How External Influences Are Reshaping B2B Marketing Measurement

There’s a shift in how B2B marketers think about measurement, and it’s starting to reshape how we define performance. In financial services especially, buyer journeys are increasingly complex, but most attribution models haven’t adapted. The real signals influencing decisions often go unseen, and that’s where opportunity is being missed.

According to Forrester’s 2025 B2B Marketing and Sales Predictions, nearly half of younger B2B buyers now factor in 10 or more external influencers when making purchase decisions. In financial services, where Millennials and Gen Z already make up 71% of B2B buyers, that has big implications for how we think about influence, and what we count as success.

What We’re Not Measuring

A prospect might hear your brand mentioned on a podcast, see a peer’s LinkedIn comment, hear you referenced at a roundtable, then visit your site. Traditional attribution tools typically credit the last click. But those earlier touchpoints often do more to shape perception.

Influence now includes analyst commentary, private Slack threads, group chats, and informal recommendations that don’t get logged in a CRM or tracked through UTMs. Yet these are often the moments that build trust.

Many teams still optimise around what they can measure: traffic, click-throughs, and form fills. But those metrics don’t always reflect where decisions are actually being shaped.

The Three Influence Horizons

In reality, influence tends to fall across three overlapping areas: 

1. Owned: What you publish and promote through your channels
2. Earned: Coverage, mentions, and recognition you can shape but not fully control
3. Ambient: Peer discussions and indirect signals that sit outside your visibility

While most measurement focuses on owned assets, much of the meaningful influence now happens in the earned and ambient spaces.

What This Means for Content Strategy

If your buyers are being guided by external voices, your content should support those voices as well as your direct channels. It’s not just about clicks. It’s about being credible enough to show up in conversations you’re not part of. 

That might include: 

• Structuring content so it’s easy to reference in analyst reports or media 
• Developing insights that can be shared in Slack channels or community threads 
• Creating resources that advocates, partners, or prospects can confidently pass on

For many teams, this means shifting how content is viewed. It’s not just a conversion tool. It’s also an asset that fuels the wider influence ecosystem around your brand.

Evolving How We Measure Influence

So what does this look like in practice? It varies by team, but some of the more useful tactics we’re seeing include: 

• Keeping an eye on how often your brand is mentioned across LinkedIn, Reddit, Quora or industry-specific forums
• Noting when your content is cited by analysts or picked up in influencer posts
• Mapping who’s shaping conversations around your target accounts, especially in niche verticals 
• Looking at how content spreads through third-party channels and what kind of sentiment it carries

None of this is about replacing attribution. It’s about rounding it out, and giving yourself a clearer view of what’s influencing decisions, even when you’re not in the room.

Where This Goes Next

Younger buyers are already operating in this world. They don’t only rely on brand comms, they piece together opinions from a dozen trusted voices and make decisions from there.

For financial services marketers, that means we need to build measurement models that reflect influence, not just interaction. And content strategies that work with, not against, the wider network of decision-shaping conversations.

Here’s the exciting part. Many of the most influential touchpoints in your buyer’s journey will never hit your CRM. But they’re there. And the brands that figure out how to map them, even roughly, will start making sharper calls on where to invest, how to build trust, and when to step back and let others do the talking

In the next post, we’ll break down how marketing teams can begin to approach this in practice. Including what to measure, how to support external influence, and where to focus to build visibility beyond direct touchpoints. 

Curious how this plays out in your market? We’d love to discuss how external influence networks are affecting your campaigns. Let’s talk about what we’re seeing and how to adapt.