Businesses have never had more opportunities to reach potential customers than today. We can buy reach, target messages to exactly the right audience, and track almost every step of the way to a purchase. Yet it is rarely a single ad that explains why a customer ultimately chooses a particular company. Often, the relationship has begun much earlier.

Briefly summarized

Marketing plays an important role in creating visibility and recognition, but in many B2B deals, being seen is not enough. The customer also needs to feel trust in the company behind the message. Our experience from Vasatorp Business Club is that the two parts often reinforce each other. A personal meeting can make the next LinkedIn post more relevant, while recurring visibility can keep a relationship alive long after the meeting is over. Therefore, the question may not be whether companies should invest in marketing or relationships, but how they make them work together.

There is something very appealing about digital marketing. It is measurable. We can see how many people saw an ad, how many clicked through, and in the best case scenario, follow all the way to an inquiry or purchase. This makes it possible to evaluate what is working and shift investments to the channels that are yielding the best results.

Relationships are much messier.

It can take months between an initial meeting and a deal, and in the meantime, the customer may have encountered the company in a variety of contexts. It might have started with a conversation at an event, continued with a LinkedIn post that appeared a few weeks later, and was followed by a recommendation from a mutual contact. When the customer finally goes to Google, clicks on an ad, and sends an inquiry, it’s easy to register Google as the source of the deal, even though the decision actually began to form much earlier.

It's this type of customer journey that makes the question of where our best customers actually "come from" much more complicated than it first seems.

Being found is not the same as being chosen.

Marketing plays a crucial role because a company that no one knows about will have a hard time getting noticed when a need arises. But visibility only solves part of the problem. Once the customer has found three or four companies that on paper can do the job, a completely different question remains: who do they trust the most?

This question becomes especially important in B2B, where a decision can involve larger investments, longer collaborations or personal responsibility for the person choosing a supplier. Recognizing a company name helps, but knowing someone at the company, having received a recommendation from someone you trust or having already had a good conversation with them changes the conditions even further.

This doesn't mean that people only do business with people they know. Rather, it means that trust needs to be built somewhere, and that companies that manage to create it even before the customer actively starts searching have a different starting position once the buying journey begins.

At Vasatorp we sometimes see exactly that effect. Companies meet in the Business Club without any current need for either of them, but then continue to appear in each other's world. They see each other's content, meet again at a meeting or hear the company's name mentioned in another context. When a relevant need later arises, the customer therefore does not start from scratch. There is already an image of the company and the people behind it.

Marketing is stronger when the recipient already knows you

It's easy to pit digital marketing and personal relationships against each other, but we think that's a pretty unfortunate division. In practice, they can make each other significantly stronger.

Think about how you behave on LinkedIn. Your feed is filled with companies, people, and messages competing for your attention, but when a post pops up from someone you met the week before, chances are you’ll stick around a little longer. The same content takes on a different meaning because you already have a relationship with the sender.

It also works the other way around. You may have seen a company's name recurring for six months through advertisements, articles and posts without really thinking about it. Then when you meet someone from the company, the name already feels familiar, which means that the personal meeting doesn't start from scratch either. Marketing has already done some of the work.

This is especially interesting for companies that work with longer sales cycles. If six months or two years pass between the first contact and an actual need, making a strong first impression is not always enough. The company needs to remain relevant and remain in the mind until the time is right, and that is where marketing can do something that a single in-person meeting can never do on its own.

The customer journey is rarely as straight as we want to measure it.

The problem is that our ways of measuring marketing tend to give credit to one channel. We ask how the customer found us, look at the last click, or try to identify which campaign created the conversion. That’s useful information, but it doesn’t always tell the whole story.

A new customer may have heard about the company through a recommendation, met someone from there at an event, followed the company on LinkedIn for a year, and then Googled the name when the need arose. In that situation, saying that the customer “came from Google” is technically possible, but it misses almost everything that made the customer choose to search for that particular company in the first place.

This is also why relationships can be difficult to measure in a spreadsheet. The impact doesn't always come as a direct lead after a meeting, but can instead be seen in more people recognizing the company, recommending it further, or spontaneously thinking about it when a need arises. Marketing can then capture and amplify that demand, but it doesn't have to be the reason it was created.

The most important customers have often met you several times

For us, the conclusion is not that companies should advertise less. Visibility plays a crucial role and good marketing can open doors that personal relationships would never have reached on their own. But in the same way, relationships can give marketing an edge that is hard to buy.

The interesting part comes when the two parts start working together. When the person you met at a networking event continues to meet your company digitally, when the customer who first discovered you on LinkedIn later receives a recommendation from someone they trust, or when a relationship built over several years means that your company is already on their mind the day the need arises.

Maybe that's why the question is “What channel did the customer give us?” sometimes less interesting than we think. For many of the most important customers, the answer is not LinkedIn, Google, an event or a recommendation. The answer is the combination of all the meetings that made the company feel both familiar and trustworthy when it came time to choose.

About Vasatorp Business Club

Vasatorp Business Club brings together over 80 companies from different industries that meet regularly throughout the year, both with and without golf. Our ambition is to create a place where companies can build relationships long before there is a concrete need to buy and where personal contact becomes another part of everything that makes a company known, relevant and easy to choose when the time is right.