It's 2025... do you really know who your customers are?

How the commodified data trap fools B2B marketers into believing they know everything.

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Welcome to another fine edition of Marketing Under The Influence

Summoning the voice of the customer at the B2B séance

20 years ago, I stood in the elevator with a handful of other moviegoers after attending a screening of Donnie Darko: The Director’s Cut, when a tall man in a dark button-down turned to me and asked what I thought of the film.

“Honestly,” I prefaced, “the theatrical cut is better.” The man pressed on and I obliged. The pacing dragged. The new scenes added nothing to the story. And the revised soundtrack was a crime against humanity.

"What did you think?" I asked the man.

“Well, I'm the director... it's my cut, so I'm biased,” he said with a laugh.

Time suddenly stretched like taffy. I had just spent the past two minutes explaining to Richard Kelly everything wrong with Richard Kelly's own artistic choices.

This decades-old embarrassment was as a helpful reminder to always know who you're talking to — which also happens to be the topic of today's newsletter.

Allow me to explain.

Trapped in a haze of big data's illusions

You see, B2B marketers think they know their target audience. But the inconvenient truth is most don't — which is why so many marketing and content strategies fail to deliver.

The availability and affordability of analytics platforms, data enrichment centers, and online surveys are partly to blame. They've made it easier than ever to populate personas with what appears to be solid, data-backed information.

Unfortunately, this abundance of data creates an illusion of infallibility — a belief that because the data is plentiful, the understanding is complete.

In reality, much of the data at our fingertips comes from the same commodified sources that every competitor also uses. Whether it’s firmographic profiles pulled from LinkedIn, behavioral trends gleaned from website analytics, or psychographics derived from surveys, every marketer has access to the same datasets.

Even proprietary customer data isn’t always as unique as marketers think. Research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute reveals a sobering reality: businesses in the same category often share identical customer profiles. The overlap is so significant that relying solely on this data can lead to indistinguishable marketing and content strategies that fail to deliver results.

What’s more, most audience research focuses narrowly on professional attributes: titles, responsibilities, goals, and pain points. While these elements are crucial, they narrowly focus on how the business serves the customer and fall short of providing the information marketers need to reach and engage them.

All of this (gestures to everything above) is a trap — a commodified data trap.

The result of being stuck in the trap? Oh, just a marketing and content strategy that feels generic, uninspired, and interchangeable (maybe even offensive). All of which leads to plateauing performance, shrinking budgets, and further distrust in marketing’s ability to impact the business.

Look, nobody wants to think their thoughtfully developed marketing strategy might be just noise in an echo chamber.

Fortunately, there's a way out of the commodified data trap.

Out of the commodified data trap and into the commercial success

Keyword tools and third-party intent platforms are no match for audience research.

Audience research, at least in the sense we’re talking about here, is how B2B marketers can get the goods nobody else has, so they discover what doesn’t matter and stop wasting time on tactics that look good on paper but fall flat in reality. The kind of insights that come directly from the source — your customers.

This isn't to say you never talk to customers. Good marketers talk to their customers and you're a good marketer. But most of the time marketers talk to customers, they're prompting customers to share the greatness of their products or retrace the steps of their buying journeys.

But that's customer research, not audience research. It tells you who you're selling to and why they need your solution.

Audience research, on the other hand, tells you when, where, how, and with what to actually reach them. Without this information, your marketing and content strategy risks being another brand shouting into the void — ignored or unnoticed by customers.

Customer research

Audience research

Identifies the decision-makers and influencers in the buying process

Identifies where, when, and how those decision-makers engage with brands

Focuses on why customers need your product/service

Focuses on how to position your brand in their media and mental landscape

Captures firmographics, technographics, and pain points

Captures media consumption habits, category entry points, and content preferences

Informs product positioning and aligns content and campaign topics to the buying journey

Informs marketing’s ability to distribute, format, and time its campaigns and content effectively

Sourced through buyer journey interviews and customer feedback

Sourced through qualitative research, social listening, and competitive media analysis

Chances are you’re already gathering audience insights. Maybe you’ve asked customers where they go for industry news, what content they find valuable, or which influencers they follow. That’s a good start. But it’s also where things can go off track.

