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Meeting Sonar
Updated: May 15, 2024
In the context of B2B customer journeys, the touchpoints where the majority of customers reside are not measured by tracking or attribution tools.
This article focuses on the unmeasurable behaviors known as the "Dark Funnel," which most companies overlook, and explains actionable strategies to address them.
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In B2B marketing, the "Dark Funnel" refers to the stage where potential customers are gathering information about products or services, but remain invisible to marketers.
Typically, some form of interaction with demand generation initiatives should occur before a lead is generated. However, if a lead appears suddenly without a clear reason or identifiable prior behavior, it is inferred that customer activity occurred within the Dark Funnel.
Specifically, this includes the following types of behavior:
Potential customers may visit a company website without providing identifiable information such as their company affiliation or contact details.
Additionally, some users access sites using private browsing modes, which prevent the collection of cookies or tracking data.
Furthermore, it can be difficult to identify the source of traffic for users who arrive directly via bookmarks or by manually entering the URL.
Since marketing-related emails are frequently forwarded to colleagues or decision-makers, the email recipient and the actual website visitor are often not the same person.
Tracking how far an email has been forwarded is extremely difficult, creating a source of traffic from unidentifiable users.
It is common for individuals to share information via messaging apps, prompting the recipient to begin online research on a topic of interest.
Similar to face-to-face word-of-mouth, these actions cannot be fully explained by data from tracking tools alone.
Users who encounter social media posts or advertisements on their timelines may sometimes leave the platform to visit a website directly.
In standard tracking tools, the referral source is often displayed as "Direct," making it difficult to distinguish these visits from other direct traffic compared to users who click on posts or ad content to visit the website.
Considering the ongoing shift toward remote work since the time of our initial research, it is highly likely that customer behavior triggered by messaging apps and social media posts has continued to increase.
The dark funnel occurs because it includes activities that are difficult to track using conventional customer analysis methods, such as cookies.
Despite customers expressing interest through the aforementioned behaviors, analytical tools are unable to track them, leading to the challenge of being unable to fully capture or understand the context of their actions.
Furthermore, the dark funnel can be categorized into two types based on its origin.
• Unidentifiable website visitors
• Potential customers who have not filled out forms
• Different representatives from prospective or existing client companies
• Second or subsequent leads from the same account (often treated as "duplicates")
• Traffic from third-party article providers
• Traffic via product review sites
• Industry news or personal blogs that do not share access data
• Traffic for comparative analysis (leads from competitors)
It is important to uncover the segments that remain invisible to traditional CRM, analytical tools, and data-sharing schemes. By distinguishing between technical causes and workflow-related issues, and implementing appropriate measures for each source, it is possible to gain a better understanding of lead activity within the dark funnel.
Many B2B companies have traffic sources with unidentified origins, such as direct access to specific web pages like blog posts. This type of traffic, where it is impossible to determine if a potential customer has accessed the site, accounts for a large portion of the dark funnel.
"67% of the buying process is completed before a sales visit"
is a research finding frequently cited in today's B2B marketing discussions.
If you can segment the information of those contacted within the dark funnel during this buying process, it becomes possible to discover new targeting criteria for your marketing efforts.
By understanding the existence of the dark funnel, marketers can more accurately predict the behavior of potential leads and design efficient demand generation and lead generation strategies based on appropriate cost allocation.
Understanding the dark funnel and demand generation are linked in that they are both strategies to promote customer engagement and lead to final sales.
Understanding the dark funnel means tracking and inferring customer behavior across multiple channels and devices, both online and offline, to generate customer insights.
Demand generation is the process of creating relationships with customers through information provision, such as content distribution and campaign execution, to generate needs that lead to sales.
By leveraging insights from the dark funnel and combining them with demand generation, a powerful combination is created that accelerates lead generation.
This allows marketers to identify and target qualified leads, enabling them to implement measures that lead to improved customer engagement, customer acquisition, and ultimately, increased sales.
