Is the marketing funnel finished?

Mention ‘the funnel’ to anyone in marketing, and odds-on they’ll know what you’re talking about. The marketing funnel has been a familiar model for decades, starting with awareness at the top and tapering down to conversion.

But does this accurately reflect the reality of modern B2B marketing?  

It’s what’s inside that counts

Back in 1898, when the funnel was initially conceived, purchase journeys were relatively linear. Jump to 2026, and buying journeys are messier, longer and far less predictable than the funnel envisages.

People are engaging with huge amounts of content and information before, during and even after converting. It’s also rare for prospects to encounter and engage with your content in a strict ‘awareness to consideration’ sequence, most will move back and forth, looking over a range of content for many months while they consider a purchase.

And in the B2B context specifically, many purchases involve multiple stakeholders, extended research phases and long periods of inactivity that don’t map cleanly to predefined stages.

Overall, what’s happening inside the funnel is far from straightforward. It’s multiple buyers moving forwards, backwards and sideways, revisiting content, sharing it internally, disengaging and then returning weeks later with new questions.

In short, the middle is messy.

What really happens between awareness and conversion

The middle is also where the most important B2B marketing takes place.

This is where your prospects develop their understanding of your brand, its products and how well you can solve their challenges. It’s not linear, but plenty of high-quality content is key to help buyers shape their knowledge, see their challenges reflected in your messaging, explore how your solutions can help them and refine their understanding of what you can do for them.

Different stakeholders will engage with your brand in different ways, consuming different types of content at different times, each focused on their own priorities and pressures.

Inside the funnel, your marketing matters less for how quickly it moves people on, and more for how effectively you engage different members of your target audience with the messages they care about.

How confidence supports conversion

This is why producing a range of relevant, high-quality content is so important to build confidence in your brand and solutions. In complex B2B decisions, it takes more than a single asset or campaign to move all relevant stakeholders to conversion.

It’s vital that your content provides the information and assurance that will help a purchase decision stand up to colleagues, procurement and leadership, long before formal sales engagement begins. This is all work that happens in the middle of the funnel, as prospects look for clarity, consistency and relevance across multiple touchpoints.

It’s the type of progress that’s hard to quantify. Even though it doesn’t create a neat data point, content sustains momentum by maintaining shared understanding and facilitating internal discussions even when the conversion decision is paused. To support this, effective B2B content strategies should prioritise continuity across core themes, rather than stage-of-the-funnel based assets. Content must work in multiple contexts, be able to stand alone, be revisited and shared internally, all while speaking to multiple stakeholders at once.

Creating content that’s effective

Does your content convey the confidence your prospects need to convert? Get in touch to find out how we help clients elevate current content, create effective new materials and move diverse B2B stakeholders towards purchase.