Why the Traditional Marketing Funnel Is Breaking Down

By David Ronald 

For years marketers have operated with a relatively familiar model.  

A prospect discovers your company, visits your website, downloads something, becomes a lead, enters a nurturing campaign and eventually talks to sales.  

It was never quite that simple, of course, but the model gave marketers a useful framework for thinking about how buyers moved from awareness to consideration to purchase.  

That model is becoming increasingly difficult to recognize.  

Today’s buyers are doing more research on their own, using more sources and interacting with companies later in the process. Increasingly, AI is sitting between the buyer and the information they are looking for.  

The result is a fundamental change in how people discover, evaluate and select B2B vendors. 

In this blog post I explain why the funnel is becoming harder to see and what you can do to address this. 

Your Website Is No Longer the Front Door

The traditional buyer journey assumed that your website was one of the primary places where prospects learned about your company.  

In my opinion that assumption is increasingly outdated.

A potential customer might hear about your company in a LinkedIn post, ask ChatGPT which companies solve a particular problem, read reviews on G2, ask colleagues in Slack for recommendations, watch a product demonstration on YouTube or search for customer opinions on Reddit.

They may do all of this before ever visiting your website.

Artificial intelligence is accelerating this behavior because it can synthesize information from multiple sources and present a buyer with an initial answer, or even a shortlist of vendors, without requiring the buyer to visit dozens of websites.

The result is a fundamental change in the role of the website.

A strong website is still crucial, of course, but it is increasingly becoming a validation destination rather than the starting point of discovery. By the time someone arrives, they may already know who you are, what you do and who your competitors are.  

The question is whether your website gives them enough evidence to keep you on the list. 

The Shortlist Is Being Created Earlier

This may be the biggest change of all.

Historically, marketing often focused on generating a broad pool of potential buyers and then helping sales narrow that pool down.

AI can reverse that process by helping buyers create their own shortlist before they ever identify themselves to a vendor. 

A buyer can ask, "What are the best platforms for solving this problem?" The answer might contain five companies. They can then ask, "Which of these is best for a 500-person company?" and the list gets smaller. They might follow that with, "How does Company A compare with Company B?" At this point, the buyer is already evaluating specific vendors, even though none of those vendors may know the buyer exists. 

G2's 2026 research found that AI chatbots had become the leading source influencing which software vendors make buyer shortlists, ahead of software review sites, market research firms and vendor websites. 

This is a profound shift because marketing is no longer simply trying to create awareness and capture demand but needing to influence the conversation that happens before demand becomes visible. 

Introducing the Dark Funnel

There has always been a part of the B2B buying process that marketers couldn't see.

Buyers talk to colleagues, forward emails, mention vendors in meetings and ask friends for recommendations. Private Slack groups, direct messages, online communities, podcasts and peer networks can all influence a buying decision without producing a trackable marketing interaction.

This "dark" activity has always existed, but the amount of buyer research happening outside traditional marketing channels is growing.

AI adds another layer. A buyer can conduct extensive research inside an AI assistant without generating a website visit, clicking an ad or filling out a form.

From the marketer's perspective, nothing happened but, from the buyer's perspective, a lot happened. They may have developed an opinion about your company, compared you with competitors and decided whether you belong on the shortlist, all without creating a single identifiable marketing signal.

This creates an uncomfortable measurement problem. A marketing team may look at declining organic traffic and conclude that its content strategy isn't working. At the same time, the company's brand may be appearing repeatedly in AI-generated recommendations and influencing buyers who eventually arrive through direct traffic.  

The activity is real but the attribution simply isn't. 

Stop Measuring Only What You Can Track

This doesn't mean marketers should abandon traditional metrics.

Website traffic, leads, conversion rates and pipeline remain important, and companies still need ways to determine whether marketing investments are producing business results. But those metrics no longer tell the entire story, particularly when much of the buyer journey happens before a prospect becomes identifiable.  

In my opinion, marketing teams need to start asking different questions, such as: 

• Are we appearing when buyers ask AI about our category?
• What does AI say about us compared with our competitors?
• Are customers and industry experts talking about us in places we don't control?
• Are our most important claims supported by credible third-party sources?
• Are prospects arriving at our website already knowing what they want?
• And how often are we being included in buyer shortlists?

These are harder questions to answer than "How many people downloaded our whitepaper?"

They are also increasingly important.  

Marketing measurement needs to expand beyond activities that can be neatly attributed to a campaign and start considering whether the company is influencing the broader market in which buying decisions are being made. 

Content Has a New Job

This shift also changes what good content looks like.

For years, marketers created content primarily to attract traffic, generate leads and support SEO. And, sure, those goals still matter, but content now has another job: helping buyers understand why your company matters.

This requires more than publishing generic articles filled with keywords. Companies need content that clearly explains what problem they solve, who they solve it for, how their approach differs, where they are particularly strong and where they may not be the best fit. 

They also need credible customer evidence, useful comparisons, clear explanations of their category and specific proof that supports their claims.

The goal isn't simply to produce more content but to create content that provides enough useful information for a buyer to understand the company and accurately represent it.

