Understanding and unpacking the complexity of modern buyer journeys is easily one of the most pressing challenges in marketing today. It’s something our marketing agency is highly focused on helping clients navigate.
As customers become increasingly versatile and unpredictable in the ways they find, research and buy products or services, how can marketing best make an impact? And how do you make sure that impact is properly understood and credited? Marketing attribution can feel like a constantly moving target.
To keep pace with how buyers operate, B2B marketers need a diverse strategy that spans channels and tactics, as well as tracking and measurement systems that bring together the full picture. Let’s break down the modern B2B customer journey and why thoughtful attribution is needed to understand marketing’s true impact.
Keeping pace with the evolving customer journey
The B2B customer journey is constantly evolving, but two things remain constant: many different stakeholders are involved, and decisions take a long time to play out. A recent report from Dreamdata found that the average B2B customer journey is 211 days long — “even longer for larger companies” — while Forrester finds that the typical B2B purchasing decision now involves 13 people. According to McKinsey, buyers interact with 10+ channels on their journey toward conversion.
These realities underscore the importance of Best Answer Marketing touchstones: integrated strategy, multi-channel discovery, full-funnel analytics. Brands need to be diversifying their distribution, orchestrating their efforts, and measuring results in a nuanced, connected way. Real B2B marketing success stories continue to demonstrate why this discipline is vital.
What the path to purchase in B2B looks like
Let’s imagine a scenario: a mid-market healthcare company is looking for a cybersecurity platform to manage insider threat risks. The journey that unfolds is not a straight line — it’s an unpredictable, cross-channel path that shows why expansive presence, cohesive messaging and precise tracking are central to the Best Answer Marketing framework.
A Hypothetical Buyer’s Journey in Action
Here’s how one realistic B2B conversion scenario might play out:
- First touch: An IT director hears the brand’s name during a LinkedIn Live event co-hosted by a respected CISO influencer.
- Independent research: Weeks later, they come across a blog optimized for search around “hybrid workforce security tools.”
- Reinforcement: A retargeting ad leads them to an interactive risk calculator that quantifies potential cost savings for their organization.
- Validation: While scanning an industry newsletter, the director sees coverage of the company’s original research study cited by a trade publication.
- Final push: The IT team downloads a gated playbook shared in a personalized email campaign, which consolidates research insights, influencer quotes and customer case studies.
- Conversion: After multiple stakeholders review the information, the healthcare company signs a one-year, $75,000 contract.
This representative journey spans search, social, events, earned media and email — all strategically aligned and trackable through UTM parameters and GA4 attribution modeling. That final part — tracking and measurement — is critical, because if you can’t prove the impact, those orchestrated efforts don’t get the credit (and investment) they deserve.
Measurement and marketing attribution for the future
Although Google ended up reversing course somewhat on its stated mission to deprecate third-party cookies, B2B marketers are still wise to develop future-proof tracking methods that don’t rely on them.
Trackable UTM parameters are one example of a simple yet powerful attribution tool, used to connect multiple touchpoints in the same journey without needing to depend on cookies. Rather than following users across multiple websites, UTM parameters only track within the context of the specific URL they are attached to. This means they do not intrude on user privacy, which is something brands everywhere need to be focused on.
Marketers are also turning to conversions APIs (like those from Meta and LinkedIn), clean rooms, media mix modeling and other advanced methods to combine online and offline signals for a comprehensive view of performance.
As the data landscape changes shape, it’s more crucial than ever to work with partners who understand marketing measurement and how to get it right.
Learn more about how clients partner with TopRank Marketing to drive sustained, measurable growth through an integrated marketing strategy in this case study.
About the author
Nick Nelson is our friendly neighborhood writer-man. As the Associate Content Director at TopRank Marketing, he is on a mission to energize brand narratives with smart, fun, sharp wordplay. In his free time, Nick enjoys basking in the misery of Minnesota sports fandom, making cringeworthy puns, and smothering all types of food in buffalo sauce.
