For many years, the marketing funnel – also known as the conversion funnel – has been the first lesson of Marketing 101. You know: Awareness, Consideration, Conversion, Loyalty and Advocacy. In this traditional model, members of your target audience are informed about your business and product or service on your website’s landing page. From there, they become leads and move into the consideration stage, where you create specialized content to show them how your product/service solves their immediate needs. From there, they supposedly convert to customers. Assuming they’re happy customers, they become advocates who provide positive online reviews and word-of-mouth.

That’s how it used to be, anyway. Now, there’s a growing consensus that the marketing funnel is dead. While the process is no longer as linear as it once was, perhaps it’s more accurate – and kind – to say that it is evolving rather than demised.

Why the Traditional Marketing Funnel is Changing

The linear progression the funnel tracked is less relevant in today’s digital world. Instead of moving through stages, consumer journeys are more dynamic and influenced by multiple touchpoints. Consumers are digitally savvy, engaging with brands across various channels – and may jump between stages or even skip them entirely.

Moreover, social media platforms and search engines offer increased opportunities for personalized and dynamic interactions with consumers. For example, someone who’s impressed by a product’s TikTok video isn’t likely to do scads of research comparing it against other similar products – they’ll just purchase it directly. Also, the focus of modern marketing is on consumer experience, which emphasizes building relationships, providing value and fostering a sense of community. Contemporary consumers are active participants in the buying process, not passive recipients waiting for the next piece of content to move them through the funnel.

So What’s Replacing the Marketing Funnel As We Know It?

The “Messy Middle” – Google’s research highlights the non-linear nature of customer journeys, where consumers may explore, evaluate, and re-evaluate products or services multiple times.

As A88LAB puts it, “The key takeaway here is that the buyer doesn’t follow a linear path. They may skip consideration or even decision-making stages, revisit content multiple times, or even abandon their initial interest entirely. The funnel assumes that every lead progresses from top to bottom, but in the real world, many prospects remain in a constant state of exploration and evaluation, bouncing in and out of stages.”

The Flywheel Model – Defined by HubSpot, this model emphasizes continuous engagement and delight, creating a virtuous cycle of customer interactions. In fact, its Attract, Engage and Delight cycle has Growth at the center – and has inspired this leading inbound marketing company to redesign its own inbound methodology around it!

As HubSpot explains, “… in the attract phase, you attract visitors with useful content and remove barriers as they try to learn about your company. The key is to earn people’s attention, not force it … In the engage phase, you make it easier to shop and buy from you by enabling customers to engage with you on their preferred timeline and channels. Focus on opening relationships, not just closing deals … in the delight phase, you help, support, and empower customers to reach their goals. Remember, customer success is your success.”

Customer Journey Mapping – Understanding the entire customer experience – from initial awareness to post-purchase interactions – is crucial for adapting marketing strategies. This model involves mapping out the entire journey a customer takes with your brand, helping to identify and optimize key touchpoints that influence purchasing decisions specific to your customer segments.

Wide Angle provides the following outline of customer journey mapping:

• Holistic view – Provides a comprehensive understanding of customer interactions across all channels.
• Optimization – Identifies critical touchpoints for improvement to enhance overall customer experience.
• Alignment – Ensures that all marketing efforts align with customer needs and behaviors.
• Customer insight – Deepens understanding of customer demographics and psychographics.
• Empowers customer service – By highlighting touchpoints where customers feel delight or friction, it allows for strategic intervention across the customer journey.

The Content Experience Model – Sometimes referred to as a content experience framework, this model focuses on the complete experience a user has with content – from finding it to engaging with it. It goes beyond just creating content and considers how that content is delivered, consumed, and experienced across different channels and devices. Essentially, it’s about ensuring that every interaction with your content is seamless, engaging and valuable for the user in order to build relationships and drive conversions.

Omni-channel Marketing – This model creates a seamless and personalized experience across all touchpoints, whether digital or physical. As McKinsey & Company explains, “More and more, customers move across all channels – in person, online, and beyond – to get what they want. But not every customer is looking for the same thing, and omnichannel marketing acknowledges that. Some people want more services for certain transactions; others prefer low-touch, 24/7 interactions. Effective omnichannel marketing, then, happens when companies provide a set of seamlessly integrated channels, catering to customer preferences, and steer them to the most efficient solutions.”

How Your Business Can Adapt to This Brave New World of Marketing

Change isn’t easy. If you’ve been using the traditional marketing funnel as your model, recognizing that it’s now fluid, rather than solid, is the first step in reaching members of your target market more effectively in the journey to convert them to loyal customers. The people you want to reach can be in a variety of places – both digital and physical – at any given time. Making sure you’re there to meet them with a warm welcome and assurance that your business understands their needs and can provide just what they want can win them over!

Our team at Virtual Stacks Systems welcomes the opportunity to help you create a plan targeted to meet your marketing objectives. Every small business is unique, and so are our solutions! We offer experienced website design and redesign, SEO marketing, PPC advertising, content writing and much more!

Contact us today to get started!