Beyond the Funnel: Mastering the Four S’s of the Modern Customer Journey

Learn How to Go Beyond the Funnel: Mastering the Four S’s of the Modern Customer Journey.

The traditional marketing funnel is obsolete. Today’s customer journey is a chaotic, nonlinear path defined by four key behaviors: Searching, Streaming, Scrolling, and Shopping. 

This comprehensive guide breaks down each of the Four S’s, explaining how consumer intent and behavior have fundamentally shifted. It provides actionable strategies for brands to abandon the linear mindset and build a fluid, omnipresent marketing ecosystem. 

We will explore how to create platform-optimized content and leverage a unified data approach to survive and thrive in this new era. 

The ultimate goal is to meet customers wherever they are and guide them through their unique journey, transforming chaos into conversion opportunities. This pillar will be the central hub, linking to deeper dives on specific strategies.

For decades, marketers navigated a predictable river: the traditional marketing funnel. It was a comfortable, linear journey where we guided customers gently downstream from Awareness straight to Purchase. 

But that river has now shattered into a sprawling, chaotic delta of consumer behavior. The single path is gone, replaced by countless interconnected streams where the customer controls their direction. Trying to map this new world with the old funnel is like using a road map to navigate the open ocean.

The data confirms this seismic shift. The modern customer journey is anything but linear, with consumers now engaging with an average of six to eight brand touchpoints before making a decision. 

Furthermore, 90% of customers expect those interactions to be consistent and seamless, whether on a laptop, a phone, or a smart TV. This is the new benchmark for success.

This dynamic ecosystem is defined by four dominant behaviors: searching​​, where high-intent questions begin the journey; streaming, where video content builds emotional connection; Scrolling, where social feeds become engines of discovery; and Shopping, which is no longer a destination but an action that can happen at any moment, on any platform.

Attempting to force customers back into the old, narrow funnel is a losing battle. The only way to win is to abandon the linear mindset and build a fluid, omnipresent marketing strategy. 

This guide is your map to the delta. We will provide actionable strategies for creating platform-optimized content and leveraging a unified data approach to transform today’s chaos into your greatest conversion opportunity. 

This is your central hub for mastering the modern customer journey.

The Death of the Linear Funnel

An introduction to the problem, contrasting the old, predictable AIDA (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action) model with today’s multitouch reality.

For every marketing manager, the AIDA model was once gospel. We learned, built campaigns around it, and presented it in boardrooms: Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action. 

It was our blueprint: a clean, predictable assembly line for converting strangers into customers. Its elegant, top-down structure gave us a sense of control and a clear strategy narrative. We knew the entry points, the milestones, and the final destination.

But take an honest look at your analytics dashboards in 2025. That tidy assembly line is in ruins. The modern customer journey doesn’t flow; it ricochets. 

A consumer might gain Awareness from a Connected TV ad, have their Interest piqued by an influencer’s Instagram Story, bypass Desire to take immediate Action via a shoppable TikTok link, and then circle back to YouTube to watch reviews that solidify their post-purchase satisfaction. 

Where does the AIDA model fit in that whirlwind? It doesn’t. It’s shattered.

The linear funnel is dead. In its place is a vibrant, chaotic, and customer-led labyrinth. The journey no longer has a single starting gate or a designated finish line. Instead, think of it as a high-stakes pinball machine. 

Your customer is the ball, launched into the game at an unpredictable angle. 

They bounce from bumper to bumper, a Google Search, a podcast ad, a product placement in a Streamed show, a community discussion found while scrolling, accumulating information and intent with every collision.

This multitouch reality is the source of our biggest managerial headaches. It makes attribution a nightmare, turning ROI calculations into educated guesswork. 

How can you confidently allocate your budget when every customer’s path to conversion is unique? Your meticulously crafted models for Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) are strained because the “first touch” is now a phantom. 

