Learn
Why B2B needs awareness advertising
About 95% of your buyers are not in the market today. They will be. Awareness advertising builds your place in their memory before that day comes — because when buyers finally shop, roughly 90% pick from the shortlist they already had in their head. freeB2Bads.com exists to write you onto that list.
What is awareness advertising?
Ads for people who aren’t buying yet.
That’s the whole definition. Most B2B marketing chases the people shopping right now: search ads, retargeting, comparison pages, a demo CTA on everything. Awareness advertising talks to everyone else. The people with the problem you solve who aren’t doing anything about it yet.
That sounds wasteful. It’s the opposite, and the math is the reason.
Why advertise to people who aren’t buying?
Because of how buying actually works.
Professor John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute put a number on it: at any given moment, about 95% of your buyers are out-of-market. It’s called the 95:5 rule. It’s a rule of thumb, not a law of physics — but in B2B, where companies buy your kind of product every few years, it holds up. Only around 5% of the people you want are shopping this quarter.
So the audience you can convert today is tiny, and every competitor you have is fighting over it. (We wrote a whole page on that squeeze: Bottom-funnel is saturated )
The other 95% can’t be converted. Not today. But they can be reached, and what good advertising leaves behind is memory. A link in the buyer’s head between the problem and your name. The ad does its job now. The payoff waits.
What happens when buyers finally start shopping?
The deal is mostly decided before you ever hear about it.
Bain and Google surveyed 1,208 business buyers and published the results in Harvard Business Review: most buyers had a set of vendors in mind on day one, before any research. And about 90% ended up choosing from that day-one list.
6sense found the same thing from another angle. In their 2024 study of 2,509 buyers, 81% had already picked their winner before talking to sales.
Put those together and the picture is uncomfortable. By the time a buyer lands in anyone’s funnel, the contest is mostly over. If you’re not in their memory on day one, you didn’t lose the deal. You were never in it.
Does brand advertising actually pay off?
Yes, and not by a little.
The LinkedIn B2B Institute worked with Les Binet and Peter Field — the two researchers who have studied ad effectiveness longer than almost anyone — on what works in B2B. Their finding: campaigns built to make a brand famous are around 12 times more effective at driving long-term sales growth than campaigns built on rational product messages.
Twelve times. Not because logic doesn’t matter. Because nobody remembers logic. Buyers remember how an ad made them feel, and that feeling is attached to a name. Your ad should be about them, not you goes deep on this.
How we make sure you’re the name they remember
This is the part where we show our work.
Every script Video Brothers writes has to pass what we call the Friday night test. It’s Friday night. Your prospect has had a long week and a couple drinks, and they’re telling a friend what’s actually been hard at work. Whatever they say — those words, that frame — is what the ad connects with. Not your features. Their Friday-night version of the problem.
That’s how you get ads people bring up in meetings. And it’s why freeB2Bads.com pairs those ads with media that reaches the 95% — Video Brothers makes the work, Elite Media Group puts it in front of your exact buyers, and the creative is funded by the media budget you already have. See how one roof works Why the creative is free
Frequently asked questions
What is awareness advertising in B2B?
Advertising aimed at buyers who aren’t shopping yet — about 95% of your market at any time. Its job is to build a memory link between the problem you solve and your name, so you’re on the buyer’s shortlist the day they start looking.
Is awareness advertising a waste of money if we can’t attribute it?
Memory doesn’t click. A buyer can carry your name for a year before they search, and most attribution tools will credit that deal to the last click. The research says the payoff is real: fame-driving B2B campaigns are ~12x more effective at long-term sales growth (LinkedIn B2B Institute / Binet & Field).
How is this different from demand generation?
Most demand gen harvests the ~5% who are already in-market. Awareness advertising builds your position with the 95% who aren’t yet. You need both — but only one of them decides whose shortlist you’re on when buyers show up.
How long does awareness advertising take to work?
It starts building memory immediately, but the compounding is the point — buyers enter the market gradually, so the campaign pays out over quarters, not days. It’s also why we build campaigns that stay fresh for years instead of one-off videos.