Bottom of the Funnel Marketing Strategy: How to Get More Leads

Most discussions around bottom of funnel (BOFU) marketing are about tactics to use, such as: 

• Personalized email campaigns
• Retargeting ads
• Demos
• Limited time offers or discounts, etc.

While these are all useful and have their place, there are two issues with labeling these ‘marketing strategies’:

1. They are tactics not strategies. A strategy is a long term plan for how you’re going to accomplish something. A tactic is just one (of many) specific actions you can take to progress on that plan. For example, offering a limited time discount is one way of closing deals, but there are many others.
   
   
2. They are tactics to close leads, not bring them in. The job of marketing is to bring in qualified leads. It’s the sales team’s job to close the deal (with a good product demo, personalized follow-up emails, well-timed discounts, testimonials, etc.)

So, if these commonly shared tips aren’t BOFU marketing strategies, what are? 

A BOFU marketing strategy is about choosing which channels to use and how you’re going to use them to get more leads from people who are ready to buy now. 

Below, we share our experience on which channels have worked the best for BOFU marketing. Namely, we dive into organic search, paid search, and paid social and why they’ve worked well in BOFU marketing strategies we’ve executed for a variety of clients. Then, we also cover how to measure the success of your BOFU marketing strategy. 

Paid and Organic Search: Best Channels for Driving Leads

In our experience, search engine marketing (both paid and organic) is the number one best channel for BOFU marketing because unlike basically every other marketing channel, targeting someone through search means you know what the reader is looking for at that moment and can show up for keywords that indicate they’re actively searching for a solution like yours. 

While this is well accepted for paid search, most companies don’t think of organic (SEO) as a bottom of funnel strategy. Let’s discuss each in turn.

Organic Search (SEO) Strategy 

When it comes to SEO, there is a culture of using it as a top of funnel (TOFU) channel. Content and SEO teams seem to prioritize traffic above all else and pick keywords based on what will get them the most traffic the fastest. 

The typical thinking behind how a traffic-based strategy will lead to new customers usually rests on capturing emails from this traffic and dripping emails to your readers until they are ready to buy. 

But our data suggests there are two flaws with this approach. 

First, it ignores the fact that BOFU SEO keywords exist. 

BOFU keywords include any keywords that show the reader has buying intent now — i.e., that they’re looking for a tool or service to solve an existing problem. For example, ‘best route tracking software’, ‘best way to collect online payments’, ‘top software development services’, ‘automatic payroll solutions’, etc. 

Not only do BOFU keywords exist, but they also convert at a much higher rate than typical high volume TOFU keywords. For example, here are the conversion rates for 60+ BOFU and TOFU keywords for our client Geekbot: 

As you can see, BOFU keywords don’t convert just a little bit better — they convert significantly better, multiple orders of magnitude. This difference is so great, in practice it’s the difference between the entire company thinking “SEO isn’t a customer acquisition channel” to “SEO is definitely a customer acquisition channel”. We’ve seen this mental shift happen to many clients over the years.  

The natural next argument here is: while BOFU conversion rates might be better, don’t TOFU posts have so much more traffic that they end up with more conversions overall? The answer is no. We consistently find the opposite to be true. Continuing the example with Geekbot, the difference in conversion rates more than makes up for the difference in traffic.

Note in the second graph, the BOFU pieces generated over 1300 product signups when the TOFU pieces generated only 400 despite the heavy traffic disparity in favor of the TOFU pieces in the graph above. 

The second flaw with the TOFU approach is that the math of collecting emails and dripping or nurturing those until they convert doesn’t usually work out. 

Reason being, the conversion rate of BOFU content to a product call-to-action (CTA) can be as high as email collection in a lot of cases. For example, in this study of over 95 keywords we ranked clients for, BOFU keywords converted between 1%–5%, with many pieces converting at 10%+: 

These are the same conversion rates you often see for ebook and white paper downloads. Except with these BOFU conversions, visitors are immediately converting to the product CTA. They’re starting their trial or they’ve requested a demo. 

