A Five-Year Marketing Plan? Here’s the Honest Answer.
A GGC client called me last week with a good problem. His leadership team, deep in a midterm planning exercise, had handed him an assignment: map out where marketing goes over the next five years.
It is an admirable question. It is also, right now, close to impossible to answer with a straight face.
Anyone who’s been a marketer for a few decades as I have can usually see the shape of the next few years in a market. Not this time. I can barely tell you what martech will look like in twelve months, let alone five years. The tools, the buyer behavior, the rules the platforms enforce, all of it is moving too fast to forecast that far out.
So I told him to stop trying to predict the destination. For a manufacturer selling complex, engineered products, there are already a variety of massive shifts in buyer behavior taking place that are already here, already durable, and already affecting next quarter’s revenues. Guessing at year five is a parlor game. Instrumenting for how engineers actually buy right now is a plan.
Here is what I walked him through.
Your plan is built on a funnel that no longer exists
The marketing analyst firm Gartner buried the familiar sales and marketing funnel years ago, yet manufacturers are still building plans around its ghost. The buyer’s journey today for “the complex sale” is circuitous, full of stops and starts, with dozens of information points a buyer visits on their own schedule. Roughly five percent of the buying process now involves a salesperson at all. The rest is self-serve, which is where marketing has to make an impact.
It is also not one buyer but a committee, and the two people who start the evaluation may not be the two who finish it. Layer on how a manufacturer actually sells, some direct, some through distribution, some through reps, and that committee is researching across every channel before anyone raises a hand.
The takeaway is blunt. The engineer and the buying committee complete most of their evaluation before they ever contact your rep or distributor. If your technical content, your specs, and your comparison data are not sitting at those self-serve touchpoints, you are not in the evaluation. You are not even losing the deal. You never entered it.
Engineers do not trust AI content, and that is your advantage
This is where manufacturers hold an edge most B2B companies do not.
In the engineering survey our friends at EETech produced earlier this year, along with a second survey of mechanical and MRO professionals we conducted ourselves for another client, a striking share of technical buyers, and nearly all of the younger ones, said they place essentially zero trust in large language models for spec-level information. They can smell generated content, and it bothers them. That distrust is growing.
At the same time, the manufacturer’s own website ranks as one of the most trusted sources an engineer uses to decide, with Google around fourth on that list. Read that again. For a technical buyer, your site and your data sheets outrank the Google itself as a trusted information source.
That is not a five-year bet. That is what engineers trust today. So invest there: reference-grade specifications, helpful selection tools and chat assistants, real application notes, honest comparison data, recognized case histories, engineering depth a competitor cannot fake. The website should be a living, breathing, ever-changing engine. It is the single most credible salesperson you have.
AI raised the content bar. It did not lower it.
Everyone assumes AI makes content cheap, and cheap makes marketing easy. Watch what is actually happening. Google is de-ranking obvious AI slop, engineers distrust it on sight, and the flood of generated content – and sales outreach emails – has made effective content rarer, not more common.
It reminds me of when the Macintosh shipped with PageMaker and suddenly anyone could lay out a brochure. What happened was it became possible for a lot of people to produce a lot of really bad work. Misapplied AI is doing the same thing to content: volume went straight up, effectiveness did not.
The companies that win use AI to move faster, then apply human judgment, creativity, and craftsmanship on top of it. At GGC we go back in and adjust the things AI does that read as inauthentic, because authenticity is the whole game with a skeptical engineer. Thought leadership matters more now, not less, because it is the part a language model cannot produce for you.
If your organic search leads dropped, can paid search spending replace them?
Your number one organic ranking on Google is not what it used to be. Even at position one, the searcher scrolls past AI answers, paid results, People Also Ask questions, and a row of videos before reaching you. Most manufacturers are watching organic traffic decline as AI search answers the query without requiring a visit to your website.
Two responses. First, you can use paid search to carry more of the load, because it is proving to be one of the most effective ways to gain visibility back at the top of a Google search result page. In one instance, we doubled the paid search budget for one manufacturer and instantly saw leads and bottom-of-funnel form activity jump 30-40% overnight.
Second, it’s time to fold in something new called signals-based marketing. Tools like ZoomInfo intent data and website de-anonymizers let you see the person, not just the company, researching you right now, visiting competitor pages, and never filling out a form. I do not want to know that someone from a big account visited my site. I want to know who, with a title, email AND PHONE along with what pages they visited. It’s a secret weapon for your sales team with information they never had before. Those are the buyers in-market today, and you market to the signal instead of waiting for the form.
Speed to lead is the cheapest sales advantage you are ignoring
When a buyer does raise a hand, the clock matters far more than most manufacturers act like it does. Respond within five minutes and you are 21X more likely to connect with that person. Wait until the afternoon or the next day and you have wasted the spend that generated the lead, because email and the phone no longer break through. You paid good money to generate the opportunity, but in many cases it’s lost – just because of the delay.
There’s an easy solve – assign a dedicated resource to the 5-minute response rule, whether that’s an internal customer agent or an outsourced firm that exists to respond immediately.
Your leads are perishable today more than ever. Treat them like it.
The real question is not “predict five years”
Here is what I left him with. The question his leadership is really asking is not “what will marketing look like in 2031.” Nobody knows, and anyone who says otherwise is selling something.
The prediction that actually makes sense for today is this: you must build a self-serve digital marketing machine that:
- Reaches the entire buying committee
- Reaches people at multiple information points in multiple channels
- Uses signals technology to find people in the buying process now
- Allows the engineer/technical buyer to supplement your sales team by getting as much of his/her questions answered on their own, with calculators, comparison information, AI chat assistance, etc.
- Uses AI that plugs the “revenue leakage” at every lead-to-opportunity handoff in ways that accelerate the buyer’s journey at every touch point
Marketing driven by white paper download forms are a 10-year old model of how people used to buy. Today you need to be far more strategic than than betting on which platform wins or which acronym replaces SEO. You are building a new digital marketing machine around the one thing that does not change: technical buyers reward the companies that make it easiest to trust them and easiest to buy. Start instrumenting for that now, and year five takes care of itself.
