This article shares the high-level takeaways from a webinar run by our CEO and Founder, Matthew Stibbe. To catch every pearl of wisdom, watch the full webinar here (gated content).
B2B buyers aren’t behaving like they used to. They’ve been burned by years of low effort or manipulative sales outreach, and they’re empowered by the sophistication and personalisation of AI search results.
By the time they reach you, they don’t want a primer for understanding their business problem. It’s clarity, credibility and proof they’re after, and that’s the job of your mid-funnel content.
So what is the mid-funnel, why does it matter more now and how can you widen yours to increase conversions? That’s what we’ll cover in this article.
What is the ‘mid-funnel’?
The mid-funnel is where B2B buyers stop thinking, ‘I have a problem,’ and start thinking, ‘How do I solve it, and who can help?’
It’s the stage where they start actively researching solutions, comparing vendors and building internal consensus. Still too early for a sales conversation, but beyond a casual Google or ChatGPT prompt. Your goal is to educate, nurture and position your brand as the safe, smart choice.
Why the mid-funnel matters more than ever
A survey of 4,000 B2B buyers by 6Sense found that buyers don’t engage with sellers until they are two-thirds of the way through their journeys. That means your mid-funnel content has to work much, much smarter than it used to, ensuring customers know how relevant and valuable your business and solutions are to their problem.
Specifically, these are the challenges for the traditional B2B marketing playbook:
- Zero-click search: You’re getting less top-funnel traffic, so there’s a greater need for engagement when you do capture buyers’ attention.
- The gated TOFU content dilemma: Gated content at the top of funnel hides your best content from AI LLMs, but ungating it means less TOFU lead capture.
- Enshitification of social media: LinkedIn, X and Facebook (and Reddit, Quora and the rest) want you to pay for views and clicks.
- Buyer scepticism and self-service: Increasingly, there are more stakeholders, more self-service, more decision delays and fewer direct sales contacts.
There are two new rules for the mid-funnel game: focus on quality, not quantity, and avoid failure modes.
Quality, not quantity
Just pumping more content into your mid-funnel isn’t the answer. Flooding the zone with AI slop is a tempting but destructive response to declining TOFU performance. Google is wise to and discourages fully AI-generated content, viewing it as spam and penalising it in search results.
Instead, mid-funnel content should be:
- Relevant, useful and interesting, providing genuine clarity to buyers, not keyword-stuffed filler. It should meaningfully help them solve a problem, understand a choice or make a case internally.
- Human content, cutting through bland, low-quality articles with interviews, podcasts, videos, interviews and analyst-style commentary. These formats surface real-world experience that buyers trust.
- Built on Expertise, Experience, Authority, Trustworthiness (EEAT), the framework Google uses to rank web pages. Importantly, these are markers of value that the buyer wants to see in their own research.
- Research and original data, which builds authority like nothing else. It’s the backbone of most successful flagship content that’s harder for your competitors to copy.
Failure modes
It’s easy to sabotage your mid-funnel without realising. The most common traps include:
- All ‘what’ and no ‘why’: Too many companies lead with features or product lists. Buyers want to see the value: outcomes and impact.
- The ‘man in the mirror’ problem: Tech-led companies often write for people like themselves: deep in the weeds, overly technical. But as more executives join the decision-making process, the more clarity you need to emphasise business-wide benefits in your copy.
- Fighting AI slop with AI slop: Replacing organic traffic you lost to AI overviews with high volumes of low-quality, AI-generated output is chasing vanity metrics at the expense of trust.
- Lack of sector-specific content: Sectors, industries and individual roles have distinct vocabulary and priorities. It might feel safer to hedge your bets on more generic content, but if you try to speak to everyone, you risk speaking to no-one.
- Hiding important information: Buyers hate having to dig for what they need, and LLMs can’t retrieve information behind logins, PDFs or sales conversations.
Examples of content that works in the mid-funnel
Here’s what good content looks like in practice, using categories and formats that we employ ourselves and for clients at Articulate.
- Flagship reports demonstrate authority, diving deep into a potent topic for your industry. If you’d like to see some examples, check out our AI Pragmatist’s Playbook and our Top 300 Environment and Sustainability Websites report. There are several approaches you can take to them, depending on your time and resources:
- Survey-based reports
- Large-scale analysis of industry data
- In-depth desk research
- Benchmarks and maturity assessments
- Real human stories build trust because they’re grounded in personal, often third-party experience. People trust voices like their own, especially if they’re feeling fatigued by automated sales outreach:
- Podcasts with industry experts (including your own)
- Video customer interviews
- Blogifications (turning webinars or interviews into high-quality written content)
- Case studies that go beyond problem-solution-benefit. They tell a story about the wider industry challenge, provide insight into the process, share measurable outcomes and offer social proof. The strongest ones feel editorial, not salesy. Check out how we do it in our portfolio.
- Industry pages and use cases help buyers see themselves in your story, even if you don’t have a relevant or recent case study to share. Use their terminology, prioritise their pain points and show how your solution tackles them.
- How-to guides offer specific and actionable advice that position you as an expert. Rather than withholding your methodology, explain ‘how’ and ‘why’ customers can do something in clear, concise steps. You’ll often find it leads naturally to a sales conversation: ‘If this feels like too much, we can help.’ Here’s an example from our article on how to write a sustainability report for your business.
- Sales and product information are now assets that buyers expect to find without too much friction as they avoid early sales calls. If it used to sit in a salesperson’s head, it now needs to live on your website. This might include:
- FAQs
- Detailed product explainers
- Sales decks
- Objection-handling content
- Product demos and visualisations offer the self-service experience that more and more B2B buyers want before they’re willing to talk to sales. Videos, interactive tools and other detailed visual demonstrations help meet that need.
- Pricing information, when hidden, can sow seeds of doubt or distrust. Even if you can’t provide exact figures you can share starting prices, typical ranges, tier comparisons or cost-model explainers that help buyers manage their own expectations. It’s a win-win that respects the buyer’s time and filters out poor-fit leads.
Make your mid-funnel work smarter
The companies that win in this new sales and marketing landscape won’t be the ones producing the most content, but the ones producing the right content and getting it in front of buyers at the right time.
Done well, widening your mid-funnel should do more than increase conversions. It should elevate your brand, improve lead quality, speed up sales cycles and build long-term trust with the buyers that matter to your business.
If you’re not sure where to start with your own mid-funnel strategy, you’re in the right place. We’ve worked with 180+ B2B tech brands to help engage their audience, smash their targets and change the world. Find out how we can help you with a free, no-BS marketing strategy review session.