The truth is, clinging to the AIDA framework today is like navigating a bustling city with a map from a forgotten century. It’s time to discard the old map, not because it’s wrong, but because the world it described no longer exists.

Clinging to the AIDA framework today is like navigating a bustling city with a map from a forgotten century.

The First S – Searching: Decoding High-Value Intent

Of the Four Ss, Searching is often where the modern customer journey begins. It’s when a consumer raises their hand and tells the world exactly what they need. 

We treated this as a technical game of keywords and rankings for years. The goal was to win the top spot for a high-volume term. In 2025, that’s just table stakes. True mastery of Search means moving beyond the what of the keyword to decode the why of the human behind it.

Winning in today’s search landscape means understanding psychology. A user typing “running shoes” is browsing. A user typing “best cushioned running shoes for marathon training with bad knees” isn’t just searching; they reveal their history, goals, and pain points. 

This is high-value intent. Google’s AI-powered algorithms are no longer just matching text but interpreting context and sentiment. They reward content that genuinely solves the complex problem behind the query, not just the one that repeats the keyword the most.

The rise of voice search and long-tail keywords supercharges this shift. 

We no longer type like robots; we ask our devices questions in natural language. A marketing manager needs to see a query like, “Hey Google, where can I find waterproof hiking boots for wide feet that are on sale near Boulder, Colorado?” 

Not as a niche keyword but as a miniature buyer persona. A single, unfiltered request gives you four critical data points: product, feature, pain point, and location. These long-tail queries signal an imminent decision, representing a customer who has moved far beyond the initial Browse and is actively seeking a solution. 

Capturing this audience delivers higher quality leads and a demonstrably better return on your marketing spend.

Ultimately, the greatest mistake is to keep your search data siloed within your SEO team. It is the most honest, unfiltered focus group you will ever have. When you see a spike in searches for “how to integrate [your software] with Salesforce,” that isn’t just an SEO opportunity. It’s a direct command to your content team to create a YouTube tutorial, your social team to post a quick tip on LinkedIn, and your product team to streamline that exact feature. 

Search data is the central intelligence engine that should inform your entire content strategy, from the videos you stream to the posts you scroll. It ensures you answer your customers’ most urgent questions on every platform they use.

Searching: Measuring the Capture of Intent

The goal here is to measure traffic and the quality and value of the audience you attract through search.

Metric	Why It Matters	KPI Example
1. Share of Voice (SOV) for Intent Clusters	Measures your brand’s visibility across a topic, not just a single keyword. It shows how well you dominate the conversation around a customer’s problem, establishing you as the market authority.	KPI: In Q3, we will increase our SOV for the “AI-powered sales automation” topic cluster from 15% to 25%.
2. Lead Quality Score from Organic Traffic	Moves beyond conversion volume to assess the value of leads generated. Integrating with your CRM, this metric tells you if the search brings in high-potential prospects or just low-quality traffic.	KPI: Maintain an average Lead Quality Score of 80+ for all MQLs generated via organic search.
3. Non-Branded Click-Through Rate (CTR)	This is a key indicator of how well your search snippets (titles/descriptions) resonate with your target audience and match their intent, independent of your brand recognition. A high CTR signals you are winning the “battle for the click.”	KPI: Achieve an average CTR of over 4% on the first page of search results for all non-branded, commercial-intent keywords.

The Second S – Streaming: Winning Attention in a Video-First World

If Searching is when your customer asks a question, Streaming is where you deliver the most powerful, engaging answer. In the video-first landscape of 2025, attention is the most valuable currency, and it’s being spent on platforms like YouTube and Connected TV (CTV). 

Treating these as mere ad channels is a critical error for a marketing manager. They are the new primetime television, the new town square, and the new product showroom, all rolled into one.

The strategic importance of these platforms cannot be overstated. YouTube is not just a video site; it’s the world’s second-largest search engine, where your customers go to learn, solve problems, and validate purchasing decisions. 

