September 12, 2025
|8 minute read
B2B marketing isn’t working the way it used to.
For years, marketing teams have been stuck in the same loop—chasing Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), optimizing form-fills, and pouring budgets into retargeting campaigns that deliver diminishing returns. We’ve built complex engines optimized for attribution, not genuine market impact.
The result? Escalating costs, stagnating pipelines, and a buyer who is increasingly adept at ignoring us.
The fundamental flaw in this model is its myopic focus.
A landmark study revealed that approximately 95% of B2B buyers are not in-market to purchase at any given time. Yet, the vast majority of B2B marketing tactics are laser-focused on the 5% who are. [1] This creates a hyper-competitive, expensive fight over a minuscule slice of the total opportunity.
This isn’t strategy; it’s scavenging. It’s a frantic scramble for the same handful of ready-to-buy leads, while the real prize—the 95% who represent tomorrow’s pipeline—is left completely untouched.
The brands that will define the next decade won’t be the ones that are best at capturing existing demand. They will be the ones who are best at creating it through relentless education, valuable insight, and unwavering trust. This shift isn’t optional. It’s existential.
In a world of information overload and buyer autonomy, growth comes from moving the market, not just moving leads through a funnel.
Let’s break the myth.
We’ve been sold on the idea that optimizing for the funnel—nurture sequences, lead scoring, and intent signals—will drive growth. But buyers have moved on.
70% of the journey happens independently. Buyers are researching on Reddit, consuming POVs on LinkedIn, listening to podcasts—not filling out your gated PDF form. [2]
AI is flattening awareness. GenAI floods search with surface-level answers. Your blog post is now competing with ChatGPT.
Privacy regulations and cookie deprecation are dismantling third-party tracking. Old targeting tactics are fading fast.
Imagine your entire potential market as a stadium of 100 people. Traditional demand generation tactics involve screaming at the five people who have their wallets out, trying to out-shout every one of your competitors who are doing the same thing.
Meanwhile, the other 95 people are just watching the game, forming opinions, and learning.
Who is providing them with value? Who is helping them understand the game better?
The old model funnels the entire marketing budget into the most expensive and crowded part of the market:
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Bidding Wars
Every competitor bids on the same high-intent keywords, inflating the Cost-Per-Click (CPC) and driving the Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) to unsustainable levels.
Recent benchmark studies show the average Cost-Per-Lead (CPL) in many B2B sectors can easily exceed $100, and that’s before a single sales call is made. [3]
Gated Content Treadmills
We place our most valuable insights behind forms, creating friction and repelling the modern buyer who expects information to be free and accessible. This approach generates low-intent “leads” who often provide fake information just to get the asset.
Retargeting Overkill
We relentlessly follow the few prospects who have shown a flicker of interest, bombarding them with ads until they either convert or become completely blind to our brand.
First, it operates in a “Red Ocean” of competition, where rising costs are inevitable.
Second, it ignores the “Market Black Hole”—the 95% of potential customers who are learning and developing preferences long before they signal buying intent.
Third, it fuels a burnout machine. Sales teams waste time chasing low-quality leads that marketing calls “qualified,” creating friction and mistrust between departments while pipeline velocity grinds to a halt.
The data paints a stark picture.
A Gartner report [2] found that B2B buyers now spend only 17% of their buying journey interacting with supplier sales teams. The rest of their time is spent conducting independent research.
If your strategy only begins when they fill out a “Contact Us” form, you’ve already lost the race.
The most forward-thinking B2B companies are flipping the funnel on its head. They understand that true growth comes from a three-stage process: creating demand, generating interest from that new demand, and finally, capturing it when the time is right.
Demand creation is not a fleeting trend for “nurturing.”
It is the proactive strategy of educating 95% of your out-of-market audience about problems they may not even know they have.
It’s about shaping the narrative in your industry, expanding your Total Addressable Market (TAM), and positioning your brand as the indispensable guide.
The 95-5 rule presents a clear choice: will you scramble for the 5% of scraps, or will you cultivate the vast 95% ocean?
This is not a fleeting trend; it is a fundamental reordering of the B2B landscape, driven by four powerful forces:
#1 AI Has Flattened Commodity Content
Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) can produce “good enough” content instantly. The differentiator is no longer the what, but the who and the why.
