There’s a persistent myth in business-to-business marketing: because you’re selling to companies, you can be clinical. Feature-focused. Transactional.
But companies don’t make purchasing decisions. People do.
The operations manager at a regional winery evaluating a new website has different pressures than the practice manager at a medical clinic doing the same thing. One might be thinking about tourism seasonality and cellar door bookings. The other is worried about patient privacy and Medicare integrations. Treating them identically means connecting with neither.
The Problem with Volume-First Marketing
Traditional B2B marketing chases numbers such as more leads, more clicks, and more form submissions. The logic seems sound: cast a wider net, catch more fish.
But this creates marketing that talks at people rather than with them. It prioritises what your product does over what problems it actually solves. And it treats every inquiry as equal, when they’re clearly not.
The result is noise. Forgettable, interruptible noise.
What Human-Centred Marketing Looks Like
Shifting to a human-centred approach doesn’t mean abandoning measurement. It means reorienting around genuine value creation.
Start with their challenges, not your capabilities. Before explaining what you do, demonstrate that you understand what they’re navigating. What’s keeping them up at night? What’s the actual problem behind the problem they’ve described? When your marketing reflects their reality, you’ve earned the right to be heard.
Offer perspective, not just information. Your audience has access to endless content. What they want is insight that helps them make better decisions. Take a position. Challenge conventional thinking. Give them something useful, whether they buy from you or not.
Be specific about who you’re talking to. Generic messaging aimed at “businesses” connects with no one. The more precisely you can speak to someone’s specific situation, their industry, their role, and their actual constraints, the more relevant you become.
Prioritise fit over volume. Not every lead is a good lead. A smaller number of genuine conversations with the right people will always outperform thousands of superficial touchpoints. Some prospects aren’t right for you, and that’s fine. Knowing when to walk away protects your standards and your sanity.
Why This Creates Real Advantage
In crowded markets, differentiation increasingly comes from how you engage, not just what you sell.
When you consistently demonstrate understanding, provide genuine value, and treat prospects as intelligent professionals rather than targets, you build trust that compounds over time. That trust creates relationships competitors can’t easily replicate, and clients who stay for years rather than months.
Technology is accelerating this. AI-driven personalisation and smarter content delivery make it possible to create genuine connections at scale. But only if you use these tools to deepen relationships rather than just automate volume.
The Path Forward
This isn’t about being soft or abandoning results. It’s about recognising that the most effective path to those results runs through genuine human connection.
Your buyers are people first. Market to them accordingly.
