The marketing funnel is a thing of the past: the customer journey is now like a pinball game, Rand Fishkin thinks:

Today, people using the Internet and the real world to find and solve problems don't move in groups from a few channels at the top of the sales funnel to a few other channels in the middle, to your website, phone call or storefront at the end. No. They're like ... well, like pinball machines.

A person may start his journey with a chat on WhatsApp, a Substack newsletter, a «Discover» page on Instagram, scroll through a personalized news feed on Google, LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube's homepage, or a dozen other pages. Then it's on to Google searches, asking questions on ChatGPT, connecting with friends, browsing Reddit, private messaging experts you're subscribed to on LinkedIn or Threads. And even at the bottom of the sales funnel, he goes back to the same places before the final conversion event to double-check information on your website or with a salesperson (sometimes in real time, on his phone at the store checkout).

This is not a process that can be well described using the funnel analogy.

This is exactly what pinball machines demonstrate perfectly. If you want to continue the analogy, imagine the size of those flipper paws below increasing as you put more effort into your product, brand, and promotional messaging across different channels (or decreasing as you ignore them).