It’s not your imagination. The B2B buyer’s journey has changed — and the changes aren’t making your job as a content marketer any easier. In truth, the buyer’s journey is becoming more complex with more people involved at every stage. According to SiriusDecisions research, half of B2B buying decisions today involve a group of people. And that percentage goes up the bigger and more complex the business.

Madison Logic, an account-based marketing platform, released Journey Acceleration, a new feature designed to help marketers create targeted ABM programs for all stages of the buyer’s journey.

HubSpot released Conversations, a new tool designed to build stronger one-to-one relationships with customers through enhanced messaging features.

Messaging applications are a common appliance on smartphones today. Facebook Messenger, What’s App and Slack all play an important role in both personal and professional lives. In fact, a 2017 eMarketer study found that more than three-quarters (76.3%) of the world’s smartphone users use a mobile messaging app.

Now, this trend is expanding into the business world as B2B gravitate to quick, authentic engagement mediums as they research new solutions.

The later stages of engagement are where deals are often won or lost. That’s why more B2B organizations are stepping up their investments in tools and tactics to support late-stage decision-making.

In an interview with Demand Gen Report, David Bruno, Marketing Director at Aptos, discusses the challenges marketing teams face to keep consistent brand messaging throughout the buying cycle, as well as tips and tactics to better align messaging across marketing and sales.

The Content2Conversion Conference has grown substantially over the past three years — both in terms of attendees and the content covered during the event. Expanding to four tracks in 2017 — ABM in Action, Content2Conversion, Demand Gen Summit and Sales Impact Summit — the event is now moving under the umbrella brand of the B2B Marketing Exchange (Feb. 20-22).

The holiday season is the time of the year when B2B marketers must ignore their product-centric habits when engaging with prospective customers. As the last few vacation days are being scheduled and teams hunker down to meet year-end goals, it’s going to be much harder to draw their attention. However, there ismuch B2B marketers can learn from some of the core holiday traditions.

Much like aspiring comedians have to stand out among the competition in order to catch their big break, marketers have to make sure their content trumps others’ for clicks and engagement. With a sea of content out there in the B2B marketing space, buyers have no shortage of information to help them make their decisions. That’s all the more reason to not just create batch-and-blast content, but instead give current and potential customers a unique story to remember.

Oracle unveiled new account-based marketing (ABM) capabilities, available through the Oracle Marketing Cloud. The new ABM features are designed to optimize users’ paid media targeting, enabling them to engage target accounts while simplifying the data management and integration processes involved.

Sales enablement provider Skura Corp. enhanced its Skura SFX technology platform to provide greater levels of insight, visibility and auditability throughout the entire sales process.

This next generation technology, which the company calls adaptive sales enablement, is designed to align customer interests and behavior with the content, messaging, and activities of sales and marketing teams.