Most B2B marketing does Diddly Squat because its focused in the wrong areas.

Watching Clarkson’s Farm the other day, I saw a correlation between farming and marketing. His onions and beetroot failed (spoiler alert) and it was purely down to the weather. They were doing precision farming – optimising the spread of seeds and fertilizers based on which soil was the healthiest – using AI and drone technology. They even replanted all of them to get a better yield when the weather was too hot for the first couple of weeks after the seeds were down. But then the entire crop failed. They went to harvest and nothing was there.

I think an interesting thing is happening in B2B marketing right now where we’re measuring more than ever, yet understanding less. We’ve built entire operating models around attribution. Dashboards update in real time. We’ve got agentic technology ‘extracting insights’.

The harvest potential has never looked better. And yet many B2B marketers are seeing a bad yield.

The traditional response is predictable. Tweak the targeting. Optimise the landing page. Adjust the bidding strategy. Find another efficiency. But that’s all digital marketing optimisation.

Marketers are trying to harvest harder to get more yield.

But what if the problem isn’t the harvesting?

What if the problem is bigger?

 

The great illusion

Modern marketing has become obsessed with demand capture.

We’ve become incredibly sophisticated at identifying people who are already in market and then persuading ourselves that our activity created the sale. Intent platforms are making a killing selling ‘in-market leads’ based on proprietary intent signals overlaid on data lists.

But the reality is that the demand capture activity might not have been the reason the customer entered the market to buy.

The customer was already looking.

Performance marketing is brilliant at intercepting demand. It is brilliant at converting intent into action. It is brilliant at making sure that when someone raises their hand, your brand is standing there ready to respond.

What it isn’t brilliant at is creating that intent in the first place. That’s a different job entirely. Yet many organisations continue to act as if every sale can be traced back to a click. Because clicks are measurable.

Demand creation is harder to see.

The result is predictable. Budgets flow towards the things that are easiest to count rather than the things that create value. It’s easy to build a business case for a “lead gen campaign” than “brand awareness” despite ALL of the effectiveness evidence pointing to brand > performance.

 

The corn field problem

James Hurman offers a wonderfully simple analogy. Marketing is farming. Brand marketing plants and grows the crop. Performance marketing harvests it.

Nobody would look at a farmer and suggest eliminating seed costs because harvesting metrics look stronger. Nobody would conclude that because the combine harvester generated revenue, the planting wasn’t necessary.

Yet in marketing this logic appears remarkably often.

When pressure mounts, long-term investment is usually first on the chopping block because its impact isn’t immediately visible.

The irony is that this creates the exact outcome leaders are trying to avoid.

The harvest initially looks fantastic.

Then the field starts producing less.

Then harvesting costs rise.

Then yields weaken.

Then everyone starts asking what’s wrong with performance marketing.

Nothing is wrong with performance marketing. There are just less onions and beetroots to harvest.

 

The most important number in marketing isn’t this quarter

One idea that doesn’t get enough attention is the distinction between current demand and future demand.

Most categories contain a surprisingly small proportion of people who are actively buying right now. The vast majority of potential customers aren’t in market today.

Mostly 95% of B2B buyers aren’t ready to buy today.

They may have no intention of buying your product this month. They may not even have a need yet.

But eventually they will. The question is simple. When that moment arrives, will they think of you?

This is where many growth strategies become dangerously short-sighted.

If 90% of your effort is focused on the small pool of people ready to buy this week, you’re effectively competing for the same limited demand as everyone else.

You’re fighting over harvest. The bigger opportunity is increasing the number of people who will choose you six months from now. Or twelve. Or three years.

The bigger opportunity is planting more onions so whatever the weather does, your chances of a good harvest is better.

 

Why awareness matters more than marketers like to admit

For years we’ve been taught to think that advertising causes sales.

Show someone an ad.

Create desire.

Generate action.

Job done.

The reality is messier.

Most buying decisions are made from a consideration set that already existed before the buying journey began.

The battle is often won before the customer enters the market. Which means brand building isn’t really about convincing people to buy now. It’s about ensuring that when buying becomes relevant, you feel familiar. Trusted. Safe. Known.

Human beings are remarkably predictable in this respect. We gravitate towards things we recognise. We assign greater credibility to names we’ve encountered before. Familiarity reduces perceived risk.

That’s not a marketing theory. That’s human psychology.

 

Thinking like a CFO

The most useful way I’ve heard this framed isn’t actually a marketing framework but a finance framework.

Performance marketing behaves like an operational expense. You invest. You generate a relatively immediate return. Turn the spend off and the return largely disappears.

Brand investment behaves more like capital expenditure. You are building an asset. It accumulates. Compounds. Creates future economic value. And importantly, its value remains even when the spending period ends.

Every CFO understands the difference between maintaining a machine and buying a new one. The challenge is that many organisations continue to treat both forms of marketing as if they belong in the same category.

They don’t. One captures value. The other creates it.

The strongest companies understand that growth isn’t about choosing between brand and performance. It’s about balancing the two.

They plant. They grow. They harvest. Then they plant again.

Which brings us to perhaps the most important question every leadership team should ask itself.

When you look at your marketing investment, are you building future demand? Or are you simply getting better at measuring the exhaustion of it?

Because a dashboard can tell you how much corn you’re harvesting but it can’t tell you what’s left in the field. And getting better at harvesting still leaves a ceiling on your yield. Think about the future. Create future demand. And then whatever the weather, you’re likely to get a better yield from your field.