What’s not going so well with your Video Funnel?

If you already have a video sales funnel in place then you can skip ahead to our bullet hole ancedote.

When it comes to your video marketing, what’s going well for you right now?

If you’re like most marketing professionals we chat with, you probably have a mental list of “wins” ready to go. Maybe your view counts are ticking up nicely, or perhaps that one LinkedIn video got a surprising number of reposts. It’s natural to look at the shiny, happy numbers and think, “Job done, kettle on.” But has any of it lead to an inquiry or even a sale? If not, then you need to look at your video sales funnel.

A sales funnel is simply the journey a stranger takes to become a customer/donator/signator or have their minds changed. Picture a massive, literal funnel: you target and pour a load of curious people in at the top, and a smaller, highly interested group drops out the bottom, ready to change.

A solid video funnel maps directly onto this audience journey. Here is how video applies to the three main stages:

• Top of the Funnel (Awareness): Your audience has a problem, and they’ve just stumbled across you. At this stage, you need snappy, engaging social media videos or short adverts to grab their attention and get them onto your radar.

• Middle of the Funnel (Consideration): They know who you are and are weighing up their options. Now, you serve up explainer videos, culture videos, or behind-the-scenes content to build trust and prove you know your onions.

• Bottom of the Funnel (Decision): The finish line. They just need a final nudge to choose you over the competition. This is where high-converting landing page videos, glowing client testimonials, and in-depth product demos step in to seal the deal.

When your video content aligns perfectly with this journey, everything flows beautifully. When one of these isn’t quite working? You’ll notice!

So how do you identify what isn’t working in your video funnel? Well I read a facinating ancedote the other day that I’d like to share. For it to work, we need to go back to the 1940s.

The Bullet Hole Misconception

During the war, Allied combat plane engineers were faced with a bit of a conundrum. They wanted to reduce the amount of Allied planes from getting shot down. So, they looked at the planes that returned from battle, noted where they were riddled with bullet holes in certain places, and decided to slap extra armour on those specific spots.

Makes sense, right? Put the protection where the damage is.

Except, a statistician named Abraham Wald pointed out that this was exactly the wrong thing to do. He realised that the engineers were only looking at the planes that survived. The planes with bullet holes in the fuselage or wings made it home. The planes that were hit in the engines or the cockpit? They didn’t come back.

The “bullet holes” on the survivors were actually the safe spots. The fatal blows were happening in the places that looked pristine on the returning aircraft.

(If you fancy a deep dive into the maths and history of this, the rest of the story can be found in the link: The Bullet Hole Misconception).

Are You Armouring the Wrong Bits of Your Video Funnel?

So now you might get where I’m coming from. You might be obsessing over the metrics and wins (the surviving planes), while completely ignoring the silent killers that are stopping your entire video funnel from working efficiently, or even at all.

It’s easy to focus on what is visible. But to really supercharge your strategy, you need to look for the missing planes or leads. The people who scrolled past your video, who only watched 10 seconds of it, who made it to your landing page but were put off by big blocks of text. You need to identify the parts of your journey that aren’t just damaged, but are completely non-existent. What’s stopping your target prospects from getting through your video funnel?

1. “All Lead, No Value”

You might be using video content to get more qualified leads into your sales funnel, but then you fail to convert them because they miss the value you have on your website.

You’ve armoured the top of your video funnel because that’s where you see the activity, but you’ve neglected the “Website Value” engine at the bottom. If your video promises the moon but your landing page delivers a damp squib, those leads aren’t just lost; they’re annoyed.

2. “A Lonely Landing Page”

On the flip side, you may be harnessing a landing page video to improve website conversions, but realise that your target audience aren’t reaching your website because you don’t have a social media video campaign.

You’re staring at your high conversion percentage (the bullet holes you can see) and polishing that landing page until it shines. Meanwhile, the fatal flaw in your video funnel is that nobody knows you exist because you haven’t built the bridge to get them there in the first place.

• Audit Your Analytics for Drop-offs: Look at your customer journey data. Are you getting thousands of video views on LinkedIn but zero clicks to your website? You have an awareness win, but a consideration gap. The Fix: Add a clear, compelling call-to-action (CTA) to your social videos, or create a retargeting campaign that pushes those viewers to a dedicated landing page.

• Do a Content Map Audit: Physically map out all the video assets you currently have and place them into the Top, Middle, or Bottom of your video funnel. If you have ten promotional brand videos but zero customer testimonials, you know exactly where your armour is missing. The Fix: Stop making top-of-funnel content for a few months and invest in a high-quality case study video to help close the deals you already have in the pipeline.

Look for the Silence

The trick to fixing your marketing isn’t to relentlessly focus on part of your video funnel. Instead, you need to train yourself to look for the silence. Look for the leads that never appeared, the website traffic that never arrived, and the sales conversations that just never happened. Those quiet, empty spaces are your missing planes.

By shifting your focus away from the views and interactions and actively hunting down the gaps in your video funnel, you can stop armouring the wrong bits. Find where the real damage is happening, plug the holes, and watch your entire marketing strategy finally take flight. I’m sorry about the pun but it was offered to me on a plate.

Need a Co-Pilot to Find Your Missing Planes?

Again, sorry for the puns, but spotting the invisible gaps in your own strategy can be incredibly tricky when you’re busy flying the plane every day. That’s exactly why we’re offering a completely free video funnel audit.

We’ll take an objective, no-nonsense look at your current video marketing setup—from your social media teasers right down to your website landing pages. We’ll help you figure out exactly where you need to add some armour, and where you should probably just leave well alone.

Fancy a chat and a fresh pair of eyes?

Book Your Free Video Funnel Audit Here