Rob Scott
Honestly, most marketers already know that the funnel they learned about in their early careers has disappeared. The clean “step-by-step” journey we assumed people took from awareness through to purchase was really always a bit of an oversimplification.
Now, though more of the stages of that journey are happening in a world marketers and business owners can’t track: the dark funnel.
That term (coined by 6Sense) might sound spooky, but it isn’t really. It’s just another way to describe all the buyer intent information most companies miss out on.
We already know that most B2B tech buyers are about 70% of the way through their purchasing journey before they speak to a company. But most companies aren’t aware of what potential customers are doing in that “hidden” part of the funnel. They’re not necessarily reading your blogs or visiting your product pages.
They’re listening to influencers, reading reports on industry publications, and checking reviews. All of those actions are invisible to your attribution tools, but they’re influencing deals anyway.
Learn how to shine a light on the dark funnel, and you learn how to better connect with your audience, master influence, and accelerate sales cycles.
Understanding the Dark Funnel in Marketing
The classic lead-gen playbook is buckling under pressure. And the problem isn’t your content or your targeting. It’s that buyers are doing most of their homework where you can’t see it, and they really don’t want to speak to you until they’ve almost made up their minds.
According to 6sense, 81% of buyers have already decided on their vendor before they reach out. Most of their journey is DIY, and there are multiple people involved (11 decision makers on average).
The journey has changed, but marketing strategies haven’t. Companies are still “tracking” intent and customers with UTMs and form fills. But the real insights are lost in the dark funnel.
Buyers are visiting dozens, or hundreds of resources far from where you can track them. So when we talk about the marketing dark funnel, we’re talking about this massive, mostly invisible zone of influence. In this arena, traditional attribution mostly falls apart.
All you see is “direct traffic”, and you miss out on the “bread crumbs” that buyers leave behind when they’re conducting real research.
Building Your B2B Marketing Strategy for the Dark Funnel
The rise of the dark funnel in marketing introduces two major changes for teams. The first change comes in which channels you prioritize for marketing. Today, the need to go “beyond owned media” is greater than ever, because most real buying decisions don’t happen on your website.
They happen in the places attribution tools can’t reach, such as:
Private Messaging Apps and Collaboration Tools
This channel is easy to overlook, because its inherently private for your customer. Slack threads, WhatsApp groups, Microsoft Teams chats, internal emails, this is where someone says, “Hey, have you heard of these guys?” and drops a link, or forwards a deck.
Most teams share influential content privately, not publicly. So even if your post flops on LinkedIn in terms of likes, it could be moving through five different department channels at a target account.
Podcasts and Audio Content
Podcasts and audio interviews are rising stars in the dark funnel B2B marketing landscape, because they build trust at scale. They’re non-invasive, and they give your brand a voice, literally. They also often feel more authentic than many other forms of content.
Podcasts don’t have UTMs. They don’t “convert” the way landing pages do. But when a prospect tells your sales rep, “Oh yeah, I heard your CEO on that RevOps pod last week,” that’s still pipeline influence, and something worth tracking.
Niche Newsletters and Industry Publications
Industry publications that earn trust with genuine, authentic editorial content are common staples in the B2B tech buyer journey. Most customers trust journalists and niche newsletter creators far more than brands that are constantly shouting about how great they are.
Instead of always trying to rank on Google, think about who your buyers are already reading content from. Think about how you can get these publications to mention you.
Peer Review Sites & Buyer Research Platforms
Platforms like G2, TrustRadius, Capterra, and even Reddit are huge dark funnel arenas. They’re where anonymous buyers research, compare, shortlist, and validate, without ever alerting you that they’re shopping.
B2B buyers might only spend 17% of their time actually talking to suppliers – but they use a whole lot more of their journey finding out what other people have to say about those vendors.
Community Platforms & Micro-Networks
This is where dark social and dark intent fully blur. Communities are where buyers build relationships, vet vendors, and swap “what’s working” stories.You won’t always know which Slack group or private Discord server your target persona is lurking in. But you can:
- Be present in the ones you do know.
- Sponsor conversations without selling.
- Hire subject matter experts active in those communities.
- Share value, not pitch decks.
In B2B tech and SaaS, this might look like:
- PeopleOps pros sharing onboarding tools in a #culture-tech channel.
- CFOs asking for pricing benchmarks in an invite-only WhatsApp group.
- A product lead dropping a job description template sourced from your content hub.
So What Do You Do With This?
You stop optimizing for visibility, and start optimizing for shareability.
You stop trying to own the whole buyer journey, and start earning a presence in the places buyers trust each other more than they trust you.
You stop saying “there’s no attribution”, and start listening for evidence of influence. Because if your stuff shows up in these dark funnel channels, even once, you’re in the conversation.
The Dark Funnel: De-Anonymizing the Intent Ocean
The second part of adapting to the dark funnel, is understanding what to track.
