B2BFYI #15: Why your buyers can't find you (+5 channels to consider)

Welcome! 👋 The B2BFYI newsletter is for B2B marketers looking for a competitive edge. Covering brand, marketing + tech, B2BFYI serves as a guide to building a more effective marketing strategy.

B2BFYI is written by industry veterans Chris Bennett (Strategy), Geoff Bretherick (Creative) and Philip Bennison (Tech), and published weekly. You can sign up here to get issues straight to your inbox.

When I work with businesses, they tell me over and over again that one of their biggest challenges is acquiring clients.

When I dig down into the weeds to find out what’s going wrong, it rarely ends up being anything to do with the actual service delivery itself.

It’s an issue with feeling like no matter what “marketing” happens, you still feel invisible.

And you're invisible because you're spending your budget in places your buyers aren't paying attention, while ignoring the places they are.

I speak to B2B marketers every week who feel overwhelmed with this. And it’s not because they lack ideas. They're typically drowning in channel options with various pressures from around the business to be everywhere at once. LinkedIn, events, PR, podcasts, paid ads, exec branding, webinars, email sequences… The list never ends, but the budget absolutely does.

So they do a bit of everything. And a bit of everything usually means nothing works particularly well.

This issue is about cutting through that noise. It's a practical framework for deciding where to actually put your demand gen budget based on where your buyers pay attention, not what LinkedIn thought leaders are evangelising this week.

Let's get stuck in.

Most B2B demand gen budgets are built around what's easiest to measure, not what's most effective.

Lead magnets give you download stats. Paid campaigns give you click-through rates. Email sequences have open rates. All very trackable, and all very easy to put in a report to management. And often, totally disconnected from how your buyers actually make their decisions.

So what I've observed talking to buyers (not marketers…buyers) is that they don't remember the gated PDF they downloaded six months ago. They do remember the industry conference where your CEO gave a genuinely useful talk. They remember the piece in whatever trade press that made them think differently about a problem. They remember that one person in their network who consistently posts things worth reading.

The channels that feel hard to measure are often the ones doing the most work.

That doesn't mean you abandon measurement. Or lead magnets. It means you stop letting measurement dictate your channel mix. Stop letting “easy” be the blocker to “good”.

Before we talk channels, we need to talk about what "demand gen" is actually trying to do here. Especially in 2026!

The goal isn't leads. The goal is to be in the consideration set when a buyer has a problem you can solve. You can also think of it as chasing longlists.

That's it, really. That's the whole game.

And to be on the longlist, you need three things:

➡️ Awareness: they know you actually exist
➡️ Credibility: they trust you're capable (safe pair of hands)
➡️ Relevance: they associate you with their specific problem

Most demand gen activity focuses almost entirely on the third one. This looks like targeting people with specific job titles, writing content about specific pain points etc.

Which is generally fine, if the first two are already in place.

But for most B2B service businesses, they're not. Your buyers have never heard of you. Or they've vaguely heard of you but have no real sense of whether you're any good. And so even the most perfectly targeted campaign lands flat.

You're fishing in the right pond (sorry, can’t help the analogy!), but with no bait.

The channels that follow are mapped to these three layers. The point isn't to do all of them. It's simply to understand which layer you're weakest on, and then invest accordingly.

What it builds: Awareness + Credibility

PR gets dismissed a lot in B2B, usually by people who've had bad experiences with agencies that churn out press releases no one reads (or that rarely even get picked up). And yeah, a lot of B2B PR is undoubtedly terrible. Reactive, generic, entirely disconnected from anything a buyer would care about. Nobody cares you hired yet another project manager.

When it’s done well, though, it's one of the most powerful credibility signals you have.

When a credible trade publication covers your perspective on an industry trend, it does something no LinkedIn ad can - it borrows the publication's trust and transfers it to you. Your buyers see you through the lens of a source they already respect.

The mistake most B2B marketers make is treating PR as a coverage machine. More mentions, more links, more brand awareness impressions - the more, the better. That's the wrong frame.

Think about it instead as positioning infrastructure. What do you want to be known for? What conversations do you want to be associated with? Then reverse-engineer your PR activity from that.

