The Dark Funnel

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

This familiar Marketing adage was said by business owner John Wanamaker over 100 years ago.

Despite the multitude of tracking tools we have today, some insights in the buyer journey are unknown and aren’t trackable -> aka The Dark Funnel.

Buyers are researching products in places that cannot be tracked.

Private forums, podcasts, influencer mentions, industry events, word of mouth, and private slack channels are some examples of Dark Funnel spaces.

But these spaces can have much higher engagement than other trackable digital channels.

I was recently looking for a simple video tool. I did my research and picked a few contenders. I also asked a private group I’m a member of, and got a recommendation from another member.

Guess which tool I went with. Yup, the recommended tool from a trusted peer.

The challenge with a lot of trackable channels is that they are saturated and noisy, so prospects may be tuning them out.

We also can’t start tracking the buyer’s journey until after they come to our website, and in some cases it’s hard to know what brought them there.

Prospects may also feel overwhelmed with the sheer number of options available in some cases.

To meet buyers where they are, we have to run programs that are hard to measure, like:

- Switching to ungated high quality content
- Becoming a guest on relevant podcasts and creating your own
- Engaging with industry influencers’ LinkedIn posts in a meaningful, non-salesy way
- Creating video content from blog posts
Spend time on one-on-one conversations with prospects

Marketing programs have to touch on as many channels as possible to reach, educate, and empower the buyer.

Even if some of these channels cannot be tracked, they may be the thing that empowers the buyer to buy.