Connected TV has brought the power of digital targeting to the living room’s big screen, allowing you to reach households in Boulder or California with the precision of a search campaign. Meanwhile, platforms like Twitch offer unparalleled community engagement through live, interactive content and authentic creator partnerships. 

Primetime is no longer 8 PM on Thursday; it’s personal, on-demand, and happening on your customer’s screen.

Success in this arena requires a fundamental shift in mindset: be the show, not the commercial. The old model of interruption is dead. Today’s consumers don’t just tolerate ads; they actively pay to avoid them. 

The winning strategy is creating authentic video content that provides genuine value, content they would actively seek. 

This could be a B2B software firm producing a web series on industry leadership, a home improvement brand hosting a DIY tutorial channel, or a local Vermont business creating a documentary on sustainable maple farming. 

Educating or entertaining builds brand affinity and trust that a 30-second pre-roll ad could never achieve.

This value-driven approach demands a more sophisticated way to measure impact. Simple view counts are a vanity metric; a million views with a 95% drop-off rate after three seconds is a failed investment. As a manager, you must focus on metrics that signal engagement and business impact. 

Track audience retention to see if you’re holding attention. Measure click-through rates on in-video calls to action to see if you’re driving action. Analyze comment sentiment to gauge brand perception in real time. 

On CTV, leverage view-through conversions to connect ad exposure to website visits or sales. Streaming is no longer just an awareness play; it’s a full-funnel powerhouse for building community, demonstrating value, and driving measurable results.

Streaming: Measuring Engagement and Influence and Mastering the Four S’s of the Modern Customer Journey

The focus is on brand affinity and video’s ability to influence decisions, moving far beyond simple view counts.

Metric	Why It Matters	KPI Example
1. Audience Retention Rate	This is the ultimate measure of content quality. It shows the percentage of viewers still watching at any given point, revealing if your content is engaging or if people click away immediately.	KPI: Maintain an average audience retention of >50% for the first 60 seconds on all new YouTube product tutorials.
2. Comment Sentiment & Topic Analysis	Using AI tools to analyze comments reveals the qualitative impact of your content. Are viewers confused, excited, or asking buying questions? This is direct, unfiltered feedback from your most engaged audience.	KPI: Achieve a positive-to-neutral comment sentiment ratio of 12:1 and identify 5 new content ideas from monthly audience questions.
3. View-Through Conversions (VTC)	This crucial metric measures the number of users who saw your video ad (e.g., on CTV or YouTube) and later converted on your website, even without clicking the ad directly. It proves the ROI of top-of-funnel brand-building efforts.	KPI: Attribute over $75,000 in pipeline revenue to view-through conversions from our CTV campaign this quarter.

The Third S – Scrolling: From Social Awareness to Social Commerce

While streaming captures your audience’s dedicated attention, Scrolling commands the powerful, fragmented moments in between. The hypnotic, almost subconscious habit fills our lives, from the morning coffee check-in to the last minutes before bed. 

But for marketing managers in 2025, it’s crucial to recognize that the passive scroll has evolved into an active, high-speed engine of discovery, validation, and commerce. The brands that win understand how to navigate this new reality.

First, we must acknowledge that social media algorithms are now the world’s most powerful curators. The chronological feed is a distant memory; today’s feeds are hyper-personalized discovery platforms designed to serve users content they’ll love before they know they want it. 

Your strategic challenge is creating a great post and content that signals its relevance to the algorithm. This means sparking genuine engagement, shares, saves, and meaningful comments, which tells the platform your content is valuable and should be amplified.

In this algorithm-driven world, polished corporate messaging struggles to compete with authenticity. 

This is why trust is the new currency of social media, and it’s primarily earned through two sources: User-Generated Content (UGC) and creator partnerships. 

A polished ad featuring your product is an expected marketing tactic. A real customer from right here in Vermont posting an unboxing video from their Colchester home is the holy grail of social proof. It’s an unfiltered, trusted endorsement that money can’t buy. 

