Content repurposing strategies help convert marketing assets into content for different stages of the buyer’s journey through the marketing funnel. For example, bottom-of-the-funnel (BoFu) content can be repurposed into multiple pieces of content for the top of the funnel. However, be careful how you do it, as your audience and channels are likely to be very different.
BoFu content like case studies, eBooks, and white papers are some of the best formats to repurpose. They are rich in detail and often technical or solution oriented. However, when converting a marketing asset into content for a different point in the funnel, special care must be taken to consider the new target audience and what stage of awareness they are in. Simply repurposing a case study as an SEO optimized blog post or series of LinkedIn posts will not resonate with prospects at the top of your funnel.
Let’s take a look at BoFu content and the considerations to be made when repurposing it for top-of-the-funnel (ToFu) content.
What is bottom-of-the-funnel (BoFu) content
BoFu content is targeted at an audience very familiar with your brand and the product or solution you offer. Oftentimes, the goal of the content is to educate an audience around a specific solution, feature, or use case to push them to buy. The assumption is that the consumer of BoFu content does not need high level overviews and might even be ready to purchase from your company.
We usually see content like whitepapers, case studies, competitor comparisons, eBooks, and data-heavy infographics at the bottom of the funnel with the goal of accelerating the sales cycle.
Who consumes BoFu content?
The ideal audience for BoFu content is an audience that is ready to buy.
Consumers of BoFu content often consist of warm prospects, prospects currently in the sales cycle, and people very familiar with your product or service that may become a customer some time in the near future. Casual readers doing research about your industry or category are not the ideal consumer of this type of content.
What are the main goals of BoFu content?
The goal of BoFu content is to convert a warm prospect to buy your solution.
BoFu content is meant to accelerate a prospect down the sales funnel. The prospects are usually very familiar with your offering, but may need an extra push or a few more reasons to make the decision now rather than waiting until next month or next quarter. Elaborating on their specific problem and the consequences of not solving it now is an effective approach to creating BoFu content.
Case studies, data-heavy reports, and polarizing competitor comparisons are great ways to move the needle for a prospect that may not have urgency or is on the fence between your solution and a competitor’s.
Where does BoFu content sit in the awareness funnel?
BoFu content sits at the very bottom of the awareness funnel where the prospects are fully educated and ready to make a purchasing decision.
BoFu content sits at the “most aware” section of the awareness funnel. Consumers of this content are either seeking it out to make an educated decision based on prior research and information, or it is delivered directly to them by direct advertising or sales in order to accelerate the sales process.
Repurposing BoFu content
How to start a content repurposing objective
There are four main steps to starting any content repurposing objective. In short, you need to figure out who, where, how, and what (and in that order):
- Audience: Who is the target audience for the repurposed content? What stage of awareness do they have and what are they trying to learn from it?
- Channel: Where will this target audience be reached? SEO? Social? Email marketing?
- Format: How does the audience expect to consume on the channels you can reach them? Does a simple webpage work? Twitter thread? Carousel on LinkedIn?
- Content: What standalone content and key takeaways can be extracted from the BoFu content to be repurposed?
Let’s look at an example.
Most large companies publish content across the entire marketing funnel from social posts to case studies. Atlassian is an example of this. They have BoFu content like this case study about how Nextiva saved over $50k by moving to Atlassian. They also publish a lot of ToFu content on their blog like this post: Top 8 ways to grow your career at home.
The difference in depth and impact between these two assets is clear. One is rich in specific product and solution detail and the other is broad and meant to gently educate a reader on a topic tangentially related to Atlassian’s product suite.
However, if we take a deeper look at the case study with Nextiva, we can extract a few general themes that are not specific to Atlassian, Nextiva, or the partnership between them. By asking the following questions, we can uncover a few of them.
Q: What problem was Nextiva facing before they started using Atlassian?
A: Nextiva was growing so fast, it was having a hard time managing its internal tools.
Inspiration for ToFu content:
- Operational challenges for high growth companies
- Managing employee productivity while your company is growing quickly
- Challenges of process management during hiring surges
Q: How did Atlassian solve Nextiva’s problem?
A: The centralized all of their internal tools to “calm the chaos”
Inspiration for ToFu content:
- Why centralized tooling is important for high growth companies
- How consolidated documentation and knowledge bases keeps growing teams organized
- What you’ll gain by centralizing internal tools: security and savings
Each of these topics is touched on in the case study and can easily be turned into standalone social posts or blogs. An understanding of how each relates to the customer in the case study gives you a great understanding of the pain points that your ToFu readers might be experiencing as well.
The most important thing to notice is that the ToFu topics aren’t specific to any Atlassian product or service. They describe a problem, and discuss general solutions of that problem. The purpose of ToFu content is to guide the user through the exploration phase. They may go consider other solutions, including your competitors, after reading your content. And that’s great! That is a healthy stage in a buyer’s journey, and it’s where your middle and bottom-of-the-funnel content plays a big role. At that point, they are aware of their problem and potential solutions, and it’s your job is to convince them your’s is the best.
Repurposing BoFu content as ToFu content
There’s an enormous opportunity with BoFu content to repurpose it for an audience that is less aware of your product or service. For example, an audience that may not be looking for your solution at the moment is not ready to read a case study with your star client or read through a customer comparison article. However, there is plenty of content within these assets that would be interesting to any reader, even at the top of the funnel.
Look at BoFu content as research reports that you need to convert into short, understandable, and engaging pieces of content for future customers that are just beginning their journey. For example, you can extract the key themes from a case study and write separate blog posts, or social posts about each one. The case study likely describes in detail how your solution solved a specific problem for a customer. By extracting that problem, and removing any detail around the customer and your specific solution, you have a great ToFu topic to create social, email, and SEO content about.
This can be extended to any ToFu content. Ebooks often go deep on a specific topic and offer a comprehensive explanation and authoritative analysis. The same principles apply.
Advantages of repurposing BoFu content
BoFu content accomplishes a very specific goal for a small audience. However, the amount of work and insights that go into creating it should be exploited throughout the funnel. Understanding what a BoFu audience wants to consume is very beneficial to planning a content strategy for the top and middle of the funnel.
If you know the audience that is ready to buy your product cares about a specific set of topics, then it’s likely that the unaware and cold audience at the top might be interested in these same topics, in a more general sense.
Key takeaways
Bottom-of-the-funnel (BoFu) content offers a valuable opportunity to understand the interests of users throughout the marketing funnel. By understanding the key themes and points of interest in BoFu content, you can extract insights and topics to create content at the top of the funnel through SEO, email marketing, and social media.
For a more detailed example of how to repurpose a piece of BoFu content, check out our previous article about repurposing case studies.
