How to Build Your B2B Buyer Journey (and What to Prioritize)

The B2B buyer journey is changing. Shifting market trends, new tech, and organizational restructures have made the journey more complicated than ever—especially in SaaS.

The average buying committee is 7-20 people.

The average SaaS sales cycle is 170 days for deals over $100,000.

We see a lot of clients working off of stale buyer journeys that don’t reflect the complex, multi-touch nature of B2B decision-making. It’s no surprise their content is inconsistent and ineffective.

We understand why this happens, though. With more pressure than ever (and, often, fewer resources), marketers are paralyzed by the amount of work they need to do to strengthen their buyer journey.

They don’t know where to start.
They don’t know what to prioritize.
They don’t know what will make the biggest impact.

If you’ve dealt with any of these issues, you’re not alone. We’ve faced them in our own agency (and our clients’ organizations), and we’ve learned how to expertly rebuild journeys that guide buyers from awareness to advocacy as smoothly as possible.

Today, we’re going to walk you through the definitive stages of the modern B2B buyer journey and share our best tips to optimize for both buyer autonomy and effective engagement. With this blueprint, you can better prioritize your workflow, allocate resources, and get better results at every stage.

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Before you continue, download our free B2B buyer journey template to work through each step.

How to Map Your B2B Buyer Journey

According to 6sense research, 69% of the purchase process happens before B2B buyers engage with sellers. That means you need to optimize your journey around brand-building and buyer enablement to effortlessly move them to the later stages—and nurture a lasting relationship after that.

Start by carefully auditing every stage of your journey to ensure your content strategy is aligned and your messaging is effective, then take the priority action items we’ve outlined to make the most impact possible.

Stage 1: Awareness

Goal: Capture attention and build brand recognition among target buying groups, decision-makers, and influencers.

Content to focus on:

Thought leadership articles (highlight trends, address key challenges, demonstrate expertise)
Brand videos and explainer videos
SEO-driven blogs
Social media engagement posts (organic and paid)
Industry reports and whitepapers

Priority actions:

Document goals. Align content creation to your strategic business goals (e.g., capturing a new market or introducing a product). Outline objectives & key results that reflect those goals and allow you to measure content success.
Collaborate cross-functionally. Integrate insights from product marketing, demand generation, and corporate communications to ensure your awareness stage is fully mapped.
Build scalable, evergreen content. Focus on content that addresses the exact pain points or questions your audience is asking early in their journey. (Tools like AnswerThePublic can help identify these questions.) Note: With the recent avalanche of AI-generated content, it’s important to showcase your humanity in content. Highlight personal experiences, use a strong voice, and make every effort to connect on an emotional level. That is the best way to stand out at the awareness stage.

Tip: Running low-cost, high-impact ads on platforms like LinkedIn, Google, or Instagram is also a great way to promote awareness content. Use targeting options to focus on job roles, industries, or behaviors specific to your ideal buyer persona. (We’ve also found success with targeting competitor keywords.)

Stage 2: Consideration

Goal: Educate and engage buyers by showcasing how your solution uniquely solves their problems. Start influencing internal discussions within buying groups.

Content to focus on:

Product comparison guides and datasheets
Case studies (tailored by industry or use case)
Webinars and virtual events (demonstrating expertise)
Interactive content (e.g., ROI calculators, assessments)

Priority actions:

Create content that appeals to multiple personas in your buyer group. For instance, when selling enterprise software, prioritize content that serves multiple personas—IT, procurement, and C-suite—within the same buyer group. (See more tips on selling to B2B buying committees.)
Align content to key events. Whether it’s a product launch or seasonal event, map out the most pressing consideration-stage content, such as case studies, comparison guides, and industry-specific webinars, based on important upcoming events.
Create data-driven content. This adds credibility and demonstrates your deep understanding of your buyer’s challenges. Prioritize anything that reinforces clear results. Internal data can be a great source of original content. (Here are 9 types of data you can turn into great content, plus our best tips to find the stories in your data.)

Tip: Use ABM tactics to create personalized content experiences for key accounts (e.g., a custom microsite or email series tailored to their pain points, featuring specific use cases and resources). AI can also support these efforts. (Find out how to create a more personalized experience with AI.)

Stage 3: Decision

Goal: Drive buyer confidence to select your product or service, eliminating friction from the decision-making process. Provide tailored content to key decision-makers on the B2B buying committee.

Content to focus on:

Product demos, technical deep dives, and feature videos
Proof of concept offers, free trials, or pilot programs
Pricing guides, demos, ROI calculators
Sales enablement content (personalized pitch decks, RFP responses, tailored presentations)

Priority actions:

Tailor different decision-making content for different personas. Things like pricing calculators or technical deep dives help make your case as people get closer to selecting a solution. But tailoring these materials to speak to individuals’ unique pain points will help you get mass buy-in. It’s also important to proactively address buyer objections in your content by providing clarity on pricing, implementation, and time-to-value.
Use agile content sprints to generate content quickly. To make it easier to create that personalized content, create an agile creation process (utilizing tools, templates, and demos that can help you quickly close deals). Also, as you deploy this content and gather feedback about its efficacy, look for opportunities to iterate and improve for better results

Tip: Throughout this stage, look for opportunities to minimize friction and speed decision-making in the buying process. Offer straightforward pricing transparency, provide a dedicated point of contact to walk them through onboarding, etc.

