Did you know that conversion attribution can go beyond the focus points identified in your traditional marketing funnel? They can.
With digital marketing functioning as the norm in the online world, marketers and business owners tend to neglect the touchpoints that may exist from digital channels.
In this blog article, we will discuss this phenomenon known as the dark funnel.
What is the Dark Funnel?
The best way to describe the dark funnel is to compare it with a traditional marketing funnel.
The marketing funnel is a visualization of the journey a customer takes from the first time they land on your website to their final purchase and beyond.
The traditional funnel can be conceptualized by the list below.
- Customer lands on the website.
- The customer gives contact information for the lead magnet.
- Customers are nurtured through email.
- The sales team follows up when the lead is determined to be marketing qualified.
- Customer converts on a sale through your website.
The marketing funnel is very rigid. Mobility through the funnel is always downwards. Because of how concrete the funnel is, digital marketing methods can be easily tracked through the funnel.
However, there are several areas a traditional marketing funnel cannot display attribution which can affect a marketer’s decision-making ability.
The concept of the dark funnel can be defined as the hidden insights or information concerning the customer journey to purchase that a marketer might miss out on in creating a fluid user experience from acquisition to final conversion.
There are hidden gaps in the traditional marketing funnel that are also apparent and can contribute to the final conversion.
Example of Dark Funnel in Practice
In this example, we’re going to map out a funnel for a conceptional lawn car, named LawnGreens. LawnGreens offers a lawn mowing service.
LawnGreens is active on social media using Facebook and Instagram to show off its work. They also have Google My Business and Yelp Accounts. For paid acquisition methods, they run ads on Facebook and Google Ads.
Top of Funnel – User Acquisition
LawnGreens has a website that features a one-pager PDF describing how to take care of your lawn as their lead magnet to attract customers into their marketing funnel. LawnGreens runs paid ads on Facebook and Google Ads to attract potential customers to take action on their lead magic.
Traditional Funnel: The traditional funnel tracks the performance of LawnGreens’ paid media campaigns concerning the number of leads acquired.
Dark Funnel: However, not being tracked is anyone that visits the LawnGreen website because they saw the LawnGreens truck outside a customer’s house having their grass cut.
Middle of Funnel – Nurturing Leads
Once leads enter their funnel, Lawn Greens has an automated email workflow that sends the lead a series of emails that describe their lawn mowing service featuring content related to their service, testimonials, etc.
Traditional Funnel: LawnGreens can track interactions from leads in their emails and on their website.
Dark Funnel: LawnGreen does not track an external comparison video a customer watched on YouTube that mentions that LawnGreens was a top lawn care service amongst the local competition.
Bottom of Funnel – Conversion
When a lead makes it through their funnel, someone from the LawnGreens team reaches out and tries to schedule a free lawn consultation meeting. Typically, when a lead goes through the lawn care consultation, they then book an appointment through the LawnGreens website.
Traditional Funnel: LawnGreens can see the lead actions before conversion on the website as well as information about the lead through the salesperson that handled the case.
Dark Funnel: The customer’s neighbor used LawnGreens before and came over after the consultation and gave a good recommendation.
How Can You Optimize Your Marketing Strategy For The Dark Funnel?
Deeper Research Into Your Buyer Persona
One thing you can do is include a “How did you hear about us?” form field on your lead gen forms. You can list all the possible sources that your lead might use to stumble onto your company. Based on the information you generate for these forms, you can help mold your funnel to better optimize those sources for potential customer acquisition.
For example, if you notice on your lead gen forms, that people are saying that they discover your business through word of mouth referrals. You might want to consider implementing a referral program to incentivize and reward people to mention your business to their colleagues and friends.
Create Synergy Amongst All Marketing Channels
Since the idea of the dark funnel is that you cannot attribute what channels are helping people in the conversion process for your company, one critical thing you can do is make sure all your marketing channels are sharing the same message. You can’t afford to have your social media channels promoting one thing and your email marketing program promoting another.
The idea here is that you don’t know who is sharing your marketing collateral and that you should want to create a true synergistic message across the brand. If you have a brand message or common promotion, you can rest easy knowing that the people relying on offline conversions will more than likely be getting the same message as people who are currently within your funnel.
UTM Campaign Links
This suggestion capitalizes on people sharing your content. One thing you can do is assign UTM attributes to your links and give them identifiable data points that you will be able to track in programs such as Google Analytics.
UTM parameters are shorts codes that get appended to a URL. The most common appendages are a source, medium, and campaign name. Notice the structure of the link below.
https://tommycatmedia.com?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=banner_link&utm_campaign=darkfunnel
Utm_Source – In this example, the source is set to blog. I would know that when someone shares this link, it can be traced back to Tommy Cat Media’s blog.
UTM_Medium – This is the vehicle the link was shared from. It could be an email, cost-per-click ad, or simply a banner link.
UTM_Campaign – This is to differentiate the links if you are running specific campaigns. In this example, I’ve got the link as attributed to the dark funnel blog article.
The information from these links can be pulled into lead generation forms through hidden fields. The fields from a UTM Campaign can then be mapped into your CRM and pulled into there as well. Google Analytics automatically tracks the source and medium of any link.
The preferred UTM link builder can be accessed here.
In use, you can swap out all links in an email or blog and replace them with UTM campaign links. If the article gets shared across the internet and someone makes a conversion on your website, you can attribute where exactly was the first point of contact for that person if they weren’t in your funnel already.
Conclusion
Attribution outside of your traditional marketing funnel should always be considered. You need to take measures in helping yourself identify consumer activities beyond your funnel but creating a consistent brand message, and better tracking techniques across all mediums.
