Definitive Guide to the B2B Dark Funnel

Summary

What is the dark funnel?

The dark funnel is the part of the sales funnel that is not tracked by analytics platforms. In other words, it is the unseen buyer’s journey, in which prospects become leads seemingly out of nowhere—and lead behavior can not be identified by your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform.

It is very common for many B2B companies to have a mysterious source of "direct traffic" to specific web pages (such as blog posts), which were most likely not typed in by a prospect. This unattributed direct traffic is a huge part of the dark funnel.

What is dark social?

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    63%: Private messaging apps

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    54%: Posts on social media accounts

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    51%: Word-of-mouth offline/in-person

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    48%: SMS (mobile phone)

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    37%: Email

Internal vs. external dark funnel marketing data

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    Unidentified visitors on your website.

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    Prospects that have not filled in any forms yet.

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    "Buying Group Blindness" (when CRMs track only one member of a buying group to the detriment of others).

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    "Second Lead Syndrome" (when a second lead from a same account is not accounted for in your CRM, or marked as a duplicate by your sales/marketing team).

External dark funnel marketing data

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    Unshared data from content syndication partners.

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    Product review websites.

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    Industry blogs or news outlets that feature your brand, but don’t track/share analytics.

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    Research by prospects on competitors.

What is dark marketing?

An example of a B2B buyer’s journey
through the dark funnel

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    Prospect searches about the product on Google

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    Visits the homepage

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    Follows company page on LinkedIn

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    Searches again about the product on Google and views an ad for an eBook

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    Fills in form to download the eBook

How To Shed Light On The Dark Funnel:
Metrics And Tracking Platforms

Is It Possible To Eliminate The Dark Funnel?

How to prevent a dark funnel in the future

If you are lucky enough to not have a dark funnel in the time being, or are starting a company from scratch, there are a few things you can do to prevent the dark funnel from gaining any ground on your leads:

Conclusion

DO YOU NEED HELP TRACKING LEADS IN YOUR SALES FUNNEL?

INFUSE has a proprietary network of 138+ million B2B decision makers, each tracked by our comprehensive ITCurated platform.

If you plan to distribute content with 100% visibility of every touchpoint, then contact our team of demand generation experts at [email protected]

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