The journey from creating customers out of prospects who may never have heard of your brand before isn’t easy. For advertisers who overlook mid-funnel marketing, this journey can become even harder. We’ve seen so many make the mistake of focusing too much on the top and bottom of the funnel where you collect leads and cash, respectively. To avoid the same mistake and improve the potential of your full-funnel marketing efforts, you’ve come to the right place.
In this article, learn strategies, avoid common mistakes and achieve a higher level of success with your marketing funnel.
What is Mid-Funnel Marketing?
As the term suggests, it is in the middle of the funnel. You have built awareness at this point, meaning that your audience already knows the brand. However, the job of mid-funnel marketing is to take things further. In a sense, you can think of it as the getting-to-know-you stage in a relationship. They are acquainted with you, but they’re not sold on taking things to the next level. A customer may engage in the following behaviors mid-funnel:
- Seek more information about their problem or the potential solutions;
- Compare various potential solutions;
- Engage with the brand to clarify any questions;
- Verify the quality of the product or service.
Any of these behaviors should be satisfied to make it easier for the user to transition to the last stage of the funnel.
Why Should You Pay Special Attention to Mid-Funnel Marketing?
Just to be clear, we believe that you should take every part of the funnel seriously. Together, they help the audience transform from leads into customers. Unfortunately, many don’t take mid-funnel marketing seriously. Some even believe that this part of the funnel is inconsequential. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth. We’ll even go out on a limb and say that you should pay the most attention to mid-funnel marketing. This might sound controversial, but it’s also true. If you’re not sold on the idea, we hope that the following subsections will provide some clarity.
Nurturing Takes the Longest Time
Imagine someone walks up to you, introduces themselves, then asks you to buy something from them. Your answer is probably going to be no! Mid-funnel marketing is why most virtual interactions with brands aren’t like that. It can take a long time to properly educate and nurture your audience before they’re ready to buy. If mid-funnel marketing isn’t done correctly, they’ll never progress to the decision stage. In fact, users may fall off the funnel altogether, forget about the brand and go to the competition.
Mid-Funnel Marketing Requires Consistency
Great relationships aren’t built overnight. That’s why mid-funnel marketing needs your constant attention. The brand needs to be there for the audience at all times to answer their queries and address their pain points. Even if you already have a wealth of mid-funnel marketing assets, you still have to make sure that they reach the right audience. Any inconsistency may do more harm than just forcing you to rebuild the relationship. They may see it as a reflection of the quality of the experience that they’ll have with your product or service.
Mid-Funnel Marketing Improves the Entire Funnel
Every great piece of content that you produce to nudge your audience to the decision-making phase can accomplish even more. Mid-funnel marketing assets can also do the following:
- Improve the top of the funnel through repurposed content that creates consistent messaging;
- Create more confident leads that will have fewer hesitations to buy;
- Develop advocates out of customers because they felt supported through mid-funnel marketing.
So, even though the middle of the funnel doesn’t outright create leads or customers, it has an influence on the effectiveness of the top and bottom of the funnel.
Understanding Your Target Audience for Your Mid-Funnel Marketing Efforts
With digital marketing, you can literally make the entire world your audience. But we wouldn’t recommend doing that! Having a target audience ensures that you’re most efficiently allocating your ad budget to the right people. With diverse people, attitudes, cultures, local trends and so many other differences, any message will likely only resonate with a small population of users. That’s why you need to understand your target audience for mid-funnel marketing. If you want to keep them interested beyond the initial introduction, we have some solid ideas about what you can do.
The Importance of Audience Segmentation of Mid-Funnel Marketing
At the top of the funnel, you may cast a wide net to get the largest pool of would-be customers. However, a general approach is very unlikely to work as effectively in mid-funnel marketing. With audience segmentation, you can:
- Enhance personalization: This lets you address the particular needs of the various segments.
- Improve engagement: If you can directly capture and address highly specific pain points, they’ll be more likely to engage.
