Tofu is the first stage and the wider part of the funnel. Tofu is all about making the targeted audience aware of your business. Prospects can be drawn into this stage through marketing campaigns such as events, trade shows, advertising, blog posts, infographics, and social media.

Tofu (Top of Funnel)

Bofu is where you turn leads into customers. As a marketer, you have already built enough trust with your prospective customers and can present your brand in a compelling way that inspires your prospects to take action. The bottom of your funnel might look like a limited-time offer for your products or services. Your task is to ensure prospects have enough information about the product beforehand, so they will want to complete the transaction.

Bofu (Bottom of Funnel)

A marketing funnel is a structure businesses use to turn strangers into loyal customers. A marketing funnel helps envision the entire process of the customer's journey from noticing the business to finally making a purchase. Digital marketers will cast a wide net to get as many leads as possible and then nurture them in every stage of the journey through the purchasing decision.

Marketing Funnel Definition

Mofu is where you position your company as the best product or service provider to suit the customer's needs. This stage is used to provide enough value through podcasts, comparison charts and webinars so that your website visitors are interested to learn more about your company and establish a relationship with you. You can further nurture prospective customers by offering free trials or product demos.

Mofu (Middle of Funnel)

A framework can help to create an effective marketing strategy.  Building a marketing funnel can help you visualise you’re strategies and help develop an effective campaign.

Marketing Strategy

There are numerous versions of the marketing funnels.   The simple marketing funnel model contains three stages to help visualise the entire process of the journey.<ol><li>Tofu (Top of funnel)</li><li>Mofu (Middle of funnel)</li><li>Bofu (Bottom of Funnel)</li></ol>

Marketing Funnel Stages Explained

Sales and marketing go hand in hand but have different functions. <ul><li>Sales are more focused on generating revenues.</li><li>Marketing is more focused on driving sales.</li></ul> Both can use the funnel strategy to create revenue for the company.

Sales Funnel vs. Marketing Funnel

<ul><li>A marketing funnel simplifies the customer journey.</li><li>It is useful for nearly any customer interaction.</li><li>It enables you to influence customers at every stage.</li><li>It helps you understand and visualise the process, allowing companies to map out each marketing campaign stage.</li><li>It provides a greater opportunity to drive bigger sales, more loyalty, and stronger brand awareness.</li></ul>

Benefits of a Marketing Funnel

Let's dive into marketing funnels and one of the main models of managing the funnel with the system of ToFU, MoFu, BoFu. What audience belongs to what stage and how to use the strength of this system.

marketingandsales

Marketing & Sales

business

Business

Marketing Funnels Explained: What Is Tofu, Mofu, And Bofu

We survive (in the broadest sense) our childhoods by figuring out how to fit into our families, our roles, our small world; we learn about relationships from our parents. We then carry these ways of being into our adult lives where, in many cases, they are no longer useful, or relevant.

The Past Holds Clues

Silences are often when the juiciest things come out. It takes courage to sit with it.If you fill your silence to avoid awkwardness, you’re actually avoiding something else - an intimacy, a genuine thought, an ability to feel a little exposed.

Don’t Be Afraid of Silence

<ul><li>In 2012, therapy carried something of a stigma.</li><li>The open conversations we have today around mental health weren't happening.</li><li>Now, Covid has sharpened everyone's awareness of their own mental health struggles.</li><li>Therapy can be like finding a key for a door that had been locked your whole life. </li><li>Ten million people will need support for their mental health as a direct result of the pandemic, according to the Centre for Mental Health.</li><li>Here are the nine things learned from therapy, that we can benefit from.</li></ul>

The Value Of Therapy In 2022

Once this truth is established, it leads to more interesting conversations. Understanding that you not flawed – or, more accurately, that we all are, so get over it – and that you must dictate what shape your life takes gives you the freedom to think about the choices you could make in future.With this newfound insight that your parents are not responsible for your state, only you are, comes a sense of freedom.

Don't Blame Your Parents

The cliche goes that therapists nod their heads wisely and say: “And how did that make you feel?” They do say this sometimes; and in fact, when no one has ever asked you this question before, it’s extremely powerful when they do, repeatedly. This repetition starts to have an effect: it makes you see that your feelings are valid; they aren’t right or wrong – they just are.

