A lot of founders judge social media by the enquiries it brings in each month. You post for a few months, no new clients come from it, and you decide it isn’t working for your kind of business. That conclusion makes sense when you look at how you’ve always won work. Someone refers you, you have a conversation, and the job starts soon after. But it leaves out how most business buying works, and it can lead you to give up on something just as it starts to pay off.
What the 95:5 rule says
Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, based at the University of South Australia, studied B2B buying for the LinkedIn B2B Institute. As Marketing Week reported, his research found that companies change providers of services such as banking, legal advice, software or telecoms around every five years. That means only about 20% of business buyers are in the market for a given service in a year, and around 5% in a given quarter. The other 95% aren’t looking at all.
This has become known as the 95:5 rule. The exact split will vary by industry, but the idea holds for most professional services. Think about the businesses that would make a great client for you. Most of them are happy with their current adviser, haven’t hit the problem you solve yet or don’t have the budget this year. Only a small share will need you in the next three months.
What the other 95% need from you
Dawes also makes the point that business buyers are rarely comfortable signing with a firm they’ve barely heard of. In his words, “People operate using their memory.” When a need finally comes up, buyers start with the names they already know.
So the job with the 95% is to build familiarity. You want them to know your name, connect it with a clear problem and trust your thinking well before they need you. Then, when a business opportunity comes up, you’re one of the first people they think of.
You already do a version of this offline. The coffee catch-ups, the industry events and the occasional check-in email all keep your name familiar to people who aren’t buying today. Social media does the same work across a much larger group, including people you’d never have time to meet one by one.
Why monthly enquiries give you the wrong read
If you judge your posts only by the enquiries they bring in this month, you’re judging them against the 5% who happen to be in the market right now. The value you build with the other 95% shows up later, and often in ways that are hard to trace. It might be a prospect who says they’ve followed your posts for a year, or a referral who arrives already sure you’re the right fit.
A more useful set of questions is whether the right people are seeing your content, whether they engage with it and whether prospects mention it in conversations. This ties in with the research in Most Buyers Choose Before They Call, which shows that most buyers pick a favourite before they reach out.
What staying remembered looks like
You don’t need to post every day to stay in people’s minds. You need a presence that is steady and easy to recognise. A few things help:
- A rhythm you can keep for a year. A modest pace you can hold will do more for memory than a busy month followed by silence.
- The same few themes, repeated. When you talk about the same problems again and again, people start to link your name with them. How to Create a Content System for Business shows how to organise your ideas into themes you can keep returning to.
- Content that helps people who aren’t buying yet. Lessons from client work, answers to common questions and your view on changes in your industry give people a reason to keep paying attention.
- A consistent look and voice. The same name, headline and visual style across your profile, posts and website make you easier to recognise.
Where to go from here
Most of your future clients aren’t looking for you today. They will be at some point, and when that happens, you want your name to be one they already know.
Keeping that presence steady is often the first thing to slip when client work gets busy. If you’d like someone to own it, the services page explains how I plan, write and manage social media for consultancies, advisory firms and fractional executives. You can also start an enquiry and tell me what you’d like to grow.
Sources: Marketing Week, Ehrenberg-Bass: 95% of B2B buyers are not in the market for your products (2021), reporting research by Professor John Dawes for the LinkedIn B2B Institute.
