Level up your content marketing funnel – heres how I make the right content for each stage

We've become very good at identifying intent and very poor at operationalizing it. Influ2's B2B Enterprise Buying Journey Survey found that enterprise buyers consistently flag internal alignment, not just budget, as their biggest obstacle. In enterprise B2B sales, you’re never selling to just one person. Like a breadcrumb trail, review combinations of data points to figure out buyers’ challenges, interests, and urgency. Engagement-based ad journeys serve highly personalized content to a targeted contact, and then shift future messaging based on how that person interacts. Your content should help different job roles answer questions, compare solutions, understand features, address implementation concerns, and visualize the valuable outcomes they’ll achieve.

The B2C buyer’s journey involves consumers purchasing a product or service for themselves or individuals they know well. Paired with sales funnel software, you can ensure your buyer’s journey doesn’t have gaps that cause leads to drop out of your funnel. Recommended additional reading on marketing funnels and journey.

Influ2's B2B Enterprise Buying Journey Survey reinforces this. He'll inch forward, then double back to answer questions, gather proof points, or understand competitive options. The B2B buying journey is rife with indecision, too many stakeholders, budget chokeholds, and intense competition.

What metrics should I track to measure success at each stage of the buyer’s journey?

Ultimately, sales reps have smaller windows to impact buying decisions. Research suggests roughly 70% of the B2B buying journey happens in these invisible channels before any vendor contact form is filled. On top of this, more of the buying journey now happens in the Dark Funnel.

How Does the Marketing Funnel Move from Awareness to Action?

The buyer’s journey is the simpler lens for planning top-of-funnel and mid-funnel content, while the consumer decision journey is more useful once you’re optimising for retention and advocacy after the first sale. The buyer has defined their problem and is now researching the categories of solution available to solve it. You'll also be the first to hear about exclusive offers and relevant products designed to help maximise your development. Finding comments about your brand is the first step – this can be easily done through a free service such as Google Alerts. If a negative review starts trending on social media, are you agile enough to contact that customer, assess the situation accurately and resolve their issue in a positive way? Customers will soon become frustrated if your service team don’t have access to the data they need and don’t have the flexibility to help.

What is the customer doing during the awareness stage?

The Marketers Making AI Work in ABM All Changed One Thing First Over the past 10 years, he has worked with startups and enterprise B2B SaaS companies to boost pipeline and revenue through strategic content initiatives. Run consistent contact-level advertising to stay visible to specific decision-makers at your target accounts, even during quiet periods. Strategies that only account for trackable intent signals are missing most of the actual decision-making process. Research suggests roughly 70% of the buying journey happens in these channels before a buyer ever fills out a form. By adapting your GTM strategy, you can meet buyers exactly where they are and guide decisions.

Taking the right action based on that information is what actually makes it valuable. Each persona gets their own content track, journey, and angle, so no one is a stranger when the vote happens. Make sure your champion knows how to use each piece and when, encouraging them to pull you into any conversations to offer support. Keep in mind that people who object and slow down the journey aren’t always the ones who make the final decision. First, map out the buying committee – who makes the decisions, what roadblocks they face, and what they care about most.

Map content and campaigns to each stage, ensure a single campaign or content asset has a clear stage focus at a time, and track conversion rates between stages so you know where prospects are dropping off. Simple consumer purchases buyers journey funnel can move through all three stages in minutes, while considered B2B purchases with multiple stakeholders can take weeks or months, similar to the Gartner B2B buying journey. The buyer’s journey is the path a prospect follows from first realising they have a problem to deciding on a product or service to solve it. Aim to be helpful, educational and informative for prospective buyers and use funnel analysis to make data-informed decisions and improve your marketing effectiveness.

So, how do you adapt sales and marketing processes, tools, and strategies to reflect real life rather than a fairy tale? If your GTM strategy isn't built for this non-linear journey, you can't influence your buyers in meaningful ways. When we asked enterprise software buyers what most often slows down a purchase decision, the top two answers were budget approval and getting internal alignment.

• A marketing funnel is a multi-stage process that guides potential customers from first learning about a product to making a purchase.
• So the business needs to continue to engage with them, provide added value, and create a real relationship.
• The Awareness stage is when people first learn about your brand.
• Starting with founding Ireland's first content strategy/digital marketing agency, she has over 20 years’ experience launching and building international digital-led businesses, from early concept to funding to growth.
• At this stage, a business’s content tends to communicate key benefits, capabilities, and differentiators from competitors.

Businesses can earn long-term loyalty by engaging in continued support and personalized content. Successful businesses know the first purchase is merely the beginning of the relationship, so this process prioritizes retention. The driving force behind these purchases is emotion, so B2C marketers should appeal to the desires and interests of these consumers.

The customer buying journey isn’t an exact science (despite what some models would have you believe), it is full of both opportunities and difficulties. When the stages are considered in this way, they can provide valuable insight into areas which are in need of improvement or streamlining. The customer buying journey is the path your potential customer takes, from looking for your products or services to buying them, to eventually sharing their experience. Providers often engage customers during this phase to encourage brand loyalty. The customer uses the product, sometimes seeking guidance from the provider or a user community. The customer buying journey has been subject to change and development since its inception.

Sam starts researching marketing platforms to see what's out there and compare features against his existing tech stack. There's got to be a way to use fewer tools, speed up reporting, and gain a more complete picture of performance, right? Sam, a Chief Marketing Officer, realizes his team spends three days pulling reports from six different tools to complete monthly reporting.

Basic Marketing Funnel

Advocacy platforms like TripAdvisor have grown significantly in influence, playing a pivotal role in shaping customer behaviour. That includes different purchasing options and ever more convenient customer service. Another major challenge faced by marketers is meeting rising customer expectations. So marketers must ensure consistency and convenience across all these touchpoints. Providing a smooth and easy-to-navigate customer journey is key to increasing customer satisfaction and sales, and boosting customer retention.

Other notable factors which can increase cart abandonment include requiring an account for purchase and overly complex checkout processes. Extra costs (think hidden shipping costs or additional taxes) is cited as the most common reason for cart abandonment. This is an increasingly popular way for organisations to keep themselves in consideration throughout the customer buying journey. Consumers today are increasingly sceptical of advertising and marketing messages. It means that customers expect to be engaged with on a human level – they want organisations that demonstrate understanding and empathy towards them and genuinely care about helping to solve their problems.

The B2B buyer's journey is the end-to-end process a person goes through when identifying a problem, evaluating solutions, making a purchase decision, and the post-purchase phase. Building your GTM strategy around the linear model is where the expensive mistakes get made. But the reality of B2B buyer journeys is messier, longer, and driven by a cast of a dozen or more people whose priorities rarely align on the same timeline.