There is no shortage of advice about how to do B2B marketing. Some of it is about leveraging the latest technology, most recently AI; some of it is still about finding the perfect message, the elusive silver bullet; and some of it is about finding the right channel to reach your audience. Let’s hear it for GEO.

But underneath all of that, B2B marketing is really still about one thing: how to connect with another human being.

And people don’t always behave the way we expect (or should I say want) them to. We like to think that if we have a better product, a better feature, or a better argument, people will naturally want to hear about it. But buying decisions aren’t made purely on logic. Attention, psychology, trust, timing, and even people’s desire to avoid feeling like they’ve made a bad decision in the past all play a role.

I think there are a few simple principles that are worth keeping in mind when thinking about B2B marketing.

First, you need to earn their attention

The first challenge in marketing isn’t explaining your product; it never was, and probably never will be. It’s all about getting someone to actually pay attention to you.

This is where human curiosity comes into the picture. People are naturally interested in and gravitate towards things they don’t fully understand or questions they don’t yet have an answer to, but believe others do (FOMO). That is what makes the curiosity gap so useful for us in marketing. You give someone enough information to make them want to know more, without immediately giving them everything.

But there is a balance here. You don’t want to create curiosity just for the sake of getting someone to click. That’s how you end up with clickbait, and possibly bigger problems. The information you decide to share still needs to be useful to your audience, and the promises you make need to be delivered upon.

Here is where an approach like BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front) becomes really useful. Once you have someone’s attention, don’t waste it; give them the important information right away, and then continue to provide all the supporting detail.

In other words, curiosity can get someone to stop, but value is what keeps them there.

Then answer the “so what?”

Getting someone’s attention is only the beginning.

One of the biggest problems I see in B2B marketing is that companies spend too much time explaining what their product does and not enough time explaining why anyone should care. You can describe a feature. You can explain the benefit. But there is usually another question that needs to be answered.

“So what?”

AI-powered supply chain visibility. So what?

Identify disruptions earlier. So what?

Reduce inventory risk. So what?

The real answer might be that the person responsible for the supply chain no longer gets blindsided in the Monday morning executive meeting.

That’s a very different message.

People don’t necessarily buy software because they want the software. They buy what it allows them to accomplish, and often what it allows them to become inside their organization. That is exactly why good marketing always needs to go beyond the product pitch and connect what you do to something the customer actually cares about.

Don’t make your customers feel stupid

There is another psychological problem that marketing can create without even realizing it.

If your message is based on telling someone how bad their current solution is, because you’re too excited about your own, you are also inadvertently telling them that the decision they made to buy their current solution was a bad decision. That’s not always going to make them want to hear more from you. It may actually make them defensive.

This is what makes the so-called Ostrich Effect interesting in marketing. People, for some odd reason, tend to avoid information that makes them uncomfortable, even when dealing with their problem would arguably be better for them in the long run. If your marketing, deliberately or not, makes someone feel foolish about the decisions they’ve already made, don’t be surprised if they stop listening entirely.

Most companies didn’t make terrible decisions. They made the best decision they could with the information, budget, and requirements they had at the time. The business has simply evolved past that point. Acknowledging that’s a way better starting point for a conversation about change. Instead of telling someone their current system is terrible, you can acknowledge that it probably worked well at the time they bought it and then explain why the business may now need something different for the next phase of their journey.

The question I like to use here is pretty simple: Do we make the prospect feel smart for talking to us, or does it make them feel foolish for decisions they’ve made already?

People don’t usually expect perfection

The same psychology applies to trust.

We often assume that the best marketing makes a company look perfect: the perfect customer reviews, the perfect case studies, the perfect results. But perfect can actually create doubt. If every customer actually gives you five stars and nobody ever has anything negative to say, I personally start wondering whether I’m actually seeing the full, honest picture.

This is where the blemishing effect comes into play. A small, believable imperfection can actually make the positive information around it feel much more credible. That doesn’t mean you should go and manufacture negative reviews or pretend problems don’t actually exist. If customers are actually genuinely unhappy, you have a whole different problem.

But honest criticism isn’t necessarily bad for marketing. Sometimes it makes everything else more believable. People don’t necessarily expect perfection. They expect honesty.

And then there is the question of buyer intent

Even if you have the right message and the best product and the best intent, you still need to get it in front of the right person at the right time. This is where marketing, business development, and sales have changed quite a bit in recent years. Traditional advertising often relied on identifying what people are actively searching for and then simply trying to get in front of them. That can still work very well when someone already knows what they want and is searching for a solution. But B2B buying journeys aren’t always that simple.

Someone might be researching a problem, or they might be comparing vendors, or they might be trying to understand whether a particular technology applies to their industry, or they might even be trying to develop their own in-house solution, or they might be preparing to make a purchase. Those are all very different situations, even if they use exactly the same search terms.

This is one of the reasons you also need to pay attention to where AI-driven advertising is heading. Instead of relying solely on the words someone types into a search engine, platforms like ChatGPT can potentially understand more of the context and intent behind a conversation. That creates an entirely new possibility of much more specific targeting.

Instead of advertising to everyone searching for “CRM,” you can potentially reach someone who is actively evaluating CRM systems for a specific industry, has a particular requirement, and is already showing buying signals. That’s a very different proposition for B2B marketing.

There isn’t one perfect B2B marketing formula

None of these ideas work in isolation.

Getting attention without delivering value just creates clickbait. Delivering all the information immediately without giving someone a reason to care can make the message easy to ignore, while creating urgency by attacking someone’s current situation can make them defensive.

Trying to look perfect can make your claims less believable. And having a great message alone doesn’t help much if you’re showing it to people who have no reason to buy yet. Therefore, the common thread is that good marketing always has, and forever will, start with fully understanding the person on the other side of the message.

  • What do they actually care about?
  • What are they really trying to achieve?
  • What are they most worried about?
  • What decisions have they already made?
  • What would make them stop and pay attention?

And perhaps most importantly, why should they care about your offering?

Marketing is ultimately not so much about explaining how great your product is. It’s all about making it relevant to someone who has their own problems, priorities, ambitions, and concerns. The companies that understand that tend to produce better marketing. Not because they have found some secret formula, but because they have stopped talking only about themselves.

And I think that’s probably the best place to start.