In other words, content needs to be useful even when the buyer never becomes a lead.

And that's an important mindset change.  

The objective isn't always to get someone to click, fill out a form or download something. Sometimes the objective is to make sure that when someone asks, "Who should I consider?", your company has a credible answer. 

Marketing Has to Become More Distributed

The old model placed much of marketing's responsibility on a relatively small number of controlled channels: the website, email, advertising and perhaps events.

The new buyer journey requires a broader approach because buyers are forming opinions across a much larger ecosystem. Your brand needs to show up across the places where customers actually learn, compare and validate companies.

That includes search and AI platforms, obviously, but it also includes industry publications, review sites, communities, social networks, podcasts, analyst reports, customer stories and third-party conversations.

This makes third-party credibility more important, not less. You can tell buyers that you're innovative, but a customer saying it is more powerful. You can say you're the market leader, but independent analysts, customers and industry experts can provide evidence. You can publish a comparison page explaining why you're better than the competition, but buyers will still look elsewhere for validation.  

The winning brands will increasingly be those that are easy to understand, easy to validate and easy to recommend. Marketing therefore has to think beyond what the company says about itself and focus on the broader body of information that buyers encounter while researching the category. 

Conclusion

So, what does all of this mean for marketers?

Well, it means the job is getting bigger.

Marketing can no longer think exclusively about generating demand that can be captured and measured. It has to influence demand that may remain invisible, make the company discoverable in AI-driven research, establish credibility in third-party conversations and make the company compelling when buyers finally arrive at the website.

This also means marketing has to work more closely with sales, product, customer success and even customers themselves.

The story being told across the market needs to be consistent, understandable and credible, whether that story comes from your website, a salesperson, a customer review, an industry publication, a LinkedIn post or an AI-generated answer.

Okay, so the traditional funnel isn't dead... 

But the assumption that marketers can see buyers moving through it is. 

The modern B2B buyer may spend days, or even weeks, researching your company without ever raising their hand. By the time that buyer contacts sales, much of the decision may already have been made.

The question for marketers was once, "How do we get buyers into our funnel?" Now it's, "How do we influence buyers before they ever enter it?"

And that is the new B2B buyer journey.

Thanks for reading my blog post.

Are you interested in discussing how to reinvent your marketing funnel? If so, feel free to get in touch. My email is david@alphabetworks.com – I look forward to hearing from you.

Why Your Content Strategy Needs to Change

By David Ronald  

So, for years, content marketers have followed a simple strategy. 

Identify the keywords customers are searching for, create content around those keywords, optimize the content for search engines, drive traffic to a website, and convert that traffic into leads.

But something fundamental is changing…

Buyers are increasingly using AI to discover information, research problems, compare solutions and decide what to explore next.

And that means your content strategy needs to change with it. 

 

In this blog post I explore how to make the most of the changes and re-tune your content strategy. 

Search Is Becoming a Conversation

We marketers know that traditional search is based largely on keywords.  

For example, a buyer might search, "Best customer data platform for B2B companies."

But AI-powered search allows that same buyer to ask something much more complicated, such as, "We're a 500-person B2B SaaS company with a fragmented customer data environment. What should we look for in a customer data platform, which vendors are strongest for companies our size, and what are the biggest implementation risks?"

And that's a very different search experience.

Google describes this as a more conversational approach to search, allowing users to ask longer and more complex questions and continue with follow-up questions.

For we marketers, this creates an important shift…  

The goal now is no longer simply to rank for a keyword but to become one of the sources an AI system considers valuable when answering a customer's question. 

It's About Answer Optimization

Now, I’m not suggesting that keywords no longer matter.

They do. 

But we marketers need to think beyond individual keywords and start thinking about the questions behind those keywords.

For example, a company selling sales enablement software shouldn't just create content around "sales enablement software."  It should answer questions such as: 

• What is sales enablement?
• When does a company need sales enablement software?
• What should you look for in a sales enablement platform?
• How much does sales enablement software cost?
• What are the most common implementation challenges?
• How does sales enablement software compare with a traditional LMS?
• Which sales enablement metrics should companies track?
• What should a company do before purchasing sales enablement software?

These questions address different stages of the buying journey.

And collectively, they provide something much more valuable than a collection of keyword-optimized articles: a comprehensive body of knowledge around a customer's problem. 

Commodity Content Won't Cut It

AI is making it easy to create mediocre content, and a marketer can ask an AI tool to write an article about virtually any topic in seconds.

As a result, the internet is becoming increasingly saturated with generic articles that repeat information already available elsewhere. 

And this creates a problem for marketers.

If your article simply says what everyone else has already said, why should an AI system, or a human buyer, consider it particularly valuable?

Which is where original thinking becomes a competitive advantage. 

Authority Matters More Than Ever

There's another major change marketers need to understand. 

AI systems can draw on information from across the web. That means your company's visibility on third-party websites, industry publications, communities, podcasts, analyst sites and other authoritative sources can influence how your company is understood.

This makes traditional content marketing increasingly interconnected with brand building and digital authority.

Consider this scenario: 

• Company A publishes 100 articles on its own website but has almost no independent recognition.
• Company B publishes fewer articles but is frequently mentioned by customers, industry publications, analysts, podcasts and other respected sources.