➡️ Identify three to five trade publications your buyers actually read
➡️ Build a point of view that's genuinely contrarian (and “brand safe” if you need to get approval) or insightful. Don’t rely on just "we think this thing is important"
➡️ Pitch journalists with a perspective rather than a generic press release
➡️ Measure by share of voice in your category, not just coverage volume

This can take some time to dial in. It doesn't generate leads next quarter. But it builds the awareness and credibility foundation that makes everything else work better.

Struggling to do PR internally? Work with a freelancer. Generally not too expensive.

What it builds: Awareness + Credibility + Relevance

Events are expensive, exhausting, and often a complete waste of money.

They're also irreplaceable for certain types of B2B businesses.

The problem isn't events as a channel. It's putting time + resource into the wrong events, with the wrong strategy, and then poor (or no) follow-through.

Most B2B companies treat events as a lead collection exercise. Stand + banner + bowl of cheap sweets + badge scanner + pile of business cards. It's a waste of everyone's time (and budget).

The businesses that get real value (read: revenue) from events show up with a clear purpose - to have ten genuinely useful conversations with specific types of people. That's it. Not to collect 200 badges. Ten conversations that can turn into booked calls later.

This means your event strategy needs to start with some pretty brutal selectivity:

➡️ List every event your team attends or sponsors in a year and calculate the total cost (stand, travel, time, sponsorship)
➡️ Ask honestly: which two or three generated real pipeline or genuine relationships?
➡️ Cut the rest and put the budget into doing fewer events properly
➡️ If you're speaking, say something worth saying. Controversial takes beat polished corporate presentations every time
➡️ Build your post-event follow-up into the event plan before you go (and then actually do it)

The other thing worth saying about events is that your buyers are often at events your company isn't. Niche industry conferences, roundtables, peer group dinners. These are often far more valuable than the big trade shows - and often far cheaper to be part of.

What it builds: Credibility + Relevance (and Awareness over time)

This is the channel most B2B marketing leaders want to invest in but struggle to get traction with, usually because they can't get their executives to actually do it.

In B2B, people buy from people. We know this. If there was some high hall of B2B marketing in the clouds, it would be carved in the stone above the doors. Particularly in professional services, technology, and anything with a complex or high-ticket sale. The credibility of your senior people is a material part of your commercial offer. I bolded that because a lot of folks forget it.

That being said, most B2B execs still have a LinkedIn profiles that read like a CV, and haven't posted anything since congratulating someone on a work anniversary 9 months ago.

Not good enough!

Executive personal branding doesn't mean turning your CEO into a LinkedIn influencer who posts daily (and mostly lame) motivational content. It means making your senior people visible and credible in the conversations your buyers are already having.

➡️ Start with one or two executives who are actually willing - don't force it on everyone
➡️ Build a point of view for each person based on what they genuinely believe, not what marketing thinks they should say
➡️ Ghost-write if necessary - most executives have good ideas but no time to write. Get a good writer to extract and articulate their thinking
➡️ Prioritise quality over frequency - one genuinely insightful post a fortnight beats five bland ones a week (though realistically aim for 3-4 times per week).
➡️ Track engagement from the right people, not vanity metrics

The long-term payoff here is significant. An executive with genuine authority in their field generates inbound interest, gets invited to speak, wins trust faster in sales conversations, and acts as a credibility signal for the whole business. It’s a massive win, for not a huge amount of cost and effort.

What it builds: Awareness

Right. LinkedIn.

Everyone's on it (mostly). Too much B2B content on it is awful. And yet it remains the single most important organic channel for B2B marketers, particularly for reaching the people who will eventually become buyers. Remember: 95% of your Total Addressable Market (TAM) are NOT in a position to buy today. But they will be at some point in the future.

The top-of-funnel play on LinkedIn isn't about selling. It's about being consistently present in front of the right people with content that's genuinely worth their attention.

The "always-on" brand awareness layer is about reach + recognition. You want your target audience to see your name and your perspective regularly enough that when they have a problem you can solve, you're already in the back of their mind.

