The 95:5 Rule. Marketing To People Who Don't Want To Buy (Yet).

So hopefully you've heard of the 95/5 rule, right? Since marketers have been banging on about this for the past few years since John Dawes, Professor John Dawes from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, put numbers to all of this back in about 2021, I think it was. Anyway, he put out a, a study, a research study that showed that only 5% of B2B buyers are in market to buy right now. The time they— that they see our messaging. You know, the other 95% won't buy until they're ready. Maybe weeks, months, maybe years. So when we run a campaign, when we buy ads, when we publish content, round about 95% of the people who see it aren't shopping. They're dealing with other things. They're working on other projects, they're spending other budgets. But if we watch what happens with most organizations Like, everything gets thrown at converting that 5%. We do like lead scoring and nurture sequences and sales enablement and, you know, bottom-of-the-funnel content. And the 95%, because they're not going to close in the next maybe 30, 60, maybe 90 days, the 95% get whatever scraps are left over. You know, I mean, corporations change service providers like, I don't know, a bank or a law firm or something, you know, not, not more frequently than, say, you like, what, once every 5 years, 8 years, 10 years maybe, okay? And, you know, unless that particular provider screwed up big time. So that buying window opens unpredictably. But when it does, buyers don't start their research from scratch. They start with whatever brands are sitting in their heads at the time, right? So in marketing, we call this mental availability. It's the probability that a buyer will notice or recognize or think of a brand in a buying situation. Okay, now this is not awareness, this is not consideration, this is actual retrieval. When it counts. Okay, memory structures degrade without reinforcement. Marketing should aim to increase mental availability because buyers are usually not in market when they see marketing materials. That consistent presence when they're out of market determines whether we become mentally available when they're finally in market. We've built entire marketing operations around the assumption that buyers are always shopping, always in market. You know, if you look at all these funnels, attribution models, lead stages, all of these things are designed to capture and convert active demand, while most of our future revenue is currently walking around and not thinking about us at all because they're not ready to buy. So persuasion and influence matters, of course, But it matters less than we actually think, because when that buying window opens, when budget gets approved, when the RFP goes out or whatever, the shortlist forms really, really quickly. Buyers pull that consideration set shortlist from memory, and if we're not in that memory, we don't get evaluated. It doesn't matter how persuasive or anything our messaging is if we never make it into the room. Advertising mostly hits people who aren't going to buy anytime soon. That's by design. We're not trying to convert them today, we're trying to be remembered tomorrow. Okay, now performance marketing, the stuff for the 5%, that still matters. Active buyers need to find us. But when performance is the only strategy When every dollar gets allocated to harvesting current demand, we're optimizing for this quarter while we're mortgaging for next year. The businesses that understand this, they redirect their sources more appropriately. They're less obsessed with funnel metrics, and it's more about having that consistent presence. Not because brand building feels good, but because most buyers aren't buyers yet, and memory is how we stay in the game when they are. But we consistently chase that 5% because it's the 5% that shows up in the forecast. Because sales can point to closed deals. Because performance metrics are clean and dashboard-friendly and easily attributable. The 95% are messy. They're random. They're hard to measure. And consequently they're easy to deprioritize when budgets get tight. But the thing is, it's the 95% that determines whether we're still relevant when the market turns, whether we've built up enough mental availability to survive the gaps between active buying cycles, whether we're growing or just getting better at harvesting a shrinking pool. Being recalled is much better than being convincing because, like I say, most of our buyers aren't ready to buy yet. And if they don't remember us when they are, then we've already lost. Thanks for listening. If you like what you heard, please pass it on. I'm not saying I'm right. I'm saying many out there are wrong. Please subscribe, share, comment, whatever works for you. Find out more at kexino.com. That's K-E-X-I-N-O. Hope to see you again here soon.