How to Nurture Mid-Funnel Leads with the Right B2B Content Mix

You probably remember learning about the concept of the marketing funnel and the need to create content for the different stages of the buyer journey. And you’ve likely either used the funnel — or may at some point — when building a content strategy or planning a marketing campaign.

The B2B buying process is, in reality, not as linear as what might be suggested by the concept of a buyer simply “moving down the funnel.” From the lens of the funnel, the buyer starts at the brand awareness stage (at the top of the funnel), then becomes a mid-funnel lead, and eventually makes a sale or purchase. While it’s not perfect, it remains a framework to help inform our editorial decisions.

The middle portion of the funnel is equally as important as its outer compadres in defining a brand’s longevity and the success of a content marketing strategy. Marketers who devalue this stage or fail to invest in its maturation may be missing out on opportunities to further enhance relationships with potential customers.

According to a 2024 study conducted by the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs and sponsored by Brightspot, 63% of the content marketers surveyed said content helped them nurture subscribers, audiences, and leads — which takes place at the middle of the funnel — in the past year. At the same time, nearly half (48%) of the content marketers surveyed said they find it challenging to align content with the buyer’s journey.

These data points should alert us to the importance of the stage between content creation and conversion. While leads pour in with successful top-funnel campaigns, it takes effective mid-funnel content to move them toward a sale.

What is mid-funnel content?

Mid-funnel content bridges this gap between initial intrigue and the final purchase. It is the layer of the conversion funnel that holds everything together.

Generally, mid-funnel content is most important to B2B companies. That’s because B2B sales cycles are generally more complex, which means you need to spend more time building and nurturing relationships with prospects. The middle of the funnel for B2C companies, by contrast, is focused more on customer-relationship management.

How do you know if you’re producing the right mid-funnel content? Let’s first distinguish where mid-funnel prospects come from and what our goals are when they get there.

From the lens of the traditional funnel, mid-funnel folks are viewed as either leads that have trickled down from your compelling top-funnel content or remain in your system as potential repeat buyers — though we now know that realistically, buyers may enter the funnel at any stage, and they may move back and forth between stages.

Regardless of how somebody arrived at the middle of your funnel, the goal of content at this stage is to provide material that will help buyers evaluate your brand and develop an affinity for it over your competitors. The magic happens by deepening the connection made in the top of the funnel with content that is specific to different segments of your overall audience.

Goals of mid-funnel marketing

While the content approach will be different depending on where in the spectrum they fall, the principle remains the same. Mid-funnel content must:

1. Nurture leads, drawing them to an eventual purchase. (Hello, ROI!)
2. Educate current and potential customers on the factors that differentiate your brand.
3. Continually inspire an emotional connection with unique audience segments to establish brand loyalty and create brand advocates.

Mid-funnel content is persuasive, educational, and targeted. Aimed at people already in your CRM system, mid-funnel content delivers the right content to the right people at the right time, usually with the help of marketing automation technology. (More on that in a minute.) While top-of-funnel content should be optimized for broad reach among your target audience, mid-funnel content should be intentionally crafted to speak to the needs of those closer to buying your product.

Email segmentation to nurture mid-funnel leads

The easiest and most effective way to nurture your mid-funnel email strategy is through segmentation. Age, gender, and geography are all valuable segments, but behavior-driven groups carry the most potential to connect in a relevant and valuable way with individual users. Newsletter subscribers will follow a different path than those who entered your system through a YouTube how-to campaign and will thus expect different material. Similarly, podcast subscribers will respond differently to product and service offers than the avid long-form reader.

What is at the heart of these unique segmentation patterns? Determining who you are talking to, where they came from, and what they are seeking, and being able to deliver targeted material at the optimal time for the purpose of engagement. (Remember, there are people on the other end of those Gmail and Outlook accounts.)

Types of content to nurture mid-funnel leads

Middle-of-funnel content may take any (or more) of the following forms. It’s all about having the right context mix to meet buyers’ needs.

Detailed e-books

E-books can be a great way to nurture mid-funnel leads. They can also serve to deepen the relationship between you and your audience by providing rich information on a particular topic.

HubSpot is a pro at this strategy. Its persuasive, data-heavy (and free) e-books are embedded in blog posts and easily accessible via the company’s website. As a mid-funnel tool, the focus is not on acquiring leads but on assisting the buyer in his or her evaluation process.

Case studies

Case studies or customer stories are an easy way to show, not tell, prospects exactly what you do through the eyes of the buyer by leveraging direct quotations and data points. The impact? The company demonstrates the power of its products through a user’s lens. They can be so effective that the Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs study revealed that 78% of content marketers have used them in the past 12 months — an increase from 67% the previous year.

Case studies are incredibly useful for content marketers as they can be repurposed into many formats, like blog posts, social media material, newsletter highlights, testimonials, and more. The website of Coursera for Business — the B2B arm of the online learning company — features a robust library of success stories in both video and downloadable formats, and visitors can search for content assets based on topic and other parameters.

Webinars

A webinar can be an interactive and engaging way to say to your prospects, “Here’s what you should know about your industry and here’s why we are best suited to address it.” The best webinars are those that provide unique and timely subject matter and an interesting narrative that’s relevant to the issues facing your audience. By choosing the right presenters and guests, showing compelling (but not overwhelming) visual elements, and making time for audience questions, your webinar can be a great way to nurture mid-funnel leads.

White papers and research

A white paper typically looks like a longform fact sheet or an e-book on statistical steroids. Call me crazy, but Docusign has nailed this white paper on measuring the value of an e-signature, providing data, colorful graphics and images, and actionable how-to’s for its entrepreneurial audience, all while promoting its product and brand.

