For years, the marketing funnel has been pitched as the magic journey that customers and prospects go through when making a purchase: awareness, interest, consideration, decision, and purchase. And just like that, the customer has been thoroughly and successfully nurtured through the funnel. They’re (presumably) happy with the product or service, and you relish the victory of a sale.

Now, I personally don’t think any customer in the history of forever has gone through the funnel as cleanly and seamlessly as that, and with the wealth of information, products, and brands out there all competing for attention, customers and prospects have evolved in how they make a purchase. Today's customer journey is more like a web, with multiple ways to stick to a product. There are countless ways that people discover a product, engage with content across multiple platforms, and ultimately land on a product or service to buy.

In short, the linear marketing customer journey funnel is outdated, and marketers must shift their approach.

The Traditional Funnel's Identity Crisis

I’ve worked in marketing for nearly ten years and have seen this transformation happen. The last time a prospect went through the traditional linear marketing funnel, I fell off my dinosaur (Yes, that’s a Step Brothers reference).

Today’s customers aren’t politely waiting to be guided through your awareness campaigns before purchasing. Attention spans are shortening, and people are constantly being pitched to. Influencers are telling them to buy this product over that one, and sponsored posts are all over their social media feeds, telling them THIS product is the best and greatest and all the others are losers.

I think the modern customer journey looks more like this:

1. Get a promotional email about a product/service
2. Delete the email
3. Two weeks later, get another email
4. Delete the email
5. See a social media post about the product/service the next day
6. Keep scrolling
7. A week later, see a link to a blog post about the product/service with a customer review
8. Click the link and read a blog post about the product or service
9. Close it
10. While with friends over the weekend, one of them mentions the product/service and how they’ve heard good things and are thinking of trying it
11. Go home and search for the product/service on Google
12. Find the product/service on the search page and look through three other similar products/services
13. Settle on the initial product/service and add it to their cart
14. About to click buy, but hesitates
15. Do another search and read two other blog posts about the product/service
16. Look at a testimonial page on the company’s website
17. Decides to sleep on it and decide the next day
18. Gets another promotional email in the morning
19. Finally decides to buy

See that. Although I made this up—or maybe I have done this myself because nobody is immune to marketing—that’s 19 theoretical steps back and forth across the customer journey. There’s nothing linear about that journey. It’s a mix of blog posts, social media, email, and word of mouth, all happening randomly. Multiply that random across millions of people, and you have a level of randomness that’s impossible to calculate.

And don’t get me started on trying to figure out where to attribute the ROI for this sale. Was it the initial email? Was it the word-of-mouth recommendation? We may never know. Customers are simultaneously in multiple stages of the journey, and social proof and peer influences can compress or expand the decision-making process. Not to mention that there are more digital touchpoints than ever, creating countless entry and exit points to and from a product or service. And let’s not forget how post-purchase has become just as critical as the pre-purchase journey. It’s cheaper to retain a customer than rely solely on new ones.

The New Reality: The Orbital Customer Experience

This shift requires marketing teams to make fundamental changes to the way they operate, starting with the critical need to break down traditional silos. Content teams can’t only focus on top-of-the-funnel awareness content. Content must serve multiple journey stages. They need analytics to inform the content and campaign so adjustments can be made along the way, and, possibly most importantly, cross-channel integration must become seamless, ensuring that every touchpoint is prepared to serve multiple journey stages – whether a customer is just discovering your brand or is ready to make a purchase.

This interconnected approach reflects that customers may enter or exit the journey at any point, requiring marketing teams to maintain consistent, high-quality engagement across all channels and stages.

Strategic Imperatives for Modern Marketers

To be successful in this new environment, marketers must deploy omnipresent content and embrace journey mapping 2.0. That means creating content that serves multiple journey stages simultaneously and is optimized for discovery across all channels.

Journey mapping must map content to customer intentions instead of the funnel stages. From there, you can identify and optimize key conversion moments and create content that acknowledges and supports non-linear progression.

Looking Ahead: The Future of Customer Journeys

This progression and change of the marketing funnel will not stop here, especially as artificial intelligence and augmented reality become more prevalent. Customer journeys will become more complex and require more personalization (but not the creepy kind). Successful marketers will be those who build flexible, responsive systems rather than trying to rely on outdated, rigid funnels.

Your Next Steps

It's time to audit your current marketing structure. Ask yourself:

• Does your content serve multiple journey stages?
• Can customers easily move between different engagement levels?
• Are you measuring the right metrics for non-linear journeys?

The marketing funnel isn't dead—it's evolved into something more dynamic and complex. Your success depends on how quickly you can adapt to this new reality.

We’re always ready for a good conversation about this, and we’d love to connect! AMA | Rochester is a place for local marketers and communications professionals to collaborate, learn, and grow. Reach out to us today.