What is top of the funnel content (TOFU)?
Top of the funnel content, or TOFU, is content for people who are not yet looking for a brand, and who may not know they have the problem it solves. The name comes from the marketing funnel, which narrows from a wide mouth of awareness, through consideration in the middle, to a decision at the bottom. TOFU is the wide part: films, articles, social posts, podcasts and campaigns that earn attention, entertain or teach, and introduce a brand to people who had never thought about it.
It rarely mentions price or asks for a sale. Its job is to make the brand known, liked and remembered, so that when the need arrives, the brand is already in the room. Done well, the audience does not feel marketed to at all; they feel they found something worth their time.
Why it matters
Why TOFU content matters
Every customer starts as a stranger. Brands that only invest in bottom of the funnel content, the retargeting ads and the promo codes, compete for the same small pool of people who are already ready to buy, and the cost of reaching them rises every year. TOFU content grows the pool. It is how a brand builds the familiarity that makes later ads work, the search demand that makes SEO pay and the affection that keeps a customer choosing it over a cheaper alternative.
It also carries a brand's personality more freely than any other content, because it is not weighed down by a call to action. That is often where the most memorable creative work lives.
In practice
How TOFU content works in practice
- 01
It begins with the audience's interests, not the product's features. What does the target audience watch, search, ask and share? The team finds the overlap with what the brand can credibly speak to, then makes content that rewards attention on its own terms: a film worth finishing, a guide worth saving, a post worth sending to a friend. Distribution is planned alongside it, through organic social, search, creators, partnerships and paid reach.
- 02
Success is measured by reach, view-through, engagement, brand search and lift studies rather than direct sales. The audiences TOFU content builds are then nurtured with middle of the funnel content, which goes deeper on what the brand offers and why it is different.
At RIOT
TOFU content at RIOT
Much of our work lives at the top of the funnel. The launch film we made for e.l.f. Mirror Mix has been seen about five million times, which is what awareness work is for: putting a new product in front of people before they know they want it. Our work for Red Bull Kumite on the screens of Times Square was built for the widest audience there is, everyone walking past.
Watch out
What people get wrong about TOFU content
Expecting it to convert. Judging awareness content on immediate sales is like judging a first conversation on whether it ended in a contract. The other mistake is making it about the brand. TOFU content that is a product pitch in disguise gets scrolled past; content that serves the audience's own interests earns the right to the brand's name.
