Definition

The marketing visualization showing how thousands of potential customers magically transform into a handful of actual buyers, shaped like an inverted cone of broken dreams. Each stage represents another opportunity for prospects to ghost your business entirely. Sales teams love drawing these; conversion rates love destroying the optimism they represent.

Example Usage

According to our funnel metrics, 10,000 people visited the site and 3 bought something, which is why we're all working weekends now.

Source: Marketing and sales terminology

Related Terms

Intermediate

loss leader

A product deliberately sold at a loss to attract customers who'll hopefully buy other profitable items, the retail equivalent of free samples at Costco. It's why printers are cheap but ink costs more than human blood.

📣 Marketing / Advertising
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pay per click

An advertising model where advertisers pay a fee each time their ad is clicked, commonly used in search engine marketing. Abbreviated PPC, it's a system where you literally pay for attention one click at a time.

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post-testing

Research conducted after a campaign runs to measure effectiveness and extract learnings. The marketing equivalent of an autopsy, but hopefully with better news.

📣 Marketing / Advertising
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sequential messaging

Delivering ads in a specific order to tell a story or build a narrative over time. Because apparently one interruption isn't enough—you need a whole series.

📣 Marketing / Advertising
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virality

The Holy Grail metric measuring how quickly content spreads across the internet like a digital contagion. Every marketer dreams of achieving it, most fail miserably, and the few who succeed usually have no idea how it actually happened. It's basically controlled chaos with a fancy epidemiological name.

📣 Marketing / Advertising
Beginner

content calendar

A schedule planning what content to publish and when, designed to bring order to the chaos of content marketing and typically abandoned by February. It's the New Year's resolution of marketing planning.

📣 Marketing / Advertising

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See “funnel” in Corporate Speak, Gen-Z Slang, Pirate Speak, and more.

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