#109: Why top-of-funnel content is crucial to building pipeline

Speaker A: Hey, this is Ryan from RocketSAS, and you're listening to the SaaS Marketing Weekly podcast, the show that gives you actionable marketing strategies and campaign ideas to rocket your SaaS business. And if you want even more SaaS marketing ideas, go to SaaSMarketingWeekly.com to join my free newsletter. Hello, and welcome back to the SaaS Marketing Weekly podcast with me, your host, Ryan, the founder of RocketSAS. And today I'm back in the studio with Sam, the rocketsas head of content. Hello. Hello.

Speaker B: Nice to be back.

Speaker A: Welcome back. Episode number four.

Speaker B: Here we go. It's getting serious.

Speaker A: Yes, one of our most popular guests. Episodes with Sam always get a lot of listeners, I think, because there's a lot of content marketers out there. There's a lot of people that care about content marketing, and Sam is, uh, a content legend in the B2B SaaS game and now marketing agency game. Um, so today we're talking about top of funnel content and the importance of top of funnel content. I'm a huge lover of top of funnel content. Um, rocketsas scaling rapidly. We've scaled from 1 to 7 million ARR in the last two years or so. And if you were to ask me what is the main reason for that, there's obviously lots of reasons, but really, the top of the funnel, some of you may find that surprising, is, I would say, possibly the most important factor. I think if we did what most businesses do, which is heavy, heavy focus on the bottom of the funnel, a little bit in the middle and not a lot at the top, we would be absolutely nowhere near where we are today in terms of huge believer in the importance of the top of the funnel. Um, yes, you have to wait for the sales cycle to come through if they're at the top of the funnel. But that's what demand generation is all about. If you've listened to this podcast regularly, you've heard me bang on about demand generation marketing a lot. You should know by now, but I'm going to give you a quick overview of it. It's all about the 95% and the 5%. 5% of your target audience are in market, ready to buy right now. That's the bottom of the funnel. So if you're only doing bottom of the funnel, you're only Marketing to about 5, 95% of your audience. 95% of your audience. They could buy from you at some point, but they're not in market now. They haven't got the budget, they haven't got the pain point. Bad enough their boss Says no, they're not in market right now, but they could go in market next month, next year, could be two years. So you want to market to those people. So when they do go in market because they get the budget, the boss says yes, or whatever happens in the business that they're ready, they already know you, like you, trust you, and, and they know exactly who they want to speak to you. So to create content for that 95% of people that's essentially top of the funnel, um, a lot of people say that demand generation is just nonsense and it's just like top of funnel, which I don't necessarily disagree with that, but it's just a great way of articulating it, uh, and the philosophy of it. So the importance of top of funnel content is tricky for a lot of businesses because they don't know what, what type of funnel that they should be creating sometimes. I've been guilty of this before. You end up creating top of the funnel content that is just too far left field of what you actually do. Like back in the day, rocketsas used to create top of funnel content about how your SaaS business can raise funding because I thought all of my clients want to raise funding because everyone in B2B SaaS wants to raise funding. So I'll create content about how to do an investment deck and how to reach out to investors. And then I realized it just wasn't working because rocketsas don't get involved in investments and investors and we don't design investment decks for people. So it was just a bit. Not quite there. It was along the right lines. So it's a bit of uh, a. Yeah, it's a broad area, the top of the funnel, hence why it's the widest part of the funnel. So you can easily get it wrong. So my man Sam is going to help us today by figuring out what should you work on at the top of the funnel. There's various, obviously various different topics and there's various different content for formats you can do at the top of the funnel and then also that you've got to then nurture and retarget people to the middle and the bottom of the funnel. So let's get into that then. Sam, where do you want to start?

Speaker B: So basically it all starts with your icp. If you don't know your icp, then you are not going to be able to make top of funnel content because you don't know what your target audience actually want. And I know that you feel really strongly about that.

