In modern B2B and healthcare marketing, we tend to obsess over the bookends of the buyer journey. Top-of-funnel is all about reach, impressions, and awareness. Bottom-of-funnel is where we fixate on close rates, MQL to SQL conversion, and sales enablement.
But in between?
That’s where most campaigns quietly fall apart.
The mid-funnel is supposed to be the space where leads are nurtured. Where curiosity becomes consideration. Where interest matures into intent. But in reality, it’s often a neglected stretch of the journey, a no man’s land of generic emails, mismatched content, slow follow-up, and clunky handoffs between marketing and sales.
We see this pattern over and over again:
A company invests heavily in paid media. Ads are performing, CTRs look good, traffic is flowing. But conversions stall. Pipeline doesn’t build. Sales starts pointing fingers. And leadership can’t figure out why marketing isn’t driving growth.
More often than not, the culprit isn’t the ad or the offer or the product.
It’s the experience gap between awareness and action.
Part of the problem is structural. The mid-funnel rarely has a clear owner. Your paid media team is focused on upper-funnel metrics. Your content or web team is often focused on top-level messaging. Your sales team is busy qualifying the few leads that manage to trickle through.
In many organizations, there’s no one asking:
What happens after a b2b prospect clicks an ad?
What do they see next, and does it reflect the same strategy or voice?
How do we guide them, not just greet them?
This is where intent gets lost. And once it’s gone, it’s hard to get back.
Even companies with advanced marketing automation platforms often underuse them. Nurture flows default to a one-size-fits-all sequence. Landing pages go untouched for months. Behavioral signals aren’t being acted on in real time. And worst of all, sales teams often receive leads with little to no context, just names and email addresses.
One of the more promising developments we’ve seen is the rise of AI and machine learning in exposing where the funnel breaks down. Predictive scoring models can now identify which leads are likely to convert. Journey analytics can pinpoint friction points. Personalization engines can dynamically adjust content based on user behavior.
And those are powerful tools, especially when the system around them is working.
But AI won’t save you from bad UX;
It won’t rewrite confusing copy or fix a broken CTA flow;
It can’t invent strategy where there is none.
If anything, AI accelerates outcomes, both good and bad. So if your funnel is leaking, automating it just helps you lose leads faster.
At the Experience Design Studio (XDS), we use AI as a lens, not a crutch. We leverage it to detect drop-offs, personalize mid-funnel journeys, and surface better decision-stage content. But the foundation always starts with thoughtful strategy, clean execution, and human-first design.
The way we approach this at XDS is to stop thinking in terms of “funnels” and start thinking in terms of experiences. A funnel implies linearity. Experience design, on the other hand, is contextual, dynamic, and user-driven.
We look at how a lead moves across touchpoints. What they see after clicking an ad. How the landing page either builds on that intent, or squanders it. Whether their follow-up experience is informed by what they did, what they read, and what they need next.
We layer in AI where it helps, personalizing nurture flows, scoring leads based on nuanced behaviors, identifying content gaps with semantic models. But we never let automation replace intention.
The best-performing campaigns we’ve run didn’t “optimize the funnel.”
They guided real people through clear, useful, well-timed interactions.
This is especially true in high-stakes industries like healthcare and life sciences. Our team at XDS Health regularly works with organizations who need to build trust at every stage, not just generate clicks. The mid-funnel is often where that trust either strengthens… or unravels.
We wrote more about this in In the Age of AI-Enabled Parity, Differentiation Is Experience-Driven.
Today’s buyers are skeptical. They self-educate. They drop in and out of your ecosystem unpredictably. And they don’t tolerate friction or fluff. If your mid-funnel experience is slow, irrelevant, or fragmented, they’ll leave, and you’ll never know how close they were to saying yes.
On the flip side, when you get this right, the results compound.
We’ve seen clients unlock previously stalled pipeline growth simply by tightening the bridge between lead and conversion. Sometimes that means reworking their landing experiences. Other times it’s connecting intent signals to sales outreach, or rebuilding nurture content from the ground up. Often, it’s aligning marketing and sales under a shared journey map, with AI as a support system, not a stand-in.
If you’re running strong awareness campaigns but not seeing pipeline growth, don’t just blame the ads. Look at the middle. That’s where your leads are either progressing… or quietly dropping out.
And in our experience, it’s also where the highest ROI lives, if you’re willing to design for it.
💡 Looking for mid-funnel inspiration? Check out HueRXCreative, our experimental studio focused on pushing the edges of digital storytelling and content engagement.
The Experience Design Studio is an award-winning, digitally native customer experience agency founded in 2017 by two agency veterans, bringing their collective creative, user experience, marketing, technology, and healthcare expertise together.
XDS is a full-service digital agency providing strategy to creation, consulting, design, engineering, marketing, and analytics, with the aim of providing seamless DTC and B2B experiences across all digital touch points, with common sense sprinkled in.