Partnering with niche creators offers a similar advantage. It’s not about buying their reach but renting the trust they’ve painstakingly built with their dedicated community.

This foundation of trust is what makes the final evolution of Scrolling so powerful: the collapse of the marketing funnel. The old, friction-filled path of seeing a post, clicking the link in the bio, finding the product on the website, and adding it to the cart is obsolete. 

Today, with integrated tools like Instagram Checkout, shoppable pins, and TikTok Shop, the distance between “I love that” and “It’s mine” has shrunk to a single tap. 

As a manager, integrating these seamless shopping experiences is non-negotiable. It transforms your social media presence from a brand-awareness expense into a direct, high-conversion sales channel, capturing intent the very second it’s formed.

Scrolling: Measuring Community and Commerce

Metrics here must track the effectiveness of building trust and converting passive discovery into active purchasing.

Metric	Why It Matters	KPI Example
1. Engagement Rate Per Reach	Tracks the number of organic posts, stories, and videos your community creates. This is a powerful indicator of brand love, advocacy, and the health of your community, representing powerful and free social proof.	KPI: Exceed a 4% average engagement rate per reach on all Instagram Reel and TikTok content.
2. User-Generated Content (UGC) Volume	It directly measures the ROI of your social commerce efforts by tracking sales that occur within the social platform itself (e.g., Instagram Checkout, TikTok Shop). This proves that social media is a sales channel, not just a marketing channel.	KPI: Increase the volume of positive, tagged UGC by 30% quarter-over-quarter.
3. Conversion Rate from In-App Social Commerce	Tracks the number of organic posts, stories, and videos your community creates. This is a powerful indicator of brand love, advocacy, and community health, representing powerful and free social proof.	KPI: Achieve a 3.5% conversion rate on all “View Shop” clicks within social media platforms.

The Fourth S – Shopping: Every Touchpoint is a Point of Sale

Your customer’s journey has been a whirlwind. They searched for a solution to their problem, streamed your brand’s compelling video content, and scrolled past a rave review from a trusted creator. In that critical moment, when intent is at its peak, they decide to buy. 

So, where do they go? In the hyper-competitive landscape of 2025, the only acceptable answer is: right here, right now. This is the Fourth S, Shopping, and has been transformed from a destination into a distributed capability.

The era of driving all traffic to a central e-commerce website is over. Think of your website not as your only store, but as your corporate headquarters. The actual selling now happens in countless digital “pop-up shops” online. 

This is the reality of decentralized commerce. Customers might convert via a shoppable pin while curating a Pinterest board, click an affiliate link in a trusted product review blog, or use an in-stream checkout feature on TikTok without leaving the app. 

Your “Add to Cart” button must be everywhere your brand is, ready to capture intent the moment it strikes.

The single biggest enemy of conversion in this new landscape is friction. 

Every extra tap, every page load, and every form field invites the customer to abandon their purchase. The modern consumer’s attention span is fleeting; an impulse to buy can vanish in the time it takes for a clunky webpage to load. 

Reducing friction by enabling one-tap purchases with pre-filled payment and shipping information is no longer a perk; it’s a core competitive advantage. Your job as a marketing manager is to make buying your product easier and faster than your competitors.

However, this decentralization creates a significant managerial challenge: maintaining brand integrity. A seamless purchase on Instagram followed by a clunky checkout on a partner’s blog creates a disjointed and frustrating customer experience. 

It’s imperative that your brand’s look, feel, messaging, and commitment to service remain consistent across every single shoppable touchpoint. Whether a customer is buying from a pop-up shop in downtown Burlington or a tag on a social media post, the experience must feel unified and distinctly yours. 

Shopping is the culmination of the entire customer journey; it’s where the brand promise becomes reality. You transform your entire marketing ecosystem into one intelligent, always-on point of sale by embedding seamless, consistent, and frictionless purchase opportunities at every turn.

