"The dashboard shows that leads are up... but in your gut you know it’s all house of cards? That’s ad-driven growth, folks. One budget cut and poof - you’re gone from the buyer’s brain."
Kent Height
Founders love the quick hit. The spike in traffic. The dopamine from CTRs. But here’s the thing no one wants to admit: ads don’t build trust – they rent it.
Today’s buyers are way too smart to fall for old-school marketing gimmicks – the pushy ads, the generic funnels, the fake urgency. They’re over it – and when they see those obvious marketing tactics they’re gone just as fast as your credibility is.
They’ll ghost your landing page, dodge your email drip, and only show up when they feel like it. You can’t trick your way into their buying cycle anymore – you’ve got to earn your way into their head.
And you do that with something 99% of B2B companies are still scared to try: having an actual point of view.
Welcome to the new growth strategy. Fewer funnels, more libraries. Less shouting, more showing.
Why More Buyers Don’t Click Your Ads
Only 5% of Your Market Is In-Market – And Everyone’s Fighting Over Them
Most marketers are out here playing musical chairs with ad budgets, hoping to land in someone’s inbox at just the right moment. Problem is, that moment rarely exists.
You’re probably aware of the John Dawes 95:5 Rule that explains how only 5% of your market is actually buying right now. It’s hard to hear I know, but the fact is that the 95% of your market not ready to become a paying customer at this time – for now they’re just watching. And most companies looking to win the sales game? They’re fighting over crumbs while ignoring the feast.
Paid ads are a sugar high. Thought leadership is slow protein.
95%
of your market isn’t even in the market right now. Your ads are invisible to them.
The 95% Opportunity: Build Trust Before the Funnel
Trust doesn’t get built when someone hits a retargeting ad for the fifth time – it gets built when they hear you say something that makes them nod and think, “Yeah, this person gets it.”
Thought leadership isn’t marketing fluff. It’s pre-selling at scale. It’s how founders sell before the buyer knows they’re buying.
Want to own your category? Start teaching it before your competitors even figure out how to spell it.
Thought Leadership Isn’t Soft – It’s a Sales Multiplier
The Content Compounding Effect
Here’s a tantalising truth: you’re closer to being a media company than you think. Every B2B founder now has two jobs – build a great product and narrate the hell out of the journey.
If you drop high-signal content early you’ll see it pay dividends for years. Notion Capital found content from Year 1 drove 60% of leads in Year 3. That’s not ROI – that’s compounding credibility.
And Snowflake? They built a content hub that crushed – 3.8x more engagement, 156% more qualified leads. They didn’t “go viral.” They went consistent.
Founder Visibility = Faster Growth
If you’re not showing up, you’re invisible. Period.
The best founders build public gravity. They think out loud. They post their bets. They talk to the market, not just their team. They share fresh perspectives, wildly creative concepts, big ideas, and even moments of uncertainty. And guess what? Buyers eat that up. That kind of honest, high-signal sharing isn’t just content – it’s credibility. It’s authenticity-infused brand-building that draws people in, keeps them coming back, and makes you the kind of founder they want to buy from.
You don’t need a YouTube channel. You just need to stop hiding behind the brand. Your story, your insight, the real you – that’s your unfair advantage.
“When your prospects feel aligned with those core values, it’s just a matter of time before they become clients.”
Why Most Companies Fail at Thought Leadership
The Ghostwritten CEO Without a Vision (Yet)
If your content sounds like it came from an intern with access to ChatGPT, congrats – you’re blending in with everyone else.
Founders who treat thought leadership like homework get homework results. You don’t need to write the posts – but if you can’t be bothered to think, the internet will be happy to forget you.
Great content doesn’t come from ghostwriting. It comes from ghost-extracting. Get someone who knows how to dig the gold out of your head and make it land in someone else’s.
The Illusion of Success: Vanity Metrics Without Pipeline
B2B is full of marketers high-fiving over impressions while sales is still starving. The only metric that matters: did it move money?
If it didn’t spark a conversation, shift a belief, or drive a deal, it’s noise.
“10k views? Good job.
How’s revenue?”
The Real Reason Thought Leadership Fails
Here’s the stat no one talks about: according to the Content Marketing Institute, the number one challenge B2B marketers face is producing consistent content that delivers real value. Not technical skills. Not budget. It’s simply: what the hell do we even say?
That blank page is brutal. Thought leadership demands clarity, courage, and a real perspective – and most companies are terrified of saying something that might not land perfectly. So they say nothing. Or worse, they say what everyone else is already saying.
This fear of imperfection is a business growth killer. Because while you’re sitting there second-guessing your ideas, your competitor is out there publishing, testing, learning, and building trust.
So How Do You Actually Fix It?
Everyone says “consistency is key”, and sure, that’s true. But before you worry about being consistent, you have to do the thing most companies avoid entirely: just start.
Stop overthinking. You don’t need a five-tier funnel or a quarterly content strategy that’s been through 12 rounds of approvals. You need a conversation – the kind that gets to the root of what you actually believe, where your value really lives, and what your customers need to hear from someone who’s walked the path.
But hey, if you don’t know where to start, why not take the first step by downloading the very same playbook that we use here at Techtonic – for ourselves and our clients. Just check the panel below.
The Definitive TechtonicOS Guide To Lead-Generating Content Strategies
Attention Fades, Trust Compounds
You don’t need more ads.
You need more people that share your values, approach and perspective. Because when your prospects feel aligned with those core values, it’s just a matter of time before they become clients.
That’s the brand equity that doesn’t disappear when your CAC jumps or your budget tightens.
The most compelling engagement doesn’t come from the biggest ad budget. It is the result of consistent messaging and earned empathy.
So stop chasing the quick dopamine high of ads as your one-stop fix. Invest in content that creates an impact and start saying something that speaks to the people you want to reach. And start building relationships that linger up to and beyond the point that your prospects are in the market and ready to choose you.
Author: Kent Height
Thought leader, growth marketer and consultant to innovative start-ups and scale-ups - Kent is the founder of Techtonic, and a leading voice on successfully scaling businesses with value-driven strategies. Based at Cambridge Science Park in the UK, he helps ambitious organisations cut through the noise to drive real commercial results and audience engagement with impact.