Asking The Right Questions

<ul><li>What's happening for you right now?</li><li>This is a question we don't often ask ourselves, checking in with the present moment. </li><li>It helps us stay in the now, and gradually moves us into full awareness.</li></ul>

Random Self Check-ins

<ul><li>Therapy is a powerful means to an end, and it can arm us to have the skills to become a self-therapist.</li><li>The end of therapy does not means that the problems have ended. It means that now you have the skills to handle them yourself.</li></ul>

You Have to Know when To Stop

<ul><li>The release of talking, of being listened to, is an emotional experience.</li><li>Many sessions, particularly in these early days, can be emotionally battering, tearful, and can leave anyone feeling wrung out for days.</li></ul>

Tears Are Useful

<ul><li>A therapist is part detective, part archaeologist, scratching at the surface, finding something of potential interest and digging a little deeper.</li><li>These quieter, less emotional sessions are where the deep excavation takes place.</li><li>They work as a team, trying to piece things together, make connections.</li><li>In the real world, life starts to get a little easier.</li></ul>

Proper Change Takes Time

This phrase is bandied around so freely in self-help articles and on fridge magnets, it has almost lost its meaning.Your sense of freedom and responsibility comes from self-acceptance, and responsibility can also mean being positively responsive.

Self-Acceptance Is Real

Therapy does not solve your problems, it makes you strong and self-sufficient to handle problems.

Therapy was like finding a key for a door that had been locked my whole life. Here are the nine things it’s taught me

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

mentalhealth

Mental Health

What I’ve learned from 10 years of therapy - and why it’s time to stop

The main purpose of a dashboard – think of the dashboard in your car, or the cockpit of an aeroplane – is to facilitate fast, informed decisions. This new kind of document is perfect for modern knowledge workers – more interactive than simply editing text, more intelligent than a static document, more dynamic than a bullet point list, and more collaborative than a Google Doc. And they address notetaking overwhelm by structuring, organizing, and reframing your existing notes on a just-in-time basis.

Dashboards: A Better Solution

You’re probably using email for multiple purposes far beyond what it was designed for:<ul><li>You use email to send messages</li><li>You use email as a to-do list</li><li>You use email to keep track of notes and ideas</li><li>You use email to manage complex projects and areas of your life</li></ul>These are extremely different use cases, and using one platform for all of them ensures it fails at all of them. To perform each of them effectively, you have to break apart each of the four essential activities of modern work – Email, Task Management, Notetaking, and Project Management – and use the right tool for each of those jobs.

The Productivity Stack

Notetaking overwhelm happens when you’re collecting everything, processing your notes, and growing a knowledge system – but somehow, you never revisit the notes you’ve captured, and don’t seem to be able to achieve the day-to-day usefulness from your notes you’ve already collected.

Notetaking Overwhelm

Task overwhelm occurs when the actionable items in your list are crowded out by the non-urgent ones: when your ideas, list of someday-maybes, inspirations, and random learnings make it difficult to find the singular, next important action.

Task Overwhelm

Personal Dashboards push mere notetaking to the next level: they provide the big picture, using your curated knowledge and data to guide action and help you make better decisions.Your dashboards proactively inform the actions you take every day. To do that, they have to be dynamic and responsive to your changing needs. They have to change in response to how you want information presented at the moment, which facets you want to explore or understand, or based on changes in your digital environment.

Personal Dashboards: a Just-in-Time Springboard to Knowledgeable Action 

All the subsequent waves of productivity software that we’re going to look at arose in reaction to the Email Big Bang, like gravitational waves echoing across the universe for eons. Each of them is an attempt to solve the problem of information overload that was unleashed upon humanity half a century ago.Example: Automobiles seemed miraculous until they started crowding the highways and blackening the skies (this is called a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_trap">Progress Trap</a>).

Email as a Task Manager and Everything Inbox: The Progress Trap

Email created thousands of “open loops” – unfinished or incomplete mental tasks – in our lives. And as GTD sought to create a system for taking in, prioritizing, and closing those loops in a systematic way, digital to-do list apps  gained widespread adoption as people realized just how much easier it was to maintain a to-do list using them.

