What is middle of the funnel content (MOFU)?
Middle of the funnel content is what a brand says to someone who has heard of it but has not bought. The marketing funnel runs from awareness at the top, through consideration in the middle, to purchase at the bottom. Top of funnel content introduces the brand to strangers; bottom of funnel content closes the sale. The middle is the long stretch in between, where a person is comparing, researching, reading reviews and quietly deciding whether they trust you.
MOFU content answers the questions that stretch produces. Product films that show the thing working, comparison guides, case studies, webinars, demos, detailed how-it-works explainers, buyer's guides, email sequences that teach rather than push. It is more specific than an ad and less pushy than a checkout page, and its job is to move someone from "interesting" to "I think this is for me".
Why it matters
Why MOFU content matters
Most of the money a brand spends on marketing is spent at the top, on getting noticed, and most of the sales a brand loses are lost in the middle, where the person it paid to reach wanders off because nothing answered their question. The middle of the funnel is where consideration either deepens or dies, and it is usually the least served part of a content program because it is less glamorous than the launch and less measurable than the checkout.
It is also where trust is built. A person who has watched a three-minute film about how a product is made, read an honest comparison and seen a customer's real results arrives at the purchase decision already convinced. That person converts at a higher rate, returns more often and costs less to keep. MOFU content is the difference between a brand that has to buy every customer twice and one that only has to introduce itself.
In practice
How MOFU content works in practice
- 01
The work starts by listing the questions a considering customer asks, which the sales team, customer service and the search data all know: how does it compare, does it work for someone like me, what happens after I buy, is it worth the price. Each question gets a piece of content built to answer it properly, in the format that suits the question. A product that has to be seen working gets a film. A decision between options gets a guide. A doubt about results gets a case study.
- 02
Then the content is placed where considering people are. That means the product pages, the email sequence after a first visit, the retargeting ads that follow someone who watched the launch film, the search results for comparison terms and the sales team's follow-up. It is measured differently from top of funnel work: time spent, return visits, demo requests and assisted conversions matter more than reach. And it is refreshed, because the questions change as the product and the competition do.
At RIOT
MOFU content at RIOT
Product films are the MOFU format we make most. The Nutrafol x Sephora product films for Nutrafol and the two months of social product films we made for Gantri are built for people who already know the brand and want to see the product do what it claims, up close and without the sell. A beauty customer deciding between two products rarely needs another ad; they need to see the thing, and that is what the film is for.
Watch out
What people get wrong about MOFU content
Making it sound like an ad. The person in the middle of the funnel has already seen the ad; what they want now is the detail, the honesty and the proof. Content that keeps selling at this stage reads as evasive, and the customer goes to a review site to get the answer the brand would not give.
The other mistake is skipping it altogether. Brands pour budget into awareness and then send that traffic straight to a buy button, wondering why conversion is low. The middle is where the work of persuasion actually happens, and leaving it empty wastes everything spent above it.
