Sunday, January 27, 2013

Is it TOFU, MOFU, or BOFU?



Happy New Year!

I recently returned from a 1 week foundation training course for a group of future Marketo "super users". These were a hand-picked, elite few who would help roll out the system world-wide. The days were filled with hands-on activities, super-duper advanced topics that I can't reveal, and all the flows, lists, programs and drama that comes with marketing automation. The sessions often diverged into multiple tangents and the agenda became a menu of topics from left over questions. All in all, very exciting and fun to see that look of achievement when someone gets a topic.

In the final day, I realized that we covered quite a bit of ground but something was missing. While we focused heavily on the system side of things, there was very little discussion about how all of these functional pieces were addressing the larger chain of events. 

What are the programs we were creating solving for? 
Do these programs address issues with top of the funnel (TOFU), middle of the funnel (MOFU), or bottom of the funnel (BOFU) problems?

I suspect that we were getting more and more specialized in the sense that one person is charge of executing a campaign and anther coming up with the campaigns. It wasn't just this group or this company. Often, I'm finding more and more separation between automation, marketing planning, field marketing and sales. These folks don't really share a common idea of where exactly the issues are in their funnel in order to come up with relevant campaigns that address the fallouts in these phases. Heck, the concepts are even new yet the campaigns have been planned well in advance....sort of cart before the horse.

As we look into future campaigns, I only hope that everyone is staring at the same set of conversion metrics so we can all figure out if it's TOFU, MOFU, or BOFU we're solving for.


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