Why Funnel Thinking is Holding Back Your Marketing Strategy

At some point, every marketer utilizes “the funnel”.

Whether you call it a journey, a pipeline, or a flow, it’s the same core idea: a linear model that moves people from awareness to interest, then onward to action. For decades, it’s been a perfectly acceptable way to organize your efforts, track performance, and explain your results to people who like tidy shapes and conversion rates.

The problem is, people don’t follow the typical funnel stages anymore.

The funnel still helps you plan.

It just doesn’t help you understand.

Let’s be clear: this isn’t a call to throw out structure entirely. Funnels are great for mapping intent, as they give shape to the chaos. They make sense when you’re running campaigns, syncing up teams, reporting on attribution, or trying to get buy-in from stakeholders who need neat boxes to check.

But if you’re basing your actual marketing strategy like your messaging, your timing, your entire prospect experience, on the assumption that someone is going to walk cleanly from the top of your funnel to the bottom… You’re not building for reality. 

You’re building for an idealized user journey that breaks the moment someone opens more than one browser tab.

The lead ➡️ prospect  ➡️ resident journey isn’t linear. They’re barely trackable.

Here’s what a real person might do:

1. See your Instagram ad while doomscrolling at 11pm.
2. Forget about it.
3. Catch your brand name again on Google Maps while searching for coffee shops.
4. Click on a Rentals.ca listing.
5. Backtrack to check reviews 
6. Get distracted by a group chat.
7. Come back later.
8. Visit your site on mobile, bounce.
9. Get a retargeting ad days later.
10. Reopen the tab during lunch.
11. Book a tour.  Maybe.

And that’s if everything works smoothly.

This isn’t a funnel. It’s a chaotic, cross-platform, decision-making process driven by emotion, convenience, and short-term memory. Which means the moment you build for linearity, you’ve already lost half the game.

The bigger risk? Funnels let you overlook the gaps.

This is where most multifamily marketing strategies quietly fall apart; not because they’re missing leads, but because they’re leaking them.

Your campaign might have strong reach, solid targeting, and impressive clickthroughs, but:

• Your listings are missing availability updates.
• Your website isn’t accessible for disabled users.
• Your ad tone promises premium, but your site design screams 2012.
• Your team responds to inquiries… eventually.
  
  

These aren’t major failures in isolation. But collectively?
They’re how you lose renters you already paid to attract.

Funnels don’t catch those issues because they’re designed to track movement, not friction. They tell you who entered, and who converted. Not who almost did, but didn’t.

And that’s the problem. Because that middle layer, the “almost” renters, is where the real opportunity is hiding.

So if the funnel isn’t wrong… why isn’t it working?

The truth is, it’s not that the funnel has become obsolete. It’s that it was never designed to handle how renters actually behave in a multi-tab, multi-touchpoint, attention-fragmented environment.

It was designed for simplicity, for marketers who needed a way to describe something messy without losing control of the narrative.

But in multifamily marketing, control is a luxury we don’t get anymore. Because people aren’t just consuming your content, they’re bouncing between listings, reviews, ads, social posts, maps, and competitor pages. They’re influenced by comments, photos, chatbots, Google Business hours, and whether your leasing link works on their iPhone 12. 

So if your strategy is still based on the hope that renters move neatly from awareness to action, you’re not just leaving performance on the table, you’re probably misdiagnosing the real reason your conversions might be stalling.

The shift: from funnel logic to experience logic

You don’t need to abandon structure. But you do need to build something that reflects reality. And that means looking at your renter experience less like a flowchart, and more like a map with multiple entry points, exits, loops, and dead-ends.

Here’s where you start:

1. Design every touchpoint like it’s the only one they’ll see.

Because it might be. A person’s first (and only) impression of your brand could be your Rentals.ca listing, a blurry floorplan PDF, a half-loaded Facebook ad, or a cold email that someone forwarded without context. If that experience doesn’t hold up on its own? They’re gone.

Not “gone to the next stage.”
Gone, as in: they might not come back.

2. Fix the friction. Ruthlessly.

This isn’t about big redesigns, it’s about cleaning up the clutter that quietly breaks trust.

Audit your mobile experience. Check your CTA paths. Click every button like a renter would. Ask: is this smooth? Is this obvious? Is there any reason someone would hesitate here?

Because every time they do, you lose momentum. And in leasing, momentum is everything.

3. Track where people drop off, not just where they enter.

It’s easy to report on impressions and clicks. But if you’re not asking why they didn’t take the next step, you’re only seeing half the picture.

Where are people bouncing? What page are they leaving from? Are you sending them in circles? Are your forms too long, too clunky, or just too early in the process?

Funnels love to show you a nice, clean starting point.
Real performance lives in the middle.

4. Make consistency your conversion strategy.

Your potential residents don’t want to be surprised, they want to be reassured.

If your paid media feels premium but your website is missing premium features, they notice.
If your listing says the unit has in-suite laundry, but the virtual tour doesn’t show one? They notice.
If your tone, visuals, or promises shift depending on where they land?
They’ll assume something’s off…even if everything technically works.

And when that gap shows up, trust drops.
And when trust drops, leases don’t happen.

Final thought: Your funnel isn’t broken. Your expectations might be.

Funnels are still useful for things like organizing work, explaining performance, and keeping internal chaos in check.

But, they’re not the journey.
They’re a version of the journey that assumes logic, discipline, and forward motion. And that’s not how people operate today, especially not those trying to find a place to live in the middle of everything else life is throwing at them.

So build your funnel. Use it. Present it. Report on it.

But when it comes time to market, to convert, to actually earn the lease…
Design for behaviour. Not for the model.

Because the renter doesn’t care how your funnel flows.
They care whether your experience gives them a reason to stop looking.

Want to find the friction in your own funnel?

📩 Book a strategy session