Fill your dark funnel with valuable content
Ten years ago your customers came to your website, to your event, or called your sales hotline because they needed information - and your company was often the only place they could get it.
As these customers put their hand up you captured their identity - through gated content, event registrations or badge scans.
Attribution was king - marketing teams needed to calculate the return on their investment choices and tag opportunities as marketing sourced or influenced.
But today, customers don’t need to come to you for information. They don’t need to trade their identity in exchange for insight.
Buyers choose to get their information from other sources - their peers, analysts, third party media, private social networks.
Welcome to the dark funnel
In the graphic below, you have in pink the traditional funnel of first party content and channels. You can identify the customers, derive attribution and link to your campaign budgets.
But below the line in yellow is the dark funnel. This is where your customer spends most of their time and you can’t see what they are up to.
Let’s think about us as individuals wanting to buy a car.
I speak to my friends
I read independent auto magazines
I watch a car TV show
I read online reviews
The last place I will go for an independent or honest bit of advice is the car dealership.
I will eventually go there when I know exactly what I want, the model, the colour and now just want a test drive to get a feel for the car.
Our customers are the same.
They know what happens when they fill in a form or agree to come to an event.
They’ll get a call in 20 minutes from a junior seller asking what their interest was,
Or worse they’ll get a call in 10 days when the moment has passed.
Instead buyers work their peer networks - a good example of this are the numerous Slack channels that support individual personas.
These communities exist for CIOs, CFOs, HR, Sales, Marketing, Security…..
And your customer trusts the responses they get from their peers more than any SDR that sequences them.
Fill the dark funnel with value
The dark funnel is a huge opportunity for you.
If your customers are talking with their peers then you have an opportunity to learn what is top of mind for them.
Not just in relation to your product, but their overall role.
Have the relevant member of your leadership join their peer communities. What is discussed? What are the most common questions?
Can you now provide content, events, education, data that supports them in their goal?
You are not wanting to provide this content to them directly in the dark funnel because it would from you not their peers.
Instead, your strategy is to ensure that your customers, partners, web visitors, social followers all have access to this high value actionable content - ungated.
Now when potential buyers ask questions like:
Any advice on building a pricing model?
Any tips on integrating CRM with our call recording?
Any advice on product A versus product B?
You’ll find your name and content mentioned in response.
Here are a couple of other suggestions for content placement:
Product review sites - like G2, Capterra or TrustRadius.
These sites allow you to claim your profile, upload videos and content.
Instead of putting up a boring case study have your customers record advice to those at the start of their buying process “these were the things we considered” or “this is how we structured our project team”.
This is useful content that gets shared.
Partners - 40% of SaaS is bought via partner channels today, but instead of just waiting for your partners to pass you business give them content, tools and templates to use with their customers.
Make content with individual partners that focuses on the “How To” that is unique to their product or customer base.
This is shareable content.
Bring the dark funnel to life
As the Slack question above alludes to - products like 6Sense, Demandbase and Rollworks exist to illuminate your dark funnel.
Using their networks of third party websites and data providers they track your anonymous visitors, and provide intent data based on company names or domains to help your sellers prioritise which accounts to work on.
The dark funnel doesn’t remain dark for long…
Get started
Whenever you are ready, there are two ways that I can help you accelerate your revenue.
Buyer Experience Audit - I’ll impersonate a buyer researching your segment and company and let you know what I find. Ideal for planning your Revenue Operations strategy.
RevOps Impact Playbooks - I’ll help you implement one or more tactical processes across your revenue teams - content, referrals, testimonials, adoption and more..