What to Do When Your Business Is Hard to Market

Introduction

Most of the businesses we work with are very good at what they do and find it genuinely difficult to market. Usually that is not because anybody has done the marketing badly. It is because what they sell takes explaining.

These are not products you can put on a page with a price and a buy button. The proposition has layers to it, several people are involved in the decision, and the buyer often has to understand something before they can even work out whether they need you. Sales cycles run long. Very little about the journey is linear.

So a pattern repeats. You do excellent work. Your clients know it. Your referrals prove it. But when somebody outside your existing network goes looking for what you do, they find nothing. Or worse, they find somebody who looks the part and is not half as good.

This is not a talent problem and it is rarely a budget problem. It is a structural one, and it is far more common than most agencies will admit.

What follows is not a list of tactics to try. It is a way of understanding why this keeps happening, and where to start fixing it.

You are not bad at marketing. Your marketing has a structural problem

Most hard to market businesses do not have a marketing problem. They have a visibility gap between how good they are and how well that quality travels to buyers who have not met them yet.

The frustrating part is that the evidence of quality is right there. Clients stay. Referrals come in. Repeat work builds without much effort. By any honest measure you are doing something right. None of that proof reaches the buyer who typed a question into Google at eleven at night, shortlisted three suppliers and moved on before you knew they existed.

“Most of the businesses we work with are not bad at marketing. They have never needed to be good at it, because the work kept arriving. That stops being true the moment you want to grow faster than your network can introduce you.”

– Matt Kohli, Founder and Managing Director, Fortitude Marketing

That gap does not close by running ads or posting more on LinkedIn. It closes by building the kind of presence that makes you findable, credible and convincing to people who have never met you. That is different work, and it starts well before any channel decision.

Why referral dependent businesses hit a ceiling

Referrals are evidence of quality. They are not a marketing strategy.

A referral dependent business has a ceiling built into it. Growth is limited to the people who already know you, trust you, and happen to be talking to somebody who needs what you do. That ceiling is invisible while referrals are flowing. It becomes very visible the moment they slow down, or the moment you want to grow faster than your network allows.

The fix is not to abandon referrals. They remain one of the highest converting sources of new business in complex sales, and they always will be. The fix is to build something that works independently of who already knows you. Account based marketing for complex sales cycles is one structured way of doing exactly that.

The difference between a good reputation and a visible one

A good reputation travels by word of mouth. A visible one travels on its own.

The businesses that win work before the first conversation have built more than a reputation. They have built a presence that answers questions, demonstrates expertise and earns trust with people researching independently. That is a different asset entirely, and it keeps working while you are asleep.

If a buyer searches for what you do today and you do not appear, you are not in the room. That now includes AI answers as well as search results, which is a problem specialist businesses are especially exposed to.

Buyers make up their minds before you know they exist

The B2B buying journey has changed, and not in your favour if you rely on being discovered late.

6sense’s research into buyer behaviour found buyers now make first contact around 61 per cent of the way through their journey. The direction of travel matters more than the number: that figure came down from 69 per cent the year before, and 6sense framed the finding around the window to influence buyers shrinking rather than widening.

More pointed still, 94 per cent of buying groups had already ranked their shortlist in order of preference before speaking to a single supplier, and roughly 80 per cent went on to buy from that early favourite. The eventual winner came from the day one shortlist 95 per cent of the time, and that list averages fewer than four names.

It is worth reading that carefully, because the comfortable conclusion is the wrong one. Being on the shortlist is necessary. It is not sufficient. With fewer than four names on a typical list, simply appearing gives you somewhere around a one in four chance. The position that wins is first, and it gets decided before anybody picks up the phone.

What a buying cycle of more than a year means for a complex proposition

Dentsu B2B’s Superpowers Index puts the average B2B buying decision at 379 days globally, and it has been getting longer rather than shorter. For niche or technically complex businesses it almost certainly runs longer again.

The practical consequence is uncomfortable. A buyer who finds you this month may not be ready to talk for six to twelve. If you are not present, useful and credible across that whole period, you will not be on the shortlist by the time they are ready. Understanding where the decision stages actually sit is how you find out whether you are showing up at the right moments or none of them.

Most of the journey happens in a room you are not in

Gartner research has found that buyers spend only 17 per cent of their total buying time meeting potential suppliers. What matters is what happens to that 17 per cent: it is split across every supplier in the running, so any single sales conversation may account for five or six per cent of the buyer’s attention.

The rest is not all independent research, and the distinction changes what you should do about it. Roughly a quarter of the time goes on researching online, a further chunk offline, and around a fifth is the buying group talking among themselves with no supplier present at all.

That last part is the one almost nobody plans for. Forrester found the typical B2B buying decision now involves 13 internal stakeholders alongside nine external influencers. So you are not really persuading a buyer. You are equipping one person to argue your case in a meeting you will never attend. Your marketing has to survive being forwarded, summarised and repeated by somebody who does not know your business as well as you do.

The real reason complex services are hard to explain

The usual explanation is that the service is simply too complex to explain simply. That is almost never the real reason.