In contrast, for a TOFU conversion to a white paper or ebook, you still need to wait for another conversion to the product CTA after capturing their email. That means you need two conversions to happen. 

Mathematically, that means you’re multiplying two small percentages together to get a really small total conversion percentage. For example, say 5% download the whitepaper, then 2% of those to eventually request a demo, which results in a net 0.1% conversion rate. 

You can read more about this in our article comparing lead nurturing to direct conversions. 

Finally, there is also a logical fallacy in the “capture email and nurture to a lead” approach: 

It assumes you can manufacture buying intent, which in our experience is difficult. If someone gave you their email to join a webinar on IT trends, it doesn’t mean sending them emails with the right messaging is all of a sudden going to make them switch IT security platforms (a big decision for most companies requiring multiple stakeholders and tons of employee time to execute). 

They’ll need new software whenever they need it, and while yes, emailing them will help keep you top of mind, we’ve actually measured these conversion rates and it’s tiny when you multiply multiple conversion rates together to get a final visitor-to-lead rate.  

To help you get started with developing a good, BOFU organic strategy, check out these articles: 

• How to Find & Rank for Bottom of the Funnel Keywords
• What’s the Average Conversion Rate of Different SEO Keywords?

Paid Search

While many marketers don’t prioritize BOFU keywords enough in organic search, as we’ve argued up to now, with paid search, the culture is different. There is a focus on finding BOFU, “high intent” keywords because you have the added pressure of paying for every click. 

Most marketers aren’t going to intentionally spend money on clicks that may or may not lead to a paying customer sometime in the future — they need to clearly see that those clicks are turning into leads now in order to continue spending money on them. 

Despite this focus on BOFU, high intent keywords in paid search, we’ve nonetheless seen a few common issues with the way ad campaigns are set up and run that result in ad spend being used on TOFU and non-relevant topics that don’t drive leads. Namely:  

• Using cost-per-click (CPC) and number of clicks as the main metrics of success instead of leads. The thinking behind this type of strategy is similar to traffic-chasing, TOFU SEO strategies: if you can get really low CPC, you’ll be able to cast a wider net and therefore catch more leads. However, what we’ve seen is campaigns going after low CPC keywords that have almost no buying intent and therefore little to no chance of converting. Cheap clicks aren’t worth it if they never lead to customers.
   
• Using too much automation. Google offers many features for automating your ad campaigns that promise to optimize ad performance (e.g., dynamic ads, smart campaigns, broad match). However, in our experience, these tools inevitably make decisions that humans wouldn’t. We’ll use broad match (Google’s tool for finding extensive lists of related keywords that your ads will appear for) as an example. Let’s say a car rental agency starts with the keyword “car rentals”. Broad match search terms might include “car rentals near me” or “van rentals”, which both have buying intent and could be good options. However, it might also include “car lease deals” or even “bike rentals”. Neither of these keywords have buying intent for renting a car so the likelihood of either of them generating leads is quite low. We’ve seen this happen countless times. 

• Using account structures that are too broad. The most common mistakes here are including too many keywords per ad group, using too general of ad text, or pairing the wrong landing page with the ad. All of these issues can lead to low clicks and high bounce rates even if each individual keyword is BOFU and has the potential to drive leads. 

To dig deeper into each of these points and see specific examples of how we address these issues with our approach to paid search, check out our PPC service story here. 

Paid Social: A Good Option for B2C 

While we believe search engine marketing is the best BOFU channel for B2B businesses, we also wanted to mention paid social because it can be a good BOFU channel for B2C eCommerce businesses. 

Whereas B2B buying decisions are prompted by need (e.g., your inventory software is no longer being supported) and often include a significant process change (e.g., the entire sales team needs to learn how to use a new CRM), B2C buying decisions are much more emotional, spontaneous, and visual. 

For example, most of us don’t wait until our current shoes are unusable before buying another pair. We buy shoes (or clothes, etc.) just because we see some we like and could use. 

