The marketing funnel has died. Fully just gone caput, irrelevant, dead, however you want to say it, she’s gone.
While this is something experienced marketers will have seen coming for a long time, it’s certainly come to a head with the advent of social commerce. Buying and shopping directly through an app that also exposes you to the product has officially been the final nail in the coffin of the traditional funnel.
Now, that’s not to say that marketing itself is dead. In fact, it’s quite the opposite, it’s never been more important to cut through the noise and get yourself and your product out there. However, in spite of how easy it is to post and get marketing content out there, it’s much harder to cut through the noise.
In order to do so, it’s important that we start to see marketing as an ecosystem, where everything is interconnected and builds each other up to create a cohesive and effective customer journey.
Ad Overload: Navigating a Noisy Landscape
Back in 2006, CBS News reported a stat from Walker-Smith that said Americans in the 70’s saw around 500 ads per day, but in 2006, they were seeing upwards of 5000+ ads each day. So, you can only imagine where we might sit now, in 2024, with social media ads becoming one of the primary places we interact with ads on a regular basis.
While this may seem an exaggerated stat, if you think about how often you see a social media ad. I, for one, can’t seem to go on Instagram without immediately seeing at least two ads, and even with my self-imposed time limit of 30 minutes per day, I open it up at least 4-5 times a day. And that’s not mentioning any TikTok ads, PPC ads, LinkedIn ads, Pinterest ads, billboards, bus ads, or audio ads on the radio that I might be exposed to.
Plus, if you expand the definition of an ad to include organic social media posts from brands, you can start to see how this 5000 number could be reality. After all, everything a brand posts, regardless of its content, advertises who they are and what they stand for.
While this all may seem a bit arbitrary to the main point of how the funnel is dead, it helps to see the context of the world we’re in now. Especially since we also know that only 63% of people actually click on PPC ads and the average CTR for social media ads is 0.98% in 2023. As marketers and brands, with this amount of noise to cut through, we have to take a broader look at how to approach our marketing efforts and our strategy, rather than relying on the traditional funnel.
The traditional funnel
Before we dive into why the funnel is dead, it might be useful to contextualise the argument with what the funnel actually is.
The AIDA model (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action) was developed in 1898 by the American advertising advocate (yes, that was apparently a thing) Elias St. Elmo Lewis. But, it wasn’t developed into the marketing funnel we know today until 1924, when William W. Townsend wrote about it in his book, Bond Salesmanship.
This model has gone through a few different iterations as the market and people’s perceptions have changed. Today, it looks like this:
Awareness: Also known as top of funnel (TOFU, if you’re feeling acronyms), this is fairly self-explanatory. It’s where people first become aware of your company, brand, or product.
Interest: Where people are interested in learning more.
Consideration: Where people are considering making a purchase.
Intent: Where people have the intent to purchase something
Purchase: Where people actually become a customer and make a purchase, also known as bottom of funnel (BOFU).
Loyalty: Where people remain loyal to your brand.
Advocacy: Where people tell other people about your brand.
So, in the past, people would typically enter the awareness phase and then slowly trickle down the funnel depending on the product. And while this can still ring true for certain industries, especially ones that don’t lend themselves to social media as easily, it’s definitely fading and in some industries, gone altogether. In general, this assumed step by step progression into the different phases of the funnel just doesn’t fit the diverse customer journeys of today.
Transitioning from Funnel to Ecosystem
In its place, we’re starting to see marketing as more of an ecosystem, where each part—SEO, social media, email—must coexist and feed into one another to create a balanced, thriving environment. Customers don’t follow this step by step path, instead, they enter and exit at any point throughout and can be heavily influenced by multiple touch points all at once.
Now, you don’t just need people to become aware of your product or brand, you need them to become aware while also seeing you as a brand they could become loyal to or advocate for. You want your potential customers to grow more loyal as they learn more about you and engage with you across channels. Marketing as an ecosystem is simply tailoring the content and the marketing collateral to meet people where they are rather than encouraging them to be in one step of the funnel.
The best way to think about this is to think about how you, yourself shop. Do you start with a google search (SEO)? Or do you see an ad on social media (Paid Social) and then search the brand (SEO) in an incognito tab so you don’t get as followed around the internet? Or do you search for a product and then click on the first ad you see (PPC)? Do you see something on social media (Organic Social) and then immediately go buy it off of that brand or creator’s shop or website? Do you get an email and then follow it to the brand’s website to purchase (Email Marketing)?
In this new ecosystem approach, the journey is more about loops, connections, and interactions, rather than straight lines.
Customer Journeys: Beyond Linear Paths
There are a number of ways to approach shopping these days and you can come across a brand anywhere. I mean, I saw a brand I liked on a poster on a phone booth and then found and followed them on social media. While I still haven’t purchased, that poster is on my way home and I’m reminded about it on a daily basis, which only highlights to me how seamlessly digital and real-life marketing can work together.
