Not everyone clicks. Plenty still buy.

Also: Swag still works.

Marketing Qualified
July 04, 2025

Welcome back to Marketing Qualified! Here’s what we’re talking about this week:

Not everyone clicks. Plenty still buy. How to market to dark buyers.
Swag still works. Sometimes old school tactics are still the best.

💰 Not everyone clicks. Plenty still buy.

B2B marketers love tracking. Attribution models. Multi-touch journeys. 17-slide decks breaking down how one blog post led to a closed-won 6 months later.

But the truth is: some of your highest-intent buyers never show up on your dashboards.

Your tracking says they didn’t click. Didn’t open. Didn’t fill out a form.

They just… showed up and bought.

That’s the no-click funnel.

And it’s becoming more common in B2B.

How these buyers actually move:

Their colleague dropped your tool in a Slack thread and asked, “Have you heard of this?”
They saw your CEO’s post on LinkedIn, then searched for reviews of your company on Reddit.
They got your email but didn’t click. Just went straight to your homepage.
They never responded to your DM, but searched your product 20 minutes later.
They copied a chart from your blog into a pitch deck and got internal buy-in.

These are dark signals. They don't show up in your CRM or your attribution model. But they still lead to conversions.

And if your marketing only optimizes for what’s measurable, you might be ignoring your warmest leads.

What to do instead:

Make content self-contained.

Build assets that sell on sight, without needing a click. Emails that sell in the inbox. Stand-alone charts, diagrams, or graphics. LinkedIn posts with enough detail to spark action. Etc.

Create things people want to pass along or save for later: tools, research, swipe files, real-world examples. Posts that get screenshotted. Assets worth forwarding.