- Increase conversion rates: You’ll be able to properly nurture the leads and prepare them for the last stage of the funnel.
A lot of the materials that you create for mid-funnel marketing can be reused, too! For example, a blog about the best tools for affiliate marketing written last year will still be relevant in 2025!
Refining Targeting Using Existing Data
If you’re running a full-funnel campaign, it can make sense to use the audience and its segments. However, you should also assess any new information coming in, especially from the top of the funnel. This can shape the mid-funnel marketing target audience because your efforts may only be attracting a certain type of user or someone engaging in specific behaviors. By refining your targeting, you’ll be able to achieve the following:
- Focus your mid-funnel marketing efforts on an audience that’s excited to engage;
- Move users to the last part of the funnel more quickly;
- Optimize your ad budget.
Essentially, you identify those from the original audience that are most likely to move to the middle of the funnel.
Creating Detailed Customer Personas to Personalize Engagement
Combining your initial research with the new data coming in, what does your audience look like? To allow you to create more personalized engagement, don’t think of your mid-funnel marketing audience as thousands or even millions of people you’re trying to move closer to buying. Look back at your audience segments. Then, create a customer persona for each that contains the following:
- Name and photo;
- Demographics;
- Psychographics;
- Professional details;
- Behavior;
- Goals and aspirations;
- Pain points;
- Preferred means of communication;
- Real-life quotes and/or feedback;
- Buying decision factors.
Having customer personas makes it easier to empathize and come up with relevant content for them.
Effective Middle of the Funnel Marketing Tactics
Fortunately for you, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Regardless of the market that you’re serving, there are already go-to strategies for implementing mid-funnel marketing. We’ll discuss the most common ones. You’ll most likely end up using more than one of these tactics. However, don’t feel the need to use them all. Learn to prioritize your mid-funnel marketing efforts based on budget, time and target audience. Start with what you believe will make the biggest impact, then move forward from there.
Content Marketing
This involves creating informative content that will benefit your target audience. This is a popular choice for mid-funnel marketing because it’s relatively low cost. Once you’ve created the content, you can use it indefinitely. Additionally, its flexibility also allows you to reinvent content using the same information. This may include:
- Text content like blog posts and case studies;
- Comparison guides that compare at least two of your products or contrast yours with a competitor’s product;
- Infographics or e-books that are useful in a specific industry.
All these mid-funnel marketing materials don’t just provide content that the audience can consume. They also help build your authority and ensure your offer is considered.
Retargeting Campaigns
What you must remember is that the journey to the purchase isn’t always linear. At any point in the mid-funnel marketing, users can fall off the funnel or fail to move on to the last phase. For these scenarios, you don’t necessarily have to create new content for them. Instead, you just want to give them a little nudge by connecting users to information that’s most relevant to them. Instead of the usual display ads, we recommend using native advertisements. This way, your mid-funnel marketing content will seem like it naturally came up while they were browsing, making them more receptive to what you have to say.
Email Marketing and Drip Campaigns
If you collected their email address at the top of the funnel, it’s time to put it to good use. Email marketing gives you direct access to your target audience, allowing you to control how leads are nurtured. For mid-funnel marketing, this can include:
- Sending newsletters to inform them about the latest and/or most relevant content;
- Sharing case studies that demonstrate how a solution can work for them as well;
- Creating a personal invite for them to access a free trial or demo.
Mid-funnel marketing drip campaigns help keep your audience engaged because you’re giving information at a more manageable pace. If you do it well, they may even start to look forward to your next installment.
Webinars and Interactive Experiences
This mid-funnel strategy helps your target audience get to know your brand up close and personal. Webinars are pretty straightforward — someone from the team facilitates them to address a certain pain point and/or introduce product offers. However, for many industries, an interactive experience may be more appropriate. Here are a few ways that we’ve seen people implement this:
Scanning a photo of a user to determine which products will work best for the skin;
- Getting them to take a quiz that will suggest certain solutions based on their responses;
- Using technologies that let them virtually try on your product.