That all being said, you can start to see how everything has to work in tandem. If that poster didn’t reflect the brand’s social media, it would have been jarring and I wouldn’t have followed them. If an email feels on point but their website is outdated, it won’t retain potential customers and you’ll start to see drop offs. Everything has to go hand in hand and you HAVE to meet your customers where they are.
According to the HubSpot 2024 Consumer Trends Report, 29% of millennials and Gen Z prefer to search for their information on social media rather than on search engines, so if you aren’t meeting your customers on these channels, you’re doing yourself a huge disservice and are leaving valuable consumers behind. With this shift in consumer behaviour, we have to then shift the way we market, whether that’s in an agency or from brand side.
Within marketing agencies themselves, there’s now a lot more crossover between the different departments. PPC and social media campaigns can go together, an email marketing effort can be matched with SEO efforts, and so many other possibilities. We work together within an overarching strategy that ties every aspect of these different channels together in order to build an ecosystem that speaks to the consumer and finds them where they are.
Brands leading the way
While we can talk a lot about this and how we can build out new strategies for this, it’s always best to contextualise in real life examples.
There are so many brands taking this approach to their marketing and leading the way for the rest of the world to hop on board. Whilst we see this strategy with big brands like Nike, L’Oreal, Apple, etc, let’s look a little more locally at British brands who are embracing this wholeheartedly.
Refy
The beauty brand Refy have done an outstanding job of making every touch point feel like them. Not only did they launch a partnership with a wine shop, Kerb, last year, giving a huge IRL touchpoint to a largely digital brand, but they’ve also been among the first to do community trips, rather than influencer trips, positioning themselves as a brand that cares about their customers more than press.
Now while their marketing is incredibly innovative and interesting, they’ve also had a leg up since one of their co-founders is a model and influencer with over 1.8M followers on Instagram (Jess Hunt). This level of exposure doesn’t always equal business success (looking at you, Rita Ora), but Refy have managed to make it work.
Since launching in 2020, Refy hit £24.2 million in revenue in 2023, and are set to beat that this year. Part of the reason they’ve done so well is that they aren’t afraid to be everywhere, they’re doing SEO, PPC, Instagram, TikTok, real life brand experiences, email marketing, etc. They’re building out an ecosystem for their consumers to encounter them no matter where they’re spending their time.
Gymshark
Everyone knows Gymshark by this point, but what you might not know is how they got to be this big. From a startup built in a weight lifting room in Birmingham in 2012, to a £556m company as of July 2023, they’ve gotten this big by focusing on building an ecosystem of community.
Their dedication to community building on social media through high profile influencer partnerships is a big part of how they got so successful so quickly. But it’s not the only way, they’ve been building their brand more than anything, through workout plans, classes, etc. Their main touch point with their customers is the lifestyle and the people who participate in this lifestyle become ride or die fans of the brand.
However, in the last year, they’ve done a very smart thing and begun to pivot into more real life experiences, which is something we’re seeing a lot of brands begin to do as there becomes more appetite for it. Rewarding loyalty or bringing awareness to your brand with something that may not inherently bring revenue is an incredibly clever tactic to bring people into the fold of your lifestyle and therefore into the fold of your brand.
Finisterre
Heading down south, Finisterre is a B-Corp based in Cornwall. As you might expect for a Cornish brand, they focus on surfing and the lifestyle that comes with living by the seaside. They’ve built their brand around sustainability and outdoor adventure and no matter where you encounter their brand, you’ll have an immediate sense of who they are.
They host surfing trips in the UK, they have a unique retail experience that highlights exactly who they are, giving off a complete surf shop vibe, and throughout all of their touch points, you can tell that their focus is on sustainability.
Even as silly of an app that TikTok can be, they still focus on their brand identity instead of gimmicky trends. While I don’t think it is necessarily the right strategy for TikTok right now, it will position them in exactly where they want to be and allow them to find the right audience for them rather than a big, unengaged audience.
While they all tackle this ecosystem differently, the main point is that they are indeed tackling it. Not one of these brands is focusing all of its efforts on one channel or expecting their audience to only be in one phase, they are meeting their customers exactly where they are and are building out full experiences with their customers that help them remain loyal.
All of this to say, building out who your brand is and diversifying where you are actually marketing, whilst still ensuring it fits within an overarching strategy, is going to be the future of marketing. There’s no one size fits all approach anymore and you can’t expect that a strategy you used 10 years ago is going to resonate with the audiences of today. By engaging with your audience where they are and embracing this change, you’ll be able to foster a deeper, more meaningful connection with your audience, which is only going to become more and more important. As marketers, we have to take this and run with it. When customers can engage with your brand from multiple places all at once, creating a cohesive, multi-channel strategy is going to be the main way you can thrive, and not just survive.
