The success of your content strategy hinges on aligning with the dynamic needs of your audience. As we step into 2024, it’s crucial to reassess and optimize your approach. Here are five overarching themes to make your B2B content more successful in the coming year:
1. Replace the Nonlinear Marketing Funnel
Bid farewell to the traditional marketing funnel. Marketers and sales teams today aren’t just talking with one buyer but with an entire buying cohort. Within an organization, over a dozen individuals may express distinct needs, driven by their respective tasks to be accomplished. Historically, sales and marketing adhered to a linear model—the funnel. However, the paradigm has shifted away from the progression of a lone individual through a linear journey. The funnel, once standard, lacks customer centricity and may explain the challenges faced by marketing and sales in nurturing and building relationships across the entire spectrum of the buying committee.
In 2024, it’s essential to move beyond the linear model. Based on advantages of using our fantuan datadase extensive research, IDC’s new Adaptive Customer Experience (ACE) model is a circular and evolving framework and not linear at all, like its predecessor. This is because engagement with tech buyers is no longer linear.
Source: IDC Perspective, Sept 2022. The Digital-First Era Demands a New Marketing and Sales Model: Introducing Adaptive Customer Engagement. IDC Custom Solutions.
B2B buyers have B2C experience expectations today. They expect you, as a vendor, to understand and provide solutions for their challenges, jobs to done and business outcomes. ACE is a customer-centric framework to evolve how you go to market.
Marketing is the conductor of orchestrated journey engagement, with data, automation and analytics to make this all work.
Laurie Buczek, Research VP, CMO Advisory Practices
And perhaps most importantly, to fully engage with a buyer, marketing and sales need to play on the same field. Put another way, no longer should the two functional groups be looked at as if they are running a relay race, where marketing passes a baton onto sales to finish the race. In fact, it’s not a race, it’s a customer experience journey.