Integrated email campaigns

Email campaigns can (and should) be more strategic than a weekly newsletter blast — they’re the bread and butter of the mid-funnel process. Groove is exemplary with its mid-funnel email campaigns, as are Dropbox and Marketing Sherpa. In each case, notice onboarding emails that inspire a double opt-in, follow-ups with new perks when engagement is low, personal 1:1 recommendations based on email or site interaction, and — here’s the kicker — humanized, engaging language.

ROI calculators

Rather intuitively, ROI calculators allow prospects to plug in website and company information to determine the necessary investment to reach set goals.

The power of automation

Keep in mind that the list above is neither exhaustive nor precise. Exactly what your content looks like will depend on how different segments fit into your overall sales goals. The short answer to mid-funnel content creation is that there is no universal content template. Mid-funnel strategy is successful by the nature of its specificity, creativity and case-specific data.

How do content marketers organize and monetize this specificity? Enter automation.

Too often, once marketers acquire leads after investing in top-of-funnel content, they hit their general audience with unspecific or final-sell material. Without paying attention to audience behavior and tailoring a relevant message, the relationship between prospect and seller is cheapened.

Mid-funnel prospects are humans, and, naturally, they want a degree of familiarity once the relationship has been initiated. That means you have to engage in a thoughtful and direct manner that is specific to them.

That’s where automation comes in.

Superior marketers adapt their mid-funnel strategy to provide authentic content to distinct groups and individuals. Automation — particularly of email — simplifies this segmentation, personalizing information during this critical stage in relationship-building.

At the heart of these segmentation patterns is a greater understanding of the motivation behind the behavior (i.e., desires) of your customers. Conceptualizing these actions — and the people behind them — will allow you to map and deliver content to tilt purchase decisions in your favor and create brand loyalists.

Automation tools for mid-funnel marketing

When you first hear the term “automation,” you may immediately think it’s cold and robotic. The opposite is the case. Tools like drip campaigns, lists, tags, and rules in email software, and smart lists and snippets, make it easy to organize segments of your audience to speak to them in a targeted and engaging way. Tools may even allow marketers to sort by company attribute (title, department, location), behavior, or timeframe.

Meaningful data supports automation’s role in fueling the mid-funnel portion of your content strategy. Automated emails have an 83.4% higher open rate and a 341.1% higher click rate, according to an Omnisend study.

For further examples of what to do and not to do in the automated mid-funnel, just look in your inbox. You’ll quickly be able to differentiate the companies that have effectively automated you into their systems — and responded to your behavior — from those that have you on blast.

Lead scoring

If automated mid-funnel content bridges the gap between intrigue and sale, how do we measure the impact of this content’s success?

Like creation and distribution strategy, the metrics used for mid-funnel measurement depend on your goals. If the goal of a mid-funnel campaign is to offer an upgraded service or a certification, the newsletter subscriber who always opens your email but never clicks on a link will hold a different value than the subscriber who went to your blog from the email, read the entire article, and downloaded an e-book on the same topic that corresponds to your improved service.

While the leads may have originated from the same newsletter list, it makes sense to assign different values to these people based on their actions. This numerical assignment represents different proximities to a potential sale.

Oracle, Act-On, and Salesforce each have CRM mechanisms to help assign value to prospects based on their one-to-one and/or segmented engagement. Organized as a numerical system, the lead-scoring process lets you assign points to prospects depending on a number of variables (age, gender, demographic, behavior), resulting in an evolving number for each audience member.

The result is twofold. In addition to determining the proximity of a prospect to a final sale at a given point in time (when and how are they likely to make a purchase?), lead scoring allows you to track touch points to help you start to determine the ROI on specific pieces of content. The more you understand your segmented lists, personalized emails, and the behavior of these groups, the easier it is to pinpoint valuable metrics and determine attribution.

Checklist

While there are no golden rules in mid-funnel marketing, here’s a recap of what you need to know. (Use it as a checklist, print out for your fridge, and ponder it over a sandwich.)

Align mid-funnel goals with overall sales targets. Marketing and sales should always be simpatico: Marketing spoon-feeds ripe leads to sales, while sales returns the favor with valuable insight.

Take advantage of automation tools and email campaigns. Remember the power of segmentation, personalization, and behavior-driven lists. As long as segmentation is thoughtful and intentional, a diverse array of leads will remain valuable for long periods of time.

Track audience behavior. Take the time to understand how people in your mid-funnel engage with you and reach out to them in real-time. This involves marketing and sales collaboration. Use sophisticated, actionable metrics that make sense for your overall goals. You need to understand how well your audience knows what differentiates your brand and what drives them down the conversion funnel. And don’t underestimate content engagement metrics.

Be forward thinking. Integrate mid-funnel content with social. Both mid-funnel and social strategy tie into brand authority, trustworthiness, and recognition.

Now, go forth. Nurture those audience relationships. And remember that the middle of the funnel is the glue that holds the funnel together.

Ask the Content Strategist: FAQs about search rankings

How can I determine the right topics for my mid-funnel content?

To find topics that will drive ROI, you can start by analyzing your audience’s pain points, frequently asked questions, and the content they have engaged with most. You can also revisit the content topic pillars or themes that drive your content strategy.

What metrics should I focus on to evaluate the success of my mid-funnel content?

Buyer engagement can be measured by metrics such as email open and click-through rates; social media likes, shares and comments; and audience interaction levels with specific content types, like web or blog hyperlink clicks, repeat visitors, or time on page. Additionally, lead scoring and tracking how leads progress typically through the funnel will provide insights into content effectiveness.

How often should I send mid-funnel content to my leads?

Your mid-funnel content cadence should aim to strike a balance between maintaining engagement and avoiding overwhelming your audience. Generally, a bi-weekly or monthly cadence works well, but it’s important to monitor engagement rates and adjust your content calendar accordingly.