These are just ideas for your mid-funnel marketing campaign. Go further and let your creativity run wild!
Social Proof and Reviews
Remember how we said that having amazing mid-funnel marketing will also boost the credibility of the company? The best part here is that social proof works two ways. Not only does it boost the brand’s reputation but also it creates feedback that you can use to further improve the offer. Case studies may show how effective your offer is likely to be. However, hearing it from actual customers humanizes the brand. Sure, they learn how your offer boosted signups by 50%, but your audience will also gain valuable insights into the experience of working with you or with other aspects of the transaction not covered by the offer itself.
Technology and Tools for Mid-Funnel Marketing
Does it seem like there’s a lot to consider with mid-funnel marketing? That’s because there is. Potential customers will need a lot of warming up before they’re ready to buy. That’s why, to be successful with mid-funnel marketing, you need to take advantage of the technology and tools available. This will allow you to:
- Allocate repetitive tasks;
- Avoid implementation errors in your mid-funnel marketing strategy;
- Accomplish more in a shorter amount of time.
With all these advantages, you’ll be able to make your campaign more effective. At the most basic level, we recommend having certain kinds of tools. We’ll discuss these and how they help with mid-funnel marketing below.
Customer Engagement Tools
Customer engagement tools allow you to build a relationship with your target audience by relaying timely and relevant content. They help make mid-funnel marketing easier by:
- Automating communication and workflows;
- Creating consistency in the way the brand communicates;
- Storing all prospect data in just one place to get better insights.
To promote customer engagement in mid-funnel marketing, we recommend using CRM platforms that track the interactions your target audience has with your content and segment this based on the data. Automation is also necessary for mid-funnel marketing to guarantee that everything will be implemented according to your plan and schedule.
Dynamic Personalization Tools
Dynamic personalization is also key to mid-funnel marketing because it lets you relay the content that’s most relatable to your audience. The more relatable it is, the more they’re likely to engage. This is actually the principle in native advertising, which MGID applies when placing ads on our publisher sites. Whether it’s mid-funnel marketing or not, we will always match your ads with the most relevant publisher and content. This way, the reader will interpret the ad as part of the browsing experience instead of seeing it as a distraction. The dynamic personalization tool that you’ll need will depend on the mid-funnel marketing content that you’re making. With email marketing, for example, tools like Klaviyo and Mailchimp can send personalized content based on user behavior.
Analytics Tools
Just like running any other campaign, mid-funnel marketing can’t be consistently successful without analytics tools. As with dynamic personalization, the things you’ll need will depend on the assets that you’re creating. Most advertisers engaged in mid-funnel marketing need tools capable of performing the following.
- Web analytics: This measures website-related metrics, such as traffic and bounce rate.
- Marketing analytics: This creates a visual interpretation of the data to easily identify trends.
- Engagement analytics: This measures and analyzes how the target audience interacts with your mid-funnel marketing content. This can include considerations such as how long they spend consuming the content.
Quality analytics will allow you to recalibrate your strategy based on data-based insights.
Common Mid-Funnel Marketing Mistakes to Avoid
Having the right tools can help in ensuring not only that you get the work done but also that you’re able to do it more efficiently. And having all this extra time to look at your mid-funnel content makes it worth inquiring about what can be done better. Part of optimizing your marketing campaign is ensuring that you limit all the potential ways that you can lose the interest of your target market. So, if you want to make sure that your mid-funnel marketing materials will resonate with them, start by avoiding these common mistakes.
Information Overload
As we know, the mid-funnel is supposed to connect prospects to the final phase. So, to get the audience closer to conversion, some advertisers end up putting out as much mid-funnel marketing content as possible. This is such a huge mistake because:
- It gets prospects confused: If they’re confused, they’re less likely to buy.
- It’s overwhelming: Unless they signed up for a really comprehensive mid-funnel marketing content, then they probably won’t end up consuming it.
- It can get them annoyed: Sending them into information overload can make the brand seem like an annoying salesman willing to say anything to close a deal.
