saturated market and ensures that your brand is the go-to option for many people.
Reveals problems in your process: Sometimes, bottom-funnel marketing strategies don’t produce the results you want, but there’s a silver lining. Your mistakes may reveal deeper problems in your marketing process, enabling you to investigate the cause further and develop a meaningful solution.

Drawbacks

May affect your bottom line: Bottom-funnel marketing can be costly, especially when using more advanced tactics. Failing to secure a lead means you’ve put money into prospects that provide no beneficial results. You must be tactful when focusing on potential customers who seem most likely to buy.
Loss of valuable resources: Even after narrowing down your prospects to the best ones, there is no 100% guarantee that you can complete the transaction. After sinking so much time, energy, and resources trying to convert a lead, the endeavor could ultimately end without a sale.
A decline in reputation: Your marketing strategies can also risk harm to your company’s reputation. Consumers have different perspectives, expectations, and cultures, so how you pitch to them is crucial because it can influence how they view your business.

Types of Content for Bottom-Funnel Marketing

Image via Flickr by KevalPadia

Creating content is an integral part of the marketing funnel, but the type of BOFU content you use often differs from what you might use at the top or mid stages. While those stages use content to draw interest and gain traction, BOFU content should turn prospects into paying customers.

At this stage, you want to highlight your content, products, and services on a more personalized level. The prospect should be able to envision how your offerings can serve their unique goals and objectives. While this list is not exhaustive, here are some content ideas that work great for bottom-funnel marketing:

Blog Posts

Blog posts, like articles, are a great form of BOFU content in marketing because they can drive traffic to your website through search engine optimization (SEO) tactics. Better still, a well-written blog post will include valuable information about your product, links to other web content, and usually a call to action (CTA). These details persuade the user to act, like making a purchase or signing up for a trial.

Testimonials

Testimonials from satisfied customers help to legitimize your products and services. When leads have doubts about your offerings, real testimonials can often give the prospect the reassurance they need to make a purchase. A testimonial is an endorsement, and when you display these endorsements from reputable clients, your chances of converting a lead into a sale improve substantially.

Infographics

Infographics are popular because they take complex information and display it in a visually appealing way. Images, graphics, and visuals are more digestible than columns of text and make it easier for users to remember critical details about your products or services. You can include statistics, customer stories, and other reinforcing messages to convince the lead that your business is the one they want and need.

Webinars

Webinars allow you to engage with your leads within a virtual environment. In this digital space, you can share about your business in greater detail, including product demonstrations, Q&As, high-quality slides, and other fun interactive tactics to help complete the sale. You can even record the webinar and upload it to your website for leads who cannot attend.

Paid Advertising

From Google to Twitter to Facebook, just about every modern online platform allows you to publish and distribute paid advertising to your most qualified leads. Of course, you’ll need to establish a budget for this initiative, as paid advertising can be expensive. Despite that, it’s a strategic effort worth pursuing if you have the funds to target new prospects and remarket to familiar customers. Targeted email advertising campaigns are also an effective and popular option.

Product Demos

Offering product demos and live demonstrations is the best way to drive customer interaction with your product or services. Whether you hold the demo virtually or in person, it’s an easy way for you to showcase the best aspects of your products and how they work. To personalize the experience, you can bring in realistic case studies and situations where other customers chose your product. Make sure that your demo covers all key points of interest so it satisfies the needs of your prospects at all stages.

Case Studies

Case studies help you gain valuable insight into how your product works for consumers in a real-world context. While you could put case studies in middle funneling, a prospect must have some desire to purchase your product or service before they review your published case studies—so it can work at the BOFU stage too. You could interview an ideal customer and develop a success story based on their experience with your product, why they bought it, and whether they would recommend it to others.

Pricing Pages

Many potential customers only care a little about all the fancy content and extra product features. What matters most to them is the price. You can cater to this simple desire with a price page showing your different plans. Customers can use this resource to determine which plan works best for their needs.

Competitor Comparisons

As consumers, we always want to know how two or more brands compare. Which product is higher quality, cheaper, and best meets a prospect’s wants and needs? You can produce content showing how your product or service differs from your competitors and define the aspects that make your business unique. Capitalize on those details and demonstrate to your high-value lead why your company is the best option for them.

7 Strategies for Bottom-Funnel Marketing

When deciding which strategies to use at the bottom of the funnel, there are many elements to consider. Details like your business purpose, target demographic, and product industry will ultimately determine which ones work best for you and your audience. Here are seven strategies you can use to improve your bottom-funnel marketing outcomes:

1. Remarketing

Remarketing or retargeting is when you focus your marketing efforts on people who have previously interacted with your brand. These individuals may be easier to convert into paying customers because of their familiarity with your company, allowing them to have certain expectations of you (which you can capitalize on). An online ad that targets consumers based on their previous internet searches is one such example of remarketing. Meanwhile, new prospects have no experience with you, so first impressions are crucial for successful conversions in these cases.

