The 95-5 Rule: Why Most of Your B2B Marketing Is Wasted (And What to Do About It)

In my second decade of B2B marketing, I was pretty sure I understood how things worked. Generate leads, nurture them through the funnel, convert them to opportunities, close deals. Simple, right?

Then I encountered research from LinkedIn's B2B Institute that demolished my entire worldview. The key finding: at any given time, only about 5% of B2B buyers are "in-market"—actively looking to purchase. The other 95% aren't buying anytime soon.

This is the 95-5 rule, and once you understand it, B2B marketing looks completely different.

Why This Changes Everything

Think about how most B2B marketing operates. We spend enormous effort trying to capture leads, score them, and determine who's ready to buy. We create bottom-funnel content, run demo-focused ads, and optimize for immediate conversions.

But if only 5% of our audience is in-market, what are we accomplishing with all this effort? We're fighting over a tiny sliver of the available market while ignoring the other 95%.

Here's the kicker: the 95% you're ignoring today will become the 5% that's in-market tomorrow. And when they're ready to buy, they'll choose brands they already know and trust.

A War Story

Let me share a humbling experience from my time at [a major enterprise software company—I'll spare them the embarrassment].

We ran a heavily optimized demand gen machine. Every metric looked great: leads were flowing, MQLs were converting, the pipeline was full. Leadership loved the dashboards.

But there was a problem we didn't notice for years: we were capturing the same buyers over and over. Our "lead gen" was really just catching people who were already looking for us—people who'd already decided to consider us and were searching for a demo request page.

We weren't generating demand. We were harvesting demand that brand marketing (which we'd been underfunding for years) had created long ago. And when that brand equity ran dry, so did our pipeline.

I've never made that mistake again.

The Brand + Demand Framework

The solution isn't to abandon demand gen—it's to balance it with brand marketing. The research suggests a 50-50 split as a starting point, adjusted based on your market maturity.

Here's how I think about it now:

For the 5% (in-market buyers):

• Performance marketing and demand capture
• Bottom-funnel content and conversion optimization
• Sales enablement and competitive positioning
• Lead scoring and intent signals

For the 95% (out-of-market buyers):

• Brand building and awareness campaigns
• Thought leadership and education
• Memorable creative and distinctive assets
• Broad reach targeting (yes, even "waste" is okay)

The brand marketing you do today is an investment in future demand. The companies that win don't just capture today's buyers—they shape who tomorrow's buyers consider.

How Simulated Buyers Fit In

Here's where this connects to what we do at SocioLogic: synthetic users are particularly valuable for understanding the 95%.

Traditional research tends to over-sample active buyers (they're the ones willing to take surveys). But synthetic personas let you explore how out-of-market buyers think—what they care about before they care about your product, what would make them consider you when they're ready, and what messages resonate when they're not actively shopping.

This is crucial for brand marketing. You can't optimize brand campaigns like you optimize demand gen (there's no immediate conversion to measure). But you can use synthetic research to develop messaging that will create the right mental associations for future purchase decisions.

Practical Recommendations

If you're a B2B marketer who's been all-in on demand gen, here's how to start rebalancing:

1. Audit your current split: What percentage of your budget goes to brand vs. demand? If it's 80-20 toward demand, you're probably underinvesting in future growth.
2. Extend your time horizons: Measure brand marketing on 12-24 month timelines, not monthly. Quarterly brand awareness studies are a good starting point.
3. Invest in distinctive assets: What makes your brand recognizable? If you don't have a clear answer, you have work to do.
4. Get comfortable with "waste": Reaching people who won't buy today isn't waste—it's investment. The 95% will become in-market eventually.

The Mindset Shift

The hardest part of accepting the 95-5 rule is accepting that most marketing can't be directly attributed to revenue. That's uncomfortable for marketers who've built careers on attribution dashboards.

But here's what I've learned after 20 years: the best marketing often can't be measured directly. The brands that win are the ones with the courage to invest in long-term growth, even when short-term metrics suffer.

The 95-5 rule doesn't mean marketing doesn't work. It means marketing works differently than we thought—and differently than demand gen vendors want us to believe.

Embrace the 95%. They're your future.