Your buyers do what? Think back to the start of the issue…

They make LISTS OF VENDORS. Longlist > shortlist > chosen supplier. If you’re not on the longlist, you’re not going to be on the shortlist. And that means you ain’t winning the client or project.

So, back to brand awareness. To do it right requires a clear editorial point of view. What does your brand stand for? What's your take on the industry? What conversations are you going to contribute to consistently?

➡️ Define two or three content themes that sit at the intersection of your expertise and your buyers' biggest problems (relevant to the services you actually provide, need I add)
➡️ Commit to a publishing cadence you can actually maintain, twice a week is better than daily for a month then silence
➡️ Prioritise content that makes people think differently, not content that promotes your services
➡️ Use company page and key individuals together. The company page builds brand, the people build trust

Don't try to go viral. That's not the goal. The goal is to be recognisable and credible to the five hundred people who matter. Viral is mostly luck. Tons of absolutely shit posts go viral, and the content in them is completely lacking value and expertise in any way. Don’t aim for that.

What it builds: Relevance (and conversion)

Once you've built some awareness and credibility, you can start doing the more conversion-focused stuff. Not before.

Mid-funnel content on LinkedIn means demonstrating expertise in specific, relevant contexts. These are your case studies and detailed breakdowns of how you've solved a particular problem. It can also be points of view on specific challenges your buyers face. Basically, any content that says "we understand your world in great detail."

➡️ Write case studies from the buyer's perspective, not yours - what was their problem, what was at stake, what changed
➡️ Be specific about sector, scale, and outcome wherever confidentiality allows (those pesky NDA’s, am I right?)
➡️ Use short-form posts to share insights that prove expertise rather than just assert it

Bottom-funnel is where your lead magnets live. In 2026, the bar is much higher than it used to be. A generic "10 tips for better X" PDF is not going to cut it. Buyers are busy and their inboxes are full. They don’t have time for lame, low-effort content. Or AI trash for that matter.

➡️ Your lead magnet needs to solve a specific, real problem your buyer has right now
➡️ Benchmark reports, diagnostic tools, and templates tend to outperform guides and whitepapers (but guides are an excellent place to start and are generally easy to make)
➡️ Gate less, quality-gate more. Better to have 50 highly qualified downloads than 500 time wasters!
➡️ Have a proper nurture sequence after the download, not just a single follow-up email

The short answer is it depends on where you are in your journey to actual market visibility.

If you're a relatively unknown business trying to break into a new market or compete with more established names, you need to invest disproportionately in awareness and credibility first (that’s your PR, events, exec branding). These things take time to work and show up in the numbers.

If you have decent market awareness but buyers aren't converting (your pipeline looks empty), your problem is likely credibility or relevance. More mid-funnel content. Better case studies. More specific expertise on display.

If you have awareness, credibility, and relevance (and buyers are engaged but not converting) then you've got a sales problem, not a marketing problem. More lead magnets aren’t going to fix that.

A rough starting framework:

➡️ If you're entering a new market: 60% awareness (PR, events, exec brand), 30% consideration (LinkedIn mid-funnel), 10% conversion
➡️ If you're established but underperforming: 30% awareness, 50% consideration, 20% conversion
➡️ If you're well-known in your space: 20% awareness, 30% consideration, 50% conversion

These are just starting points for a conversation you should be having about where your actual gaps are.

One last thing before I let you go.

The channel anxiety I see in B2B marketing teams is absolutely real, and it's getting worse. Every week there's a new tactic someone's evangelising. Dark social, AI-generated content at scale, community-led growth, micro-influencer partnerships…the list is long and growing all the time.

Some of it is genuinely worth paying attention to. Most of it isn’t.

The antidote to FOMO is a clear point of view on where your buyers pay attention. If you know how your buyers discover, evaluate, and decide, then every new shiny channel can be evaluated against that simple question: is this actually where my buyers are?

If yes, test it. If no, ignore it.

You don't need to be on every channel.

Pick two or three channels. Do them properly + stay consistent long enough to see results. And resist the urge to add more until you've mastered what you've got.

That's the whole framework.

-chris