The 'Pink Cloud': A Finesse on the Funnel

Like many content marketers, I find it helpful to map each page/piece of content to a funnel stage. But years ago, I noticed that the top-of-funnel/TOFU bucket became a bit of a catch-all dumping ground for everything that wasn’t more explicitly decision or conversion-oriented.

For me, this wasn’t a good enough definition of TOFU. TOFU content should still be part of your buying journey—content that creates awareness of the problems that you sell a solution for.

A lot of what I was seeing classified as TOFU content did not meet this definition, so I created the concept of the ‘pink cloud.’

What Exactly Is ‘Pink Cloud’ Content?

• It speaks to your target audience. It’s relevant and likely resonant for them.
• However, it is NOT about problems or issues that you sell a solution to.

Let’s look at some examples to make this real:

Example 1: Small Business Owner Solution

Your product is an accounting solution for small business owners. 
Your product offers solutions to their billing, payments, cash flow, and tax-time headaches.

But you decide to write a blog post about ‘when to hire your first employee’. You know your product isn’t a recruitment or hiring solution, but you feel this topic is such an important milestone for small business owners that it’s worth covering. Plus (you tell yourself) payroll and cash flow are definitely intertwined. This content is pink cloud. 

Similarly, if you thought to yourself, "Oh, hey, it’s mental health awareness month." I’m going to write a series of posts about burnout, stress management, and imposter syndrome because those are real problems for small business owners. 

You’re right! Mental health and burnout are huge problems for small business owners. But they’re also not problems you sell a solution for (that’d be Headspace, Calm, and other therapy solutions). This is pink cloud content too.

Example 2: RFP Enterprise Solution

Your product is RFP response software. It helps proposal managers complete compliant, accurate, and compelling RFP responses in record time, improving win rates and helping scale revenue.

You decide to write a blog post on ‘How to grow your career as a proposal manager.’ Obviously, this post will resonate with your audience! But the connection to your product is tenuous at best (you can probably loosely tie-in your product by advocating staying current with tools will help with advancement). 

The Beauty and Curse of Pink Cloud

The beauty of pink cloud content is obvious. First, it’s generally a lot of fun to ideate and execute this content, especially if your product is a little dull. Pink cloud content is often where novice content marketers start, especially if they come from a more journalistic background.

From an SEO perspective, your keyword universe is significantly enlarged when you include the pink cloud. SEOs love to tell content marketers they need to create hundreds and hundreds of pages and the pink cloud is where they often find them. Plus, that pink cloud content can attract backlinks and we all know the value of those.

From an audience perspective, if there’s volume or amplification associated with pink cloud topics, it can be really great for brand and traffic building to hop on these topics. It can help portray your brand as deeply caring about all aspects of your ICP’s experience—not just those topics you hope to monetize.

The curse of pink cloud content is precisely that you don’t sell a solution to these problems. So, it can create a bit of a revolving door of traffic that you can’t really do much to move forward. You can do some fun creative things to connect pink cloud into your funnel (as noted in the second example above). But you have to be light about it because 

Now, some businesses really go all-in on the pink cloud. They want their brand to be the go-to destination for all things that matter to their audience. And if you’re operating in this world, you’re very lucky because you’re basically in the “inform, enlighten, entertain” business, not the content marketing business. 

But I’m always nervous for teams in this situation and for the content marketers they become: They’re associated with vanity metrics and not revenue. And when times get tough, it can be hard to justify such a team.

Pink Cloud Best Practices & What Your Funnel Should Look Like

In general, I try to follow a rule that no more than 10% of the content I produce falls into the pink cloud category. This gives me room to play in the pink cloud but keeps me disciplined so that I won’t produce too much of it.

I’m also really tough on the pink cloud. If it doesn’t drive traffic, it’s pretty pointless. So, low-performing pink cloud content gets ruthlessly chucked out (I call it Kondo-ing your blog and recommend you do it annually).

Finally, I work hard to connect the pink cloud into my funnel—if not in the content itself, then with surrounding assets (CTAs, newsletter signups, related links), etc.—anything I can do to bridge the gap between the pink cloud and the actual funnel without contorting the content into something it’s not.

It’s probably helpful at this point to describe how I classify the rest of the funnel. I know there are a lot of other definitions of funnel stages out there (and a whole healthy debate on the value of the funnel, which I can argue both sides of). But here’s how I think of each stage:

TOFU: Problem Content

This is the ‘what is’ content that articulates many of your audience's struggles. The key difference from Pink Cloud content is that you actually sell a solution to these problems.

Let’s use our small business owner as an example. TOFU content for them could be:

• What is cash flow (and how do you measure it)
• Net 30, 60, 90: What are the best invoice payment terms?
• Should you charge late payment fees?

In general, I give TOFU content the biggest slice of the pie at about 50% of my content library. I know no-click content is going away with AI, so key here is to write your TOFU (and all other) content in a way that's truly magnetic to your audience, not just descriptive/informational.

MOFU: Solution Content

In my experience, MOFU content is the most overlooked. Most marketers can’t write a MOFU piece without turning it into BOFU. But the key difference is that MOFU speaks to the solution in general, not just your product. You’ll probably allude to your product (sometimes directly), but you’ll also provide solution-thinking that is valuable beyond your product.

Continuing on with our small business owner. MOFU content could be:

• What’s the best way to keep track of cash flow?
• How can I automate late payment fees?
• How to choose the right accounting software for your business.

If you have gated content as part of your strategy, MOFU content is where I like to place those gates (for BOFU content, I like to get out of the way). In general, I aim for about 25% of my content library to be MOFU.

BOFU: Product Content

The easiest. If it’s directly about your product, it’s BOFU. The classic examples are case studies, product demos and other product posts, and us-versus-them pages. If your team is measured by conversion, you’re likely to be bottom-heavy on BOFU as an approach, but working your way back up the funnel and building connective journeys can round out your content library.

How to Use the Pink Cloud Concept

I didn’t just think up the pink cloud because I like pink (though that's also true!) It’s actually something I find useful in diagnosing problems with a content strategy and blog, and when managing ongoing content production. Here's how I put the concept to work:

Auditing Content

• If you’ve got a traffic-rich, conversion-poor blog, it might be because you’ve gone too heavy on pink cloud content.
• If you have a bounce problem, separating out your content and understanding where that’s coming from might be key. Again, if you have a surplus on the pink cloud side, you might see that's where your bounce is concentrated.
• With pink cloud content classified separately, you have a clearer vision of your TOFU content and can build better journeys from TOFU to MOFU to BOFU.
• Mapping all your content to these funnel stages will give you a sense overall of where your content might be gapped and what you need to prioritize.

Ongoing Content Management and Production

• If you’re ideating content, these classifications will help you rule out or rule in certain ideas.
• Likewise, teaching these concepts (especially to junior content marketers) will help them ideate more strategically.
• If you work with SEOs or do your own keyword research, using these classifications will help you prioritize the KWs that will actually move the needle on revenue, rather than on traffic alone.
• Understand how to measure what you’ve got: Content will perform differently depending on the funnel stage. We expect higher engagement at the top of the funnel but higher conversion down the bottom. Assigning funnel stages also means you can assign and track the right metric of success for each content piece/funnel stage.