A marketing coaching client asked me an excellent question recently, and I thought I’d share my answer with all of you.
The question: “How do you approach mapping content and nurture to specific buyer journey stages, given our 2-3 year sales cycle?”
Here’s my POV, and potential hot take. ❤️🔥
First, content marketing matters enormously for long buyer cycles. When the sales cycle is 2-3 years, you need to stay top of mind across long silences.
Content is one of the best ways to do that (along with field marketing and community).
But here’s my core principle: keep it simple.
As long as you’re producing quality content, over-tailoring and segmenting it to presumed buyer journey stages is usually overkill. The juice isn’t worth the squeeze. 🍋
Obviously, do the basics. Don’t send a product sheet to a top-of-funnel prospect. But beyond that, I’m consistently surprised by how often “classic” ToFu content is enthusiastically consumed by prospects deep in procurement, and vice versa.
Buyers don’t move through funnels the way marketing diagrams suggest. They jump around, go quiet, resurface. Real enterprise B2B buying journeys are messy.
So stop over-engineering your “buyer’s journey” with fancy workflows, tools, and AI agents.
Instead, put your energy and dollars into producing genuinely good content, consistently. That’s what keeps you top of mind for three years.
We’ve written extensively about this over the years at Blue Seedling, including our crash course, Winning with Content Marketing. Check it out.
