The funnel is dead, here’s what to do instead

Hey — Patrick here from Ad Juice!

Welcome to this week’s edition of The Squeeze, the newsletter created for B2B marketing operators looking for fresh LinkedIn Ads tactics, proven on real ad accounts.

I’ve audited ~10 ad accounts for prospects over the past 8 weeks.

All of them had been following my content for a while and were bought into the philosophy.

But, one thing was super evident when diagnosing issues in accounts: they still hadn’t broken free from funnel-thinking.

Ditching the funnel is the most important mindset shift I want marketers to make in 2026 though. 

So, I‘ve realised, I need to do a much better job of explaining why it’s broken, and what to do instead.

That’s what we’re going to cover today.

Funnel-thinking is the mistaken belief that you can convert B2B buyers with the right TOFU, MOFU, BOFU content served in sequence.

Fill the funnel, nurture it, convert it.

Looks good on a slide deck. Doesn’t work in reality. 

That’s why investing more in “BOFU” Google Ads or retargeting never improves pipeline. 

I’ve had dozens of clients over the last 7 years with that exact problem asking how to fix it.

Here’s the reality: there are a finite number of in-market prospects.

Most of them aren’t using Google Ads and aren’t in your retargeting pool.

And, no amount of nurturing will convert most out-market buyers. 

It’s either: 

Imagine you bought an Audi yesterday, is a nurture sequence from BMW gonna convince you to buy one in the next 3 months?

Unless you’re Jeff Bezos, probably not.

So the main job of the modern B2B demand gen marketer isn’t to nurture more or funnel harder. 

It’s actually to reach more.

If 5% of category buyers are in-market in a given quarter, then the more total category buyers you reach, the more likely you are to reach that 5% of in-market buyers shopping right now.

Providing you have a convincing marketing message, that translates into increased pipeline.

When we switched from a funnel-based approach to a reach-based approach at KlientBoost, we reduced CAC from ~$5K to ~$2.2K over 12 months. That was during a period when CPMs and CPCs were rising too.

We were no longer wasting budget trying to convince prospects who’d never convert to book a call. 

Instead, we used cheaper campaign objectives and broad audiences to reach more category buyers. Over time, that magnetised more ready-to-buy inbound which made the whole program more efficient.

Here’s a simple illustration to show you the difference:

Shifting to a high reach and frequency demand generation approach isn’t easy when you’ve spent years believing in the funnel myth.

But, it’s one of the most effective changes you can make. Some of the most elite LinkedIn marketers operate this way now.

First, let’s tick off what not to do with an assessment of the 5 most common pitfalls I see accounts using “funnel-thinking” make:

Promoting TOFU, MOFU, BOFU content that’s designed to be consumed in a linear order for the message to make sense.

It assumes buyers remember what the previous content said, when most of them won’t.

The result is that all of the ads are confusing in isolation, making it difficult to build mental availability and associate your product with a category and/or pain point. 

Because campaign structures end up so complex—3 “TOFU” campaigns, 2 “MOFU” campaigns, 3 “BOFU” campaigns—the budget ends up spread super thin.

This typically results in accounts targeting 100K+ audiences, often reaching <20% of the total audience over a 30-day period.

The odds you’re actually reaching any in-market buyers is low to zero.

And, it’s even unlikely you’re building any meaningful mental availability or recall either.

It’s not always the case, but often accounts running funnel-based approaches overestimate the power of ad creative and underestimate the power of audience targeting.

That means targeting is sloppy or an afterthought.

Creative is a huge lever. Yes.

But, if your ads aren’t targeting the right people, it won’t matter how good your creative is.

The most common issues I see here are:

eBooks, whitepapers, reports, webinars.

There’s nothing wrong with running these. But, a webinar attendance or whitebook download isn’t a buying signal.

If sales start spamming cold leads with aggressive follow-up, you’ll more than likely turn them off and LOSE potential prospects instead.

Website conversions, lead generation, and website views are the most popular.

Makes sense.

You want more form submissions, leads, and website traffic, so surely those campaign objectives win your more of them?

Well, the reality is much different.

We ran a test at KB between the awareness objective and the conversion objective. Guess which one generated the most conversions… it was the awareness objective. 4X more to be exact.

Again, B2B buying journeys are complex. The algo signals that work for simple B2C buying journeys on Meta break on LinkedIn Ads.

