The Marketing Funnel Isn’t Dead, It’s Just Wrong For B2B
by Scott Stransky | Dec 17, 2024
Gurus, experts, and thought leaders have led marketers astray for too long
Over the years, the marketing funnel has been retired, killed, and reincarnated a million different ways.
Since its inception in the late 1890s, generations of would-be marketing visionaries have pitched their own buyer journey model in an effort to gain clout and cred. But aside from personal brand building, I’m not sure what the fascination is with trying to reconfigure something that’s fundamentally wrong to begin with.
The problem is that everyone’s new and improved buyer’s journey is actually the seller’s journey. It’s the path and process sellers either think buyers take or that sellers want buyers to take instead of the path buyers actually take.
And all this happens because marketers, for whatever reason, still believe the purchase decision process is both linear and singular.
The decision to buy stuff isn’t linear
By and large, content and product marketers have been convinced that prospective purchasers follow a conveniently clean and straightforward path to signing on the dotted line and forking over some cash.
Typically, it involves a prospective buyer reading a blog or social post that caught their eye. That compels them to then download an eBook or white paper (in exchange for their email, natch) for more in-depth information.
That, in turn, is immediately followed by a series of follow-up emails designed to “nurture” a prospect through to purchase, whatever that means.
These follow up emails frequently link to other content — infographics, other blogs, maybe a buyer’s guide or comparison chart, and eventually a customer case study.
Voilà! Purchase process complete, right? WRONG.
Complex decision making is complex
There’s strong evidence showing that complex decision making — like the kind that goes into determining how you’re going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars of your company’s budget — doesn’t often happen like you’d expect.
Instead of the awareness —> consideration —> purchase —> advocacy model everyone wants buyers to follow, buyers don’t all start from or end in the same place. And by extension, their process of determining which product to purchase also doesn’t follow a predictable path.
When it’s time to take action and address a business challenge, buyers can take a near-infinite number of paths to reach their buying decision.
Some might start by asking their peers for recommendations and then hit up a Google search to create an expanded roster of vendors to consider. Others could find your website on Google organically, call a sales rep but decide it’s not the right fit, and then attend a webinar a month later that prompts them to reach out to sales again.
Or, they might learn about you from a webinar a friend shared, download a case study but get distracted from other priorities for a few months, and eventually come back to visit your website and then reach out for a demo — all without reading a single nurture email the entire time.
None of this follows the traditional funnel-based buyer’s journey that’s somehow become everyone’s “best practice.”
B2B Buying is a Team Sport
The other big miss in B2B marketing — and the actual fatal flaw in the funnel-based approach — is assuming decisions are made by a single person. In B2C marketing, this makes sense. You only need to convince one person that your product or service is the right one for a particular situation.
On the contrary, the average complex B2B sale can involve as many as 28 stakeholders. That may include everyone from C-Suite execs who’ve been with the company for a decade to a specialist-level daily user who just hit her 1-year anniversary.
Each member of that buying committee has their own personal preferences, needs, agendas, and Day One vendor lists they’ve developed over the course of their professional experiences.
More importantly, they each have their own individual approach and process for gathering the information they need because buying committees are as diverse and dynamic as the organizations they represent.
Trying to push each person or group through the same prescribed stages of education — probably using all the same content and messaging, too — is a recipe for wasted time, budget, and opportunity.
Let answering questions be the journey
In the B2B space, nearly 85% of purchase decisions are made before the first contact with a vendor’s sales team.
That means that a HUGE amount of the fact-finding and evaluation is done long before your sales and marketing teams are even “prospect-aware” (commonly known as the “dark funnel.”) and vice versa.
Marketers expecting prospective buyers to wait until they’re served some content from the brand to take the next step in their purchase process are going to be left in the dust by competitors who actively and proactively look to make finding answers easier and more convenient.
Success requires a sizable mental shift away from structured, programmatic content delivery and toward buyer self-service that makes it easier for them to find the information they need on their own terms.
Conducting deep-dive interviews with your “most ideal” ideal customer accounts to understand the exact steps they took to becoming a customer in the first place will allow you to clearly define and map your prospects’ actual buying journey.
Combine that information with historical content engagement trends to map your content plans directly to each step and stage — using key buying questions as the pillars of each phase — and then create a range of multimedia, multichannel content that addresses each question for every buying role in the committee.
The marketing funnel as we’ve known it is a flawed seller-focused model that is increasingly failing B2B marketers and customers alike. What was once seen as an infallible model for marketing operations is now holding marketers and their companies back from sustainable success.
In the era of increased buyer self-service, marketers need to take a proactive, buyer enablement-focused approach to marketing content development and find ways to create content in a variety of formats, for a variety of channels that answers essential buying questions that prospective customers can discover and engage in the order they prefer.
Contact us to more about how Thrū Content’s Demand Planning programs can help you use your own customers’ buyer journeys to develop an intelligent content strategy.