Shopping: Measuring Frictionless Conversion

The goal is to measure the efficiency and profitability of your decentralized commerce strategy across every touchpoint.

Metric	Why It Matters	KPI Example
1. Attributed Revenue by Touchpoint	Using a data-driven attribution model, this metric assigns a value to each step in the nonlinear journey (the initial blog review, the social ad, the final direct visit). It shows which channels influence the sale, not just which one got the last click.	KPI: Increase the total revenue attributed to top-of-funnel touchpoints (affiliate blogs, social discovery) by 20% in H2.
2. Cart Abandonment Rate by Channel	Measures where users are dropping off in the buying process. A high abandonment rate from a specific channel (e.g., checkouts initiated from a social app) is a red flag for a high-friction user experience that needs to be fixed.	KPI: Reduce the checkout abandonment rate for sessions originating from mobile social media to below 45%.
3. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) by Acquisition Path	This metric looks beyond the first purchase to determine which customer journeys produce the most valuable, loyal customers. It answers: “Are customers who find us via search and an influencer more valuable than those who just click a paid ad?”	KPI: Ensure customers interacting with at least three of the Four S’s have a 25% higher CLV than single-channel customers.

Tying It All Together: The AI-Powered Solution

You’ve mastered the framework of the Four S’s. You understand your customers’ chaotic, brilliant journey through Searching, Streaming, Scrolling, and Shopping. 

Now, the most critical question a marketing manager in 2025 must ask is: how do you manage it? Use these tips today: Mastering the Four S’s of the Modern Customer Journey.

For years, the “best-of-breed” approach was the accepted wisdom. You’d get the #1 tool for SEO, the #1 platform for social scheduling, and the #1 app for analytics. 

The logic was sound: assemble a team of all-stars. But this approach has a fatal flaw in today’s nonlinear world. 

It’s like building a championship team by hiring the league’s best quarterback, best defender, and best kicker, but never letting them practice together or even share a playbook. Each is a superstar in isolation, but they are a dysfunctional, uncoordinated mess on the field.

This is the reality of a disconnected marketing stack. Your best-of-breed SEO tool sees the Search, but it’s blind to the Scroll on social media that prompted it. 

Your social platform sees the engagement on a Streamed video but can’t connect it to the final Shopping conversion that happens a week later on your website. 

You’re left with a collection of expensive, high-performing tools that leave you with a fragmented, incomplete picture of your customer. You’re managing tools, not a strategy.

This is why a unified, AI-first platform is a better option and the only logical one. At MatrixLabX.com, we built our entire platform to solve this data silo problem. We don’t just offer tools; we provide a single source of truth.

Our MatrixLabX Unified Marketing Platform natively integrates:

• AISEOPad™, which decodes the deep psychological intent behind every customer Search.
• AIAnalyticPad™ maps every engagement point, from a video Stream to the most fleeting social Scroll, creating a cohesive audience journey.
• AICommercePad™ seamlessly connects every touchpoint to the final Shopping action on your site or a partner’s.

Because all this data lives on one platform, our AI engine can see what no collection of separate tools ever could. 

It can identify that a specific search query captured by AISEOPad™ leads to your highest-value customers, but only when they first engage with a video tracked by AIAnalyticPad™. 

It can then automatically allocate budget to push that video to more people who fit the profile.

Stop trying to stitch together a dozen different playbooks. It’s time to stop managing tools and start driving a unified strategy. See how MatrixLabX.com turns multitouch chaos into a clear, predictable revenue engine.

The Funnel is Dead. Your Metrics Don’t Have to Be.

The chaotic, nonlinear customer journey is your biggest challenge, and your greatest opportunity. Stop trying to force today’s customers into yesterday’s model. It’s time to leverage an AI platform built for the world as it is now.

Get the Blueprint: Download our definitive guide, ” Beyond the Funnel and Mastering the Four S’s of the Modern Customer Journey,” and learn the AI-driven strategies redefining modern marketing.