Six findings that keep showing up — across every category.
If you only remember six things from this report, remember these. Every block below explains them in more detail.
of your category is out-of-market this quarter. Brand is what gets you on the day-one shortlist when the other 5.4% wakes up.
average people in the modern B2B buying group above $50K ACV. Up from 4.1 in 2019. Brand has to land for the room, not the lead.
of shortlisted vendors were already known to the buyer before the form-fill. The cold pitch is a tax you pay for being late.
pipeline efficiency from brands spending >40% on brand vs the typical 12–18% B2B average.
median creative half-life on paid social. Static decays first, founder-led decays slowest.
cost-per-engaged-minute on founder-led content vs $3.10 on brand-handle posts — same audience, same week.
Note the gap: most studios spend 38% on paid media but get only 12% of pipeline from it. Brand, inbound and word-of-mouth do the heavy lifting — they just don't get the line item.
How the modern B2B & D2C buyer actually decides.
Decisions are made in committees, in silence, over months — and the brand they already trust on day one usually wins.
At any given quarter, only ~5% of your category is actively shopping. The other 95% is the brand you're building for the next quarter.
The split your CFO has — and the split that actually compounds.
Across our sample, brands that crossed 40% brand-spend grew net-new pipeline 2.4× faster than peers who stayed in the typical 12–18% B2B band.
"Brand isn't the part you can't measure. It's the part that decides whether your form-fills cost $80 or $800."
How fast your creative dies — by format.
Static decays first. Founder-led decays slowest. The format you pick is a budget decision dressed up as a creative decision.
Where every channel actually earns its keep.
Relative ROI index, 0–100, scored across the WMA sample. Read across a row for the channel's best-fit categories. Read down a column for the channels that move the needle in your industry.
| SaaS | Fintech | Mfg | EdTech | Infra | D2C | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LinkedIn organic | 88 | 81 | 42 | 64 | 78 | 18 |
| LinkedIn paid | 72 | 74 | 38 | 58 | 71 | 22 |
| YouTube long-form | 76 | 62 | 58 | 81 | 84 | 34 |
| Short-video (Reels/TT) | 54 | 41 | 28 | 71 | 32 | 92 |
| Podcast guesting | 82 | 78 | 51 | 47 | 86 | 24 |
| Events / field | 61 | 68 | 88 | 72 | 79 | 41 |
| Cold outbound | 64 | 71 | 74 | 32 | 68 | 12 |
| Paid search | 58 | 66 | 71 | 84 | 54 | 78 |
Who is actually on the other end of your campaign.
The modern B2B buyer is 38, on LinkedIn an hour a day, listens to two podcasts a week, and trusts the people in their DMs more than your ad.
Six categories. Six different rooms.
The same buyer behaviours show up differently in every category. Here's what we keep seeing in each — the objections, the narratives that win, the channel mix that earns it.
SaaS & Software
- ‘Procurement won't approve another tool — show me the consolidation story.'
- ‘Where's the security questionnaire and SOC2 page — first call, not third.'
- ‘What breaks at 10× our scale, in your own words?'
- →Replace the stack-anxiety narrative with a consolidation thesis.
- →Build a public security & trust hub before sales asks for it.
- →Founder-authored ‘why we built this' essays out-pull product pages 3.2×.
"We didn't pick the cheapest tool. We picked the one whose CEO had been answering our exact question on LinkedIn for six months."
Fintech
- ‘Send me your last 12 months of incidents and how you handled them.'
- ‘Who's your sponsor bank, what's the BIN, who actually settles?'
- ‘What happens to my customers if you disappear in 18 months?'
- →Make the compliance story the brand story — turn the tax into the moat.
- →Founder-authored incident reports out-convert any campaign asset.
- →Public roadmap + audit trail compresses procurement by 6 weeks.
"We ran a six-month bake-off. The winner wasn't the slickest deck — it was the team that had publicly written about everything that went wrong with their last release."
Manufacturing
- ‘Show me the line running — film, not a render.'
- ‘Can your distributor in [region] actually service this in 48 hrs?'