If you accept most of your buyers are off-grid for most of their journey, swapping links in Slack, researching you on G2, listening to your podcast, and reading press releases, you know you can’t rely on standard attribution models anymore.
But that doesn’t mean you’re totally blind.
Because while the dark funnel is full of anonymous activity, it’s not completely inaccessible. There are signals and footprints in the sand. Here’s just some of the data living in the dark funnel that you might be missing (and should be paying attention to):
Here’s what 6sense says you’re likely missing — and should be paying attention to:
- Company-level anonymous web traffic: IP-matched visits to your site
- 3rd-party research behaviors: Buyers reading analyst reports or visiting comparison tools
- Review platform activity: Insights from G2, TrustRadius, Capterra, etc.
- Search behavior across ad networks: Not just what they searched, but when and how often
- Content engagement on publisher networks: People reading blogs, guides, even contributing comment sections
- Social mentions, shares, and click trails: Particularly untagged or dark social links
- Technographic changes: Like a new hire, tech stack switch, or open job posting
Most of this data doesn’t show up in your CRM or Google Analytics, but it’s out there.
These anonymous signals make up a huge chunk of the dark funnel. The trick is to de-anonymize them, match behaviors with companies, and ideally, individuals. Companies can use AI to do that, blending web traffic, IP resolution, behavioral scoring, and cross-platform intent data to build what’s essentially a heatmap of your real buying activity.
What to Do with the Data
If you can get your hands on that data, you need to know how to use it.
Use the intent data to inform how you prioritize accounts for outbound. Stop calling every lead the same way. Start with the ones showing signs of life. Adapt messaging based on actual interest signals, and what people are reading and viewing away from your site.
Remember, intent signals don’t just tell you who to talk to, they tell you what they care about right now. That can shape everything from your content strategy to your outbound email subject lines.
Shift from attribution to influence.
You’re not going to get clean attribution. Not anymore.
When VP of Engineering sees your analyst brief on LinkedIn, screenshots it, drops it into their team Slack, and then two weeks later someone from that company Googles your name and types your homepage directly into Chrome? Your attribution model will still call it direct traffic.
That’s an incomplete insight. Try diving deeper:
- Add a free-text “How did you hear about us?” field to forms. You’ll get gold like “Heard you on a podcast” or “You came up in a Slack group I’m in.”
- Track branded search lift month-over-month. If your name is showing up more often in search, something’s clicking out there.
- Look at content engagement before leads convert. Are they spending time with your stuff? Are they coming back unprompted?
- Measure qualitative signals. Are sales calls referencing a specific press release? Is your name coming up in community threads?
Treat every piece of content like a trust-builder, not just a lead magnet. That means it doesn’t have to convert immediately. It just has to stick. If it gets screenshotted, forwarded, cited, bookmarked, that’s influence, and it matters.
What to Do Now: 6 Moves for the Dark Funnel Era
Okay, so you get it. The dark funnel is real. It’s where most B2B decision-making happens. You can’t fully track it, but you can’t afford to ignore it either.
So now what? Here’s a quick checklist:
- Get Comfortable with Invisible Influence: You’re not going to see every touchpoint. You won’t always know what worked. Accept that, then build trust anyway. Focus less on filling the funnel and more on being the brand that shows up everywhere your buyers are.
- Invest in Brand–First Content: What really moves buyers in the dark funnel is content that makes them feel something: trust, curiosity, respect. That means opinion pieces, strong POVs, smart visuals, sharp explainers, category leadership content and community-driven ideas.
- Lean into Communities: Your buyers are in Slack groups, subreddits, private LinkedIn chats, virtual peer cohorts. Go where they already talk, not where you hope they’ll click. Sponsor a newsletter, speak to a journalist, or attend an event.
- Use Intent Data: AI-driven tools can help you see which accounts are heating up, even if no one’s reached out yet. Use that info to prioritize intelligently, not just blast sequences. Find out what’s really driving your customer’s journey.
- Train Your Team on Attribution Gaps: If your execs or sales leaders are still stuck on old models, give them the playbook. Show them what’s changed. Educate your team so they stop chasing ghosts and start nurturing influence.
Remember to monitor dark signals manually too. Spikes in branded search, or repeated mentions of an interview in sales calls tell you something important about what’s working.
Shine a Light on the Dark Funnel
If you feel like your funnel has been lying to you lately – it’s really just been “hiding the truth”. Dark funnel dynamics have completely reshaped how B2B buying works, and everyone is still working out a new rulebook. The first step? Adapt.
Stop chasing every click and start showing up where your buyers are, even if you can’t measure how you’re influencing them directly.
The months (and years) ahead are going to be complicated. But isn’t that always the case with marketing? Particularly in B2B tech. You can’t go back, only forward. But hopefully, this guide has given you a small spark of light to help guide you through the dark funnel era.
Need more help showing up where B2B tech buyers are? We’ve got you covered.
