Why Enterprise Content Should Start at the Bottom of the Funnel — Not the Top

Welcome to the Orama Newsletter. I’m George, Founder/Producer at Orama, and this is a monthly newsletter that I send mainly to clients and partners, with two goals:

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TL;DL (Too Long; Didn’t Listen)

I started my career in financial markets, for big banks. We had a ‘marketing’ department, but the head of the department was not called ‘CMO’. As far as I understood it, that department was mainly creating PowerPoints for the sales, helping with events, etc. They were not expected to generate leads.

This was a decade ago. It feels like a different era, but this culture is still felt in the FinTech world, where most founders have a financial background and have not been exposed to a modern marketing setup. But they are smart people who know it’s not just about having ‘hungry’ sales anymore. So they hire marketers - but they expect results fast. It’s one of the main reasons Fintech CMOs have such a short tenure.

That’s the realm where my guest, Araminta Robertson, the MD and founder of Mint Studios works. Her answer is ‘BOFU’ or Bottom of the Funnel Content. The process is explained in the episode, and you can read about it in detail here. I will share a few quotes below to give you an overview.

Here’s the idea:

Start with the bottom of the funnel. Start with people who are closer to converting.  So these are people who already know they have a problem and are actively looking for a solution.

And its benefit:

It helps you get results sooner, which makes your leadership happier, generally. It helps direct your content strategy because then you suddenly know the topics that seem to bring in customers and revenue.

In an ideal world, you’d get the topics directly from your customers, but in practice:

We use a proxy, which is the salespeople, customer service reps, product people, the people on your team who are constantly talking to customers and over the period of like two or three weeks, we interview them and ask like a list of questions to try and understand the customer.

Araminta runs a copywriting studio, I trust they write well, but this conversation makes me understand the role of the copywriter differently. I’ve used copywriting services before, but mainly because I though they had a comparative advantage: they’re better writers, they have SEO skills and it makes sense for me to spend my time elsewhere. But this is different.

Copywriting is as much a process as a skill. And if you think of the brand as a content engine, audience data was exhaust from the publishing process. It’s becoming the fuel.