2. Promo Codes and Discounts

From individuals to entire corporations, everyone likes to save money. Once you’ve brought awareness to your brand during the top and mid stages, you can attract them by offering discounts and promo codes on your products and services. While cutting prices for these promotions can hurt your profits for a little while, it could encourage them to stick around as long-term, high-value customers once those discounts expire.

3. Transferring Leads to Your Sales Team

Marketing to prospects is one thing, but landing the sale is an entirely different ball game. Sometimes it’s best to hand off leads to your sales team, as these professionals can transform your bottom-funnel efforts into successful conversions. In fact, it’s common practice to transfer a lead to the sales team as they get to the end of their buyer’s journey to address concerns or questions that only a salesperson can answer thoroughly.

4. Upselling

Upselling is a sales strategy where you persuade customers to purchase a more expensive version of the products and services they’ve committed to buying. Sometimes an upsell might take the form of a product upgrade or a package deal. When you upsell, you’re expanding on your initial marketing and sales efforts, but it doesn’t usually require much additional effort. Sometimes simply exposing the customer to these other options is enough to persuade them.

5. Business Development Representatives

Business development representatives are professionals who generate new business ventures, qualify leads, and work with prospective buyers. These sales experts can produce quality leads for you through tactics like cold calling, social selling, cold emails, and networking. While they usually perform their work during the top and mid stages of the marketing funnel, their efforts are crucial to your bottom-funnel marketing objectives.

6. Content Variety for High-Volume Keywords

Different market segments require content that matches their needs. To add variety to the content you produce for these segments, look at the keywords people use when searching for a solution, service, or product. These common search terms can tell you exactly what your audience wants to see from your brand’s content. For example, the common keywords that senior citizens use will usually differ from the search terms young adults or teens use to find info online. So diversifying your content will help you reach a wider audience and expand your brand’s target demographic.

7. High-Quality User Experiences

Giving your prospects appealing content is excellent, but what about the digital spaces that host your content—like your website, product pages, and virtual sales materials? The user experience is just as important for driving traffic and converting leads into buying customers. If they become frustrated with your site, they may decide to leave. Therefore, your website and aligning content must be easy to navigate, buy, access, view, and download.

Bottom-Funnel Marketing vs. Mid- and Top-Funnel Marketing

While each layer of the marketing funnel is crucial for a fully developed campaign, it’s vital that you understand how mid and top-of-the-funnel marketing differs from bottom-funnel marketing. That way, you can focus your efforts on whichever stage is best for your immediate goals. Here’s what you need to know:

Purpose

Top and mid-funnel marketing approaches focus on building brand awareness, increasing traffic to your website, and remarketing to interested prospects. Comparatively, the bottom-funnel is about converting leads into sales. So content at the top and middle levels of your marketing funnel should aim to answer questions, provide expert insights, and drive leads further down the funnel, while the purpose of the bottom level is to convert leads into paying customers.

Costs

Generally, top and mid-funnel initiatives will cost more than bottom-funnel tactics because you have to pay for the upfront costs of starting your campaign. From content generation to social media ads, every tool you use to reach your audience is an expense that adds up. If these costs continuously exceed your profit gains, then the financial health of your business is in jeopardy.

Difficulty

The hardest part of most marketing campaigns is conversions. In the top and mid stages of the funnel, pushing out advertisements and content to bring some recognition and potential interest to your brand is relatively easy. As long as you have the money to sustain these efforts, it’s simple. But convincing a prospective customer to make a purchase can be challenging, especially if the benefits of what they’re buying take time. You must be more thoughtful in convincing the individual that your offer is better than anything else on the market.

Join Forces with CopyPress and Improve Your Bottom-Funnel Marketing Strategies

So you’ve reached the bottom of the marketing funnel, and you’re ready to close the sale. But you need something to help boost your content—just enough to convince your leads to become paying customers. This is where CopyPress comes in. We have the tools, resources, and expertise to help you take full advantage of your bottom-funnel marketing plans.

Using our in-depth content gap analysis, we help you identify content gaps and discover new topics to boost brand recognition in your field. We work directly with your business to help you transform these insights into an actionable and results-driven content plan. Schedule a strategy call with us and find out how your content marketing efforts can produce the best outcomes for your team.

Lauren Oliver

Digital Marketing Manager at CopyPress