What worked in content marketing 5 years ago isn’t as likely to work now. Araminta Robertson advises us to focus on bottom-of-funnel in 2026.

Araminta says: “Now, it's more important than ever to do bottom-of-funnel content to help appear for the right topics and the right keywords in Google, but also for LLMs.”

How do you describe the different stages of the funnel, and the content that is needed at each stage?

“It's really important to make that distinction because people have different definitions of what each stage in the funnel is.

To me, top-of-funnel content is for someone who's not aware. They are still very much at the beginning of their journey in terms of making a purchase. I work in the B2B payments and financial services sector, so I’ll use the example of an e-commerce site or merchant who wants to work with a payment provider and start accepting payments online.

At this stage of the funnel, they're still doing a lot of research. How do other companies accept payments online? What different business models are available? They're almost looking for inspiration, and they may not even have a problem yet. They're at a very early stage of their journey.

Middle-of-funnel, they are starting to be more aware that they have a problem. They're starting to do research on types of payment providers, what kind of payments they should be accepting, and what the flow should be. They're trying to understand exactly what the problem is, but they may not be looking for a solution just yet.

Bottom-of-funnel is someone who's aware they have a problem and is actively looking for a solution. In this case, they're looking for things like ‘top payment gateways,’ ‘how to accept payments online with Stripe,’ or ‘Stripe vs PayPal’.

What's key here is that it's non-branded. Often, people assume that the bottom-of-funnel is someone who already knows about your company and is trying to understand how the product works. That could be the case, but I would say that's after the buying journey, because they're already aware of your brand.

We're focussed on non-branded bottom-of-funnel: someone who doesn't know that your product exists and is actively looking for a solution to their problem.”