Which company is more likely to be perceived as an authority? 

Don't Abandon SEO

None of this means SEO is dead. I’m not saying that. 

In fact, Google's own guidance makes the opposite point: many established SEO practices remain relevant for AI-powered search. 

But SEO should become part of a larger strategy.  

 And, at the end of the day, I like to think of it this way: great SEO helps search engines find and understand your content. A strong content strategy gives them something worth finding. And brand authority gives them a reason to trust it.  

That's a much more powerful combination in my opinion. 

Measure More Than Traffic

Finally, AI search requires marketers to rethink measurement.

Website traffic will continue to matter. But it shouldn't be the only metric.

We marketers should increasingly pay attention to questions such as: 

• What topics are we associated with?
• Which competitors are being recommended alongside us?
• What sources are AI systems citing when discussing our category?
• Are customers and third parties reinforcing the same positioning we communicate
• Is our content influencing pipeline?

Some of these measurements are still emerging.

And that's okay because, after all, the behavior of buyers is changing faster than the traditional marketing measurement stack. 

Conclusion

Some of the people that I speak with  view AI search as a threat to organic traffic.

But I think that's too narrow a perspective…  

In my opinion the companies that will mean in this new era are going to be the ones that develop the strongest point of view. This means: 

• They'll understand the questions their customers are asking.
• They'll create content that answers those questions better than anyone else.
• They'll build authority both on and off their websites.

And they'll make sure their brand is consistently associated with the problems and categories they want to own.

The AI search revolution is about creating content that is so useful, distinctive and authoritative that both machines and humans recognize its value.

And that’s a much bigger, and much more interesting, content marketing opportunity.

Thanks for reading my blog post.

Are you interested in discussing how to change your content strategy to take advantage of the Ai search revolution? If so, feel free to get in touch. My email is david@alphabetworks.com – I look forward to hearing from you.

How to Stop Writing Uninspiring Marketing Content

By David Ronald 

Marketing has never been short on data, features, or claims. 

What it has often lacked, however, is meaning.

In a world where buyers are overwhelmed by information and increasingly skeptical of hype, storytelling has become one of the most effective ways to create clarity, trust, and emotional connection.

The most memorable brands don’t just explain what they do - they tell stories that help audiences recognize their own challenges and imagine a better way forward. 

In this blog post I explore why storytelling matters in modern marketing, how to determine the right narratives, and how to incorporate storytelling into content in a way that strengthens credibility rather than diluting it.

Why Storytelling Works in Marketing

We humans are wired for stories. 

Long before dashboards and data models, stories were how people made sense of change, shared knowledge, and built alignment. 

Neuroscience reinforces this reality – stories activate more areas of the brain than facts alone, making information easier to remember and more emotionally resonant.

In marketing, storytelling works because it creates emotional engagement, builds trust through authenticity, simplifies complex ideas, and differentiates brands in crowded markets.

Although Buyers may justify decisions with logic, but they are motivated by emotion and reinforced by belief. 

Storytelling bridges that gap by making value feel real. 

Reframing Storytelling: It’s Not Fiction

One of the most persistent misconceptions about storytelling is that it requires embellishment or creative invention. In effective marketing, storytelling is grounded in truth.

It is about selection, emphasis, and framing, not fiction.

Every organization already has stories embedded in its work - customers navigating change, teams learning through failure, or founders responding to overlooked problems.

The marketer’s role is to surface those stories, give them structure, and connect them to the audience’s lived reality.

That work begins with identifying the right narrative – the consistent throughline that gives individual stories meaning. 

How to Determine the Right Narrative

Strong storytelling starts long before content creation. 

A narrative is not a campaign tagline or a clever hook – it’s a point of view about the world your audience operates in and the change your company enables.

The most effective narratives begin with deep understanding of the customer’s reality.

Patterns emerge when you listen closely to customer interviews, sales conversations, onboarding feedback, win‑loss reviews, and so on.

These patterns often reveal tensions customers struggle to articulate directly – outdated assumptions, invisible costs, or accepted tradeoffs that no longer make sense. 

Every compelling narrative challenges a status quo.

The question is not simply what problem you solve, but what way of thinking or operating you are asking customers to leave behind.

When marketing names the limitations of the old approach with precision and empathy, audiences feel understood rather than sold to.

From there, the narrative must clearly articulate the change you enable – this change is rarely about a single feature; it is about a shift in outcomes, confidence, or capability.

The narrative arc should consistently move from the constraints of the past, through a moment of realization, toward a more effective and credible future. 

Finally, narratives must hold up internally.

The strongest ones resonate in sales conversations, product priorities, and customer outcomes. 

Core Elements of a Strong Marketing Story

Once the narrative is clear, individual stories become easier to shape.

Most effective marketing stories share a common structure. They begin with a clear protagonist, usually the customer or buyer, rather than the product itself – and the audience should be able to recognize their own situation in this character’s experience.

They introduce a meaningful problem that creates tension and stakes.

Specificity matters here because, while concrete challenges feel credible, vague pain points feel manufactured.

