I just finished reading Rand Fishkin’s – SparkToro’s take on the modern customer journey, and frankly, it’s the reality check we all need. For years, the marketing funnel has been our north star—a neat, linear path from Awareness to Purchase. It was comforting, predictable, and, as the evidence now shows, completely divorced from reality. The biggest takeaway? The Pinball Customer Journey has arrived, and it’s time for our strategies to catch up.
The New Law of Attraction: Pinball, Not Pipeline
What did I learn? That the modern path to purchase looks less like a funnel and more like a chaotic, high-energy pinball machine. Our customers don’t cleanly move as groups; they bounce:
- The Starting Point is Anywhere: A journey might begin on WhatsApp, Substack, a personalized Google News feed, Reddit, or LinkedIn—not just a few targeted campaigns.
- The Middle is Messy: Users bounce between searching Google, asking ChatGPT, pinging friends, scouring Reddit, and DM’ing experts.
- The Bottom is Not the End: Even at the point of conversion, users are bouncing back to these same scattered places to double-check information from our website or sales team.
This is a profoundly important observation: the customer’s process is absolutely crazy, and we can’t pretend it’s a clean funnel.
Reinforcing the Message: Beyond Online Visibility
This “pinball” reality powerfully reinforces the message that Marketing should actively support and feed into sales: It’s more than online visibility.
The linear funnel model encouraged us to think of marketing’s job as simply moving the user from one defined stage to the next, often focusing on easily-tracked online channels. The pinball journey, however, demonstrates that our true role is to be the strong, perfectly-placed flippers and bumpers that constantly re-engage the customer, no matter where they bounce.
- Active Support is Omni-Channel Presence: If your audience is on Substack, Reddit, and asking friends, your marketing needs to be intentionally present in those places. It’s not about being visible on a channel; it’s about being present in the places that your audience pays attention with a consistent, compelling message. This directly supports sales by ensuring the customer is re-engaged with your brand at every turn—even the social, non-trackable ones.
- Feeding Sales with the Right Message: The bank example is perfect. If you’re competing on high interest rates, your message on a personal finance Substack or Reddit thread must be “High Yield Savings Accounts.” If your bank’s stadium branding inspired a lookup (an unmeasurable, offline touchpoint), your easily-found online content must confirm that high-rate message. This ensures every marketing touchpoint, no matter how disparate, feeds the right prospect into the final sales evaluation with the correct information.
- More Than Measurable Visibility: The pinball journey accepts that you cannot measure everything (like the value of a podcast appearance or stadium branding). This forces us to move past the obsession with ‘online visibility’ as defined by last-click attribution. Instead, we must focus on right message, right place, right audience as the true metric of success—a process that demonstrably drives sales, even if the econometrics model can’t capture every input.
Our job now is to understand our audience’s pinball board and make sure our flippers are big, strong, and always ready to push them toward conversion.
Ready to stop chasing the clean, linear marketing funnel?
The pinball customer journey is messy, but it’s where your customers live. Let the Witmer Group help you map out your audience’s chaotic board and ensure your brand’s flippers are perfectly placed, strong, and ready to drive conversion. Connect with us today to discuss how we can transform your strategy from a pipe dream into a powerful pinball machine that feeds directly into sales.