Attention is now the scarcest resource in B2B marketing. Your buyers are drowning in content and have trained themselves to tune out traditional marketing. In this attention economy, the old playbook of gated whitepapers and MQL targets is a fast track to irrelevance.
B2B buyers form opinions through content they consume daily on LinkedIn, newsletters, and podcasts. They’re not waiting for cold calls or downloading your 40-page reports. If you’re not creating content that earns their attention where they spend time, you don’t exist.
The Best B2B Companies Are Acting Like Media Brands
High-growth B2B teams aren’t just buying clicks. They’re building audiences with the same sophistication as consumer brands. They understand that buyers don’t enter through your funnel; they enter through your content and point of view.
Take startup Cluely, which used part of its $15 million venture round to launch 10,000 TikTok accounts that repost short videos, bypassing search entirely. One studio shoot yields dozens of clips, and ten thousand accounts repost them with different personalities and angles.
The results: 24 million views in thirty days and a 38% week-over-week bump in branded searches without buying a single Google ad. Provocative hooks like “cheat with AI on everything” spark comment wars that juice watch time and earned mentions. It’s bold thinking that traditional B2B marketers might hate, but the attention economy loves.
These companies hire creators, not just campaign managers. They produce native content that educates and entertains across platforms. They don’t just participate in their category; they define it through narratives that shape market thinking.
Building Your Modern B2B Growth Engine
Act like a media company. Build an always-on content machine with high frequency and relevance. Your content calendar should resemble a newsroom’s editorial schedule, not a quarterly campaign plan.
At Direct Agents, we see this shift every day with our B2B clients. The ones winning aren’t just running campaigns, they’re building content ecosystems that live where their buyers actually spend time. We help them move beyond traditional demand gen to create awareness campaigns that feel native to each platform while driving measurable business impact.
Blend brand and sales into one motion. Demand creation fuels demand capture; they’re two parts of the same engine. Every thought leadership piece should drive commercial outcomes, and every sales play should reinforce your brand narrative.
Hire differently. Your next best hire might be a TikTok creator, YouTube strategist, or visual storyteller who can turn B2B concepts into compelling narratives. These are now core competencies for growth teams. Direct Agents partners with brands to identify these talent gaps and build teams that can compete in the attention economy.
Define your point of view now. If you’re not shaping how the market thinks about your category, someone else is. Winners don’t just explain features better; they explain why their approach is the future.
Build systems that ship content weekly, not quarterly. Learn from engagement data and iterate fast. Your ability to move quickly beats your ability to plan perfectly.
The Future Belongs to Attention Architects
Distribution beats product until you have both. The best product is worthless if no one knows it exists, and being discovered requires more than SEO and paid ads.
The future belongs to companies that win attention authentically and turn it into commercial outcomes. Marketing isn’t about supporting sales; it’s about creating conditions where sales become inevitable. Direct Agents understands this evolution and works with B2B brands to develop modern awareness strategies that don’t just reach buyers, they engage them in the spaces and formats they prefer.
The attention economy doesn’t care about your Gartner quadrant position. It rewards brands that show up consistently with content worth consuming. The playbook has shifted from interruption to attraction, from gating to giving, from selling to storytelling.
Contact [email protected] to learn how we can help you prepare for what’s next.
Jackson Richards, VP of Strategy, Direct Agents