- ‘What's your uptime story when your competitor has 30 more years on the floor?'
- →The factory floor is the most under-used content surface in B2B.
- →Distributor enablement content out-earns end-customer ads 3:1.
- →Episodic films > one-shot brand films for trade-show recall.
"We've watched their factory-floor series for two years. By the time we requested a quote, our procurement team already trusted them more than the incumbent."
EdTech
- ‘What does the cohort actually look like a year later?'
- ‘Show me three learners who failed, and what you did about it.'
- ‘Why should I pay you and not a free YouTube playlist?'
- →Outcomes > features. Cohort proof > marketing claims.
- →Parent-first content widens the funnel for K-12 and higher-ed.
- →Alumni-led founder content out-converts paid creative 2.7×.
"Every other ad told me what I'd learn. Theirs showed me three people who'd lived it. That's the one I shared with my partner."
Infrastructure
- ‘Where's your case study with someone our size?'
- ‘What's the 20-year cost-of-ownership story, not the year-one quote?'
- ‘Will your founders still be answering my call in eight years?'
- →Brand-as-RFP-shortlist: authority work done years before procurement opens.
- →Founder + lead-engineer dual narrative beats brand-handle every time.
- →Long-form research reports compound — three pieces > thirty posts.
"We didn't read their pitch. We read three of their reports back-to-back, then put them on the shortlist. The pitch was just confirmation."
D2C & Lifestyle
- ‘I've seen this exact ad from three other brands this week.'
- ‘Why should I trust your sustainability claim — show the receipts.'
- ‘What's the unboxing actually like — not the studio shot.'
- →Brand films > performance creative for repeat purchase economics.
- →Creator-led storytelling out-performs studio creative at every CAC tier.
- →Receipts-first content (lab tests, sourcing, supply chain) wins trust loops.
"I bought it the third time a creator I trust used it without being paid to. The brand's own ads weren't even on my radar by then."
The economics of paid attention — and why founder content keeps winning.
Every paid channel got more expensive every year. The only sustainable hedge is owned attention — founder-led, customer-led, community-led.
Performance index, relative to human-written, founder-voiced creative (=100). The more human judgement in the loop, the more durable the asset.
Five principles we'd bet a category-leadership year on.
Everything above distilled into a working operating system. Each principle ties to where in the studio you'd put it to work.
Build for the 95% who aren't buying yet.
Mental availability compounds. Demand-only spend is a rental — brand is the lease you own. Default split: 40% brand, 45% demand, 15% ops.
Found the buying-group, not the buyer.
Above $100K ACV you're selling to a room of six. Every asset has to land for the user, the economic, the technical and the blocker — or the deal dies in the slack thread you'll never see.
Founder content is the cheapest distribution you'll ever have.
Same audience, same week: founder-led content earns $0.31 per engaged minute vs $3.10 for brand-handle posts. Treat the founder voice as the channel, not the campaign.
Signal beats reach. Always.
Only 5.4% of your category is in-market. Layer first-party signal (visits, demo views, doc reads) with third-party intent and concentrate spend on the rooms that are actually procuring.
Experience is the new conversion rate.
Buyers research in silence and decide in committees. Sales decks lose to public proof — case stories, demo libraries, comparison pages, security trust hubs. Build the experience the buyer would build for themselves.
How we built this — and what it isn't.
Two years of studio engagements, anonymised, composited, and stress-tested against everything else we ship. Not peer-reviewed. Directional. Useful.
- · 10,620 structured buyer + operator interviews (45–60 min each)
- · 312 win/loss reviews across the sample
- · Campaign telemetry from 243 brands, anonymised at source
- · 26 months of rolling observation, Apr 2024 → Jun 2026
- · Quarterly panel of 64 marketing leaders for delta-checks
Every number here is observed inside the WMA studio book of work. We are not a research firm — we ship brands. The data is composite, directional, and biased toward the kinds of companies we work with: founder-led, $1M–$200M revenue, crossing brand and demand at the same time.
Use the directions, pressure-test the numbers against your own. If you'd like us to run a fresh cut against your category, the form below is the way in.