Task Managers: How to Get Your To-Dos Off Your Mind

Coinciding roughly with the rise of the iPhone in the late 2000s, digital notetaking apps like <a href="https://evernote.com/">Evernote</a>, <a href="https://bear.app/">Bear</a>, and <a href="https://simplenote.com/">Simplenote</a> rose to meet the demand for easily capturing notes from anywhere (and having them available everywhere).Each new generation of tools takes over certain jobs but not others, and notetaking apps unlocked a new form of digital creativity well-matched with our fluid, mobile, always-on, everyday lives.

Notetaking Apps: Your Own, Personally Curated Solution to Information Overwhelm

It takes far more time and energy to create a Personal Dashboard in Notion, for example, versus a note in Evernote. A personal dashboard has to be architected – designed, built, iterated on, and maintained over time. Start building with the end in mind. Here are some good questions to ask yourself:<ul><li>What problems do I want to solve – the big questions I’m trying to answer?</li><li>What is the ideal future state for a challenge I’m facing?</li><li>What personal dreams or goals do I have that I might not have shared with anyone else?</li></ul>

Build, Don't Migrate

The very first email was sent 50 years ago, in the spring of 1971.The incredible spread of email since then unleashed an unimaginable torrent of information into our everyday lives.As knowledge workers, we continue to struggle to process our inboxes, not to mention use that flood of information to move our projects and goals forward.Many have tried to lead us on a path out of information overload, and each “wave” of productivity tactics and apps valiantly attempts to solve the problems the previous one created.

The Humble Email

A simple medium that was originally meant for sending messages – email – has expanded to become a notification system, a to-do list, a notetaking tool, a contact database, and an archival system for our digital lives.All great technologies begin as blessings… but end up expanding so wildly that they become a curse.

Email Is Used For Everything

The power of dashboards has now trickled down to everyone, as part of the “no-code” movement: apps that allow for extensive customization, without requiring technical coding skills, such as Webflow (for web design), Zapier (for automation), Airtable (for databases), and Notion, Coda, and Microsoft Loop (for dashboards and collaborative pages).

From Email To Notion

We all have a holistic productivity stack, which changes slowly. We can call it a “Second Brain,” because it allows you to offload and utilize all the complex information swirling through your mind.Each new generation of productivity software adds a new layer on top, instead of completely displacing the ones that came before. Not only is it unnecessary to immediately ascend to the highest layer, but it’s also probably wise to wait until the dust has settled and it’s clear what the new layer is and what it’s for. We need to have patience.

How to Craft Your Personal Productivity Stack

From the dawn of email to the rise of personal dashboards: Introducing the 4 functions of your productivity stack & how you can use each piece of it better.

productivity

Productivity

How to Build Your Personal Productivity Stack

<ul><li>“I did it before” – Recall a recent success and think through how you achieved it, step by step, “from start to finish.”</li><li>“They were able to do it” – Notice successful people around you and in the media. Draw inspiration from those who have achieved great goals.  </li><li>“They think I can do it” – To gain confidence, think of the belief other people have in your abilities.  </li><li>“I know I can do it” – Remind yourself of your successes. Build your confidence based on the knowledge that “you’ve worked, prepared, rehearsed and anticipated success as you move toward your goals.”</li></ul>

How To Emphasize Your Ability to Succeed: Mantras

Focus on a pared-down to-do list and commit to giving those tasks your complete attention. Start the day by setting the alarm for the time you actually get up; don’t build in time to press the snooze button and fall back asleep. Gather the tools you need to work more efficiently, but use as few tools as possible and learn to handle them expertly so you can be more productive. Most hardware and software offerings have lesser-known features that can save precious work minutes.

A Pared Down To-Do List

This is the environment in which you work. Do you waste time looking for what you need? Do your tools and devices work properly? Are better tools available? Does your workspace inspire you to do your best? If you gave a negative answer to any of these questions, change your context to help you work smarter.

Context: Change Your Environment

Tap the power of your social network – the web of people with whom you are connected. Your social network existed long before the advent of Facebook or Twitter. List the people you admire, those you want to spend more time with and those you’d like to be around less. This categorization will show you the people who are most important to you. For a given project, construct a “mind map” of “Team You” – the people you can rely on to give you ideas, feedback and support.

