Top of Funnel Marketing: How to Pick Content That Builds Pipeline

You spend three months building a big piece of content. It goes out, the engagement is brilliant, everyone in the business shares it, and your LinkedIn notifications run hot for a week. But when you go and open the pipeline report, it hasn’t changed at all.

This normally happens when the piece was really good, but it wasn’t directly related to anything your business sells, so the people who loved it were never going to buy from you.

That’s the thing almost nobody gets right about top-of-funnel marketing. Everyone knows they should be doing it, but most businesses and their teams don’t know where to start.

On episode 109 of SaaS Marketing Weekly, our founder Ryan sat down with Sam Gocher, our Head of Content, to work through how you choose a topic that builds pipeline instead of collecting likes.

Listen to Episode 109: How top-of-funnel content builds your biggest source of pipeline

What is top-of-funnel marketing?

Top-of-funnel marketing is everything you do to reach people who don’t yet know your business, or who know they have a problem but aren’t looking to buy anything. It’s the widest part of the funnel, and the content is there to teach rather than to sell. It sits above your case studies, your pricing page, and your demo booking.

You are marketing to 5% of your audience

Only about 5% of your market is in a position to buy from you right now. That figure comes from Professor John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, whose research for the LinkedIn B2B Institute found that companies tend to change providers of services like software, banking or legal advice roughly every five years, which leaves only about 5% of buyers in the market in any given quarter.

The other 95% are not in the market to buy right now, but they might at some point. This is most likely because they don’t have a budget, their pain isn’t bad enough, or their boss simply said no.

If the bottom of the funnel is all you invest in, that 5% is the entire pool you’re fishing in. Everyone else in your market goes elsewhere, and by the time their budget frees up, they’ve forgotten your business existed.

Top-of-funnel marketing is how you reach the 95% now, so when they are ready to buy, they already know who you are and who to call.

If the bottom of your funnel needs work first, start with our guide to fixing the B2B marketing funnel from the bottom up.

Where top-of-funnel content goes wrong

Here’s a mistake we made ourselves at Rocket SaaS.

We used to publish content about how a SaaS business raises funding. The logic seemed sound at the time. Most B2B SaaS founders want to raise money at some point, so surely that’s a problem worth solving for them.

The trouble is that Rocket SaaS can’t help businesses get funding. We were putting genuinely useful content in front of exactly the right people, about a problem we had no way of helping them with, so there was nowhere for any of those readers to go next.

If you’re going to go broad with your top-of-funnel content, that’s totally fine, as long as it leads back to something you can help your audience with.

Start with your ICP

If you don’t know your ideal customer profile, you can’t make top-of-funnel content, because you don’t know whose problems you’re solving. ICP marketing starts with you knowing the job titles, the company headcount, the industry, and everything else that describes the people you sell to best.

There are four places to find it:

1. Market research
2. Your CRM
3. Your closed-lost deals
4. Conversations with the customers you already have

Plenty of businesses lose months in the data trying to be certain, when all they need is an educated and slightly brave call. So if you’re trying to decide on your ICP, do the research, or if you already know who you need to talk to, go for it. We’ve written about what happened when we narrowed our own focus if you want to see how that decision plays out.

Find the problem that keeps them up at night

Put yourself in their shoes. Picture what it’s like to spend a day in their job title and think about what keeps them up at night. Are they worried because they aren’t getting enough leads, or because they aren’t making enough sales?

Those exact pain points and worries are the things you need to make your content about.

Should you gate top-of-funnel content?

The short answer is no.

The moment you put a form in front of something, you’ve asked the reader to give you something before they get anything at all. Gated content belongs at the bottom of the funnel, where someone has already decided they want what you’re offering. The top of the funnel is the part where you give something to your audience first.

Build one big rock around the problem

Once you’ve pinned down the big problem your ICP has, this is where you build your big rock content piece.

A content pillar is one substantial, deeply researched asset built around a single problem that gets broken up into smaller pieces that all point back to it. Many businesses run these as major campaigns every three to six months, ideally once a quarter, with a few months of work behind each.

A state of the industry report for your category might pull from four sources:

1. Interviews with your own internal team
2. Your internal business data, such as your CRM and your analytics
3. Third-party data tools or platforms you use
4. Interviews with external partners or industry experts, for a view of the wider market

Most businesses skip point four, but this is essentially what keeps the piece educational. If you only use your own data, the report quietly becomes a piece about your company, and it slides down the funnel. Outside voices and recognisable names keep it useful to someone who has never heard of you.

Then repurpose it

Take that report and turn it into short-form video featuring team members from various levels across the organisation, with paid spend behind it on LinkedIn.

Then comes a long-form YouTube video summarising the findings, cut down into shorts. Then you could host in-person events, and your SEO team writes blogs on the same theme, each with a CTA pointing back to the full report. Your subject matter experts can post the findings in their own words as well, and we’ve covered how to get them posting on LinkedIn separately.

That’s one problem, one piece of research, and half a year of content.

How to find your topic when it isn’t obvious

Most SaaS companies look at their ICP and see a dozen possible problems with no obvious winner. There are two ways through that.

Ask your market directly

You can run research aimed purely at the top of the funnel, using something like Wynter. Ask what problems they’re dealing with, what worries them about their industry, and what they’d want to learn more about.

Keep pricing and product questions out of it entirely, because those pull the answers straight down to the bottom of the funnel. There’s more on running this properly in our guide to SaaS market research.

Mine your own sales calls

This is the best hack you can use.

Add a few top-of-funnel questions to your discovery and demo scripts. Take those calls, transcribe them with an AI system, drop the transcripts into an LLM, and ask it to mine what themes and struggles keep coming up across all of them.

Your sales team is in these conversations every day with your clients and typical audience. The problems your buyers describe on those calls are the same ones they would read an article about, so without pulling that data out, you’re guessing at what to create for your top-of-funnel content.

Decide what you want to be known for

Once the research is in, the question becomes what you want your business to be known for, and how that connects to what you sell.

Take an HR platform for example. They want to be known for great HR, so their content has to live in that world and lead back to the product without it ever turning into a sales pitch. Everything they publish should make an HR director better at their job, and the platform should be the obvious next step for anyone who wants to go further.

That’s the rule holding all of this together. Don’t push your product at the top of the funnel.

Why the podcast is our best top-of-funnel play

Over the last two years, our founder Ryan James has published more than 100 episodes of SaaS Marketing Weekly.

“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, and it’s easily been arguably the best investment we’ve ever made.”

One recording or episode can branch out into so many different forms of top-of-funnel content. It becomes a blog, an email newsletter, LinkedIn clips, short-form video, long-form video, and posts from the subject matter experts. So out of an hour’s recording a week, you get a whole bunch of content that follows out from that. We consider that a win, and you can hear the full back catalogue on our podcast page.

Start with the sales calls

Most CEOs push back on top-of-funnel spend because you can’t point at a lead and say that it came from that specific top-of-funnel piece.

That’s fair, but it’s still the wrong reason to skip it. People remember where they learned something. When they change jobs, or the budget finally lands, they know exactly who to call. And it might just be you, because you were consistent with your top-of-funnel content.

So run the sales call exercise this week. Pull your last month of transcripts, put them through an LLM, and ask what problem keeps coming up. That gives you your topic to work from, and the rest follows on from there.

If you’d rather work through it with someone, that’s what our content creation service is for.

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By Ryan James

Founder of Rocket SaaS