Customers don’t always remember how they first became aware of a brand. They’ll name the channels they think they should be using, not necessarily the ones they actually engage with. And they’ll reference well-known sources, even if their real habits are more scattered and subconscious.

Without the right approach, audience research can leave you overconfident in the wrong information. But done correctly, it unlocks an unfair advantage that’s nearly impossible for competitors to replicate.

Here’s how.

It's 2025... do you really know who your customers are?

Compared to just five years ago, technology has radically reshaped customers discover, evaluate, and engage with brands. Customers discover, consume, and discuss content in private Slack channels. They turn to Reddit for advice and subscribe to email newsletter to stay on top of industry trends. And by the time they request a demo, their choice has already been made.

Yet many marketing and content strategies operate under assumptions and follow industry norms that predate these changes — relying on outdated playbooks, secondhand data, and best practices that may no longer apply.

This is why qualitative audience research isn’t optional. It’s the only way to discover how customers behave today, not how they did five or ten years ago.

Thing is — qualitative audience research ain't easy.

Extracting them from customer interviews is a lot easier said than done because:

  1. Customers don’t always articulate what actually influences them

  2. Surface-level research often leads marketers to chase signals that don’t translate into impact

Over the years of my career, with the help of smart marketers along the way, I’ve developed and refined a protocol that is both resource-friendly and strategically sound.

The abridged guide to brand-to-demand customer research interviews

What follows is by no means foolproof. But it yields the necessary data that’s not just actionable but impossible to find in the endless river of data that you, your competitors, and the college freshmen running side hustles from dorm rooms. If, that is, you have a well-researched, up-to-date ideal customer profile (ICP).

No ICP, no bueno Without a strong, up-to-date ICP, audience research is just noise. If you don’t deeply understand who your best-fit customers are and why they buy, no amount of media insights will help you reach them effectively. Your marketing and content will either be too broad to resonate or too misaligned to convert. Get the foundation right first — then layer in audience research to sharpen your strategy.

The wide world of work Before you can understand how to reach your customers, you need to understand how they work. Not just the sliver of their job that your product touches, but the full picture — their responsibilities, pressures, and strategic priorities.

This is why audience research starts with a conversation about their daily reality. What are they responsible for? What challenges are keeping them up at night? What major goals are shaping their decisions over the next year?

Questions like these uncover the context that frames every decision your customers make — including whether they even notice, engage with, or eventually buy from you.

Consumption junction... Understanding your audience isn’t just about knowing what they search for — it’s about uncovering how they consume, share, and engage with content. Do they rely on trusted industry newsletters or prefer quick LinkedIn takes? Are they passive consumers, or do they actively share insights with peers?

These media habits shape how and where your brand earns attention. Without this intel, you risk investing in content no one sees, trusts, or cares about. But with it, you can meet your audience where they actually are — not where you assume they should be.

Media diet restrictions Not all content is consumed for the same reasons. Some pieces help buyers make sense of emerging trends. Others guide them through immediate challenges. And some validate decisions they’ve already made.

Understanding these content “jobs” across the buying journey reveals how customers use content — not just where they find it. Do they rely on whitepapers and research reports for deep analysis or quick LinkedIn posts for daily updates? Are they turning to case studies for internal buy-in or will an ROI calculator help the buying team agree?

By mapping these patterns, you can create content that doesn’t just exist in the right places — but actively moves buyers forward, from problem awareness to confident decision-making.

Job insecurities Customers don’t just seek out content for industry updates — they turn to it to fill gaps in their own knowledge and skill set. The real content goldmine isn’t in what they know — it’s in what they don’t.

ICPs might tell you a prospect’s title, but they won’t tell you whether that person is struggling with attribution models, navigating a new compliance framework, or trying to level up their strategic thinking. That kind of insight only comes from conversations that go beyond their job title and into their competencies.

