The 88-Touchpoint Buyer Journey

The nurture stage has quietly become much longer.

Buyer behaviour is changing every year, making the B2B customer journey longer, more complex, and increasingly self-directed. 

The data backs this up. In Dreamdata’s B2B GTM Benchmarks 2024, it took an average of 62 touchpoints for a buyer to reach a purchase decision, and in the latest benchmark, that figure has risen to 88.  Dreamdata also found that 81% of the B2B customer journey now happens outside the sales pipeline, up from 70% the year before. At the same time, the journey is becoming more fragmented, with buyers engaging across an average of four channels and involving ten stakeholders throughout the purchasing process.

What does this mean for marketers?

The increase in touchpoints reported by Dreamdata shows the growing amount of content, reinforcement, and engagement that is needed to move buyers from initial awareness through to consideration and, ultimately, a purchasing decision. It also highlights how important ongoing brand visibility, educational content, and multi-channel engagement have become in influencing buyers throughout an increasingly fragmented and self-directed journey.

Content Is a Long-Term Investment — and That's Exactly Why Most Companies Underinvest in It

Building a sustainable B2B pipeline today requires a content strategy that compounds over time. For companies to perform well, they need to have been investing consistently for 12 to 24 months — publishing educational content, building search authority and maintaining visibility long before their buyers entered active procurement cycles.

The challenge is that a 12 to 24 month return horizon is hard to justify. Long nurture cycles make it difficult to attribute pipeline growth to specific content, which makes it harder for marketers to demonstrate what is actually driving conversion. And when economic pressure hits, long-term brand and educational content are often the first things cut — precisely because their impact is harder to measure in the first place. The irony is that this creates a compounding risk. Cutting content investment in response to economic pressure can quietly create a pipeline problem 12 to 18 months later, when fewer buyers are entering the funnel and the lead problem that follows is not a quick fix.

Measuring What Actually Drives Pipeline

To understand the value your content is bringing to your nurture program, you need to be able to attribute the influence of content touchpoints to pipeline outcomes — both directly and indirectly. Direct attribution links a specific piece of content to a conversion or sales handoff. Indirect attribution captures the broader influence of content consumed throughout the journey that shaped a buyer's thinking before they were ready to engage with sales. This visibility helps create an understanding of which content is performing, which pieces are being consumed at which stage of the journey, and when a buyer is genuinely ready to be passed to sales.

Having this insight is especially important with middle-funnel content, because this content serves as a readiness signal. The content a buyer chooses to engage with at this stage tells you something meaningful about where they are in their thinking. A buyer who is still defining the problem will gravitate toward content that quantifies the cost of inaction or helps them build an internal case for change. A buyer who is actively comparing options will consume content that explains trade-offs, outlines evaluation criteria, and maps use cases to their context. These are not just content types — they are signals of where a buyer sits in their journey, and without a system to track and act on them, that insight is lost.

Dreamdata's data tells us something important: content strategy for nurturing buyers is not a static program that can be built once and left to run. Buyer behaviour shifts, and what resonates today may not be what your audience needs in six to twelve months. Your strategy requires regular review to understand what is being consumed, what is converting, and where new content is needed to fill emerging gaps. According to Marketo, companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost. So getting nurturing right is not just a marketing priority — it is a business one.