You don’t need more blog posts; you need a powerful, original point of view that cannot be replicated by a machine.
#2 Product-Led Growth (PLG) Has Rewired the Buyer Journey
Buyers want to try, not be sold to.
Freemium models, interactive demos, and free tools allow your product to be the primary driver of acquisition.
As stated in OpenView’s PLG benchmarks [4], letting the product do the talking aligns perfectly with buyers who want to self-educate and validate a solution on their terms before ever speaking to a Sales Development Representative (SDR).
#3 Communities Have Supplanted Funnels
Your future customers are not waiting for your email newsletter. They are in Slack channels, private forums, and niche communities, asking their peers for advice and recommendations.
Trust is built in these third-party spaces, not on your landing page. Demand is sparked when a trusted peer mentions your brand.
#4 Attention Is the Only Currency That Matters
The ultimate battle is not for leads; it is for attention and trust. You win when you earn the scroll-stop on LinkedIn, the share of your podcast episode, or the “save for later” on your in-depth guide.
Demand creation is the art of earning that attention consistently.
To survive and thrive, B2B marketing leaders must pivot their strategy and tactics immediately.
Un-Gate Everything. Now.
Your best, most insightful content should be freely accessible. Gating your expertise signals a lack of confidence and creates unnecessary friction.
Removing forms builds a loyal audience that seeks you out for value, no strings attached. This turns your content from a lead magnet into a demand magnet.
Embrace Product-Led Growth (PLG)
Let your product be your most effective salesperson.
Create frictionless experiences—freemium offerings, interactive demos, sandbox environments that allow buyers to see the value firsthand before talking to sales.
Empower users to self-discover, self-validate, and self-advocate. When done right, your product becomes the engine of trust, adoption, and expansion.
Forge Communities and Partnerships
You cannot build influence in a vacuum. Actively participate in the communities where your audience gathers.
Partner with other non-competing companies and influencers who serve the same audience. Empower your internal experts through employee advocacy programs.
Launch a podcast-and-newsletter loop to become a trusted voice in the channels where your audience is already learning.
This strategic pivot requires a corresponding shift in how we measure success and allocate resources.
First, ditch last-click attribution. These outdated models glorify short-term, bottom-of-funnel tactics and render top-of-funnel brand-building activities invisible.
Adopt more sophisticated multi-touch attribution models that assign value to every touchpoint, from the first podcast listen to the final demo request. This provides a more holistic view of how value is truly created.
Second, reallocate your budget boldly. A proven framework, advocated by experts at the B2B Institute, suggests a 60/40 budget split: 60% dedicated to long-term brand building and demand creation activities, and 40% to short-term sales promotion. Offer a free version, a valuable standalone tool, or an interactive demo.
This respects the buyer’s desire for a “try before you buy” experience and allows them to discover value on their terms.
Companies with strong PLG motions often see significantly higher free-to-paid conversion rates than their their sales-led counterparts.
Build a Content Engine, Not a Content Calendar
Ditch sporadic, disconnected assets. Build an “always-on” engine that produces a distinct and valuable perspective on your industry’s most pressing problems.
A study by Edelman and LinkedIn [5] found that 64% of C-suite executives believe an organization’s thought leadership is a more trustworthy basis for assessing its capabilities than its marketing materials.
Stop overspending on chasing the 5% and start investing in creating your future market.
This pivot is being accelerated by two inescapable technological shifts: the rise of AI and the death of the third-party cookie. AI requires vast amounts of first-party data to deliver on its promise of personalization. Simultaneously, the rise of global privacy regulations is choking off the supply of non-consensual data.
As Gartner predicts, by 2025, 75% of the world’s population will have their data covered under modern privacy regulations. [6]
The only sustainable way to succeed is to build your first-party data asset through value and trust. Demand creation is the engine that accomplishes this.
You don’t need better leads. You need to build better beliefs—in the minds of your future customers, long before their search for a solution begins.
The brands that win in 2025 and beyond will not be the ones that generated the most MQLs. They will be the ones who shaped the industry narrative, earned unwavering trust, and built the demand of the future.
The future belongs to the creators, not the captors.
So, what are you waiting for?
Your next customers aren’t searching for you yet. But they are watching.
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