They include a moment of change or insight, when continuing the old way becomes untenable and a new approach emerges – this is where your product or perspective enters naturally, as an enabler rather than a hero.  

They conclude with a resolution that shows improvement without pretending perfection. Honest outcomes build more trust than flawless endings. 

Applying Storytelling Across Marketing Content

Storytelling is not limited to brand campaigns or keynote presentations.

It can, and should, inform nearly every type of marketing content.

On your website, storytelling helps orient visitors quickly.

Rather than leading with features, effective pages begin with the customer’s world: the challenges they face, what is at risk if nothing changes, and what a better future looks like.

Proof points, examples, and product details then reinforce that narrative.

In thought leadership and blog content, storytelling provides context and direction.

Stories explain why a topic matters, illustrate abstract ideas, and show how perspectives evolve over time. When appropriate, sharing lessons learned or mistakes made humanizes the brand and signals credibility. 

Case studies benefit enormously from a narrative approach.

Instead of functioning as technical summaries, the strongest case studies trace a journey – the customer’s starting point, the constraints they faced, the decisions they made, and the outcomes they achieved.

Metrics become more powerful when they are tied to that journey.

Product marketing and launches also gain clarity through storytelling. Framing a release around a real customer problem or a broken workflow helps audiences understand not just what changed, but why it matters now.  

In sales enablement, stories turn messaging into conversation. Short, relevant customer narratives help sales teams address objections, demonstrate empathy, and guide buyers toward insight rather than pressure. 

Balancing Story and Substance

While storytelling is emotional, it must remain disciplined.

The most effective marketing balances narrative with evidence. Data, benchmarks, and third‑party validation reinforce credibility, while customer voices keep stories grounded.

Overly polished or exaggerated stories may attract attention in the short term, but they erode trust over time.

Real stories acknowledge complexity, tradeoffs, and learning curves. 

Building a Storytelling Capability

Storytelling should not depend on individual talent alone. 

Marketing leaders can institutionalize it by creating systems to capture customer stories, encouraging cross‑functional sharing, and developing repeatable narrative frameworks.

When storytelling becomes part of how teams think – not just how they write – content becomes more consistent, authentic, and effective. 

Measuring the Impact of Storytelling

Although stories appeal to emotion, their impact is measurable.

Narrative‑driven content often leads to stronger engagement, higher completion rates, improved conversion, and better sales feedback.

Over time, storytelling compounds brand equity, making future marketing efforts more efficient. 

Conclusion

Incorporating storytelling into marketing content is not about adding flair.

It is about adding meaning. In competitive markets, the brands that win are those that help customers make sense of change, risk, and opportunity.

When your marketing consistently tells honest, human stories grounded in real problems and outcomes, you do more than inform. You earn attention, trust, and long‑term loyalty.

Storytelling is strategy, expressed in a way people remember.

Thanks for reading – I hope you found this blog post useful.

Are you interested in discussing how to improve your storytelling? If so, let’s have a conversation. My email address is david@alphabetworks.com – I look forward to hearing from you.

A Brief Guide to Content Marketing

By David Ronald 

Brands win when they create content that feels purposeful, trustworthy, and unmistakably human.

Yet, truly effective content is the outcome of a thoughtful, ongoing relationship between a brand and its audience.

Over the years, I’ve watched teams transform their marketing simply by stepping back and asking, “Why are we creating this?” 

Everything else flows from that clarity.  

In this blog post I examine the best practices that separate truly resonant content from digital noise.

(You may also be interested in reading this post Mapping Content to Your Buyer’s Journey.)

Start With Strategy, Not Output

Too many marketing teams jump straight into production without understanding how any of it connects into business goals.

The best content marketers, by comparison, begin with something more foundational. Strategy. 

Before a word is written, you should know which business objective the content supports: 

• Is it meant to generate leads?
• Establish authority?
• Nurture customer loyalty?
• Or something else? 

And who exactly are you trying to reach at that moment in their journey?

Once these anchors are clear, choosing formats becomes intuitive: early-stage buyers might need educational explainers, while those closer to purchase benefit from case studies, webinars, or ROI tools.

When strategy drives creation, content stops being clutter and starts becoming a force multiplier. 

Let Your Brand Voice Do the Heavy Lifting

A distinctive tone builds familiarity, and over time, trust – the key is consistency, whether your brand sounds authoritative, warm, witty, or visionary.

For example, a cybersecurity startup may use calm, data-driven language signals credibility – a wellness brand may adopting a softer, more empathetic tone that conveys approachability. 

What matters is that every piece of content, feels like it comes from the same personality – documenting your voice ensures that anyone who creates content reinforces the same identity. 

Lead With Storytelling, Grounded in Substance

We are wired for stories.

But storytelling isn’t about being dramatic – it’s about making meaning tangible. The most resonant content casts the customer as the hero and the brand as the guide – it highlights tension (ie, what challenge the customer faces) and resolution (ie, how insight, not hype, helps them overcome it).

The story may bring people in, but it’s the substance that keeps them there.

Pairing narrative with expertise is the combination that turns readers into believers. 

