Affinity represents a liking, preference, or connection. Building affinity takes time and a focus on value-added content and shareability. Affinity is a soft metric best valued for trends, and it provides directional insight.
Marketing may discover benefits in decision-making where affinity metrics offer connections between programs and perceptions. This ties into the marketing mix of activities, people, and investments. This influences content and conversation focused on storytelling and thought leadership. Consider what you use to measure the value of affinity and tie sentiment to revenue through marketing.
The emotional factors associated with affinity tend to strongly influence long-term loyalty and advocacy, while practical affinity may drive consistent purchasing behavior. Long-term requires nurture programs that sprinkle relevant content and conversation toward topically oriented target audience members who meet demographic criteria. Those points of contact need to turn into points of value with ideas, peer comparisons, or best practices that are relevant and retained in some way, even as a positive impression. Affinity builds over time.
Affinity is a sentiment that includes relationship and experience perceptions. Each perception is best measured for trend insight around how views change and strengthen.
Affinity offers an analytical area that marketing can shape around momentum. A positive sentiment motivates more top-of-mind thinking, which we call buzz. Marketing needs to measure its buzz and the changes over time in perception.
Reaching a B2B audience benefits from credibility, expertise, and visibility over time. Marketing has the most direct and consistent effect on affinity. It extends beyond brand awareness as positive feelings bring endorsement and advocacy.

Affinity Helps Marketers Reach the B2B Buyer

The world of prospects is more fragmented, hidden from view by social media layers, and hit daily by so much white noise that they put in earplugs to avoid hearing loss. In corporations, these buying team members are often hidden from demand generation pursuit behind voicemail and email folders. They go at a fast pace and, in the past, averaged nine members. They are hard to find and hard to reach to influence.
In decades past, there was a widely held belief that a prospect must be touched by a brand offering seven times on average to compel those who might pursue a product or service to buy. Based on a review of current B2B buyer behavior, my estimation suggests that fifteen is the new norm. In thirty years, the number of required touches has doubled; with it, the complexity of the awareness, interest, and preference process has doubled.
Affinity’s key benefit is that it does some of the selling for marketers and reduces the cost of sales. Use it to create buzz within buying teams, use thought leadership to bubble up interest and momentum, and allow its alignment with business objectives to trickle down from executives to processes and teams. Hear its echo and see its measurable impact on business performance in one key way: making the shortlist. Affinity can help put sales in a position to close the deal.