Speaker A: I do, yes. So um, yeah, you have to be narrow on your ICP because top of funnel content is mainly helping people solve their problems. So if you don't know who your ICP is, what their job titles are, what their company headcount is, then you don't really know what their problems are. So you can't create content about that. So, yeah, that's where it starts. And I don't want this episode to be completely about who is your ICP or like how to find your icp, but if that is a problem for you, then that's where you need to focus before you start creating content at the top of the funnel. So market research, analyzing your CRM, your clothes lost, speaking to your, your customers, um, and maybe even making a bold decision to be like, okay, this is our icp, uh, as opposed to like waiting too long to try and figure it out and just getting in a mess. So sometimes creating an ICP is just making an educated but brave risk to be like, we're going for this icp. And then everything just kind of clicks. Not just from top of funnel, but the whole of marketing clicks. The whole of sales, the offer, the website, the brand, everything just kind of clicks into place. Like when I found out my ICP of B2B SaaS, companies, marketers and founders, I just was able to very quickly understand, like, what content that they would resonate with. So that's a, you know, you really have to get tight on the icp. Um, and then, yeah, I'll kind of hand back to you. So let's say you've got the icp, you know, the, uh, size of the company, the typical headcount that you're going after. Um, there can be obviously multiple ICPs and multiple, um, job titles. That's completely normal and you can obviously break them out. Um, but let's say you've got that nailed. How would you now kind of approach what to create top of the funnel?

Speaker B: So basically I always use the example, uh, at Cognizant. So once we knew our icp, we had a large ICP based across three different Personas, which was sales, marketing and Revops. I owned the sales Persona at Cognizant, so that was my focus. And so with that sales Persona, we had to understand as part of identifying your icp, what are their pain points? They need strong contact data so that they can make their calls and they can make their sales. Part of their job role is making the calls. So basically we created top of funnel content in the form of a state of cold calling report. For SDRs, AES, all the way up to sales management to read, uh, basically to understand exactly what they should be saying on their cold calls.

Speaker A: Right. So you basically identified this is the icp, which is salespeople that work for within like sales teams. And then you identified what is the main problem that these people have. And the way that I always like to think about it is like, what keeps them up at night. If I like just put yourself in their shoes. Imagine you were them, their job title, their Persona. You were lying in bed at night and you're thinking, I might lose my job, I might get fired if I don't solve this problem. What is keeping me up at night? And your example of like salespeople, it's like I need to close more deals on the calls that I'm making. Because your Persona was not people that necessarily doing loads of emails. It was mainly people that were hammering the phones. So you just narrow and narrow and narrow into their job and their problem, which is how do I get more people to respond to me on the phone to book a demo with my ae? So that's what you narrow down and then you start to create content to basically help them solve that problem. Is that a good way to describe it?

Speaker B: Exactly? No, that's absolutely perfect. And to bring it back to that top of funnel piece, that was how we were being discovered. The top of the funnel is so that your business and brand can be discovered via that content. So people googling search terms like how do I cold call better, how do I get a higher success rate? They were coming across this state of cold calling report. It was also boosted by ads, but there was a lot of an organic incoming of readers as well. And yeah, that's how they discover the brand. And if an SDR is reading the piece, they'll mention it to their sales manager, so potentially the decision maker and they'll say, great piece from Cognizant. Did you know they're also a data provider and that's when you start moving the further down the funnel.

Speaker A: Yeah. And did you start to uh, gate stuff? So that report for example, is that gated or is that completely ungated?

Speaker B: Well, yeah, we can delve into this because Cognizant was a large company. We had a tool called Dream Data, which is where we could basically, um, understand every specific content piece. So with the URL of that content piece led to how much pipeline. And that is because Dream Data knew uh, when a deal crossed the line, whether that prospect, which was now a customer, had actually touched on that content before. So there was no need at Cognizant for gated content. But if you're a smaller business, I would highly recommend adding maybe a gated asset within the top of funnel content. I'm not personally an advocate of gating top of funnel content because by gating it, you're immediately bringing it down to BofU. You're immediately bringing it down to the bottom of the funnel. They have to give you something. Top of funnel is about you giving them something.

Speaker A: Mhm. Yep. Agree with that. So you created it sounds, I think you're gonna get onto this next, aren't you? Is what you would call a big rock campaign. So your state of Cold Calling report. So what was that like a PDF that was like what, 20 pages? Something like that?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So that was what we at Cognizant called a big rock campaign.

Speaker A: Okay, so and how often do you do them?

