Is B2B marketing broken? Do organizations need something different?
I don’t think so. But here’s why I opened with those questions.
A young chief revenue officer at a SaaS company recently told me something over coffee that stopped me mid-sip:
“We’re replacing our entire marketing team with a growth team.”
Naturally, I asked, “So, what will this growth team do?”
He rattled off the usual suspects: brand development, data-driven acquisition, audience segmentation, conversion optimization, experimentation across channels, and paid media.
In other words, marketing.
It would be easy for me to chalk his approach up to inexperience. But he’s not wrong. His instincts were sound.
The problem wasn’t that the CRO misunderstood marketing. It was how their marketing team had been executing it.
Somewhere along the way, they’d traded strategy at some cost for efficiency at any cost. They’d optimized themselves into a corner.
I see this frustrating story play out all the time on B2B marketing teams. Not long ago, I wrote about how many of these teams had spent the past few years “moving fast and breaking things,” only to find themselves feverishly trying to fix all the broken things.
The CRO’s marketing team, like many others, had become so focused on identifying existing demand (via inbound, lead magnets, SEO, and paid capture) that they’d stopped creating demand.
Their marketing had become completely reactive. They focused less on planting seeds and more on chasing clicks. Less on building markets and more on patching leaks in the pipeline.
They weren’t generating demand. They were just harvesting it.
What that CRO wanted from this “growth team” was … a marketing team. One that’s at least partly focused on what marketing should always be doing: creating demand.
I see this same discussion surfacing online. Most recently, I saw it dressed up as the tired “brand versus performance marketing” debate. (1995 called and wants its argument back.)
Organizations have always had to balance brand and performance marketing according to the dictates of their business objectives. So, no, we don’t need a new label. And no, we don’t need to rehash which part of the funnel is more important. The whole thing is important.
But somewhere in the last few years — between dashboards, the death of cookies, and AI eating our tech stack lunch — marketers forgot that the job isn’t just to respond to signals. The job is to create them. To make markets. To shape demand.
At our best, we marketers make demand. We turn “meh” into “must-have.” We spark questions nobody has yet asked. We flip on the lights in corners of the buyer’s mind they didn’t realize existed.
Look at how AI exploded into the mainstream. No one thought they needed a chatbot until OpenAI made it feel inevitable.
And now? Ironically, the very chatbot no marketer asked for threatens to take a piece of the practice away. (But that’s a conversation for a different set of beverages.)
The rules may have changed — but the game is still the same.
Move from playing the demand game to changing it
Short-term thinking is one of the biggest challenges in B2B marketing.
It’s easier (though not easy) to focus on identifying demand using paid search, inbound marketing, events, and other media efforts.
The safe move is to run the playbook: Find buyers already looking, slap together some SEO-friendly content, spin up a lead magnet, and hope you land in the right inbox.
That’s fine. But if everyone’s doing that? You’re running on a treadmill while the next market maker is out there paving a whole new road.
Let’s break it down:
Demand identification = capturing existing intent.
Demand generation (or creation) = creating new intent.
Here’s why that CRO felt they needed a “growth team:” Their marketing team had been stuck on demand identification and missed out on demand generation.
The fix isn’t a new team. It’s shifting the focus from chasing demand to creating it.
Buyers are sharper, more distracted, and more skeptical than ever. To make markets rather than chase them, you need more than a content calendar and a prompt engineer.
Here are five moves that I’ve seen work in 2025.
1. Treat content like a full-funnel experience
Alongside the return of the “growth team” comes another familiar buzzword: “full-funnel.” Spoiler: It’s not new. But it is necessary.
Many B2B teams start and stop at the nurture phase. The goal becomes to get the list — to capture leads through webinars, emails, and events and then load those warm contacts onto the sales enablement conveyor belt.
What gets lost in this approach? The content to build a nascent market. The content to position your brand as a leader. The stuff that makes the unaware aware. That reframes the conversation in adjacent markets and teaches people there’s a better way.
I’ve written about the idea of blue oceans vs. red oceans — and how the real opportunity might be in creating a “purple ocean” that blends bold, differentiated ideas with known market demand. It’s about pulling people out of crowded spaces with fresh thinking before they realize they need what you offer.
You won’t find your purple ocean by prompting ChatGPT to write a visionary blog post. You find it by knowing the conversation you are uniquely qualified to lead — and showing up there with something original to say.
But here’s the kicker: You can’t limit your work to top-of-funnel vision.
To shape markets, you need to connect the dots. Repurpose that thought leadership into demand identification. Turn that demand identification angle into nurturing content. And turn that into customer momentum. It's the same story — you just need to connect the experiences.
