Embracing B2H (Business to Human): Are B2B Marketers Ready?

There's a slide that's been in every B2B marketing deck since roughly 2015. You know the one. It's got a funnel on it. Maybe a flywheel if the presenter is feeling fancy. Somewhere on that slide is the phrase "buyer's journey," and somewhere else is a logo cloud of your top accounts, and the whole thing is built on a premise that made sense for about a decade and is now quietly falling apart: that companies buy things.

Companies don't buy things. People buy things. People who happen to have a corporate card, a budget code, and a boss who wants a slide of their own by Friday.

That's not a new observation. Every B2B marketer has said some version of "we're marketing to humans, not logos" in a meeting at some point in the last five years. But saying it and building your entire go-to-market motion around it are two very different things, and most of us are still doing the former while pretending we've done the latter.

The account-based marketing era taught us to be surgical. Identify the account, map the buying committee, orchestrate the multi-thread outreach, wait for the six-to-nine touchpoints to compound into a meeting. It's a good system. It's also a system built entirely around the company as the unit of analysis. The account is the target. The human is a stakeholder within the account. That's backwards, and buyers have started to notice.

We're entering an era I'd call B2H — Business to Human. Not because the acronym is clever (it isn't, particularly), but because it names the actual shift happening under our feet: the winning B2B brands over the next five years won't be the ones with the best account scoring model. They'll be the ones who figured out how to talk to an actual person, on the actual platforms where that person spends their actual attention, about the actual things that person actually cares about.

That's a lot of "actual." Let's get specific.

Step One: The Mediums Have to Change

Here's an uncomfortable fact for anyone whose media plan is still 80% search, email and display: your buyer doesn't experience their day the way your media plan assumes they do.

They're not sitting at a desk clicking through sponsored search results, patiently working their way down a comparison matrix. They're scrolling Instagram on the train. They're doom scrolling funny TikToks right before they open a work Slack. They're bingeing a prestige drama on a streaming service with an ad break every twelve minutes. They're getting a text from their kid's school about an early dismissal, and thirty seconds later, another text — this one from a vendor they actually opted into — reminding them a demo starts in ten minutes. They're on Reddit at 11pm, not because their company pays for Reddit, but because they trust a stranger's blunt opinion about a piece of software more than they trust that same software's own website.

None of that looks like a B2B media plan from 2019. All of it is where your buyer actually lives.

The common thread across all five: identifying your ICP on these channels isn't fundamentally different from identifying it anywhere else. You still need firmographic and demographic precision. What's different is the creative, the tone, and the expectation of what "conversion" looks like on each platform.

Step Two: Market to the Human Emotion, Not the Company ROI

Here's the part of this newsletter that's going to feel less like a media plan and more like a gut check.

For twenty years, B2B marketing has run almost exclusively on a single emotional register: rational self-interest on behalf of the company. Reduce costs. Increase efficiency. Mitigate risk. De-risk the vendor selection. Every case study, every ROI calculator, every "here's what you'll save" one-pager is built to answer one question: what's in it for the company?

That question still matters. But it's stopped being the only question, and for a huge and growing share of buyers, it's stopped being the primary one.

The average tenure for a marketing or ops leader at a mid-market company is measured in a couple of years, not a couple of decades. People change jobs more than they used to change cars. And when the relationship between a person and their employer is transactional and short-term, the calculus a buyer runs when evaluating a vendor shifts too.

Today's buyer is asking a different question underneath the official one:

• Will this make my job easier this quarter, or harder?
• Will this make me look good to my boss, or expose me if it fails?
• Will implementing this take political capital I don't have to spend right now?
• Will this vendor make me feel stupid, or will they make me feel like I have a partner?
• If I champion this and it works, do I get credit? If it fails, do I get blamed?
• Is my job even going to exist in this org in eighteen months, and does this purchase help me either way?

None of those questions show up on an ROI calculator. All of them are the real reasons deals stall, champions go dark, and "perfect fit on paper" opportunities quietly die in procurement.

The differentiator is whether your marketing makes the individual buyer feel something: relief, confidence, recognition, belonging, ambition, even a little bit of "these people get it" validation. Practically, that shows up in a few ways:

Step Three: Kill the B2Boring Playbook

Let's talk about the language.

If you've spent any real time in B2B marketing, you can write this paragraph in your sleep: "In today's rapidly evolving landscape, businesses are increasingly leveraging cutting-edge solutions to drive synergies across the value chain and unlock best-in-class outcomes at scale."

Every word of that sentence is technically English. None of it means anything. And worse — nobody talks like that. It's a dialect that exists only in decks and one-pagers, invented by marketers, for the approval of other marketers, and it has almost nothing to do with how the actual buyer thinks or talks.

The B2Boring playbook is built on a very understandable but ultimately self-defeating instinct: writing to satisfy the internal audience rather than the external one who's actually going to read it. Buzzwords survive because they're safe.

Here's the tell: read your last three pieces of content out loud. If you'd feel embarrassed saying any sentence of it to a friend at a bar, that sentence needs to go:

• "We're excited to announce" — nobody's excited, cut it.
• "Best-in-class" — compared to what? Be specific or don't say it.
• "Robust" — meaningless, replace it with the actual thing that makes it robust.
• "Seamless integration" — nothing is seamless, say what it actually does.
• "Unlock" — you're not a heist movie, say what actually happens.

Speaking your audience's language means a few concrete adjustments:

• Write like the practitioner you're talking to: A demand gen practitioner doesn't say "we're leveraging a multi-channel approach." They say "we're throwing a bunch of stuff at Reddit and CTV because search traffic is drying up." Write the second sentence.
• Have an actual point of view: The safest content in B2B is also the most forgettable. "If your pipeline is 90% dependent on search in 2026, you have a structural problem" is a real opinion that makes the right people lean in.
• Match the register of the platform: The tone that works on your homepage is not the tone that works in a Reddit comment, a TikTok script, or a text message.
• Let your best practitioners write: Some of the most effective B2B content comes from founders, salespeople, and customers writing in their own voice, without rounds of review flattening personality.

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