If we’re honest, we’d admit that much of B2B marketing today is performance. It’s shallow, lacks the nuance that comes with buyer context, and suffers from irrelevance. The B2B buyer research I’ve read recently confirms this is how buyers see vendor content; a blur of sameness where they wish they could find meaning that matters to them.
We’ve perfected the optics, the campaign sequences, the metrics. But somewhere along the way, we lost the thread. We’ve mistaken activity for impact. Optimization for understanding. Pattern matching for progress.
This is Marketing Theatre. It’s when we perform the motions of B2B marketing with the confidence of best practice, without the clarity of understanding our buyers. It looks good on dashboards but leaves buyers cold because it does nothing to help them solve the real problems they face. There’s no trust building occurring, no forward momentum.
It’s time to change our approach. It’s past time.
Activate Relevance Engineering for Content Marketing
Relevance engineering requires applied focus on the buyer-driven experience (BDX). Recent McKinsey research, The CMO’s Comeback, shows that companies that put customer [buyer] experience at the heart of their operations achieve up to 2.3x the revenue growth of peers that don’t.
Engineering relevance well takes discipline and practice. It means designing marketing strategy, content, and experiences that help your buyers make sense of complex realities, find clarity, and build confidence to pursue outcomes that matter. The result is you/your brand valued as a trusted advisor. It’s about building relationships with meat on the bones. That’s what creates buying velocity and revenue growth.
Those are strengths and competitive advantages you’ll never create with marketing theatre. It’s time you see how marketing theatre constrains growth and revenue.
From Meaningless Metrics to Meaningful Momentum
AI hasn’t helped. In fact, it’s amplified the problem.
Marketers use machines to detect patterns, produce content, and scale clicks. But in doing so, you often bypass the very essence of marketing which is to help your buyers find meaning and clarity in the quest to solve the complex problems impeding successful outcomes.
Instead, marketers build volumes of mediocre content that says little and provokes less. We mistake speed for attunement—while failing to create connections through understanding. And we optimize for reactions, not for what matters, but for what’s measurable.
Relevance engineering is the equalizer that puts you back on common ground with buyers. It’s not grounded in algorithms, but in solid buyer understanding and attunement.
Relevance engineering means answering:
- What matters to this buyer right now given their situational context?
- What ideas, what frames, what signals will help them make sense of their uncertainty?
It’s less about automation. More about architecting confidence.
Helping Buyers Think, Not Just Click
The buyer’s world is increasingly unstable. Tech disruption, organizational chaos, shifting goals. But rather than slow down to understand, we push harder, faster, louder. In this pressure to do more with less, we forget the one thing that builds real trust: depth.
Relevance is not performance. It’s proximity.
It’s the ability to see the buyer’s reality as it is, not as our GTM playbook tries to orchestrate. It requires the intellectual courage to abandon frameworks when they no longer fit the market. It means choosing fieldcraft over formulas. Not what worked last year, but what works in this moment, with this buyer, in this context.
It’s not enough to position value. We need to help buyers create possibilities not by dictating the next step, but by expanding their situational view.
- What do they need to understand first for the next idea to land?
- What are they missing in their current thinking about the problem?
- What step could they take to see a way to shift that thinking to find more clarity?
Our Tech Stack Led Us Astray
Martech promised transformation but delivered constraint. We built systems for scale and consistency, not for evolution or insight. Our tools assume the market is static. Marketing Theatre assumes the next performance will be as impactful as the last, without adaptation.
But buyers aren’t static. Markets shift. Sensemaking shifts.
Relevance engineering means letting go of the need to push for the demo, the form fill, or the MQL based on convoluted lead scoring. Instead, it calls for a focus on cultivating relationships through meaningful insights and depth of thinking. It’s stepping into uncertainty with the buyer and offering clarity, not just content.
It’s not just messaging. It’s meaningfulness.
Build Meaningful Buyer Relationships with Relevance Engineering
The goal is no longer to be everywhere. It’s to resonate with your ICP deeply, specifically by being visible and compelling in the places they frequent. Relevance engineering isn’t about being something for everyone who could buy. It’s about being the most compelling choice for a specific audience by sharing meaning that makes a connection and earns their trust.
Let’s stop marketing at buyers and start thinking with them.
Let’s stop pursuing what scales and start honoring what resonates.
Let’s move from Marketing Theatre to Relevance Engineering.
Because in a world of volatility and noise, B2B marketers who help buyers make sense of their reality are the ones who will lead.
Not by pushing harder.
But by thinking deeper.
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