Taking Advantage of Dark Social and the Dark Funnel

Dark social and the dark funnel are hard to both define and measure.

But they’re a significant part of your leads and conversions.

Jason Widup, VP of Marketing, and Mark Huber, Head of Brand & Product Marketing at Metadata, explore the concept of dark social and the dark funnel and what you need to know about them.

Tune in to the full session to learn more about harnessing the power of dark social and the dark funnel and how you can tap into them for your business.

Watch the full episode

Three top takeaways:

Here are the three most important takeaways from the episode:

Takeaway 1: Dark social is how you drive word-of-mouth leads in the market

Dark social can be defined in a few different ways. But overall, it’s about how you drive word-of-mouth leads for your brand.

It’s about the podcasts, the blogs, and the other ways you currently build your audience and distribute content.

In some ways, it’s the most honest amplification mechanism you can tap into. But it can work either for or against you. Bad words spoken about your business can do as much damage as good words can benefit you.

Takeaway 2: Community is key to influencing the dark funnel

While you might not ever have the type of insight or control into the dark funnel as you might like, there are some things you can do. You can influence a dark funnel when you are a marketing team that sees the importance of dark social first and foremost.

One of the first hurdles is getting your CEO and leadership team on board to see the value in it. Once they do, your marketing team can spend more time in communities, building your own community, investing in content marketing like launching a podcast, and so on. These increase the number of positive experiences = prospects have before they turn into real leads.

Takeaway 3: It’s tough to measure dark social and the dark funnel…but not impossible

One of the biggest questions surrounding this topic is can you measure dark social or dark funnels? You might not be able to measure all the hidden elements of dark social like you can with a planned LinkedIn campaign.

But that doesn’t mean you’re flying blind.

There are other things you can do to gain a window into dark social, starting with looking at organic social. What comments are coming in? Who’s leaving them? Some marketing teams will take screenshots and pass them on to the rest of the sales team or the customer success team to use as lead indicators.

It’s not perfect, but it does give some indication of whether you’re doing things right and are building trust and interest in your brand.

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