Create for Humans First, Algorithms Second

Search still matters, but modern algorithms reward what humans reward: clarity, relevance, and value. The days of stuffing pages with keywords are long gone.

A user-first mindset changes how you write. You focus on topics instead of keywords, structure articles for readability, and incorporate visuals or data to elevate the experience.

Ironically, the more human your content feels, the better it performs in search. 

Reach Audiences Where They Already Are

Because people consume information differently, format diversity matters. Some audiences gravitate toward long-form articles; others prefer short videos, podcasts, or interactive tools.

Effective marketers don’t try to be everywhere - instead, they selectively show up where their audience already spends time.

A deep-dive blog can be converted into a video summary. 

A customer interview can become a podcast; a webinar can produce social clips and infographics.

So, distribution becomes a strategic act, not an afterthought. 

Let Data Be Your Compass

Content is creative, but it’s also analytical.

Every interaction leaves a trail of insights – what people click, how long they stay, what they share, where they drop off. These patterns tell you what resonates and what falls flat.

High-performing content should be repurposed and expanded – and underperformers should be refreshed or retired.

When teams treat analytics as feedback rather than judgment, they evolve faster and produce content that feels increasingly indispensable. 

Quality Over Quantity

The digital world is overflowing with content.

What’s scarce is clarity, originality, and meaningful insight – producing more doesn’t increase impact; publishing better does.

High-quality content reflects real research, thoughtful structure, and a point of view – it adds something new, an opinion, a framework, a dataset, that audiences can’t find in ten other tabs.

In the end, a handful of exceptional pieces will always outperform a flood of forgettable ones. 

Build a Culture of Collaboration

Great content is rarely created in isolation.

It comes from cross-functional collaboration: product teams who understand features and roadmaps, sales teams who hear objections firsthand, customer success managers who know what frustrates and delights users.

When these voices inform the editorial process, content becomes more relevant, accurate, and aligned with go-to-market priorities.

Monthly content councils, shared dashboards, and regular feedback loops turn content into a company-wide asset, not a marketing department project. 

Repurpose and Refresh to Maximize Impact

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time you launch a new campaign. Often the most powerful content already exists, it just needs to be reshaped or modernized.

A popular article can become a LinkedIn carousel; a podcast interview can become a case study; a series of related blogs can evolve into an eBook or a nurture sequence.

This approach not only saves time but reinforces your brand’s key messages across channels and formats. 

Earn Trust Through Transparency

In an era where AI-generated content floods every feed, trust is the most valuable currency. Audiences can sense the difference between content created to manipulate and content created to help.

Attribution to real authors, transparent sourcing, honest reflections, and open engagement are powerful trust-builders.

When a brand demonstrates humility, expertise, and empathy, people do more than simply consume the content – they rely on it. 

Use AI Thoughtfully, Without Losing the Human Spark

AI has become a powerful creative partner.

It can cluster keywords, draft outlines, analyze user behavior, and automate repetitive tasks.

But it cannot replace human insight, intuition, or imagination.

The best content teams use AI to accelerate workflows, not dictate them. AI handles the grunt work; humans shape the story.

That partnership (I think of it as “speed with soul”) is what sets modern content marketing apart. 

Measure the Metrics That Matter

Executives want results, and the strongest content teams speak the language of impact.

Instead of celebrating vanity metrics like impressions, they connect content to outcomes: pipeline creation, lead quality, customer expansion, share of voice, loyalty.

Clear dashboards, regular reporting, and narrative insight about why content worked help stakeholders see the strategic value. 

Once they do, support, and investment, increase.

Commit to Continuous Learning

Content marketing is a moving target.

New channels appear, old ones fade, and audience expectations shift constantly.

The teams that thrive are the ones that stay curious – reading industry reports, watching emerging formats, experimenting with new ideas, and analyzing their wins and failures.

Curiosity is a competitive advantage.

Each iteration makes your content sharper, more relevant, and more aligned with what audiences truly need. 

Conclusion

The best content has the potential to transform minds.

It turns passive readers into active advocates and fleeting attention into lasting loyalty.

When strategy meets storytelling, when clarity pairs with creativity, content becomes more than a tactic. It becomes the heartbeat of a brand.

When you commit to creating content that is strategic, human, and consistently excellent, you’re building trust at scale.

Thanks for reading – I hope you found this blog post useful.

Are you interested in discussing how to improve your content marketing? If so, let’s have a conversation. My email address is david@alphabetworks.com – I look forward to hearing from you.

Mapping Content to Your Buyer’s Journey

By David Ronald

Too many marketing teams fail to map the journey of their buyers.

Consequently, they send buyers similar content again and again—and are surprised when they don’t achieve the results they want.

It’s important to map the buyer’s journey and create content that’s relevant for each stage along the way. 

And it’s important to experiment with different types of content and optimize based on outcomes. 

A large portion of a buyer’s journey is done digitally (even if it’s not the 67% cited by SiriusDecisions in the early 2010s). This provides a huge opportunity for you to understand your buyer's journey and optimize digital touch points with relevant content, to ensure you influence prospects early in their journey, leading to better engagement and conversion rates. 