There are 5 pillars of effective high reach and frequency demand gen marketing, as outlined below:

Let’s look at each one in more depth:

There’s loads of academics who love to quote that killer creative is the most important lever for marketing performance.

They’re wrong for a very simple reason:

Some things you can only learn doing the work.

As a general rule, the best place to start with targeting is your CRM:

Analyse all closed deals for the last 3, 6, or 12 months.

Look specifically for this: what are the shared traits of the companies and job titles that BOOK THE CALL.

This is REALLY important. 

Many B2Bs want to target everybody that might be in the decision comittee.

This is a waste of budget. ONLY do this once they’re in-pipeline. It’s way cheaper and more effective at this point.

From there, build out a tiered audience list based segments with the: 

Those are your most valuable audience segments.

Next, use a 3rd party audience building tool, like Clay or Primer, to target those segments precisely.

If I’m using Clay, I tend to build a company list, and then use a combination of job function and job seniority targeting to tighten the audience further. Generally avoiding job title targeting entirely because it’s so sloppy.

If I’m using Primer, you build a contact list you can dynamically sync directly to LinkedIn Ads that’ll auto-update.

With both, you’ll want to exclude any competitors, existing customers, employees, etc.

In my experience, when you do these level of targeting, you need to do very little audience cleanup and can focus your attention on building new creative concepts and kooky in-platform experiments instead.

Good times.

I mentioned earlier, but your primary goal as a modern demand gen marketer is to reach as much of your target audience as possible. 

I aim for 80% audience penetration and 10+ frequency, every 90 days.

Some people think this isn’t possible, but I know it is because we consistently hit it at KlientBoost with just $20K/mo and a 160K target audience size.

To workout how much budget you need for your audience size, try this calculator Kim Meier developed when we were at KlientBoost together: https://thereachratio.lovable.app/

If you find that you don’t actually have enough budget to reach your audience, I’d advise against “trying it and seeing if it works”.

In almost every case where I’ve tried to force a small budget on a big audience, it hasn’t worked.

Instead, you have a few options:

Finally, a couple of little hints:

I’m not going to spend too much time here, since I’ve covered it in a bunch of other newsletters.

The main pricniple I want to get across is that your positioning, messaging, and unique POV need to be CRYSTAL CLEAR.

Can’t stress this enough.

Typically, I recommend building out a messaging matrix, pulled from an analysis of pains, gains, and jobs to be done from your discovery calls. 

From there, build all of your ad angles and concepts around those insights. 

This ensures there is a clear, consistent offer being communicated at every touch point which will maximise mental availability to convert in-market buyers AND drive recall as out-market prospects shift to in-market. 

Check out this article if you want more information on how to build a messaging matrix.

As above, I’ve covered this in-depth in multiple previous articles. Here’s a few you can check out for creative inspiration:

From a philosophical perspective, here’s the 4 most important mindset shifts to make when approaching creative as a modern demand gen marketer:

Aaaaand, finally, tracking. 

I recently lowered this from most important to least important on the pillar list.

The reason is pretty simple: you could realistically make LinkedIn work really, really well if you got the other 4 pillars in place. Without any tracking in-place.

This is because you’re mostly not using LinkedIn’s algo to decide who to target anymore. 

The main problem here is, without tracking, you’d struggle to prove value and you wouldn’t have access to important data that can help you optimise and make everything work even better.

At a minimum, you’ll want to setup: 

It can be helpful to use a reporting tool like Whatagraph too that consolidates all of your LinkedIn metrics into an easy-to-read dashboard. Not essential. But something I’ve found pretty useful.

Okay, I ended up going waaaaay deeper today than I thought I would. But, I think (and hopefully you do too) that it’s worth the extra effort.

If there’s one thing I want everybody reading to take away today it’s this:

For most high-ACV B2Bs with complex buyer journeys, funnel-based paid media approaches not only don’t work, but actively prevent them from being as efficient and effective as they could be.

The most effective marketers right now understand this better than anybody else: in the age of AI-slop and content commodification, brand is the most powerful lever we have at our disposal.

The reach and frequency approach to demand gen on LinkedIn Ads is the best model right now for leaning into it.

Tune in next week for the full audit process I take clients through to diagnose what’s wrong with their accounts and how to fix it.

Thanks for reading and catch ya in the next one ✌️

P.S. Wanna have me run your LinkedIn Ads for you? Hit this link to book a 30 minute strategy call where I’ll ask a few questions about your biz and strategy, then send across an in-depth 90 day roadmap to get your account generating consistent pipeline.