Marketing to Buyers Who Don't Know Your Category Exists

To market a product buyers don't know they need, stop leading with your category name and meet them in the searches they already make: their problem, and ways to fix the homegrown tool they built. Then show them, plainly, how a purpose-built product compares.

A go-to-market leader I spoke with recently said one of the hardest parts of his job is getting into the right rooms, because some people don't even realize a product like his exists. They think they just need to keep hacking on their homegrown thing.

That's a different problem from losing to a competitor. Nobody is comparing you to anyone. They don't know there's a comparison to make.

Why category marketing misses these buyers

Most marketing assumes buyers know what they're shopping for. You target your category name, you compete for "best [category]," you build comparison pages against direct competitors.

That's all useful for buyers who already know. But a buyer who doesn't know your category exists will never type its name. They're typing something like:

• "how to fix [specific recurring problem]"
• "[tool they use] keeps breaking when [situation]"
• "best way to manage [task] at scale"
• "should we build our own [thing]"

If your pages don't answer those, you're invisible to them.

Write for the problem first

Start with the problem in the buyer's language. Look at sales calls, support questions and the searches that eventually brought customers to you. What were they trying to do before they knew you existed?

Then build pages that answer those problem searches directly. Explain the problem clearly. Explain the common ways people solve it, including the homegrown ones. Then introduce the kind of product that solves it, and only then, your product.

Speak to the workaround

Buyers with a homegrown fix aren't wrong. Their fix probably worked for a while. Respect that.

What they often don't see is where it breaks. So write about that truthfully:

• What happens to the workaround as the team grows?
• Who maintains it, and what happens when they leave?
• What does it cost in time each month?
• What can't it do that they'll need next year?

A page titled something like "When a homegrown [thing] stops scaling" can reach a buyer at exactly the moment they're feeling it.

Make the build-versus-buy comparison easy to find

At some point, a buyer with a homegrown fix will ask, should we keep building this or buy something? Give them a page that answers it truthfully.

Show both sides. What building really costs, in people, time and upkeep. What buying costs. When building is actually the right answer. That last part matters. A comparison that admits when you're not the right fit is one people trust, and one they'll forward to their boss.

Be patient with it

Educating a market takes longer than competing in one. These pages may not get huge traffic. But the people who find them have the problem, and very few vendors are speaking to them yet.

Signs your buyers don't know you exist

• Prospects say "I didn't know anything like this existed" on first calls.
• Your category name gets very little search volume.
• Lost deals are mostly "we'll keep doing it ourselves."
• Customers describe what you do in different words than you use.

What to do this week

Ask your sales team for the exact phrases prospects used to describe their problem before they knew about you. Search those phrases yourself and see what comes up. If it's forums, scattered articles or nothing at all, you've found an opening. Write one page that answers the most common phrase directly, explains the homegrown fix fairly and shows where it breaks.

A worked example

Say your product replaces the spreadsheets and scripts operations teams use to track something by hand. Those teams don't search for your category. They search for things like "how to stop spreadsheet errors in [task]" or "automate [task] without IT." A page titled with that phrase, opening with the problem in their words, showing the spreadsheet approach fairly and then where it breaks, meets them exactly where they are. Your category name can appear halfway down, once they care.

Common mistakes

• Leading with category jargon. If buyers don't know the term, they won't search it.
• Mocking the homegrown fix. The person who built it might be your buyer.

Find the searches you're missing

The first step is knowing which problem and workaround searches your buyers make, and whether you show up for any of them. The 15-minute traffic check shows you.

See the traffic you're missing. BoFu, Baby builds bottom-of-funnel content engines for B2B companies: 15 money pages and 15 supporting posts in 90 days, built to rank on Google and get you named by ChatGPT. See what you're missing.