What is a marketing funnel, and is the model still useful?
A marketing funnel models the stages from first awareness to purchase, typically awareness, consideration and decision. It remains useful for diagnosing where prospects are lost, but real buying journeys are rarely linear: people enter at different stages, revisit earlier ones and are influenced by colleagues outside your analytics.
As a diagnostic tool, the funnel helps locate the constraint. For example, many visits to a pricing page with few enquiries indicates a specific problem, while many enquiries with few sales points elsewhere.
In B2B purchases, several people are usually involved, and the person researching is often not the decision-maker. Content that helps an internal champion make the case is particularly valuable.
For recurring relationships, retention, expansion and referrals after the first purchase are often where most value lies.
The funnel is most useful as a set of questions: where people arrive, what they need to know next, what stops them and how progress is measured.
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