I know we’ve all spent years drawing funnels. If you’re in marketing or sales, top of funnel, middle of the funnel and bottom of the funnel will have followed you throughout your career, lingering longer than the smell of fish left in the office fridge.

Those neat little journeys, where someone sees a piece of content, perhaps downloads a guide, speaks to sales and eventually buys. Whilst they’re very tidy, very easy for your board to digest, they’re not actually how people behave.

Buyers don’t move in straight lines anymore, if they ever really did at all. They search, ask a colleague, read something on LinkedIn, ask ChatGPT, ignore your first follow-up, then just maybe they attend an event six months later, arriving at sales already half-decided.

You almost run out of steam just writing it. That’s because it’s not a funnel, but actually much closer to a playground - parents out there will know the feeling. Messy, non-linear, full of different routes for kids to play hide and seek.

In the first 20 years of my career, I saw businesses treat content as a silver bullet to visibility. Write more blogs, post on LinkedIn, send another email. I understand, content has been the ‘visible’ part of marketing for years, so it’s easy to confuse more output with more progress.

But now, AI’s changed the rules. It’s dramatically reduced the cost of producing content; a business can generate a blog outline, social posts, email copy, and sales follow-ups before most competitors have finished their first coffee.

Useful? Absolutely. A competitive advantage? Not on its own.

When everyone (your competitors!) can create more content, it becomes less of a differentiator. The real advantage is now in the things much harder to fake: trust, data, positioning, execution and, above all, human judgement.

Marketing goes beyond creating content or running campaigns (or creating that last minute slide deck!). Now, it’s the commercial ecosystem that helps a business become discoverable, trusted, and the obvious choice when your audience comes to buy.

Visibility doesn’t just mean traffic

How can we get to Number 1 on Google? Are people clicking? Is the website getting more visitors than last month?

The echoes of CEOs and board members in the month-end marketing meeting. 

Those questions still matter, but they’re not the full story. People are now finding answers in places that don’t always send a neat click back to your site. They’re asking ChatGPT, scanning Google AI overviews. They’re comparing businesses through Perplexity, Gemini, LinkedIn posts, podcasts, reviews, and recommendations from those they trust. 

Which means marketing has a new visibility problem. It’s not enough to be the business with the most content. You need to be the business that shows up in the places where buyers are weighing up their options. More recently, that’s evolved into AI assisted search, where brand discoverability is key.

Sometimes it’s Google, other times it’s an AI answer, a LinkedIn newsletter, perhaps a comment from a colleague in a WhatsApp group you’ll never see. That’s why the old funnel feels too narrow, as it assumes people move through a route we can track easily, but the reality is much messier.

With so many ways to find out about you and interact with your brand’s content, by the time a buyer gets in touch, the decision may have been forming for weeks, or even months. 

So, marketing has to build visibility across the whole playground, not just the parts that are easiest to measure.

Trust beats volume

The old answer to a visibility problem was usually more. More blogs, more social posts, more campaigns. I’m not against content, obviously, but there’s a difference between content that builds authority and content that fills a calendar.

Buyers can generate their own content. They’re asking AI to explain a topic, summarise a market, and give them a checklist before they’ve spoken to a single business. 

So if your marketing is only giving them half-baked, generic information, it’s competing with the same tools they already have open on their laptop. This is where trust has a bigger job. 

People need to see that you understand your market. They need proof that you know their problems, and can offer real solutions; a polished article saying the same thing as everyone else will not do that.

Trust comes from being specific, showing the work, sharing the evidence, and being consistent enough that people start to remember what you’re good at. Content is still king, but authority is what gives it value. Distribution is Queen of course, but that’s a topic for another day, stay tuned!

Marketing has to be closer to revenue

For a good while, marketing functions were reporting on the things that were easy to count, and it did the job. Website traffic, email opens, clicks, downloads; some of these numbers are indeed still useful, but when presented in isolation, they leave a big gap.

Marketing may be running campaigns with sales chasing conversations, but in this new playground, these silos are running out of steam.

Marketing, sales and customer relationships need to operate much more like one system; marketing should understand what sales needs to open better conversations, sales should know what campaigns are live and why, and customer insight should feed the messages that are put out to the market.

The businesses doing this well are not asking marketing to ‘make things look good’, or ‘get something out on LinkedIn’. Instead, they’re asking better questions:

  • What demand are we trying to create?

