How to stop throwing shit over the wall

Like we said in our Big Beautiful B2B Blueprint, we’re in the middle of a marketing effectiveness crisis.

The reason isn’t just because we’ve trained buyers that filling in forms for shitty content locks them into an endless nurture of more shitty content and unwanted sales touches. 

It’s also that the systems, processes and ways of working that deliver meh experiences have become so normalized that it’s hard to imagine alternatives. 

To borrow a term from the cyberneticist Stafford Beer, the purpose of a machine is what it does. And to borrow an analogy from Jon Miller, businesses have been treating marketing like a gumball machine for so long (put money in, get leads out) that we’ve forgotten how to build anything else.

The trick for marketers trying to snap out of the gumball mindset is to build a different kind of machine. One that isn’t designed to deliver a short burst of sugar rush leads that ultimately fails to feed the pipeline.

If you want to get into some big-picture recommendations and practical exercises, head straight for the blueprint. In this blog, we’re going to dive deep into the new creative relationships you need to form to bring a new, unified GTM marketing machine to life.

Snorkels on folks…

Step 1: Get aligned on what the new machine should do

The issue at the heart of the effectiveness crisis isn’t solely a strategy or creative or activation issue — it’s also a connection-between-those-things issue. More effective marketing comes from more cohesive and connected marketing teams. 

To build a better marketing machine, you have to agree its purpose with everyone connected to it — probably folks from your brand, content, marketing operations, and sales teams.

Bear in mind you aren’t building in a vacuum. Think about the marketing machines that came before you, what they set out to achieve, and whether they were successful.

In the early/gold rush content marketing years, we saw marketing machines built to pump out as much content as possible, to make a landgrab for mindshare when people read eBooks for fun.

Then the pendulum swung from brand to measurability above all else, and we saw marketing machines built to track exact ROI against every marketing dollar. (That’s how we got to the MQL mess we’re in today.)

Now the answer feels like a sweet spot between the two — a marketing machine designed to build memory links with buyers that aren’t in-market, galvanize in-market buyers to action, and systematize the link between the two.

That’s not an easy machine to build. But to stand a fighting chance, you’re going to need to ween the business from its addiction to sugar rush MQLs and prove the commercial efficacy of long-term brand plays.

Step 2: Rethink what a commercial action is

We know that any move away from something that feels more measurable (no matter how ineffective) is going to raise eyebrows, heart rates, and concerns across your organization. 

The key thing to keep in mind here is that leaving the gumball life behind isn’t about measuring less, it’s about measuring very different stuff. And that involves rethinking what constitutes a commercial action.

The problem with measuring form fills as a definitive commercial action isn’t just that you capture a lot of junk, it’s also that you miss a bunch of high-intent signals from folks who are actually interested.

Our very own Neil Stoneman wrote a full blog on this, I can’t recommend enough reading it in full. In the meantime, here are two post-gumball metrics that you should consider:

• Defined Customer Journeys: When you’re not mugging every passerby for their contact details as a measure of content performance, you have more brainspace to consider other more subtle signals of buyer intent. Filling in a demo form from your home page could be a prospect — but it could also be a tire kicker or a competitor. But going from a blog, to a product page, to a pricing page, to a trial page? That’s someone worth speaking to. 

• Compelling Conversion Points: Then get even more granular and consider where in the content journey your conversion interactions are happening. Is it in context-driven CTAs or in a ‘next steps’ slide at the end of the content itself? What kind of micro-copy seems to deliver the goods most consistently? 

But “you still don’t have an email address to chase” I hear you cry. True. We’re not advocating here for never having a form fill ever. We’re saying that if you measure content performance on volume of email addresses alone (regardless of the quality of those leads) you’re filling your funnel with a lot of noise that’s going to make ROI very hard to find.

Step 3: Build a post-gumball era content team

One of the biggest problems with gumball-machine-mindset is the transactional perspective with which it views content. Stick a form on anything and everything and hope you catch some leads.

The post-gumball era is about raising standards as much as resetting expectations — we’re not just teaching the business that leads aren’t a magic bullet. We also need to make stuff that people actually want to engage with. 

Making good stuff isn’t just your content team’s job. At a minimum, they need support from the folks with customer insight, and the team responsible for activation. When you isolate creative thinking from channel strategy, you limit yourself to making stuff that, at best, happens to work well in-situ. The real win is to make stuff optimized for the places your audience spends time. 

And if you think we’re already there, ask yourself this question — content marketing is kind of stuck using the tools that were popular at its inception — how many eBooks and PDFs do you run into during the rest of your online life? It’s weird we’re still stuck here. And not in an endearing way. 

Similarly, when you isolate creative thinking from actual customer insight, you end up making stuff based on a hunch of what you think your audience cares about. As April Dunford says “everyone’s got a theory about what your audience wants. But Sales knows.”

That advice is as true for competitor analysis in positioning as it is for knowing what makes a good lead. Ignore this knowledge at your peril.

Step 4: Empower that team as an iterative loop of glory

Once you’ve brought together all this knowledge you’re in a great place to produce great content. 

The next easy-to-say-but-hard-to-do bit is to empower those teams to actually influence each other. Otherwise you’ll still end up throwing shit over the wall, albeit nicer shit over smaller walls. 

Bring these different practitioners together to collaborate early in the process. Make your blueprint / strategy and the associated content recommendations with the influence of:

• What Sales know your customers are asking about
• What your brand team know your business excels at
• What content producers know represents value exchange
• What your channel strategists and performance teams know is targeted and measurable

At each stage practitioners should bring malleable ideas into the mix, based on their in-depth knowledge of the subject. These ideas can then be honed collectively to make content that fits a specific need, that is infused with brand, is measurable, and actually gives customers something they care about. 

And there you have it.

We hope this has given you an insight into some tangible ways to fight back against the marketing effectiveness crisis and stop throwing shit over the walls of your organization’s marketing function. 

This blog is all about bringing to life key learnings from our blueprint to life — but there’s plenty more learnings to explore. To swat up on the rest, check out the Big Beautiful B2B Blueprint here.