How do you target potential customers when you don’t know who or where they are?

That’s increasingly the problem for marketers in both B2B and B2C. Back in 2019, research by Gartner found that 75% of B2B buyers preferred a sales rep-free purchase experience. We’ve always secretly known that customers want to take the purchase process at their own pace, unbothered by salespeople. The Gartner research finally dragged this uncomfortable fact into the open.

Under GDPR, the situation became even more challenging. The requirement for site visitors to opt-in to being tracked made it harder to target potential customers in the early stages of their path to purchase. And while last year Google cancelled the much-anticipated cookie-pocalypse, opt-out rates for 3rd-party cookies continue to increase. According to figures published in December 2024 by Apply Digital, 38% of UK consumers intend to opt out of third-party cookies when a single opt-in is introduced to Chrome this year. Around a quarter are still undecided.

As a result, it’s increasingly likely that a potential customer could go through their entire purchase process and buy from your competition without you realising they were in-market.

To make things even more complicated, big ticket B2B purchases are increasingly decided by a committee. Just as you may never know a potential customer is looking to make a purchase, you may never know who’s on their buying committee. There will be end-users, along with relevant technical specialists (eg IT). But there could also be people from finance, legal and procurement. If the users are going to need lots of training, someone from HR might be involved. And if the new purchase is essential to the company’s strategy, the CEO may want a say.

(This dynamic is also seen to a lesser extent in B2C. A study by NRF found 87% of parents admitting their children had an influence over their purchase decisions.)

All this has created a new task for us as marketers. We need potential customers to reveal themselves much earlier in their journey. That way we can communicate with them in a tailored, relevant manner. And that increases the chance of them choosing to buy from us rather than our competitors.

The only way to do this is through content marketing.

Our challenge is to create content that resonates with each individual member of the buying committee. We have to show that we recognise their particular concerns and information needs. We can’t just be experts in our own products and services. We have to make clear that we understand the problems faced by businesses like theirs, and that we can solve them. And we have to place this content in the places where each individual goes for their information. If one of our target committee members is a lawyer working for an engineering company, it’s no good placing content aimed at them on engineering sites and hoping they’ll happen across it.

The importance of building this sort of brand-awareness might seem self-evident, but it’s less common than you might think. Marketers continue ploughing money into performance marketing at the expense of branding. But at the start of 2025, WARC issued a stark warning. Its report The Multiplier Effect—A CMO’s Guide to Brand Building in the Performance Era says that: “An over-reliance on inaccurate and misleading performance metrics leads many advertisers into a “doom loop” of wasted spend and declining returns as they optimise the wrong things.”

The research found brands that shift from a mixed advertising model to a performance-only approach see average ROI decline by 40%. Meanwhile, those that balance performance and brand advertising see an average revenue ROI uplift of 90%.

Current marketing wisdom holds that building first-party relationships with potential customers will be the foundation of future success. Until then, content marketing is the only way to establish yourself as someone who understands – and can solve – their problems. And you’ll know it’s working when they remove their cloak of invisibility and reveal who they are.