Speaker B: Once every three to six months. We ideally got one out once a quarter.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: Um, so you know, a few months work would go into them. They were large pieces of content and that's because of the amount of research that would go into them. So I was creating this, this top of funnel content piece. I had to speak to our internal sales team. I had to pull loads of salesforce data, uh, gong data, uh, uh, I also interviewed external sales agencies for an external look. So it was basically to say, say here's Cognizant's data. But then also here's the industry data as well. If we were just pushing our own data, it was already moving slightly further down the funnel. It's oh, Cognizant this, Cognizant that. That's not what it's about. It's purely an educational piece.

Speaker A: Okay, so a bit of market research, um, maybe you didn't in this example, but getting other guest um, people to kind of edit and like well known kind of influences to input onto the research piece often works well. Um, so that's like the one like central piece and then I'm presuming it was repurposed into multip short form, uh LinkedIn posts and video clips and shorter form blogs that linked back to the main piece and it just like spiderwebbed out. Am I right in saying that?

Speaker B: Exactly. There was massive, massive repurposing. So if you picture it as you've got this one big rock piece, this one pillar piece, we then created short form video. So we got uh, some of our best sales names within the business. So these were from SDR level, ae Sales Manager, all the Way up to CRO posting short form video content saying which, which, which was more towards BofU style video. So it was something along the lines of incognizing state of cold calling. In 2026 report we uncovered X and then that was boosted with, boosted with paid spend on LinkedIn. Uh, that was a great way to bring people into the content, um, hook, hook readers into the content. So you know, I want to hear a little bit more about that. Um, there was also long form video. So we accompanied, we basically summarized the large piece of content with a long form YouTube video. We cut that video down into shorts,

Speaker A: um, webinars on it.

Speaker B: Webinars. Yeah, it was more that we had in person events talking about it. So because coggins and we're based in the Shard, it's a great location, come on in. But there's definitely, definitely a piece um, that you can look at. And then on the other side of it our SEO team just sent out a few blogs on it as well. So it was being paid boosted, it was being sent out on LinkedIn, it was being sent out on meta. But then from the organic side of it as well, they were sending out blogs which then led into that content. So they were also top of funnel blogs which had CTAs within the blogs linking through to the full report.

Speaker A: Yeah, nice. Okay. Well I would say with, I want to try and um, give examples of what to do when it's not quite so obvious and clear what the top of funnel problem would be. I mean that cognizant example don't mean to diminish it but I guess it was quite an obvious like very clear path in terms of like we're targeting salespeople, let's teach them how to be better at doing cold calling. Uh, whereas a lot of SaaS companies, they're probably looking at their ICP going well, not exactly sure what. There's lots of different problems that these people have. It's not obvious where I should go with this type of funnel content. So basically market research is generally the right answer to do. Polefish Winter spelled with a Y where you're just asking your target audience um, not necessarily about your products and your pricing and the usual things that you might um, ask people at the bottom of the funnel to do a survey about, purely survey them about top of funnel stuff like what, um, what problems are you suffering from at the moment, what's keeping you up at night, what your thoughts and fears about the industry, um, what kind of content would you like to consume? Like Asking those sorts of questions, doing market research. And if you've got a good customer base, you can be asking your customers, like, what are you caring about in the industry at the moment? What trends, what, I don't know, AI things are you looking to learn about? So basically doing market research purely focused at the top of the funnel, it's in terms of just basically the audience telling you what content you should be creating. And then also one of my favorite exercises is every demo that you do, every sales call that you do in the script or in the list of questions that you ask or go through, make sure there's some top of funnel questions in there. Like just, just out of interest, like what you're. Yeah, all the stuff I just said, basically. And then you use AI to transcribe those calls. And then when you've done a load of calls, you can pump it into one big LLM. Okay, what are the most common themes that people are saying here? And that basically tells you what type of funnel content to create. So that's a really good exercise that I recommend that you do, because otherwise you're just kind of going to be guessing, like what content you should be creating, where you really need the audience to be telling you this. Um, but yeah, any other tips around that?

Speaker B: To be honest, everything you've just said is absolutely perfect. And if you were in a position where you've got that data, you've got the cool data, you've got, you've got all of the FAQs, you've got all of this, AIs run you through it and said, this is what your audience is saying. The best way that I can express to simplify it down is to decide, okay, we've got all of this. What do we want to be known for and how can it tie back to our actual offering? So that's what we did at Cognizant. And again, you can use this, you can use this in any business. Let's say you're an HR platform. What do we want to be known for? Our, uh, HR tool. How can we bring the topic that we want to be known for? We want to be known for great hr. How do we bring the topic that we want to be known for back to our actual offering? Remember, it's top of funnel. Do not push your product in. Top of Funnel.