Remember: To make markets, you can’t just widen the top of the funnel. You have to expand the entire thing.
2. Stop just publishing. Start showing up where your new audiences are
Your next audience isn’t waiting around on your website. Nor are they searching for those keywords you’ve focused on for the last few months.
They’re in their inbox. They’re on LinkedIn. They’re listening to podcasts, lurking in Slack groups, maybe even scrolling TikTok. They’re searching for things you’re not optimized for.
If you’re serious about making markets, you have to meet them there.
I wrote recently about audience gravity, the idea that you need to stitch together fragmented audiences across platforms and create enough value that they seek you out beyond the platform.
This is where zero-click content and marketing shine. It’s not about driving a conversion (yet). It’s about being undeniably useful before asking for anything in return so new audiences seek you out.
Demand generation isn’t just about optimizing known paths. It’s about forging new ones.
And, yes, I understand what a tough sell that is to sales and some executives. You’re essentially pitching content for an audience that’s not ready to buy and not even prepared to consider buying this quarter.
But that’s the long game of making B2B markets. You can’t expand the middle of your funnel if you’re not feeding the top.
3. Set goals that measure market creation
Success in B2B demand creation isn’t about lead volume (yet). It’s about momentum. Are more people talking about your category? Are you getting pulled into deals earlier in the cycle? Are analysts and influencers using your language?
Map your metrics to your actual intent:
Brand awareness: Measure increases in branded search volume, social mentions, or share of voice in industry conversations.
Engagement and reach: Track views and comments on your zero-click LinkedIn posts, dwell time on your ungated content, podcast listens, etc. These show that your ideas are spreading, even if people haven’t filled out a form.
Audience growth: Measure newsletter subscribers, webinar attendees, and community forum members. A growing audience is a leading indicator of future demand (more people interested in what you have to say).
Pipeline contribution: When possible, track how many opportunities or revenue dollars can be tied to your demand-creation content. Multi-touch journeys make this tricky, but you can use multi-touch attribution models (or simply ask new customers how they heard about you).
When you’re making markets, don’t just chase what’s measurable. Find a way to measure what matters.
4. Know your personas (like, really know them)
Most B2B personas are a lazy blend of job titles, tech stack preferences, and stock photos that scream corporate diversity clipart. That’s not enough.
You need to know what your audience cares about. What keeps them up at night? How do they explain their problems to their boss?
More than that, you need to understand them beyond the buying journey.
Their buyers’ journey is one chapter in their story (often, it’s a short one). Do you know who your customers are before they know they have a problem? What are their trigger moments? What patterns shift them from unaware to curious?
And if you’re exploring personalization, remember to do more than drop a first name into an email. Real personalization means tailoring the message to buyers’ context.
For example, a first-time visitor might see a broad industry insight, while a returning CFO would see a relevant case study. Maybe your nurture stream looks wildly different for a marketing ops lead versus a finance exec.
It all starts with deeply defined personas and journey mapping that goes wider than the traditional funnel.
When you truly understand your audience and speak directly to their reality, you don’t just generate leads. You generate demand.
5. Build an audience, not a list
If you want to make markets, stop obsessing over leads. Focus on audiences.
Audiences stick around. They share. They introduce you to groups you’re not in yet.
Shifting your team’s mindset from lead-gen to audience-building will fundamentally reshape your content strategy.
Instead of asking, “How many leads did this blog generate?” start asking, “How many people found this valuable enough to subscribe or share it?”
Focus on delivering consistent value (and remember that not everything should be assets). Maybe you provide a knowledge hub. A private community. A Slack group. A podcast. A weekly video series. It doesn’t matter what format you choose. What matters is that you offer something that makes people choose you.
As your audience grows, so does your gravitational pull. You stop chasing buyers. They start coming to you.
Markets are made by the bold
Great marketing (and great marketers) doesn’t chase clicks or crank out the most campaigns. They create markets. They define categories. They earn and serve audiences.
You have more tools than ever. Use them for more than responding to what buyers already want. Guide them toward what they’ll want next.
A loyal audience gives you more than leads. It gives you insight into what resonates (i.e., what they care about). It gives you reach (via shares, word-of-mouth, and amplification). And it gives you early access to future demand because you’ve been earning their trust all along.
In the short term, an audience looks like a group of people who aren’t ready to buy. In the long term, they’re your next pipeline. Your advocates. Your growth engine.
So, if you’ve got a point of view — and you’re willing to teach, challenge, provoke, and lead — you’re not just playing in the market.
You’re making it.
It’s your story. Tell it well.
Subscribe to workday or weekly CMI emails to get Rose-Colored Glasses in your inbox each week.
HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:
