March 27, 2026

£38m pipeline in 12 weeks.

That was the outcome of a programme for a large tech B2B brand built on a fairly unfashionable idea. Instead of filling social and event content with the messages the brand most wanted to push, we built it around the questions buyers were genuinely trying to answer.

It also came from squeezing the pips out of a major annual event. Rather than treating the forum as a three-day burst of activity and a lead list, we treated it as a trust and demand engine. We interviewed senior voices in a format that felt more like a business programme than a corporate promo, tackled the challenging questions customers were already sitting with, and used Facebook as the primary channel because that was where the C-suite in large enterprise tech was actually spending personal time.

Start with the question, not the brochure

That matters because too much marketing is still built to make the business look busy, clever, or vaguely important(Lovely for the ego. Less handy for revenue.) Buyers are trying to work out whether you’re credible, whether your point of view holds up, and whether backing you will make them look smart or daft in front of colleagues. That is a very different job from simply getting attention.

This was exactly what I discussed with Christina Moore on A Mind for Marketing, and she was a cracking host. Smart questions, no waffle, and plenty of room to get into the commercial reality of what trust is actually doing in marketing.

Why this worked commercially

The content worked because it lowered the effort of making sense of a difficult decision. We built interviews around the buyer’s challenging questions. The itchy ones. Why legacy systems refuse to play nicely with cloud. What is actually going wrong in transformation projects. What the board is worrying about.

We deliberately made the interviews feel like something worth choosing. More BBC business sofa than branded explainer. That mattered. Senior buyers gave some of those videos 16 minutes of attention. In B2B, that is not a nice engagement stat to admire. That is evidence that the subject, the format, and the channel were aligned to a commercial audience.

Trust is pulling harder than most dashboards show

This is why I keep banging on about trust. Trust is not a soft metric that sits in a nice brand deck. Trust is commercial.

Buyers make decisions in a climate where scrutiny is high and confidence is in short supply. The brand that feels safer has an advantage. The brand that explains itself clearly, answers the challenging questions, and sounds like it understands the stakes will usually get further than the one making the most noise.

Social is where that safety gets built

That safety gets built in public.

Not only on your website. Not only in a pitch deck. On social. In comments. In thought leadership. In video. In the sendable little bits of content that get passed around internal chats when someone is trying to make sense of a decision. That is why the old line between brand and demand looks increasingly knackered. The same content that reassures can also help accelerate a deal.

It is also why events deserve a lot more respect as content engines. Too many teams spend a fortune getting the right people into a room, then leave most of the value there when the lights go down. The smarter move is to use the event to create distribution-worthy proof, then keep that proof working long after the lanyards have been binned.

Virality gets applause. Familiarity gets chosen

And yes, this is also why I think the obsession with virality is a bit of a nonsense. Going viral is wildly overrated as a growth goal. It may get you a nice spike, a bit of internal fuss, maybe a congratulatory message from someone who has not looked at your sales numbers in months. But it does not reliably move the financial needle.

Consistency does. Familiarity does. Useful thought leadership does.

The reason is simple. Most buyers are not ready the day you post. They are circling, lurking, comparing, hearing your name in different places, checking whether your people sound credible, and trying to reduce the chance of making a bad call. We know most of the market is out of market at any given point, so the job is to build enough familiarity and confidence that when the moment comes, you already feel like the safer choice.

There is no neat line from one LinkedIn post to one lovely little revenue number. There is a build-up of proof. There is repeated exposure. There are hidden buyers with veto power who never fill in a form.

Public content now has a second job

That is why social deserves a much more serious role in commercial thinking. If social is where familiarity gets built, where expertise gets tested, and where your ideas start travelling beyond your own channels, then it is already doing far more than distribution.

It is also where content begins its second life. Once something is public, it can be searched, summarised, quoted, misquoted, lifted into answer engines, screenshotted into decks, and passed around without your brand guidelines attached. Which means clarity matters more. Specificity matters more. Repetition with intent matters more.

Measure the middle like it matters

So what do you measure when trust is doing the work?

First, keep your attention metrics, but put them in their place. Reach, completion rate, the right job titles, the right audience fit. Useful, yes. Sufficient, no. They tell you whether the content had a chance. They do not tell you whether it helped someone choose.

Then look at trust and intent signals. Saves. Shares. Repeat viewers. Brand search. Mentions of your people. Whether your ideas are being passed on privately. Less glamorous than a big spike, I know. Far more useful if you want to understand whether your thinking is lodging in someone’s head.

Then connect that to commercial outcomes. Did a prospect mention your report? Had they followed one of your leaders? Did meeting acceptance improve? Did deal size increase? Did the time to opportunity shorten? Those are the sorts of links that help social stop looking like a cost centre with a Canva subscription.

The bit we need to get braver about

The point is not that trust replaces commercial measurement. It is that trust is often the thing doing the heavy lifting before the commercial signal shows.

That’s the bit marketers need a bit more courage around. We have to stop apologising for the messy middle and start measuring it better. Because the brand that wins is rarely the one that shouted the loudest. It is usually the one that turned up often enough, answered the right questions, and made the choice feel easier to defend internally.

Which, when you think about it, is a much better job for marketing anyway.