By leveraging the untapped potential of the dark funnel in B2B marketing, companies can achieve greater results.
By understanding the activities in the dark funnel as described above, marketers can better respond to the needs of potential customers and devise and design strategies to satisfy customer needs that are not easily tracked by conventional methods.
While behavior in the dark funnel is difficult to detect with analytics tools or CRM platforms, there are ways to infer what happened in areas that cannot be mapped to the sales funnel through proper data processing and the use of data utilization tools.
Below are representative methods for understanding the behavior of potential customers in the dark funnel.
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As mentioned above, a large amount of dark traffic is displayed as "Direct" on analytics tools. When such traffic increases, it is necessary to consider the possibility that blog posts or webinar content have attracted attention and interest, and were influenced by information sharing on social media.
By excluding traffic from easily memorable URLs such as the top page or web pages that may have been bookmarked, you can analyze the remaining traffic, which consists almost entirely of dark funnel traffic, and grasp how much user behavior could not be tracked.
To verify the hypothesis that the dark funnel is generated by sharing on social media, introducing features for sharing your company's content on SNS is one effective way to track customer interaction.
If it is more seamless and easier for users to click a share button to share content with peers than to copy and paste a URL, the likelihood of capturing that behavior increases.
Social listening tools are specifically used to track mentions of your company and keywords related to your brand.
For example, suppose a B2B influencer posts about your blog article. If it is found that this resulted in a large amount of direct traffic, it can be inferred that this was access by the influencer's followers.
By setting alerts every time information is published by influencers on social media, it is possible to logically identify dark traffic.
Asking leads you have actually acquired is also an effective way to identify the source of the dark funnel.
By casually asking during the information provision process to customers, or by adding a question such as "How did you find us?" to inquiry forms, you can identify the source to some extent.
This is also said to be an effective method for estimating the number of leads triggered by word-of-mouth or face-to-face events such as trade shows, in addition to access from social media.
This is a method to minimize cases where the dark funnel is generated by face-to-face events or offline advertising.
At face-to-face events or seminars such as trade shows, placing 2D barcodes on your booth, handouts, or presentation slides is an effective identification method.
Providing incentives such as receiving novelties or discounts will likely increase the probability of having the 2D barcode scanned.
For offline advertising such as taxi ads, specifying unique keywords that other companies do not use as search keywords, in addition to 2D barcodes, is also an effective way to bridge the gap between offline and online.
Corporate information databases collect vast amounts of data and can provide unique insights into lead behavior.
Some platforms are equipped with machine learning algorithms that can predict trends in high-potential customers and future customer behavior.
By using corporate attribute data and intent data, it becomes possible to add information to access generated from the dark funnel and verify whether the access was from companies belonging to your target audience.
It can also provide reference information for discovering new customer segments.
It is impossible to track every action of leads and potential customers.
As evidenced by the successive announcements regarding the phasing out of third-party cookies, privacy and data security have become increasingly important in recent years.
Companies need to be more considerate than ever when tracking lead behavior, and from the perspective of technological limitations, the "dark side of customer behavior" as seen by marketers is expected to continue to grow.
In other words, it is impossible to completely eliminate the dark funnel in B2B marketing.
However, by utilizing various tools and data, you can make the unknown aspects of customer behavior as inferable as possible and continue your efforts to understand your customers.
Our customer data integration solution, "uSonar," is equipped with a data provision function that visualizes the companies to which users who access your website belong.
We also provide intent data that allows you to infer user interests and contact status with competitors, and it is equipped with an AI function that predicts the order probability of non-trading companies.
For more details, please feel free to contact us from this page.
About the Author
uSonar Editorial Department
MX Group Editor-in-Chief
This is the uSonar Editorial Department.
We provide information on data utilization and digital technologies useful for considering future business operations, primarily for companies engaged in B2B business.
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various companies across all industries and sectors.
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