So for B2C businesses, it’s worth looking into paid social as a BOFU channel. We’d just recommend applying the same level of rigor to measuring leads and cost per lead as you do in search (see below). We’ve observed ad agencies engaging in similar practices in paid social, where they create campaigns that don’t generate many sales but argue that they’re beneficial for “brand awareness” — so exercise caution.

(Social media marketing isn’t where our expertise lies, however, it’s worth looking into further if you have a B2C business.)

How to Measure the Success of BOFU Marketing: Count Leads Not Traffic

When you’re filling the top of the funnel, it makes sense to track traffic. But as you move down the funnel, it’s no longer about pure volume but rather about the quality of those visitors from a sales perspective — i.e., leads. 

That’s why we believe the main metric of success should almost always be leads, not traffic. 

And, more specifically, it’s important to track leads by post (or by ad). This level of granular attribution is necessary for knowing which channels and pages are working. For example, in our Pain Point SEO post, we use the image below to show how, more often than not, the majority of your leads (and traffic) come from just 2–5 posts. 

Knowing this, you can direct more of your time and resources toward targeting similar topics, improving the rankings for high performing posts, and ensuring you keep high rankings for the posts that are working. (This is especially important for paid search and paid social since you’re paying for each click.)

We’ve written a detailed guide on how to directly attribute conversions to individual posts using GA4, which you can check out here: How to Set Up and Track GA4 Conversions. 

You can also watch our video about it here: 

When it comes to organic search, we carefully track rankings because we’ve found that rankings are directly correlated to leads. Leads often start coming in when you’re ranking on the first page for high buying-intent keywords and they really start flowing when you’re ranking in the top three positions. We use Ahrefs, but you can use any rank tracking tool that you prefer. 

FAQS

What is bottom of funnel marketing? 

Bottom of the funnel (BOFU) marketing deals with choosing which channels to use and how you plan to use those channels to attract potential buyers. 

Is it more effective to target the bottom of the funnel or the top of the funnel first? 

This is entirely dependent on your goals. For most businesses, the end goal is to increase conversions. In that case, it makes the most sense to start at the bottom of the funnel because those people are already prepared to make a purchase decision without you having to be responsible for every stage of the marketing funnel. 

Note: There are also many mid-funnel (MOFU) opportunities with higher conversion rates than TOFU marketing efforts.

How effective is a full funnel approach?

While the idea of starting at the top of the sales funnel and nurturing your target audience along until they’re at the decision stage is a long standing one, there are consumers and businesses out there that are ready to buy now. So why not target these people first? Not only is starting at the bottom of the funnel more efficient, it also results in more leads overall. For example, we’ve seen BOFU SEO posts convert at a much higher rate than TOFU posts — 10x higher. 

Then, as you run out of bottom of funnel marketing tactics and strategies to use, you can start working your way up the funnel. However, in our experience, there are way more bottom of the funnel keywords and opportunities than most businesses realize, so you can spend quite a bit of time and resources focusing entirely on ready buyers. 

Learn More About Our Agency

• SEO and Content Marketing Service: If you want to hire us to execute a content-focused SEO strategy built around driving lead generation and sales, not just traffic, you can learn more about working with us here.

• Paid Search Service: We started PPC services at Grow and Convert after seeing thousands of dollars of wasted spend in our client’s Google Ads accounts (full story). Specifically, we noticed that many paid search agencies focus their strategy around maximizing clicks and traffic and rely heavily on Google’s automation tools. In contrast, we applied our well honed bottom of funnel strategy from SEO to paid search, where we take an active, manual approach to ensuring every campaign maximizes lead generation instead of click generation.

• Join Our Content Marketing Team: If you’re a content marketer or writer and would love to do content marketing in this way, we’d love to have you apply to join our team.

• Our Content Marketing Course: Individuals looking to learn our agency’s content strategy and become better marketers, consultants, or business owners can join our private course and community, taught via case studies, and presented in both written and video content formats. We include several details and examples not found on this blog. Our course is also built into a community, so people ask questions, start discussions, and share their work in the lesson pages themselves, and we, along with other members, give feedback. Learn more here.

• Continue Learning: Find additional content on our blog and YouTube channel.