This is the second in a 3-part series on audience understanding, co-authored by Ledger Bennett (Anna Harris, SVP of Strategy) and DMPG (Graham Newell, Head of Global Sales), who are part of Havas Media Network.
Ledger Bennett is a B2B marketing agency with expertise across the funnel, including big brand media thinking, customer experience, strategy, digital PR, and SEO.
DMPG is a digital agency that combines data and technology to deliver effective omnichannel marketing solutions across disciplines.
It’s human nature: We all want to be special. B2B buyers are no different.
Research consistently shows that B2B buyers expect marketing content and experiences to reflect their role, context, and stage in the buying journey, not generic narratives. Campaigns that do this perform better by reducing uncertainty and helping buying groups align faster.
According to Dreamdata research, B2B buyers now engage in about 76 touchpoints over 3.7 channels before a decision is made, which could include websites, reviews, analyst content, demos, internal conversations, LLM searches, and live interactions.
How does your brand stand a chance at cutting through the noise?
What B2B brands need to know about reaching modern buying groups.
Audiences are not disengaged. They are discerning.
They engage deeply when brands communicate in ways that respects their role, context, and constraints. But they disengage quickly when information is unclear, poorly sequenced, or forces them to join the dots themselves across disconnected channels.
Marketers must manage differing perspectives.
B2B decisions rarely lie on one person alone. As we discussed in our previous blog, members of the buying committee have different priorities:
- Strategic leaders focus on outcomes and risk.
- Finance focuses on governance and downside.
- Practitioners focus on feasibility and effort.
- Influencers look for credibility and peer validation.
Addressing the committee pays dividends.
By addressing the whole buying committee, not just individual stakeholders, marketers can generate over 50% more leads, according to research presented at LinkedIn B2Believe. We must identify that committee and their priorities, then plan our interactions, evolving from customer journey mapping to buyer group decision mapping.
B2B buying is driven by sequences of interactions, not individual touchpoints.
To deliver timely and relevant content, your underlying data quality, structure, and technology must capture accurate person, account, and buying group information. With this, interaction sequences can be changed based on behavior, intent, and other signals, instead of forcing everyone through the same sequence. This helps us deliver meaningful journeys, increase confidence, and reduce friction.
4 things B2Bs need to know about reaching new buying groups.
To reach the entire buying group with the right messages, we need to first gain clarity. This involves asking ourselves questions like:
- Whose opinion matters most at the earliest stages?
- Who can block the decision and needs to be nurtured gently and consistently throughout?
Then the critical shift is moving from knowing who the buyers are to understanding how decisions progress.
To do that, B2Bs need clarity on four things.
- What information helps buyers move forward, and how that differs by role. Not what content is available, but what reduces uncertainty for an executive sponsor versus a technical evaluator versus a commercial stakeholder.
- The sequence in which that information is needed. Most friction comes not from missing information, but from the right information arriving at the wrong time. Buyers lose confidence when they are forced to connect the dots themselves.
- How intent builds and fades over time. This means understanding the moments that increase momentum as well as the moments that quietly kill it. This requires plotting the full sales cycle (not just digital interactions) and evaluating each touchpoint in order.
- What causes decisions to stall in the real world. Internal alignment issues, unaddressed risk, lack of proof, implementation anxiety, or late-stage stakeholder involvement.
When B2Bs understand these dynamics, they can move beyond static, fragmented journeys and begin to design adaptive paths. Paths that automate progression when confidence is high and introduce reassurance when it’s not.
This is how audience understanding turns into a real growth advantage. Not by creating more journeys, but by building systems that learn, adapt, and remove friction as buyers move forward.
How we can help.
Deeper audience insights are the starting block for campaigns that resonate with and reach buyers where they are.
Ledger Bennett helps B2B brands do that with Converged. Combining LinkedIn data with your first-party data (optional), Converged provides invaluable audience insights that can inform every aspect of a campaign — and ultimately, increase its effectiveness.