Connet With Your People

<ul>
<li>“Identify a very specific area” – Decide what in your life or work you want to fix.</li>
<li>“Develop strategies” – Determine what steps to take and what methods to use to achieve your targeted improvements.</li>
<li>“Experiment” – Try different approaches to “generate bursts of momentum.”</li>
<li>“Assess the value the effort has created” – What have you accomplished, and was it worthwhile?</li>
</ul>

The IDEA Elements

The people surrounding you greatly influence the choices you make, even if you don’t realize it. This includes people you physically interact with, as well as those in your social networks. To change your habits, change the people around you who influence you; add a person or two whose work style you admire.

Network: The People Around You

Your beliefs determine your success. Remember, “If you think you can, you can.” Thinking bigger involves building “self-efficacy” – the belief that your actions will succeed. Self-efficacy can be hard to maintain when you have more priorities on your to-do list than you have time to complete, so reduce your daily priorities. Boost your efficacy by attending conferences and seminars.

Thinking Big: Your Beliefs 

Like most people, you tend to keep doing what you have always done. What you have been doing thus far has taken you to where you are now, so your routines probably seem successful. But to achieve more, you must do more, and that means changing your routine.

Homeostasis: Change Your Routine

A day consists of 96 blocks of time that are 15 minutes long, so each 15-minute block is about 1% of your day. You can dramatically increase your efficiency by managing the time on your calendar in blocks of a quarter of an hour. When you suddenly have an extra 15 minutes, such as when a meeting ends early or when someone you’re expecting is late, be prepared to use the time to your advantage. Carry the tools you need to complete some of the small tasks on your to-do list, like making hotel reservations, listening to your voicemail, writing thank-you notes or outlining a writing project.

Working Smarter

Imagine your ideal day. What time would you get up in the morning? What would you do first? What would you accomplish? Who would you be with? Visualizing your ideal day and committing that vision to paper will help you “work smarter, think bigger and make more.”

Your Best Day

With so little time in the day, follow a three-step process to achieve your targets: “set a goal, be consistent” and “take action.” Identify your “Most Important Things” (MITs) – the top goals you want to address during a set time period. How will you break down these goals? Some people make to-do lists, using nouns, like “book launch.” Others prefer lists of verbs, like “find bookstores for book promotion.” Brainstorm a list of nouns that summarizes your goals. Then use verbs to identify “action steps” that you can address within the next four days.

The Days Are Too Short

<ul>
<li>First, to work smarter, use all the available time in your schedule, identify your top priority tasks, pare your task list down and maintain your focus. To work better, change your work habits, even if your existing habits brought you success. </li>
<li>Second, to think bigger, believe in yourself and what you can accomplish. Spend time with supportive people, expand your social network and eliminate distractions.</li>
<li>Third, to make more – more money, time, opportunities, memories or anything else – create a continuous cycle of improvement.</li>
</ul>

The Three Driving Points

Making more – money, time, opportunities, memories or anything else – requires creating a continuous cycle of improvement. One powerful way to continue improving is to ask for feedback.When you redirect your focus, your perspective changes, and when that happens, you have a significant option: You can begin to make things better.

Making More

<ul><li>“Results” – At the end of a set period of time, consider how the matters you want to change are going now.</li><li>“Experience” – This is how you feel your life is transpiring. </li><li>“Contribution” – “Who said thanks?” View others’ appreciation of your contributions as an assessment of your effectiveness.</li><li>“Measurement” – This is objective data, like the amount of money you saved or the number of clients you landed during a particular period.</li><li>“Service” – Consider whom you helped lately and who helped you. </li><li>“Habits” – Building good habits helps you reach your goals. </li></ul>

Tracking Your Actions: The Six Kinds Of Feedback

To make more, you have to focus to finish. Two techniques can help you maintain your focus, though they have varying degrees of effectiveness:<ul><li>Use the “stop and do” tactic when a task should take so little time that it makes sense to just go ahead and do it. This approach can lead to a busy day in which you make progress toward your MITs.</li><li>Employ the “stop, think and bunch and then do” method when you feel you need to accumulate all your necessary tasks and group them into categories of activities that you can dispatch all at once.</li></ul>

