Does your marketing reach your market?
Carlos Hidalgo shared a story about failed ads—and how he turned the marketing plan on its head—at B2B Forum in 2024.
To discover how Carlos attracted buyers, watch this clip from his presentation, or read the transcript below.
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Do you know the watering holes that your customers go to gather information?
If not, you’re guessing with your investment.
We had a client earlier this year where they were spending a ton of money on digital ads.
Well, they sell to trucking companies.
Guess who’s not on LinkedIn? Trucking companies!
You know what they like? They like a good old handshake. A round of golf. They like events.
They like going out to restaurants because, for them, it’s a trust thing.
They want to know you. It’s their business. Even the big guys, JB Hunt and the like, they want to know you.
So we said, “you know what? We’re not doing digital ads anymore.”
We put together an ABM campaign…
You ready for this?
Direct mail’s not dead.
We actually put together a FedEx direct mail that was about 12 pages worth, with a letter from the sales rep.
The first mailing that went out, the next day—they all went overnight—the next day, the rep got a call from one of the target accounts and said, “I’ve seen this movie that you sent me. We’re in the middle of this now. When can we see a demo?”
Not bad. I thought direct mail was dead. Depends on the industry.
The reason we knew to do that is we knew who their customers were.
The reason we were able to take the investment in digital media and turn it into direct mail was because we spent the time to really understand who their customers were.
We took the time to understand that events and direct mail are going to be your best source of the generation of leads for your salesforce.
Because these people aren’t digital natives.
They don’t care about the digital stuff.
Did you know that most of our trucking that happens—which by the way, if you ever see a trucker, thank them, our country would come to an absolute halt if trucking stopped—but do you know how much of that is still paper-based?
It’s a little scary.
I could go on. I know more about trucking than I ever thought.
I almost came up here with a trucker hat just to feel the part.
But we knew their customers so well, we said, “let’s move our investment.”
And it’s paid off.
So it’d be great if we only sold to one person, wouldn’t it?
But we sell to committees.
We know this. And so we have to understand that full committee.
It’s not just good enough to say, “well, who’s the decision maker?”
And we hear this all the time: “Well, we talk to the CIO.”
Well, if you’re talking to an organization of any size, mid-market or above, the chances that the CIO is coming to your website are pretty slim.
Because what the CIO does, or the CSO or the CEO or the CFO or the CMO tells their team, “I agree. We need a solution for this. Go do the research, come back with a shortlist and we’ll figure this out together.”
So there’s so much of this buying process, this journey, but they’re not even on.
Yet because we say, “well, we sell to the CIO,” we create all the CIO content and we wonder why we’re not effective.
We should be creating content for the people like Sarah, the fleet manager. Or Dave, the logistics manager. Or AJ, the operations VP.
In this scenario, the CFO Laura was actually at the beginning, like, approval to go out and start an initiative, and at the end for budget approval.
Why would I create a bunch of content for Laura?
She’s not involved. Finance wasn’t involved unless it was at the beginning or the end. But this particular client had created all this financial justification content.
It was really about Dave and Sarah who are going nuts trying to figure this stuff out.
We have to create more content for them. We’re going to invest so much more in CFO content if we don’t have these insights.
Bad investment. Bad return. New CMO would figure that out.
So it’s not only good enough to understand who we’re talking to.
We have to know their journey.
Now, one of the things that we see a lot as well is a focus on new customer acquisition. New customer acquisition, new customer acquisition.
I’m very delighted to see that more and more.
I’m starting to see companies do more customer marketing.
So what happens after that first purchase? And so this is what we should be doing, right?
According to Gartner… somebody just said, “oh geez.” Somebody was like, “when does that bar open?”
How do you do this? How do you do that?
I mean, I appreciate, I have respect for Gartner. But problem identification, solution exploration, interest consideration, evaluation, decision…
It would be awesome if it was that simple.
It’s not.
But take this. This is one buyer! Now multiply it by seven, or sometimes 12.
Anybody have technology that’s going to map that?
Anybody want to put together an attribution model that represents how well we do here?
Kind of crazy. So I think we can simplify it.
So we break it down pretty simply to say, “look, anything pre-purchase”—so brand engagement all the way through what we would call that demand stage that buying process—“is a value creation stage.”
We are trying to create value for our company by acquiring new customers.
Pretty simple.
For the customers we’re trying to get to buy our product or solution or service, we are trying to create value for them by the way we engage with them.
So I want to be helpful. I want to provide some thought. I want to help solve their problem with my content, if I can.
Published September 5, 2025
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