The traditional B2B buying journey looked reassuringly simple. Awareness → Consideration → Decision Real B2B buying was never quite that tidy. Today, it’s even less so. Buyers can research solutions, compare vendors, read reviews, ask AI tools for recommendations, watch demos, evaluate pricing, talk to peers, and build an internal business case before ever speaking with your sales team. And “the buyer” often isn’t one person. Forrester’s 2026 research found that the typical business buying decision now involves 13 internal stakeholders and nine external influencers, with even larger groups involved in complex or strategic […]
For years, Microsoft Dynamics 365 customers knew this change was coming. Now it’s official: Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys’ Outbound Marketing module is gone. Microsoft began moving away from Outbound Marketing years ago, stopped making it available to new customers, shifted investment toward real-time journeys, and ultimately removed the module from all environments in May 2026. For marketing teams that built campaigns, journeys, forms, segments, lead scoring models, and other processes around Outbound Marketing, the question is no longer whether they need to adapt. It’s what they should build around next. Microsoft’s answer is Customer Insights […]
Most customer journeys don’t happen in a straight line. Someone downloads a guide, ignores your next two emails, returns to your website three weeks later, visits your pricing page, attends a webinar, talks to sales, and then disappears again. Meanwhile, your marketing automation may still be dutifully sending: Email 1 → Wait three days → Email 2 → Wait five days → Email 3 There’s nothing inherently wrong with a linear nurture sequence. Sometimes it’s exactly what you need. The problem is expecting customers to follow the sequence as neatly as your workflow diagram does. Better marketing […]
Text DEMO to learn more. Reply YES to confirm. Text EVENT to get the registration link. Reply 1 for Product A or 2 for Product B. SMS keywords look simple because, from the customer’s perspective, they are. Someone sends a word or short response. Something happens. But what happens next is where SMS keyword campaigns get much more interesting. Instead of treating a keyword as nothing more than a way to send an automated reply, marketers can use that response as a signal of intent. It can trigger another message, update what you know about the contact, place someone into a relevant audience, or become […]
UTM parameters are supposed to make your marketing data more useful. They tell your analytics platform where traffic came from, how someone reached your site, and which campaign or piece of content drove the visit. That information can help marketers compare channels, evaluate campaigns, and make better decisions about where to invest. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. In practice, UTM tracking can get messy quickly. None of these mistakes seems particularly serious on its own. Together, they can turn your campaign reporting into a collection of fragmented, misleading, or downright unusable data. The […]