I’m going to examine how to understand and influence your buyer’s journey in this blog post.

What is the Buyer’s Journey?

First, what is the buyer’s journey? 

The buyer’s journey encompasses the path a buyer takes, starting from the recognition of a problem or need, followed by the evaluation process, all the way to a purchase.

Understanding the path your buyers take when choosing to make a purchase can be complex and confusing. But, by proactively addressing the needs and expectations of customers at each stage, you can create a seamless path that leads to higher customer satisfaction, stronger relationships, and increased sales.

Understanding Your Buyer’s Journey Matters

Understand the buyer’s journey matters for a number of reasons. These include:

• Facilitates the identification of challenges encountered by your target audience throughout the purchasing process.
• Enables the examination of the choices customers make at each stage, offering valuable insights into their decision-making patterns.
• Encourages a solution-oriented approach in your marketing efforts, ensuring that your messaging aligns with customer needs and pain points.
• Enables the customization of marketing strategies to specific audiences, leading to more targeted and effective campaigns.
• Builds trust with your customers by demonstrating a deep understanding of their journey, fostering credibility and loyalty.
• Enhances the customer experience by addressing pain points, providing relevant information, and delivering personalized interactions.
• Enables data-driven decision-making to help business leaders make informed decisions, refine their marketing strategies, and allocate resources effectively to maximize their results.

Each of these reasons is important in its own way.

Buyer’s Journey vs. Customer Journey

Before going further, though, let’s compare examine two terms that are often used interchangeably:

• Buyer’s Journey—focuses primarily on the path a customer takes from the initial stage of identifying a problem or need, through the evaluation of solutions, to the final purchase decision. It centers on the pre-purchase stages of the customer’s experience.
• Customer Journey—encompasses the entire end-to-end experience a customer has with a brand, including the post-purchase phase. It extends beyond the purchase itself and covers the ongoing interactions, support, and satisfaction that customers experience throughout their relationship with the brand.

(You may also be interested in our blog post, The Secrets to Keeping Your Brand Design Fresh.)

Stages of the Buyer’s Journey

The buyer’s journey, also known as the marketing funnel, is shown conceptually in the following diagram:

1.Awareness

During the awareness stage, buyers have come to the recognition that they are facing a problem but haven’t identified a specific solution yet. They are unaware of you and how your product can solve their problems. 

Your role is to educate them on ways the problem can be solved, ideally in a vendor-neutral way that builds interest and trust. 

Marketers also refer to this stage as Top-of-Funnel.

2.Consideration

In the consideration stage, buyers have progressed beyond mere awareness and are now actively exploring multiple solutions available to address their identified problems and needs. 

They are evaluating different options and assessing which ones align best with their requirements and preferences. 

Your role is to provide comparative analyses, and compelling value propositions to position your product as a compelling option. 

Marketers also refer to this stage as Middle-of-Funnel.

3.Decision

At the decision stage, buyers will make a decision which product will solve their problem and are ready to move forward to a purchase. This involves finalizing details such as pricing, terms, and any additional considerations before committing to the chosen solution. 

Your role is to accelerate their buying decisions with clear and persuasive calls to action and removing any obstacles. 

Marketers also refer to this stage as Bottom-of-Funnel.

Mapping Content to Your Buyer’s Journey

Delivering the right content at each stage of the buyer's journey ensures that prospects receive value and positive experiences, ultimately influencing their purchasing decisions. 

Here are some recommendations for types of content that are appropriate to each stage in the journey of your buyers:

1.Awareness

• Corporate video
• eBook (eg, describing the common solutions used in your industry)
• Third-party survey / report (eg, examining common pain points in your industry)
• Technical content (eg, a solution brief)
• Social posts
• Blog posts 

These are just a few of the items that are relevant to this stage in the journey.

2.Consideration

• Case Studies
• Buyer’s guide
• Benchmark report
• White papers (eg, “Key Advantages of the DataPelago Engine”)
• Analyst report (eg, Forrester Wave)
• Product demos
• Online courses
• Workshops
• Webinars

These are just a few of the items that are relevant to this stage in the journey.

3. Decision

• Total Cost of Ownership report
• Executive dinners
• Consultations

Of course, some of the items in these lists are not content but are instead, marketing deliverables.

I cannot emphasize enough that it’s crucial to create a variety of content—some people enjoy learning about a topic by watching videos or webinars, some people prefer reading short-form or long-form content, and others would rather take class or talk to a subject matter expert.

Identifying Your Content Needs

Here are some recommendations on creating content that make a compelling journey for your business: 

• Ask the sales team what their content needs are—if they need a specific piece of content, such as a benchmark report, in order to move a large opportunity to close, create that first.
  
• In general, though, focus on creating content for the top of the funnel first. Create content that has the broadest applicability, such as a corporate video or an eBook.
• Move onto creating content for the middle of the funnel such as a buyer’s guide or a white paper.
• Return to the top of the funnel and develop content specifically for each buyer, such as developers, data scientists, CXOs, that you want to bring to your side—content targeted towards a specific persona is likely to resonate more than content that is generic.
• Move onto creating similar content for the middle of the funnel.