The real reason is positioning. The business has not yet found the language that connects what it does to what the buyer is trying to solve, and those two things are not the same. A buyer looking for help does not search for your process or your methodology. They search for their problem. If your marketing describes your inputs rather than their outcomes, you are invisible to exactly the people who need you most. It usually shows up on the first page a buyer sees.

There is a related finding worth sitting with. Gartner found that 74 per cent of B2B buying teams show unhealthy conflict during the decision process. The difficulty is often not in understanding your product at all. It is a group of people with competing priorities trying to reach agreement, and the supplier who makes that easier tends to win.

Why knowing your product too well works against you

Experts assume context that buyers do not have. It is one of the most consistent patterns in technical marketing, and it is genuinely difficult to see from the inside.

When you have spent fifteen years in a discipline, the foundational ideas feel obvious, so you skip past them when you write, speak or pitch. But the buyer is often at the beginning of their understanding rather than the middle. They do not need less information. They need information that starts where they are rather than where you are.

This is the curse of knowledge, and it is structural. It does not resolve by writing simpler copy. It resolves by starting from buyer language instead of expert language.

How to find the words your buyers already use

The language that works in marketing is almost always the language buyers use to describe their problem before they have found a solution.

Sales calls, support conversations, referral introductions and enquiry forms all contain it. So do LinkedIn comments, industry forums and the questions people ask in discovery meetings. The task is to collect it systematically and build your messaging out of it, which is core part of what persona workshops are actually for.

Personas are hypotheses. Enquiries are evidence. The work is closing the gap between the two.

What doing nothing actually costs you

Staying put has a cost. It is just harder to see than a wasted ad budget.

Every month without a credible, findable presence is a month where people researching your category land on somebody else. If 95 per cent of winners are already on the day one shortlist, and you are not building presence now, you are not on next quarter’s list either. That is a fairly direct line from inaction to lost revenue.

“Our marketing has always been word of mouth” describes a position that has become more fragile every year. Buying cycles have got longer, buying groups have got larger, and buyers have become more self directed. The window for a late, reputation only entry into a deal has narrowed considerably.

Inaction also compounds. A competitor who starts building content authority today is materially harder to displace in two years than they are now. The cost never appears on your profit and loss. It appears in the pipeline you did not know you were losing.

Dark social is probably already working for you

Dark social is the name for sharing and recommendation that never appears in your analytics. A forwarded email. A message in a Slack channel. A mention in a procurement meeting. A screenshot of your article in a WhatsApp group.

For referral heavy businesses it is likely already one of your best performing channels. You simply cannot see it. The goal is not to measure it precisely, because you cannot. The goal is to create things worth passing on, then make them easy to find and easy to send. Articles that answer the questions people ask before they call you. Case studies about one specific problem. A clear explanation of what you do and who it is for.

This connects straight back to the buying group point. If thirteen internal stakeholders and nine external influencers are involved in the decision, most of your marketing is going to reach most of them second hand. Content that only works when you are in the room to explain it is not doing the job.

Why your best marketing does not show up in your analytics

If you rely on last click attribution to understand where clients come from, you are looking at the end of the journey rather than the beginning.

Somebody who found an article six months ago, mentioned it to a colleague and eventually submitted an enquiry appears in your reporting as direct traffic. The six months of influence that preceded it is invisible. For a business with a year long buying cycle, that means your attribution is structurally incapable of showing you what actually worked, which is worth knowing before you cut the thing that was working.

Where to start when you have limited time and no clear answer

The most common mistake is jumping to a channel before the message is clear. Picking LinkedIn, or search, or paid, without first knowing who you are talking to and what you need them to understand, is how businesses end up running activity that feels busy and generates nothing.

For most hard to market businesses the starting point is the same. Fix the positioning first. When the message is right, every channel works harder. When the message is wrong, no channel saves it.

Start with your positioning, not your channels

Positioning answers a single question: why should a buyer who does not know you choose you over a credible alternative?

If your current answer is “because we are the best” or “because we have been doing this for twenty years”, it is not doing its job. Both of those are true of most of your competitors, and neither is something a buyer can act on. A useful positioning statement names a specific type of buyer, the specific problem you solve, and why your approach to solving it is different.

The one question that unlocks most of this

Here is the diagnostic question worth sitting with. If your best client referred somebody to you tomorrow, what would they actually say?

Not the polished version. The actual words.

The gap between that answer and how your website describes what you do is usually the entire positioning problem, sitting in plain sight. If your referrer describes a specific problem you solve and your website talks about your process, your marketing is starting from the wrong place.

What this kind of work actually needs

A lot of marketing advice for complex businesses is written by people who have never sold one. Tactics designed for consumer brands get repackaged for B2B. Content calendars get proposed before anybody has understood how the buying decision is actually made. The advice sounds right and does not transfer.

What this work needs is people who have done it before in a situation like yours, and who are senior enough to tell you when the brief is wrong rather than quietly executing it.

If you want to understand how we think before you speak to anybody, you can complete our free marketing health check. Once you have done that, or if you would rather skip it and arrange a discovery call we can talk through what is actually holding you back.

Frequently asked questions