The funnel has left the building
The marketing funnel used to make everything look so reassuringly simple. You build awareness at the top, nurture interest in the middle and wait for the customer to emerge at the end. If only prospects were still that obliging.
Today, someone can discover a business on LinkedIn, forget about it, hear the name on a podcast three months later, Google it, read an article, ask AI who the best providers are, visit the website, disappear again and finally get in touch after someone at work mentions the name. Now, that doesn’t all fit as neatly in a funnel.
This is just one of the reasons we believe integrated marketing has moved from being a nice idea to something much more fundamental. When your audience is constantly shifting between platforms, influences and sources, your marketing should, and needs to, move with them.
Google has named this behaviour as the ‘messy middle’, describing how people loop between exploration and evaluation as they navigate huge amounts of information and choice before making a decision. The traditional funnel no longer tells the whole story, with people streaming, scrolling, searching and shopping across a network of touchpoints rather than following a once-predictable route. For marketers, that’s changed the job.
Did we ever control the journey?
It’s not that we controlled it, it’s that we had far greater controls over where customers encountered a brand. Today discovery can happen almost anywhere. A colleague’s recommendation might spark a Google. A bit of coverage might lead someone to LinkedIn. A social post might create a search that generates an AI answer containing third-party sources. And a prospect might just disappear for six months before they have a different interaction that brings the business front of mind. Each encounter influences the next and that’s hard to track; well, impossible. It’s impossible.
That makes the traditional idea of choosing the channel that will build awareness increasingly unhelpful, because there may not be one. The opportunity here is to make sure that wherever someone encounters your business, they keep building on what they already know.
Being everywhere isn’t the quick fix
This doesn’t mean you need to open an account on every social platform and start throwing budget at advertising activity. Just because it fits together does not mean it is everywhere. You can appear in 10 places and still be forgettable. The world’s biggest brands understand this incredibly well. Coca-Cola doesn’t need every interaction to look identical, but it has spent decades reinforcing the same distinctive brand assets. McDonald’s can change its creative endlessly without losing the golden arches. And when we look at the variety of storytelling by Nike, we know the messaging is different on ads, retail, sponsorship deals and social but it’s always unmistakably Nike.
For growing businesses, the budgets aren’t comparable, but the principles are. You can use your press activity to build authority, your social as the heartbeat of the brand and your search content to answer any questions for when someone starts researching. The activities don’t need to say the same thing, but they do need to feel as though they come from the same business. If they don’t, you’ll make the prospect feel that each interaction is them starting from scratch.
Some science about this
The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute in Australia talks about mental availability, which is a really useful way to think about the importance of recognition. It means how easily a brand comes to mind in a buying situation. The research produced in B2B growth argues that brands benefit from being easy to think of and easy to find when the buyer is ‘in market’.
One of the traps businesses fall into is getting bored with their own marketing long before the audience does. A message has been used for six months and now someone is asking for something new. The creative gets over-familiar internally and so the feeling is that it’s time to refresh. But what’s happening externally is that the customer has barely noticed it twice. Consistency can feel repetitive when you work inside the brand, but from the outside it’s a key tactic on building recognition.
Building value with each encounter
This is the value of integrated campaigns. It’s not that all activities are happening at once (PR, social, ads, content, search, brand, creative, digital), it’s each one makes the next more powerful.
The article someone reads makes the name in their search result more familiar next month and then a post on LinkedIn reinforces something they’ve already heard. The beautiful case study you’ve created then gives substance and validation to the advert they’ve seen and that final colleague recommendation feels more authentic because your brand is perceived as known.
In a fragmented customer journey where the funnel is nowhere to be seen, marketers know we won’t see every conversation, search, AI response or moment that influences a purchase. But we can make sure that in every place the brand is seen, it’s working hard, delivers continuity and helps shape the next encounter. All until someone sees the brand and thinks ‘I know them’.