0.5 What the buyer already knows

The same person needs a different thing from you depending on how far along they are, and the most common content mistake is answering a question the reader has not asked yet.

Five states. They are not a funnel and people move between them in both directions, but they are a useful way to check whether a piece of marketing has an audience.

They do not know they have the problem. They are tolerating something. Nothing you say about your product lands, because it is an answer to a question they have not formed. What works here is a description of the situation precise enough that they recognise themselves in it.

They know the problem and not that solutions exist. They think it is just how it is, or that fixing it would be a project. What works here is showing that this is a solved problem.

They know solutions exist and are comparing. They are typing category names into a search box. What works here is comparison, honestly done, including the cases where you are not the answer.

They know your product and are not convinced. They have visited. Something stopped them. What works here is the objection, named out loud, which is the piece of content almost nobody writes.

They are ready. What works here is not getting in the way. Level 3 is about this.

The stage mismatch that looks like a channel problem

A consultancy publishes daily on a professional network. Engagement is good. Enquiries are none. The content is written for people at the first state, general and encouraging, while its actual buyers arrive at the fourth, with a specific and expensive problem and a specific reason to doubt that an outside firm can help. The engagement is real and it is coming from peers, who are the largest population at the first state and buy nothing. From inside, this looks like a platform that does not convert. It is a piece of content that has no buyer in its audience.

There is a widely quoted figure that buyers are 57 per cent of the way through their decision before they contact a seller. It comes from a 2011 survey of 1,500 contacts drawn from the customers of 22 large business-to-business organisations, and the document that reports it gives no operational definition of what a percentage of a decision is, no question wording and no stage model. It is quoted in 2026 as though it were a constant. Treat it as an influential industry claim with an undocumented denominator.

Better-documented recent work, from a vendor with a direct commercial interest, surveyed 934 people who had made business purchases over ten thousand dollars in the previous two years: an eleven month average journey, an average of 7.6 months before contacting a seller, and buyers initiating contact 83 per cent of the time. Take the direction and not the decimal. No primary source was found for consumer pre-purchase behaviour at all, so if you sell to consumers, this is a question you answer from your own buyers in 0.6 rather than from a statistic.

What you do with this: for each of your three buyer accounts, write down which state they were in when they first heard of you, and which state they were in when they contacted you. If those are the same state for all three, either you have a very short journey or you have only interviewed people who arrived ready, and the second is more likely.