  • Which audiences are showing intent?

  • What does sales need to follow up on?

  • Which activity is creating conversations?

  • Where are we losing people in the journey?

That’s a very different role for marketing, and a much more valuable one.

Your data is the real advantage

Everyone wants the clever campaign, the latest tool, the shiny new platform. But very few get excited about whether the CRM is clean, if the segments make sense, or whether they actually know enough about their customers.

On paper, it’s not thrilling. But on the bottom line, it can be.

AI is only as useful as the information it’s working with. If your data’s messy, out of date, or sitting in six different places, AI will only help you make slightly faster assumptions with slightly unreliable information.

First-party data is becoming one of the most valuable marketing assets a business has to shape marketing activity. It can show:

  • Who has engaged?
  • What have they shown interest in?
  • What did they buy?
  • What problems are coming up in sales calls?

That information should influence content, campaigns, nurture journeys, and the way the business talks about its value. Here, AI can be really useful in finding patterns, summarising information, and making sense out of data, but the business still has to know what it’s looking for.

AI should amplify the human bit, not replace it

AI can help with research, analysis, first drafts, spotting patterns…all of those tasks that used to eat into the week. But it doesn’t know your customers like your people do. It can’t tell when a client says one thing but really needs another, or when messaging is too far away from your tone of voice and doesn’t fit into your culture.

These things still need people. Strategy, creativity, judgment and relationship building are all the parts that machines can’t fully replace. AI is brilliant when given proper direction, good data, and human insight to work from. So yes, use AI to make sense of the information, but don’t confuse speed with strategy. The human bit is still where the value is.

Systems beat campaigns

Campaigns still have their place: a launch needs a campaign, an event needs promotion. But if every piece of marketing starts and ends as a separate campaign, marketing teams are always having to start over.

New brief, new audience, new content. Then everyone moves on and wonders why momentum disappeared. This is where the playground analogy really comes to life. On a playground, children have a whole host of things to interact with. Maybe it’s the monkey bars, perhaps the climbing frame. Where one may choose the monkey bars first, another will go for a quick stop on the see-saw. That’s how marketing is now. 

There are so many places for people to interact with you; LinkedIn, AI answers, your website, a guest blog, and not all of them follow the same path. People do not always engage when it is convenient for your campaign calendar. They might be ready now, in three weeks, in six months, or after they have ignored you for a year and suddenly have a problem you can solve.

Marketing needs systems to control the journey. A system can keep the right people warm, use data properly, and connect content to nurture, nurture to sales, sales to follow-up, and follow-up back into insight.

It means an event doesn’t end when the room empties, a guide doesn’t stop working after the first download, and a good conversation doesn’t rely on someone remembering to send the right thing at the right time.

That’s where automation and AI are really useful, as they stop the work disappearing into gaps. They can help you to measure and distribute content effectively, and keep creating, capturing and compounding demand long after the first campaign is live.

So what’s marketing’s job now?

Now more than ever, marketing is more important, because businesses need someone to make sense of the noise. The role has moved far beyond “generate leads” or “get something out there”. Those things still happen, of course, but they are not enough on their own.

Marketing now has to help the business become visible in the right places, trusted by the right people and commercially clear enough that buyers understand why they should choose you.

A few years ago, a marketing team could look busy by producing more assets. Now, the stronger question is whether the work is creating commercial confidence:

  • Are more of the right people finding you?

  • Do they understand what you do?

  • Do they trust you before they speak to sales?

  • Is your data helping you nurture and convert demand?

  • Can the business see where marketing is creating value?

That’s the new playground we’re operating in: less tidy than the trusty old funnel, but much closer to how people actually buy. The job of marketing is to create commercial confidence. It’s now the discipline of building trust, becoming visible wherever buyers are looking for answers, and turning insight, technology and expertise into sustainable and consistent growth. 

That takes more than a content plan. It needs a clear position, clean data, better alignment between sales and marketing, and a real understanding of how AI can support the work, with the human in the driving seat.

So yes, keep creating content, but make sure it’s doing its job. Is it building authority? Supporting sales? Answering the right questions? 

If you’re not sure and need to know how marketing, AI, data and commercial growth connect, Marmalade Marketing can help. Get in touch with us here.