Marketing is often described as a pipeline, but in practice it behaves more like a concert. Buyers rarely move in a straight line from awareness to purchase; they drift in and out, paying attention when a need arises and ignoring you when it doesn't.
One of the crucial roles of marketing therefore is to keep attracting people (to our version of a ‘concert’), keep them engaged, and stay relevant until timing and intent align.
In the digital world, platforms like LinkedIn, YouTube, and Meta act as venues where these concerts take place, which is why the most resilient businesses use platforms for discovery while gradually building direct relationships with their audience.
This Story99 framework helps distinguishes between venues, concerts, audiences, and products, and tries to offer a unique but useful lens to view marketing.
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Story99.com is a Branding & Storytelling Consultancy for B2B, Tech & Deeptech
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A lot of people think marketing is a pipeline.
People enter at the top, move through a sequence of stages, and eventually buy. The model is useful because it helps companies measure conversion rates, forecast revenue, and understand where prospects are dropping off.
The problem is that buyers rarely move through markets in such an orderly way.
Someone may discover your company today and do nothing. They may come across your content months later, attend a webinar after that, ignore several emails, hear your name in a conversation, and finally reach out a year after first encountering you.
In most cases, the buying signal is not clear.
At Story99, we find the concert analogy more useful in addressing this problem.
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You keep bringing people in. You keep giving them reasons to stay (not buy). You keep creating value. And every now and then, you offer something for sale (plus the occasional inbound will anyway happen).
The concert consists of everything a company does to remain visible and relevant over time: newsletters, webinars, founder perspectives on Linkedin, customer stories, podcasts, educational content, videos, research reports, events, and recurring communication. They all serve the same purpose. They create familiarity. They build trust. They help people remember you when a problem eventually becomes important enough to solve.