A continuum approach using thought leadership to build a strong narrative and semantic connections creates voluntary momentum — for both in-market AND out-of-market buyers.
Buying cycles for complex solutions range from six to 18 months, or longer. They also tend to be longer-term purchases due to the heavy lift and disruption of switching. For example, you don’t replace your CRM very often.
This longer-term situation is one of the reasons for the recent focus on the 95/5 rule that suggests only 5% of your buyers are in-market at one time. Therefore, B2B marketing strategies that focus solely on short-term, demand capture programs sacrifice priming the market for future buying situations.
Ignoring the messy, complex journey that is difficult to measure has allowed marketers to offer proof of ROI on marketing spend. However, in the process, it downgraded the importance of brand, and the need to build memory structures with prospects not currently in market to buy.
Embrace Your Buyer’s Story from Beginning to End
I see discussions all the time focusing on either mental availability and branding, or demand generation for performance marketing. As if they’re two separate things.
But they’re not. Why?
Because you have no idea when that “95%” of out-of-market buyers will shift. Your buyers can experience a trigger event or uncover a priority use case at any moment. Buyers who were “in-market” may shift out of market for a variety of reasons.
And now they’re turning to LLMs to answer their questions, research their options, and advise on the urgency to solve a problem.
- How will your brand show up when — instead of a 4-word query — they’re using 23 words on average in a prompt?
- Do you know what prompts the buyers you need to engage are using?
- How up to date are your ICP and buyer personas?
The question is, has your content laid the groundwork so buyers will think of your brand in relation to an urgent situation or when they experience a trigger event? If not, they won’t invite you into the buying conversation.
A Continuum Solves for Both In- and Out-of-Market Buyers
I wrote about what I call a Continuum in my book, Digital Relevance. Here’s how to think about the difference between a continuum and a campaign.
“Creating a continuum starts with personas that help marketers take what they know about target markets to an extreme. The reason this is important is that a continuum approach doesn’t end. It continues across the entire customer lifecycle, focused on achieving goals at each stage. Think of it this way: with a campaign, you have a fixed goal to achieve in a set period. With a continuum, you have many goals to achieve over the customer lifecycle and the latitude to tweak and refine them as new knowledge and buyer insights become available. Instead of once and done, you’re in a state of continuous improvement of the “wheel,” rather than reinventing it with each campaign launch.“
Most B2B marketing programs start too late. They focus on the trigger event that puts buyers in-market. That set period of duration for a campaign doesn’t extend to the depth needed for a complex purchase controlled by buyers. And it fails to connect the dots between Category Entry Points (CEPs) and buying triggers. Instead, it counts on trying to push buyers into buying on your timeline — not theirs. If you’re on the shortlist, this may work. If you’re not, it’s an uphill and often unwinnable battle.
Additionally, if you haven’t optimized your content for semantic connections that help the LLMs connect the dots of relevance to show your depth of expertise and authority in your content specific to their prompts, you may not show up on their radar at all.
With a Continuum approach, you aim earlier to engage potential buyers while they’re still in status quo to build mental availability. With a continuous effort to connect the dots between CEPs, problems, triggers, and your brand, you can use semantic connections to build momentum with those buyers who become in-market, as well as with future buyers.
This is not a one-and-done effort. It’s continuous optimization in tune with how your buyers are adapting, thinking, and changing in response to shifting priorities, uncertain markets, and their competitive landscape.
Adopt a Continuum Framework to Reduce Buyer Effort
Here’s a narrative example that crosses the Continuum — the buying journey — weaving a narrative together to help buyers gain momentum:
CEP – We need to unite business and IT to speed time to market to stay competitive. (Focus on expertise and brand POV related to the category.)
Problem – How do we generate buy-in and help executives and employees embrace a path toward productive change to achieve this business initiative? (Focus on expertise and brand POV related to the category.)
About Us – Our approach helps both business and IT roles see the value for their departments and simplifies what it takes to embrace change collectively. (Now you can introduce your product.)
What to Know – Here’s how you empower your middle managers to drive change and why you need them to create enterprise-wide adoption to strengthen competitive advantage.
Will it Work – Take a look at how ABC company transformed from departmental silos to enterprise-wide collaboration to speed time to market, growing revenue by 57% in 2 years.
A Continuum Framework is easier to map out when you approach it as a narrative storyline. This allows you to see how the “dots” connect to build the story — and momentum — across the buying process. It also provides a ready-made internal linking strategy that helps you make those semantic connections the LLMs look for.
A storyline also makes it much easier to engage your buyers over the longer term of a complex buying process. Additionally, it can help your ABM programs engage more of the buying committee by inciting conversations that engage their differing perspectives based on the ideas your content introduces.
The above is a truncated example. One client program consisted of 4 CEPs with multiple approaches for the other stages that strengthened the storyline from CEP to Will It Work. Research from Ehrenberg-Bass finds that the more CEP links buyers have, the higher the probability of buying. The client executed this Continuum as an ABM 1: few, vertical program which added $5M to pipeline in 8 months.
Note: To address expansion and retention, apply a Continuum Framework based on your customers’ new status quo and related CEPs once they’ve solved the original problem that had them become your customer.
Building Voluntary Momentum Gives Buyers Control
The beauty of Continuum programs executed with content that takes a thought leadership approach focused on buyer perspectives is that they tend to be Evergreen. You can update content assets for market changes and reuse them for multiple years, remaining relevant.
Additionally, the data you collect on which topics are driving the most engagement helps you understand what’s relevant to specific buyers. When they “see” themselves or their situation in your content, it resonates. Their choice to continue engaging with you makes them feel in “control.” The insights you gain will inform a sales enablement program that helps your sales reps have more powerful, buyer-focused conversations by meeting buyers where they are at that moment.
Waiting to talk about your product until buyers are in-market means you’ve earned their attention voluntarily based on your brand’s POV and depth of expertise in the problems they face and objectives they’re after. Forrester finds that 71% of B2B buyers note that providers talk more about their solutions than buyers’ needs.
You’ll break through because you’ve become a resource they trust through relevance, thought-provoking information, and insights they can use even before they become your customer.
Considering that the ITSMA Value of Thought Leadership 2025 report finds that 63% of executives are looking for insights applicable over the next 3 – 12 months, a Continuum approach has merit for building momentum.
It’s also worth noting that:
- 59% say they’ve seen nearly identical content from different providers.
- 57% can’t differentiate between one provider’s thought leadership and another’s.
Therefore, make sure to take a human approach, be provocative, and challenge the status quo — 74% of executives want that.