We’ve all seen the beautiful funnel slides: clean lines, perfect labels, and a tidy little progression from “awareness” to “closed-won.” And then we go back to work—where none of that actually happens.

Real buyer journeys are messy, they skip around, they binge content one week and ghost the next. Sometimes they read a case study before they even know what your product does.

And yet... we’re still building content like the funnel is linear, predictable, and obedient.

If your content isn’t supporting how people actually move through the buying process, you’re not just wasting effort—you’re leaving revenue on the table.

This post breaks down how to:

• Build content that maps to the real funnel
• Avoid the giant dead zone that is middle-of-funnel content
• Work with product marketing to make it all connect

Top of Funnel — Attention, Not Awareness Theater

Top-of-funnel content  means being relevant where it matters. This is your moment to help your audience feel seen—before you ever mention your product. At this stage, buyers aren’t searching for solutions; they’re looking for someone who gets the problem. Or better yet, someone who can articulate it better than they can.
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Effective TOFU content surfaces the problem in a way that makes your audience say, “Ugh, yes—that’s exactly it.” It builds credibility without pitching. It introduces your voice, values, and point of view in a way that feels human, not transactional. It invites curiosity, not commitment.

This might take the form of blog posts that take a real stand, research-backed insights on industry pain points, challenge-based social content, or educational guides and videos that unpack the “why” behind the problem. Ungated, problem-first content hubs can work beautifully here—especially if they prioritize usefulness over cleverness.
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What you don’t want is another polished “brand awareness” campaign that sounds like corporate wallpaper. Avoid the copy-paste SEO blog factory. And maybe hold off on the “schedule a demo” CTA until, you know, they’ve had more than one touchpoint.
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Your goal here isn’t volume—it’s resonance. Top-of-funnel content should make the right people stop scrolling and think: “These folks are paying attention. I want to hear more from them.”
Get that part right, and moving them through the rest of the funnel becomes a whole lot easier.
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Middle of Funnel — The Most Ignored Stage in B2B Content
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Middle-of-funnel is where things get serious—but also where most content strategies mysteriously go dark. At this point, your audience already knows the problem exists, and they’re starting to evaluate how to solve it. They’ve seen your top-of-funnel content. They’ve nodded along with your spicy takes. Now they’re wondering, “Okay, but how do you actually help me?”

And this is the part too many teams skip. TOFU content gets all the creative energy. BOFU gets the conversion pressure. And the middle? It gets... ignored. That’s a problem, because without strong MOFU content, you’re asking people to jump from “interesting idea” to “book a demo” without giving them a reason to trust you.
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Middle-of-funnel content should build trust through depth. It needs to show how your solution fits into the buyer’s world, answer questions they haven’t asked yet, and make them feel smarter for sticking around. This is the stage where you stop just educating—and start positioning.

The best MOFU content includes things like detailed use cases, product storytelling that doesn’t sound like a user manual, ROI explainers, and comparison guides that help prospects make sense of their options. Repurposed webinar content, podcast clips, and industry-specific blog series can also do heavy lifting here—especially when they’re tied to the buyer’s challenges, not just your messaging pillars.
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This isn’t flashy content. It’s functional content. It should make your sales team’s life easier and your buyer’s decision-making clearer. Done right, MOFU content doubles as enablement—it educates the buyer and equips the champion inside the deal.

If you’re wondering why your pipeline looks strong but your conversion rates are stalling? There’s a good chance this is where things are falling apart.
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Bottom of Funnel — The Confidence Closer

Bottom-of-funnel is where the decision gets made—or delayed. At this point, your buyers know who you are, they understand the problem, and they’re trying to figure out if you’re the right answer. And spoiler: they’re nervous. Because saying yes to you means spending money, putting their name on a recommendation, and betting on your product to actually deliver.
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This is where content shifts from educating to reassuring. Your job here is to reduce perceived risk, reinforce fit, and give buyers the tools they need to advocate internally. If top-of-funnel is about attraction, and middle-of-funnel is about alignment, then bottom-of-funnel is about confidence.

That means case studies tailored to their industry or role. ROI calculators that show real impact. Post-demo follow-up kits that answer “what’s next?” before they even ask. Customer testimonials, competitor comparisons, and sales enablement assets that speak directly to objections—they all live here. BOFU content should feel like it was made for them, not recycled from last quarter’s pitch deck.

And let’s not forget who else this content is for: your sales team. When your BOFU content is strong, it shortens cycles, boosts win rates, and takes pressure off of your reps to “create” content mid-conversation. It becomes a shared language between marketing and sales—a toolkit for closing the gap between “maybe” and “yes.”
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This is the content that helps buyers walk into their internal meetings with confidence.
And that confidence is what closes deals.
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Work With Product Marketing, Not Around Them

You can create beautiful, thoughtful content for every stage of the funnel—but if it’s not aligned with product marketing, it’s probably not landing the way you think it is.
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Product marketers are the bridge between your product’s features and your buyer’s reality. They translate what the product does into what the customer cares about. They know the personas. They understand the competitive landscape. They’ve seen the gaps in the message. And if you’re not working closely with them, you’re likely repeating work, misfiring on positioning, or missing key moments to support the funnel.
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The problem is, too often, content and PMM operate like two separate teams who meet once per quarter to fight over a messaging doc.
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That’s a miss.
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The best funnel content is born out of collaboration—messaging frameworks created together, regular check-ins on campaign performance, shared visibility into product launches, and joint planning sessions that map content to go-to-market priorities. When you’re in sync, PMM ensures the messaging is on point, and content ensures it actually resonates. It’s not a handoff—it’s a partnership.
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If you want your funnel content to actually drive results, you can’t just pull positioning from a Notion doc and hope for the best. You need to be in the room, in the Slack, and in the loop—with PMM helping shape the story across every stage.
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And one thing to add, especially for startups: PMMs and product managers are often the gatekeepers to customer calls. While PMM may technically “own” the voice of the customer, content needs to be in the room for as many of those interviews and discovery calls as possible. Why? Because the nuance—the pain points, the language, the hesitation—can get lost in translation when PM or PMM is stretched thin or simply hasn’t had to think through the lens of content before.
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Being in the conversation gives you the raw material that fuels actual resonance. It also helps you build better sales enablement—because now you’re not guessing what the customer needs to hear, you heard it directly.
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Bottom line: collaboration is great. But proximity to the buyer is where the real clarity lives.

The more aligned you are, the clearer your content becomes—and the easier it is for your buyers to say, “Yep, they get us.”
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Build for the Funnel That Buyers Actually Use

It’s easy to build content for the funnel you wish existed—the tidy, linear one from your sales kickoff slides. But real buyers don’t behave like that. They zigzag. They ghost. They come back six weeks later with a forwarded link and a new stakeholder in tow.
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If your content isn’t meeting them where they are—at every stage—you’re not guiding their journey. You’re hoping they figure it out on their own.
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So here’s your move:

• Build content that maps to how people actually buy
• Fill the gaps in the middle of the funnel, not just the ends
• Partner with product marketing like your funnel depends on it—because it does

When you do that, your content stops being a support function. It becomes a revenue engine.

Ready to Map Content to the Funnel That Actually Converts?

DM your biggest funnel challenge—let’s untangle it!