A while ago we ran a campaign for a Finnish technology company competing for a tender from a huge retail company in Sweden. They were up against three other suppliers. The product was strong. The contact at the prospect was positive. But they had a problem: they were a foreign company with no local presence, and they knew that someone further into the organization would eventually ask whether they could be trusted as a long-term supplier.
We built a campaign focused entirely on that one account. Google Search for high-intent keywords related to their product category. Google display with radius targeting around the prospect’s head office and warehouse, so that anyone at the company who searched or browsed in those locations would see the ads.
The idea was not to reach a specific job title. It was to reach the whole company broadly, because we did not know exactly who else was involved in the decision. The media budget was modest. Our customer won the deal. A multi-year contract worth several million SEK.
At the time we thought of it primarily as building local credibility. But the logic behind it maps almost exactly onto research my colleague Ulf Vanselius has written about in Insight 80: that more than 40% of B2B deals fall through not because buyers chose a competitor, but because the buying group could not reach consensus.
The part of the buying group you never meet
B2B buying decisions typically involve 15 or more people. The ones we reach through digital marketing are usually the product experts: the operations lead, the IT manager, the category buyer. They leave digital trails. They click on ads, download whitepapers, attend webinars.
But there is another group involved in most significant purchases: procurement, finance, legal, operations. These are process experts who evaluate vendors on criteria that have nothing to do with product capability. They are asking whether you are financially stable, legally compliant, and safe to choose. They will not come to your demo. They are unlikely to click on your product ads. And yet they hold veto power at the final stage.
The research Ulf cites puts it starkly. Around 81% of target buyers already know the vendor brand when a formal evaluation begins. Only 4% of hidden buyers do. That gap is where deals die.
Two ways to reach them with digital ads
The campaign above worked because it did not try to reach one decision maker. It tried to reach everyone at the account who might be involved, regardless of role. There are two practical approaches worth knowing about.
The first is radius targeting via Google Ads. If you know where your prospect’s offices and facilities are located, you can draw a geographic radius around each one and serve both search and display ads to anyone within it. This reaches the whole building, not just the person you are in contact with. It is blunt by nature, but when you are trying to build presence across an account you cannot fully map, that breadth is the point. Ulf wrote about this approach in Insight 63 as one of the core ABM techniques available without extra data costs.
The second is job function targeting via LinkedIn. If you upload the prospect as a named account, you can run separate campaigns against different job functions within that company. Finance and procurement see content about reliability, compliance and risk. Legal sees content about certifications and track record. Product-facing roles see your standard capability messaging. Each group gets the argument most relevant to their concerns, rather than a single generic message aimed at nobody in particular.
One practical constraint worth knowing: LinkedIn requires a minimum audience of 300 people before a campaign can go live. For larger accounts this is rarely a problem. For smaller prospects you may need to broaden the targeting, for example by including a wider set of job functions or expanding to similar companies in the same industry, to clear the threshold.
The two approaches can also be combined. Radius targeting builds broad presence across the account. LinkedIn targeting lets you be more precise about which message reaches which function. Together they cover both the people you know about and the ones you do not.
What to put in front of them
The content question is as important as the targeting question. Hidden buyers are not going to respond to a product demo ad. What they need is evidence that you are a credible, stable and trustworthy company.
In practice that means case studies from recognizable customers, especially ones that look like the prospect. It means certifications and compliance credentials presented simply. It means anything that helps someone in procurement or finance feel they could defend the decision internally if something went wrong.
For the Finnish company in the example above, the message was essentially: we are already present here, we are known – and we are not a risk. That is a hidden buyer message. It just happened to be delivered through display ads rather than a meeting.
When to activate this
This is not a strategy for broad awareness campaigns. It is most useful when you have a specific account in play: a tender you are competing for, a deal that has gone quiet, a prospect where the product expert is engaged but the decision keeps getting delayed.
The signal to look for is a deal that should be moving but is not. In many cases the stall is not about the product. It is about someone further into the organization who has concerns you have never had the chance to address. Digital advertising is one way to address them, even without a meeting.
You will probably never know for certain which individual saw your ad and what it changed in their thinking. That is fine. What you can know is that you were visible to the whole account, not just the one person who replied to your email.
If you want to discuss effective marketing, just reach out to me.
Joakim Ebstein
Head of Digital Marketing
+46 725 555 984
joakim.ebstein@sfinxagency.se