Stage 4: Purchase

Goal: Facilitate a smooth onboarding and adoption process, ensuring your buyer’s success with your product or service.

Content to focus on:

Onboarding guides, training materials, product tutorials
Implementation playbooks and integration guides
Customer support FAQs, helpdesk, and troubleshooting videos

Priority actions:

Create content that accelerates the learning curve. This will help ensure a quick time-to-value post-purchase.
Give buyers agency through comprehensive resources. Focus on easy-to-consume, step-by-step guides and resources that reduce support inquiries and empower self-service.

Tip: Identify quick, tangible results clients can achieve within the first few weeks of implementation to build confidence and excitement. Bonus points if you can deliver reports or tangible evidence of this success.

Stage 5: Retention & Growth

Goal: Drive loyalty and increase customer lifetime value by demonstrating ongoing value and facilitating upsell or cross-sell opportunities.

Content to focus on:

Customer success stories and testimonials
Advanced product features guides and upgrade pathways
Account-based marketing campaigns for upsell/cross-sell
Loyalty programs, product roadmaps, and customer advisory board invitations

Priority actions:

Highlight product innovation. This shows you’re invested in improving your customer’s experience and long-term success.
Show people how to unlock more value. Whether it’s helpful tutorials, tips, or hacks, focus on educational resources that help people get more from your product/solution and work more successfully.

Tip: You can also use data to predict needs and suggest upgrades or add-ons. Focus on solving new problems as their business evolves.

Stage 6: Advocacy

Goal: Turn satisfied customers into brand advocates who actively promote your solution within their networks and industry.

Content to focus on:

Customer advocacy programs, ambassador programs
Case study development (in-depth collaborations with customers)
Industry awards, speaker opportunities for customers
Referral programs, incentivized sharing

Priority actions:

Amplify your satisfied customers. Turn people into evangelists who will sing your praises.
Build relationships through collaborative content. Strengthen your bonds by asking to co-create content with them. Whether that’s a customer-driven case study, a webinar, panel discussion, or Q&A, bringing their perspective and expertise into the fold strengthens your own content. (We’ve done this with our Best Story Wins podcast, which allows us to interview industry leaders about how they’re winning hearts, minds, and market share. It’s been hugely beneficial for our business.)

Tip: Provide clients with pre-written social media templates, email copy, or shareable graphics to make promoting your brand effortless.

How to Strengthen Your B2B Buyer Journey as a Whole

In addition to these stage-by-stage tweaks, there are several tactics you can use to strengthen how your buyer journey functions as a whole. Fold these actions into your priority planning to ensure you’re setting yourself up for success across the board.

1) Assign prioritization scores. Use the buyer journey stages as one axis of the prioritization scoring system, including:

Awareness: Score for high reach but longer time-to-conversion.
Consideration: Score for the potential to drive lead nurturing and product education.
Decision: Score for high-converting content that closes deals.
Purchase: Score for operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Retention & Advocacy: Score for long-term revenue growth and customer loyalty.

2) Prioritize projects that affect multiple stages of the buyer journey. For example, a webinar that educates at the Awareness stage but generates leads for both Consideration and Decision should be at the top of your list.

3) Optimize your journey based on data. Use CRM and analytics tools to track buyer engagement with content, and prioritize the highest-value content. For example, if retention content (e.g., advanced training guides) results in improved renewals or cross-sells, prioritize the production of additional customer success content. If blog posts at the Awareness stage are seeing high traffic but low engagement, prioritize revisiting the messaging or targeting.

4) Build seamless bridges. Ensure that each content piece seamlessly transitions prospects and customers from one stage to the next. A blog post in the Awareness stage should lead to a case study in Consideration, then prompt a product demo in the Decision stage, and so on.

That said, remember to strike a balance between short-term wins and long-term success. It’s easy to get sidetracked by your desire for immediate returns, but your brand-building campaigns should be prioritized alongside those revenue-driving efforts. That is the only way to build a lasting brand and grow your market share over time.

However, if you’re short on hands to help with any part of your buyer journey optimization, don’t try to spread yourself thin to get everything done. Consider bringing in an expert partner who can help you build your strategy and improve your production with an optimized infrastructure. (Follow these tips to find the right agency for you, or take a look at how we’ve helped our clients win.)

Regardless, don’t get too discouraged if you’re not seeing immediate results from your efforts. These tweaks take time and thoughtful planning to implement effectively. Make intentional moves, measure, and assess your success step by step. That is the only way to see larger wins over time.