Speaker A: Yeah, nice. Love it. And then also, we haven't even talked about the podcast yet, so, um, I know it's a heavy lift for a lot of businesses, but the best thing I ever did at the Top of the funnel was to start this very podcast. We are over episode 100 now. So we've been doing it for two years, uh, and it's easily been arguably the best investment we've ever made. Every single episode I seem to talk about something else that's the best investment I ever made. But, um, the podcast is definitely up there, um, in terms of so many different benefits the podcast brings. But the biggest benefit is the top of the funnel. You just naturally have conversations about the top of the funnel. I don't think we do any episodes where we're like, oh, this is an episode episode about Arsenal, Rockets House and how great we are. We slip it in there. Um, but it's generally about purely the top of the funnel. And when you've got two thought leaders sat opposite each other, or I do lots of solo episodes on my own, just like giving a thought leadership tip. Um, that just, it almost naturally creates Top of Funnel. When you do a content, ah, a podcast like this, it's a bit like, let me try and use this analogy. It's a little bit like running to work. Okay. So if you want to get fit and healthy, you can go to the gym like every day, which is just like a faff. You've got to kind of go out your way to go to the gym. Or you can kind of kill two birds with one stone. You can just run to the office and pack every day, so you're kind of getting fit on autopilot kind of thing. And I kind of think of a podcast like that. Like I come to studio, have a nice chat with Sam or someone, um, and it feels natural. It's something that I'm passionate in. You're passionate about content. I'm passionate about marketing and business growth. So it's just like a normal conversation that me and you might have at the pub. Um, other people just seem might find it boring at the pub. But anyway, you get the point. Um, we're passionate about it, we enjoy doing it. And then magically at the same time, it means that we create a load of top of funnel content that, uh, our audience really care about. And then the repurposing that happens from this podcast is incredible. I've talked about that many times on the pod. This very podcast will be turned into blog, email, newsletter, multiple LinkedIn clips, short form video posts, long form video posts. Um, the podcast itself goes out on multiple platforms. The other subject matter, experts in the business listen to the podcast, get the transcript, they post about it. Um, that happens every week. So every Week we're just pumping out an absolute ton of thought leadership content. Um, and it just really widens the reach that rocketsas has and all of our content and our expertise. Um, and it just makes people realize that we know what we're talking about. And when they're looking for a marketing agency that, well, those guys that I've learned a lot from and they've really helped me solve my problems, I want to work with them. So there's hopefully thousands, hopefully eking towards tens of thousands of marketers or founders of SaaS companies that have listened to this podcast or consumed our type of funnel content in some way, shape or form and we've helped them solve a problem, we've helped them scale their business, or they've implemented a tip or a strategy or a campaign or a LinkedIn thing and it's helped them get better at the job, it's prevented them from getting the sack, they've become a better marketer and, uh, they'll remember that, they remember where they learned it from. So when they maybe they moved to their next job and they have the budget to bring in an agency, they'll know exactly who to come to. So that whole demand generation thing, the whole top of the funnel is absolutely incredible for like having a really wide top of funnel. And when you've got really wide top of a funnel, there's gonna be a lot of people that make their way to the bottom. So huge fan of top of funnel educational content.

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker A: So that is it. I think that's everything that we've got to say about the top of the funnel and the importance of the top of the funnel. So, um, I know what CEOs are like sometimes. I don't love the top of the funnel because it's not immediately attributing leads to it, but really that is how you scale a business fast. You have to have a lot of really strong top of funnel content. So good luck getting stuck into it. Sam, thank you so much for coming on the show. I'm sure we will have you back for your fifth episode. Uh, so stay tuned and I'll see you soon on the SaaS Marketing Weekly Podcast. Thank you for listening to the SaaS Marketing Weekly Podcast. Now, if you are a founder or a marketer of a B2B SaaS business and you are struggling to generate leads, you should check out my demand generation agency, rocketsas. For roughly the same price as hiring one in house marketer, you will get a full team of marketing experts to create you a demand generation strategy and execute on content, ads, lead magnets and website optimization, all designed to scale your SaaS business and generate you inbound leads. To find out more, please go to Rocket SaaS IO where you can apply for a free SaaS marketing strategy. Call with me Sam.