Solve audience fatigue with sharper strategies.
The Attention Recession
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that we’ve never scrolled more or engaged less. Fingers point in unison towards the chronic oversaturation of customer touchpoints as organisations compete for the most lucrative and finite resource – our attention.
Focus and interest hold intangible growth potential, and organisations want it, but the constant barrage of information, angles, and statistics leaves audiences less interested than ever before.
Increasingly, they value psychological distance, taking time and space to come to their own conclusions before engaging in a potential interaction. 6sense’s Buyer Experience Report supports this, stating that in the vast majority of instances, prospects only make contact once they’re at least 70% into the buyer journey. Additionally, 81% of first contacts are with the eventual winner, and 85% of requirements are already set.
This can be extrapolated beyond strictly buying and selling – how do you reinvigorate the conversation between you and your audience when scores of competitors are on a mission to do the same?
Decision makers have never been more informed, more sceptical, and harder to impress. However, what they’re not is, paradoxically, harder to reach, if you know where to look, and most significantly, how to approach.
Bonfire of the Vanities
More posts equating to more leads is a former truth and modern fallacy. Reproducing oft-recycled takes and “insights” only work to neutralise equity and repel interest. In the ‘too much information’ era, audiences are saying a polite “thanks but no thanks” to the noise, and especially its (real or perceived) architects. If you want them to reconnect, give the pearl-clutching a break and stop writing for a world that doesn’t exist.
LinkedIn has enough posing contributors – the opportunity to spark fresh conversations and attention-grabbing dialogues stems from exposing reality as it is on the ground. What’s missing from the feed is approachability. Organisations need to open new pathways to signal virtue without virtue signalling in the era of macro fatigue and attention scarcity. They need to offer something that resonates with their audience’s experience in a way they’ve never seen before.
Your content should be both your front door and your foot in the door. Give them a juicy, novel takeaway (the kind they can repeat in a meeting and look good), relevant data, a clear point of view, then challenge them with ideas that travel inside the organisation.
As much as 95% of potential buyers aren’t in direct contact with you right now, but they are orbiting your ecosystem. The right kind of thought leadership generates curiosity, priming both your general audience and potential buyers to consider you when their needs evolve. Think of this as optimising receptivity, which becomes even more important when considering the less visible forces at play in the mechanics of decision-making.
Write for the Lurkers
The average number of stakeholders in any significant buying decision has grown, with Gartner estimating between 6 and 10, and Forrester going as far as 13. Moreover, LinkedIn and Edelman’s joint report places responsibility for as much as 40% of B2B deals stalling on these shadowy “hidden buyers” with enormous background influence.
This makes engineering conviction up and down the approval chain even more difficult, compounded by the fact that only certain stakeholders are “visible”. This puts the onus on organisations to design content for the rooms, conversations and viewpoints they can’t always see. It’s not the sales team’s fault that the buyer journey has become so much more complex, but it does mean that other areas of the business have to pick up the slack.
Seamless, omnichannel experiences optimised for every stage of the purchase cycle are crucial. You need to help buyers buy by giving them everything they need, because if they don’t feel 100% convinced that you can give them what they want, then they will shop around. Ambiguity invites comparison, and comparison adds months to the journey. 6sense states that adding just one other potential vendor to the mix extends the buying cycle by 66 days on average.
The good news is you can simultaneously build trust and expedite consensus. Rich, stylish, provocative and hyper-relevant content grabs attention, closes sales loops, and turns potential detractors into firm allies. The key is to write not only for the lead role, but for the lurkers, the background actors, and the forces that move in silence.
Building Connection
The right omnichannel strategy isn’t about being everywhere; it’s about being coherent everywhere. When content aligns across sales, marketing, and services, it removes friction and builds trust. In that context, thought leadership becomes connective tissue, linking every interaction to a shared understanding of who you are, what you do, and why it matters. When the entire organisation is aligned on that message, you create a seamless experience end to end for your audience.
To reiterate the necessity of building across strategies, McKinsey makes the point that no single channel strategy works; the most successful B2B organisations operate in the “rule of thirds”: one-third in-person, one-third remote, one-third self-service. Achieving consistency across the ecosystem is what creates recognition and reliability. When every touchpoint, physical or digital, reinforces the same voice, tone and intent, equity deepens.
Creating a distinct voice and operating on the belief that common ground and mutual interests exist are fundamental components of truly influential thought leadership. Moreover, collaborating intimately with your workforce at every level helps unlock a multi-dimensional voice that reflects your organisation’s ethos and values as well as lived experience. Indeed, the Content Marketing Institute cites bringing your teams into the conversation as essential to building something that stands out, so it’s important to get it right.
Finally, once you’ve reignited your audience’s interest and sparked new conversations, don’t forget to tell them what to do next. Every interaction should have a clear next step, guiding them through the next stage of their journey and further into your digital experience. This is just one of the ways Chesamel works to reinvigorate audience engagement for its clients.
Chesamel’s Approach
Chesamel is more than a consultancy; we’re your partner in transformation.
We help organisations reconnect with their audience by grounding every touchpoint in purpose and personality. Our mission is to build scalable strategies that move beyond volume, designing interconnected ecosystems that create clarity, continuity, and trust.
If you’re ready to create uniquely powerful thought leadership that gets results, we should talk.
Solve audience fatigue with sharper strategies.
