As we find ourselves amidst the digital transformation, it’s worth contemplating the profound influence of data advancements on the world of marketing. Particularly in the realm of B2B marketing, how buyers navigate their journey to a purchase decision presents a significant challenge. You can see that buyers are reacting to your ads, but then where do they go? Do your buyers vanish in the dark funnel? How can you find buyers before it’s too late?
“Traditional” Marketing is struggling
Remember when Twitter was the bomb for marketing? All the techies were hanging out there, and Twitter’s targeting was incredible. You could also build a community there, so even people who were “off the grid” could still connect with your paid marketing messages at their own pace.
But let’s face it, things have gone downhill. As social media managers, we’ve witnessed the mass exodus from the platform. And that’s not the only issue plaguing it.
But now, where can marketers find their audience? LinkedIn is great, with a solid underlying targeting system. And it seems like a lot of Twitter refugees have made their way over here, judging by the amount of traffic.
Where should marketers focus their efforts now? LinkedIn? Discord? I’ve even noticed ads popping up while playing solitaire on my phone, promoting tech companies.
Perhaps the more significant question is whether marketers should utilize advertisements on social media platforms at all.
Enter the dark funnel
“The Dark Funnel” is a term used to describe the unseen and often unattributed research and discovery activities carried out by potential customers. It’s very hard for traditional marketing tools to find this invisible part of the buyer’s journey, because this is where anonymous individuals and organizations explore and compare products and services. It really is like the buyers vanish!
This is where decisions are made, preferences are formed, and potential buyers move closer to a purchasing decision. For B2B companies, this is where you get your short list of vendors you want to trial and talk to. If you can’t uncover the dark funnel you’ll probably miss the chance to engage potential customers during their decision-making process. And that increases the odds you won’t be considered for the short list, and ultimately will lose sales.
Companies conquering the gap when buyers vanish
Although this may sound pretty depressing, there is are companies that are using good data science to develop platforms to help you when it seems like buyers vanish. For instance, a CDP (customer data platform) can help you uncover the hidden trail within the dark funnel.
6sense is a leading Account-Based Marketing (ABM) platform. They help companies predict when a potential customer is in the buying phase of their journey. They say that 70% of a buyer’s journey is in the dark funnel.
Simon Data is a CDP (customer data platform). It is built on Snowflake. Their platform solves common problems marketers face when they implement a CDP. A CDP helps marketers aggregate all customer data, create segments, and then activate personal campaigns for them as they embark on their buyer’s journey. Obviously if you use customer data to understand a customer’s behaviors, preferences, and patterns, they won’t vanish. You’ll be able to target prospects while they are in the dark funnel, making decisions!
Unifying data to nurture customers
One way to get insight that helps you when buyers vanish is to build a Customer 360. To do this, you collect information about every touchpoint for a customer, every click, call, order, return, chat, survey. The problem is that many times all of this information is in different IT silos of your organization. You could get the information in a spreadsheet (if it doesn’t break a privacy rule), but by the time you stitch everything together your 360 view is probably going to be out of date.
If you’re trying to create more targeted marketing campaigns and personalized experiences, out of date data will lead to campaigns that just don’t “hit”, and wasted marketing dollars. And if you’re trying to coalesce data from across the organization, which data is the single source of truth?
Use technology when buyers vanish
This is where I think Simon Data has a great idea building their service on Snowflake. The Snowflake Data Cloud is available on the main public clouds, and can easily ingest customer information from those sources. Simon Data is then able to offer predictive models for the likelihood a customer will purchase so you can create a tailored customer journey for them.
The brilliant thing about this is that IT isn’t needed. The data isn’t moved, privacy rules are respected, and a SQL DBA isn’t required. Just up-to-date info about customers, predictive analytics to see where they are in the dark funnel, and connections to tools marketers already use. They just need to provide the marketing magic to real data about real prospects.
While this may seem a little creepy, done right it’s pretty cool. Have you ever abandoned a shopping cart and got a message reminding you to go back? That’s helpful. But it would be even better if you were trying to find the right technical content to make an evaluation, and that information arrived in your inbox.
My take: you need modern data tools to find buyers in dark funnel
Since data collection and processing has evolved, now marketing must evolve. Sure, your prospects are spending most of their decision-making time in the dark funnel, but they aren’t really invisible. Time to level up your skillset, leave spreadsheets behind, and use a CDP to create constantly updated customer profiles. Then flex your marketing skills to make it easy for them to choose your product!
A lot of this work starts with solid content. Digital Sunshine Solutions can help you with your content strategy or even building individual pieces of content to persuade lurkers to become buyers. Contact us for a free consultation today!
