🍝 The Marketing Funnel Isn't Real

Hey friends,

Here’s the truth about marketing funnels that I think a few of you will agree with: they aren’t real.

Erica Schneider (who I just had on the KlientBoost Kitchen pod to talk about this, go listen here) actually said it better than me: Funnels are a made up, slide down utopic journey that don’t exist.

While most strategies cling to TOFU, MOFU, BOFU like it's the only way to convert customers, I’m buying into another theory to win customers over: the 95/5 rule. 

The traditional logic of the marketing funnel is simple enough:

But B2B buyers don't work this way. Especially on social media, where one post can lead to an inbound message or people will read everything you post but never engage.

It also creates problems when you try to replicate funnels in your performance marketing strategy, because B2B buying journeys are too complex for algorithms to understand. In an average deal, you might have:

↳ 5+ person decision-making committee
↳ No historical purchase data or statistical significance
↳ CFOs and CEOs making the final decision
↳ Intent signals that don't actually signal intent
↳ 100s of touchpoints across 10+ devices

If we apply this to the funnel, I guarantee the algorithm will struggle to match the prospect to the perfect TOFU/MOFU/BOFU stage when they are (almost definitely) not following it linearly.

Here’s some proof: an experiment we ran last month for a LinkedIn Ads campaign.

Same budget and same creative team. The only difference was we optimized one campaign for conversions and the other for reach.  

On paper, one of the campaigns was “TOFU” and the other was “BOFU”. According to the rules of the funnel, the TOFU content shouldn’t have performed like it did: 

Campaign set to “awareness” goal: 

🟩 3X more closed/won deals
🟩 Better qualified pipeline
🟩 Lower cost per impression
🟩 Higher engagement rates

Campaign set to “conversion” goal: 

🟥 Higher CPMs (4x more expensive)
🟥 Fewer total conversions
🟥 Less pipeline generated
🟥 Lower click-through rates

If we stuck with the traditional funnel approach, it would’ve cost us 7 conversions and a lot of wasted spend.

This is straight from research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute: At any given time, only about 5% of potential buyers are “in-market” and ready to buy. The other 95% are “out-market”, and no amount of TOFU blogs or MOFU webinars can change that.

What B2B marketers can do is build mindshare in that out-market audience, so when they do move in-market—they think of you.

Traditional funnel logic says: Create awareness content for the 95%, consideration content for the transition, and conversion content for the 5%.

But you can't predict when someone moves from the 95% to the 5%. And when they do move, they don't follow a neat progression.

The way to win this audience over is to build mental availability through memorable content that connects your product to specific problems and solutions. Then, saturate your entire target audience with that content.

On the paid side, we use demand generation campaigns to target these people. On LinkedIn, this is (easily) where we spend most of our cash, because these campaigns have the highest ROI.

We split the spend across a range of campaigns 👇

At the same time, we run demand capture campaigns to snag the people moving in-market.

These are laser-targeted campaigns focused on high-intent signals and behavior from the in-market audience.

Our full ICP list is ~180k, and as ~5% are in-market at any time, these campaigns only hit around 8k of the list. We target them with three campaigns to remind them why we're the best option 👇

👉 A more detailed breakdown of how to set up demand capture campaigns

For both the out-market (95%) and in-market (5%) campaigns, we track the same leading and lagging KPIs to understand if they’re working:

Unlike most B2Bs, we don't exclude existing pipeline from in-market targeting. A deal isn’t closed until it’s closed.

This strategy works for two simple reasons:

B2Bs who optimize for real buyer behavior will dominate the next 2-5 years.

Hope you’ve found this useful. Catch ya in the next one!

🤘

Patrick