Focus To Finish

Arrange your workspace with care: What visual and auditory distractions break your focus? Visual distractions might include piles of papers on your desk, a blinking phone light or any stimulus that draws your attention from work. Auditory distractions are prevalent in open plan offices.Focusing to finish your tasks requires removing or blocking out distractions, paying tight attention to what you can accomplish right now to further your goals and letting other tasks go

Clarify Your Workspace

Changing the way you work requires gathering data, something that most business professionals understand. To reduce interruptions and to make sure you do your work when you are at your best, monitor your work habits and record any changes. For example, if you want to increase the number of outgoing calls you make to your contacts, first log your current calls and calculate your call volume. Then, track the changes you want to make.

Your Work Habits

A well-constructed collection of sound, practical, life-improving advice to anyone seeking increased efficiency and productivity.

A forefront productivity expert argues that longer working hours do not compensate for flawed approaches to performance, outlining strategic techniques for establishing positive habits, mindset-based strategies and proactive processes for enabling more effective working hours.

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

habits

Habits

books

Books

Imagine if your best just got better every single day In Your Best Just Got Better, productivity expert Jason Womack teaches readers that working longer hours doesn't make up for a flawed approach to productivity and performance. Workers need to clarify their habits, build mindset-based strategies, and be proactive. Womack's signature "workplace performance" techniques offer specific strategies to consistently and incrementally improve performance. Readers will: <ul> <li>Understand the fundamentals of workflow and the principles of human performance</li> <li>Arm themselves with the tools and the processes to get more of their work done, on time, with fewer resources, and with less stress</li> </ul> Making your best better won't happen overnight, but learning how to effectively manage just a few critical success factors lead to an effective workday and an overall successful professional career.

Jason W. Womack is an accomplished writer whose work has resonated with readers around the world. Jason W. Womack has published several books that explore a range of topics, from fiction to nonfiction, and has received critical acclaim for the ability to weave compelling narratives. Jason W. Womack's writing style is known for its depth and authenticity, and has earned quite a loyal following of readers.

Jason W. Womack

Your Best Just Got Better

Your Best Just Got Better: Work Smarter, Think Bigger, Make More

Your e-commerce marketing plan should include a view as to how you will track and report on all KPIs:<ul><li>Customized Google Analytics goals, segments, events and dimensions to reflect campaigns</li><li>A conversion-based forecast model for media ROI</li><li>The conversion rate for different types of leads or subscribers</li><li>A method of assessing the quality of visitors to your website</li><li>Attribution across all digital channels, but also how they influence offline sales</li><li>How to track returning customers and their value</li><li>Email subscriber engagement</li><li>Customer satisfaction and loyalty drivers</li></ul>

Measuring the Effectiveness of your e-commerce marketing plan

<ul><li>Define your key brand messages to focus on awareness, familiarity and purchase intent.</li><li>Embed campaign tracking and attribution to adequately review performance.</li><li>Perform keyword research to identify strengths and opportunities (both paid and organic search) </li><li>Identify the appropriate channels to promote the right content to the right people.</li><li>Define a paid and display media budget to reach the correct audience.</li></ul>

Maximize Reach Of Marketing

What channels and content works best to grab attention with the target audience? What makes them take action?The ACT stage in the e-commerce marketing plan is aimed at encouraging interactions that will result in lead generation. It focuses on creating interactions with content rather than conversion at this point in the funnel. MoFu (middle-of-funnel) marketing works to position the company as the best provider to suit the customer's needs.Plan the next year’s activities with appropriate budgets and KPIs specifically aimed at the middle of the funnel.

Step 3: Prompt Interactions, Subscribers and Leads (ACT)

What is the growth timeline and how do you intend to reach new customers?Reach involves building awareness of your brand, products, and services. After all, no one can buy from your business if they don’t know it exists.ToFu (top-of-funnel) tactics as part of your e-commerce marketing plan should focus on how you can use other websites and offline media to drive traffic to your owned media e.g. website, blog, or social media profiles.