Repeat this process until you have all the content requirements addressed. In general, one can never have too much content.

Prioritizing Your Content Creation

Although you can never have enough content, there are only 24 hours in a day. In this section I share a process for setting content creation priorities.

At a former company company I created a series of content matrices, one for each use case, that showed the types of content available for each stage of the journey, for each type of buyer. Here's an example of what one content matrix looked like: 

Our goal was to have a minimum of three items available at each stage in the funnel for each persona. Where there were gaps, we focused on creating content to fill them, along with refreshing content that was older and becoming obsolete. This approach informed our content creation activities.

Looking for Signals

How do you know when a buyer transitions from one stage in their journey to the next?

The answer is to observe which content your buyers are interested in:

• Someone filling out a form on your website to download an eBook that explores the solutions being used in your industry could indicate they are in the awareness stage of their journey.
• Someone clicking downloading a benchmark report may imply they are in the consideration stage. 
• And someone requesting a price discount may be sending a signal that they are in the decision stage of their journey.

Although it’s not an exact science, these signals can be relevant, and you should be attentive to them—sending the wrong content to a buyer can delay or even derail their journey.

Conclusion

Understanding and mapping the buyer's journey is essential for creating a marketing strategy that resonates with potential customers at every stage of their decision-making process. 

Too often marketing teams miss opportunities by delivering redundant content that fails to engage buyers meaningfully. By focusing on tailored content for each stage—awareness, consideration, and decision—marketers can deliver value, build trust, and accelerate the path to purchase.

The digital era amplifies the importance of this journey. As a significant portion of the buyer’s journey happens online, companies must optimize their digital touchpoints to capture prospects early, offer relevant information, and guide them toward making informed decisions. 

The ability to create a cohesive, personalized journey is what differentiates successful businesses, enabling them to build lasting customer relationships and drive revenue growth.

Thanks for reading through to the end.

We’d love to hear from you – get in touch at david@alphabetworks.com and let me know what you think.

Essential Ingredients of a Successful Content Marketing Strategy

By David Ronald

Content marketing increases demand for what you are selling and should be a key component of your business strategy.

What is content marketing? Content marketing alters the way you sell—it shifts the focus from hyping your products to adding value to prospects’ decision making. Content marketing is about creating relevant, informative and unbiased content that attracts buyers and converts them to loyal customers.

Do you want to make content marketing work for you? If so, here are the three ingredients of a successful content marketing strategy.

1. Help, Don’t Sell

It’s a harsh truth that nobody is interested in you and your business—they are interested in themselves and their own problems. The starting point for your content, therefore, should be “how can we help our customers?” not “how can we sell to our customers?”

Share your expertise freely and be generous with what you know. A good starting point for creating helpful content is to begin with the questions your customers ask you. Answer those questions with your content. Blog about it, make videos about it. The format isn’t the most important thing; it’s the intention that matters more. Use what you know to create exactly the kind of content you know your customers crave.

You can’t separate content marketing from social media, they’re inextricably linked. Social media is one way you share your content – your blogs, your guides, your videos, but your social media updates are content in their own right too. Make them helpful, human and tone done the hype. Share other people’s content, if you know it will help your customers. Share it even if you think it’s too good, and you wish you’d created it yourself. Share it even if it’s so fantastic it hurts.

The biggest thing content marketing can do for you is to build trust in you and your business. Having your customers’ best interests at heart at every stage of the content process—from the subject you choose to write about, to the way you behave online—is the way to build trust, so keep this secret mantra in mind.

(Click here to read our white paper on content marketing: http://bit.ly/1GHDSxB.)

2. Know your content sweet spot

In my experience the number one place where people go wrong with content marketing is by failing to map their content sweet spot—which lies at the intersection between content which helps your customers and the content which will help you grow your business. 

There will be an infinite number of things your customers are looking for online. On the one hand you could share videos of cats doing funny stuff and gain hundreds of social media followers, but it won’t win you any business. 

On the other hand you could talk exclusively about your business and its sales messages and probably nobody will listen. The content sweet spot is somewhere in the middle. Not cats, not self-interested sales promotion. 

The best type of content marketing increases demand for what you are selling. So, focus on talking about applications of your product, instead of focusing on how it works. 

Wistia, a video hosting services company, is a good example of a B2B vendor doing great content marketing—the company has created a series of educational videos that teach viewers how to be better video marketers—each short lesson is a microcosm of some concept within video storytelling, including bulleted lists for easier retention of the subject matter.

By producing videos like these, Wistia has shifted from pitching its products to delivering content that makes its prospects more informed before they buy. And like all good content marketing, these videos are helping Wistia to increase its addressable market—someone not necessarily thinking about creating corporate videos may be excited by this content and embark on a journey that ends up with her signing up for a subscription.

3. Good content marketing is good business

People rarely write letters of complaint these days. 

Instead, they leap onto X (formerly Twitter) and expect you to sort it out. So content marketing isn’t something you can leave to the marketing organization, the whole team has to share the mission. These days, it’s as much a part of customer service as it is a front end marketing issue. 