By uncovering what customers feel least confident about, you gain a direct line to the topics they actually seek out, not just the ones keyword tools spit out. Meet them at that moment of need, and your brand becomes more than a vendor — it becomes a trusted resource they turn to long before they’re ready to buy.

From 95 to 5 Most of your future customers aren’t in the market today. The 95:5 rule reminds us that only a small percentage of B2B customers are actively buying in any given quarter — while the rest are simply absorbing information, forming opinions, and setting the stage for future decisions.

This is where the final stretch of the interview shifts focus. By now, you’ve uncovered the broader challenges, content habits, and learning gaps that shape how they operate. Now, it’s time to ask about the product/service itself — the good, the bad, and the ugly.

  • What moments force them to consider solutions like yours?

  • How do they research new providers?

  • What triggers move them from passive awareness to active intent?

These are the breadcrumbs that turn long-term brand affinity into near-term demand. Get these answers, and you’re not just collecting data—you’re mapping the path from the 95% to the 5%.

You don't have to be most B2B marketers

Most B2B marketers are still playing it safe. They're checking off boxes, adhering to industry norms, and relying on assumptions about where buyers are, what content they engage with, and what actually drives them to take action.

If you want your marketing and content to do more than just exist, if you want it to be discovered, engaged with, and actually influence buying decisions — then audience research isn’t optional. Audience research is the difference between being another forgettable brand and becoming one that customer opt into hearing more from and decide to do business with before they even know they need to.

The choice is yours: keep marketing into the void, or start gathering the insights that no keyword tool or intent platform will ever give you.

Fortuitous Threads & Lagniappe Links

Phew! So this edition of Marketing Under The Influence was set and ready to go live last week until I decided it didn't reflect my standards, deleted it, and started over from scratch. Hence the delay in the recent cadence.

The nearly 3,000 words above are an expansion of Rule #4: Overcome the commodified data trap with insights from the only source that matters from my nine new-ish rules for the next era of B2B marketing — and a continuation of my promise to dive deeper into each rule.

If you enjoyed the abridged guide to brand-to-demand customer research interviews, you're going to love the “ultimate guide” I'm currently writing (and teased recently on LinkedIn) that's tentatively titled "Brand-to-demand marketing and content strategy for B2B"

The guide is a deep dive into the foundational practices a generation of B2B marketers either didn't know existed or never needed to learn and applies everything I know about wielding media and running profitable media businesses through the lens of marketing research conducted by Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, 6sense/Kerry Cunningham, and Gartner — as well as the wisdom I've gained from experts like Dale W. Harrison.

Oh, and it'll also include the unabridged guide to brand-to-demand customer research interviews, which contains:

  • Questions and prompts I've used in my own qualitative audience research interviews with your most valuable customers

  • Detailed instructions for conducting resource-friendly, strategically sound customer and audience research

  • Guidance for using generative AI tools like ChatGPT to create synthetic audiences conduct on-demand focus groups

Want the unabridged interview guide now? Let me know and if there's enough interest, I'll break it out as a standalone resource.

In the meantime, here are some links that I hope you’ll enjoy:

  • Daisy Alioto, "Attention is what makes us human": I've pontificated about the misunderstanding of attention in marketing before but I'd love nothing more than to explore the topic more holistically. Daisy's piece in Dirt came my way via Deborah Carver and it's exactly the type of essays I'd write about attention.

  • Dave Harland, "Somebody put me back in the fridge": If you don't already subscribe to The Word, you need to. Dave's newsletter is cathartic humor that I relate to, like this piece — which borrows a line from the Sylvester Stallone movie Demolition Man to rant about LinkedIn tropes.

  • Kyle Chayka, "The internet’s distribution problem": The commodified data trap and audience research, the topics of focus in this edition of Marketing Under The Influence, matter for no other reason than the subject of Kyle's post, which is distribution on the internet is FUBAR and why it might be a good thing.

Until next time...

Ronnie ❤️ 

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