Lack of Alignment Between Content and Customer Pain Points
Mid-funnel marketing is meant to nurture. But how are you supposed to nurture if you’re unable to create a connection? Unfortunately, many advertisers fail to align the content with consumer pain points. They think that creating as many mid-funnel marketing assets as possible will do the job, throwing everything on the board to see what sticks. Unfortunately, mistakes like this will put all your efforts to waste. Mid-funnel marketing is a golden opportunity to create assets that serve you for a long time. However, if the content created doesn’t speak to your audience, it’s best to go back to the drawing board.
Failing to Integrate Mid-Funnel Efforts with the Broader Marketing Funnel
Many advertisers also treat mid-funnel marketing as an entirely different endeavor from the rest of the funnel. And in doing so, they expose themselves to these consequences:
- Disengaged audience: Any inconsistency in messaging will confuse your audience, which can cause them to disengage altogether.
- Lack of progression: Even with high engagement rates, the leads may just stay in the middle of the funnel because the mid-funnel marketing efforts aren’t able to push them closer to conversion.
- Loss of trust: Any inconsistency will make the brand seem unprofessional and even scammy.
All these things mean a wasted budget and users who are more likely to turn to the competition.
Measuring and Generating Continued Success in Mid-Funnel Marketing
Even though numbers alone don’t tell the story of how much of an impact your efforts are having, they give you something tangible to assess. That’s why measuring results and success in mid-funnel marketing is important. In the next subsections, we’ll walk you through what you should do with your gathered data. Take note that your success is predicated upon using tools that can gather data relevant to mid-funnel marketing.
Identifying Key Metrics to Monitor
You need to identify metrics that are relevant to your goals at this point of the funnel: convincing and converting customers to the next stage. Here are what we believe to be the most important factors for mid-funnel marketing.
- Lead-to-opportunity conversion rate: This is the percentage who transition from the middle to the bottom of the funnel.
- Engagement metrics: This will depend on the platform used and can include shares, likes, comments, downloads and clickthrough rates.
- Pipeline velocity: This refers to how quickly users transition to the bottom of the funnel to expose inefficiencies in a mid-funnel marketing campaign. It’s calculated by dividing the number of converted users by the average number of days it takes to convert them.
Setting Benchmarks for Campaign Effectiveness Evaluation
No measurement should be taken in a vacuum. There should always be some context by which you’re evaluating your mid-funnel marketing measurements. Benchmarks help create standards, but in setting those benchmarks, you should consider the following.
- What are the existing benchmarks for your industry? This helps you compare yourself with the competition, thus keeping you competitive.
- How well have past mid-funnel marketing campaigns performed in the past? This creates realistic expectations for what you want to achieve.
- What are the sentiments of your target audience? This helps give context to any engagement you get, ensuring that your nurturing efforts are really working.
Optimizing Mid-Funnel Marketing Campaign Performance
Once you already have enough data coming in, it’s time to find out how you can extract more value from your middle of the funnel content and assets. Optimizing your campaign includes:
- Analyzing existing data to identify any opportunities for improvement;
- Implementing feedback loops that will allow you to gain a better insight into what resonates with your target market;
- Using automation and optimization tools that will help consistently deliver relevant mid-funnel marketing content to your target audience;
- Creating various versions of your MOF material allows you to perform split tests and see what works best.
The more that you bring to the bottom of the funnel, the bigger the potential profit becomes.
Warm Up Leads with Superb Mid-Funnel Marketing Tactics
You already grabbed their attention at the top of the funnel. Now, it’s your job to keep it. If you can see user interest through your mid-funnel marketing efforts, more of them will move forward to the bottom of the funnel. That’s where money is made! To create content relevant to the user, consider native advertising to be your secret weapon. By creating a seamless experience, they’re more likely to be drawn into consuming your mid-funnel marketing content. Optimize outcomes and success when you register on the MGID platform. You get access to advanced tools, a personal manager and a department of creative specialists — all of which will help make mid-funnel marketing easier and more impactful.