You need to be a good business—one that acts in the best interests of its customers—through and through. If you’re doing content marketing well, you’ll be creating content and sharing it on social media platforms. 

Being a successful content marketer doesn’t mean creating the shiniest , glossiest, most amazing content and pouring it into the world and waiting for the results. It means using that content to help customers, and start the conversations that develop into long-term relationships. 

A big part of content marketing success is down to what you do with the content once you’ve created it—how you build content creation, distribution, and relationship building into your business model.

Thanks for reading. 

Get in touch at david@alphabetworks.com if you'd like to increase the effectiveness of your content marketing.

Good Content Marketing Will Boost Your Revenues

By David Ronald

By some estimates each of us is exposed to 5,000 ads each day. It’s not surprising, therefore, that your buyers are becoming increasing immune to traditional marketing techniques. In this post I will explain why content marketing should be a key component of your promotional strategy.

(Click here to read our white paper on content marketing: http://bit.ly/1GHDSxB.)

Consider this: 57% of B2B purchase decisions, and 72% of B2C ones, are made before a buyer contacts a vendor, according to McKinsey & Company.

Content marketing alters the way you sell—it shifts your focus from hyping your products to adding value to prospects’ decision making. Content marketing is about creating relevant, informative and unbiased content that attracts buyers and converts them to loyal customers. 

The objective of content marketing is a “light bulb moment” when a buyer understands how you can help them, and reaches out to you for more information about your product or service.

Although typically associated with B2C selling, content marketing is ready to have an impact in B2B environments.

Your long-term goal should be to create a sustainable content marketing engine that helps build your business. In order to accomplish this, consider mapping content to the different stages in the buying process of your prospects. The key stages in the typical buying journey are shown in the following diagram:

You could, for example, target the awareness stage of the buying process by creating a brief video that describes the most popular applications of your product. You could, for instance, target the comparison stage of the funnel by commissioning a third-party research agency to write about you and the competitors in your market space.

By assigning content to the most appropriate buying stage, you ensure that your content will resonate with your prospects. You will discover gaps that need to be filled, and make the best use of existing content.

Keep in mind that if you fail to embrace the content marketing paradigm you are creating a gap that your competitors will be happy to fill.

I hope you found this information to be helpful.

Email me at david@alphabetworks.com if you'd like to explore how good content marketing can boost the revenues of your business.

6 content marketing tips for every entrepreneur

By David Ronald

Content marketing can play a significant role in helping your business to grow—it is one of the best and most effective ways for you to connect with your prospects and differentiate yourself from competitors.

The problem is, however, that when it comes to developing and implementing content marketing strategies, it’s not always easy to know exactly where to start.

(Click here to read our white paper on content marketing: http://bit.ly/1GHDSxB.)

Here are the six tips that will help you use content marketing to grow revenues.

1. Tell better stories

Your words are your ambassadors and convey to your customers and prospects who you are. Many companies still don’t differentiate themselves enough through their writing voice. A compelling brand story gives your audience a way to connect with you, one person to another, and to view your business as what it is: a living, breathing entity run by real people offering real value.

Make truth the cornerstone of everything you create. Your marketing content should feature real people, real situations, genuine emotions and facts. As much as possible, it should show, not tell. It should explain—in terms people can relate to—how your company adds value to the lives of your customers.

2. Answer questions that people are asking
Remember and apply the most important tenet of content marketing: answer the questions your prospects ask. When buyers of any kind begin their journey, they fire-up Google ask a question, and will find an answer. As a marketer, the question becomes: will it be your answer they discover?

This idea should drive the content on your blog. Ask people to leave questions and use them as the basis for your blog posts.

3. Learn the skill of writing headlines

Headlines were the key tactic to make people buy newspapers, buy books and magazines. Now they make people click and share on the web and your mobile phone. Bloggers, publishers and content marketers are always on the lookout for attracting attention to drive traffic, engage with their readers and customers and make money. No clicks and you have no traffic. It’s that simple. So where do you start?

Nothing has changed. The headline is still the step and tactic that attracts attention and drives action.

4. Maintain a consistent narrative
Early in my career a marketing leader told me to “tell your story in three ways”—and that make me see the power of integrated marketing campaigns. Think about select 3-5 themes that tell your story (eg, product, company and industry) and evangelize theme across “integrated” campaigns consisting of blog posts, white papers, press releases and so on. This should increase the probability of them moving through your sales funnel.

5. Think about content promotion first 

Content promotion is the difference between brands with fans and anonymous content. Most people create content first, then think about content promotion as an afterthought. You’re better off flipping this on its head—plan out how you will promote your content before you create it.

If, for example, you want media coverage for your business, produce content that you think they want to cover, instead of trying to get media to cover things you want to talk about. This approach is much more likely to get the results you need, especially in the longer term

6. Use employee-generated content

Content is an ongoing activity, never a one-off campaign. Building your content funnel with employee-generated content will make it more varied and more likely to attract viewers. Best of all, employee-generated content is more often trusted by prospects—studies have highlighted that company advertising is trusted 47% of the time while company experts are trusted 66% of the time.

Thanks for reading. Do you agree with everything on this list?

Did we leave anything off?

Leave us a comment or question.