Step 2: Grow Your Audience (REACH)

How do you intend to convert a lead to a sale? What activities will persuade your audience to take that vital next step and turn into paying customers? BoFu (bottom-of-funnel) looks at the end of the process; generating the conversion.Today’s customers expect a personalized digital experience. This might be dynamic landing pages, multichannel marketing offering a range of conversion techniques such as email, LiveChat, and product demos, and fully optimized mobile browsing.

Step 4: Focus On Conversion (CONVERT)

It’s important to remember that payment can be made through online e-commerce transactions or offline channels. The customer journey is not linear and a deep dive into analytics and customer data is essential to understanding the path to purchase. You should consider this as part of your omnichannel marketing strategy.Identify conversion funnels and paths to purchase.Plan how you can personalize the digital experience within your current constraints and resources.Establish a communication process between your marketing and development teams.

Points To Keep In Mind For The Omnichannel Marketing Strategy

Plan: Create a digital marketing strategy, mission and objectivesReach: Grow your audience online, situational analysis and competitive landscape, target audience, budget and goalsAct: Encourage brand interactions and leads, media and channelsConvert: Increase online and offline sales through optimization, KPIs and success metricsEngage: Build customer loyalty and advocacy

The Five-Step E-commerce Marketing Plan

E-commerce marketing planning is about formalizing how you intend to drive traffic to a website and convert it from prospective users to customers.The plan specifies exactly how a business intends to use e-commerce marketing channels to attract, convert and retain customers. With an integrated plan aligned to the business vision and consistent with an omnichannel approach, a business can expect to see accelerated results.Nearly half of companies don't have a clearly defined digital marketing strategy. Of those who do, the majority have integrated it into their overall marketing strategy.

Defining An E-commerce Marketing Plan

This stage in the funnel requires you to keep adding value to your brand experience to generate repeat purchases, build loyalty, and improve customer satisfaction.<ul><li>Plan how you can use content to nurture the post-sale relationship. Examples include storytelling, case studies and engaging social content.</li><li>Outline your intended onboarding process using e-commerce marketing techniques and online messaging.</li><li>Establish your multi-channel customer service process e.g. chatbots, social media, call centres.</li><li>Identify post-sale customer data for remarketing opportunities that will build relationships</li></ul>

Step 5: Keep It Going (ENGAGE)

The <a href="https://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-strategy/race-a-practical-framework-to-improve-your-digital-marketing/">RACE Framework</a> is the perfect tool to assist the e-commerce marketing planning stage, allowing you to focus on each stage: plan, reach, act, convert, and engage. The model divides the customer journey into clear phases, demonstrating appropriate marketing activities playing a different role in each stage.

The RACE Framework

Begin your plan by assessing the previous year’s performance. To create an effective digital marketing strategy, you must first have a good idea of what is working as a strength as well as knowing your weaknesses.You should also have a view of the market and your competitors’ activities.<ul><li>Identify all of your current digital marketing activities.</li><li>Work out your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats using the SWOT/ TOWS frameworks.</li><li>Outline your e-commerce marketing goals and make sure you’ve set SMART objectives. </li><li>Understand your target market, their needs, wants and expectations.</li></ul>

Step 1: Assess Current Situation (PLAN)

Thinking about your e-commerce marketing plan for 2022? Use the RACE Framework to create a focussed and well-structured digital marketing strategy.

How to write an e-commerce marketing plan Thinking about your e-commerce marketing plan for 2022? Use the RACE Framework to create a focussed and well-structured digital marketing strategy In.

Marketing Funnels Explained: What Is Tofu, Mofu, And Bofu

What I’ve learned from 10 years of therapy - and why it’s time to stop

How to Build Your Personal Productivity Stack

It's time to
Read like a Pro.

Your Best Just Got Better: Work Smarter, Think Bigger, Make More

CURATED BY

Marketing Funnels Explained: What Is Tofu, Mofu, And Bofu

What I’ve learned from 10 years of therapy - and why it’s time to stop

How to Build Your Personal Productivity Stack

It's time to Read like a Pro.

Your Best Just Got Better: Work Smarter, Think Bigger, Make More

CURATED BY

It's time to
Read like a Pro.