The Keys to Bringing Buyers Out From the Shadows
Today’s digital commerce environment means that marketers can learn a lot about consumers who are interested in their products and services. But while that can be a boon for marketers, it’s not something that all prospects like. In fact, a rising number of consumers are actively taking steps to avoid being detected. They don’t want the bother. They don’t want the intrusion. And they don’t relish the feeling of violation that comes from being served up offers immediately after checking something out on the web.
These quiet consumers are known as shadow buyers, specifically because they lurk in the shadows as they seek to learn about the products and services available to meet their needs. They’re researching your products, consuming your content, and even influencing the purchase decisions of others, but they’re invisible to traditional sales funnels.
As Kevin Heimlich, CEO of the Ad Firm, a digital marketing agency in California, puts it: “These are the people silently circling your brand. They’re paying attention. They’re comparing. They’re reading reviews. But they’re not clicking ads or downloading lead magnets. They exist in that invisible layer of intent where traditional funnels fall short.” Shadow buyers don’t respond to requests for their contact information; they’re not attending webinars; and they’re not requesting demos. But, while they prefer to lie in the weeds and avoid detection (and targeting), they often represent some of the highest-value opportunities in a sales pipeline.
“Shadow buyers are among the most valuable and underrated parts of the funnel,” says Aaron Whittaker, vice president of demand generation at Thrive Digital Marketing Agency in Arlington, Texas. They’re high-intent prospects, but he says, “they’re just quietly studying, comparing, and waiting for the right time or encouragement to act.”
Shadow Buyers Elusive in Both B2C and B2B Environments
In B2C environments, Heimlich says, “Shadow buyers are usually more emotionally driven. They might follow your brand on social media, watch your Instagram Stories for weeks, add items to their cart, and disappear. You won’t see them in your CRM, but they’re there, stacking impressions. The trick is to track passive engagement: repeat site visits, social views, and branded search behavior.”
In the B2B environment, the climate is even murkier.
“In B2B, shadow buyers are often the people with influence, budget sway, or internal pull, but who never fill out a form or join a demo,” explains Vito Vishnepolsky, founder and CEO of Martal Group, a sales-as-a-service company based in Oakville, Ontario. “They are the [chief operating officers] who quietly vet vendors, the sales directors looped into tech decisions, or the technical buyers doing back-channel research,” he says.
Heimlich agrees. In B2B environments, he points out, shadow buyers tend to be part of a larger buying committee. “They’re likely not the people filling out your form, but they are the ones Googling your white paper five times and sharing your LinkedIn posts in internal Slack threads,” he says.
This behavior is becoming increasingly common as buyers in both B2B and B2C settings seek to maintain control over their purchasing processes, preferring to shop incognito without having to interact with companies or their sales armies.
It’s not unlike consumers shopping for furniture who know that salespeople will descend upon them as soon as they enter the store and wishing they could be invisible. While digital channels tend to provide ample opportunities to track buyer behavior, that tracking isn’t infallible, and consumers are finding new ways to gather the information they need without tipping their hands to the bots or the business development staff.
Identification Strategies: Reading the Digital Breadcrumbs
Before e-commerce emerged as a major trend in both B2B and B2C circles, potential buyers were largely hidden. Unless they reached out to request information, marketers had no way of telling if they were reading their ads, talking to friends or relatives about their products and services, or even frequenting their stores.
Today, of course, digital technologies and sophisticated behavioral tracking can identify shadow buyers, as long as marketers know what to look for.
“To find them, we lean heavily on behavioral signals—return visits to a pricing page, time on site, scroll depth, saving items or downloading gated content without initiating a demo request,” Whittaker explains. His team uses tools like Clearbit Reveal, now part of HubSpot, and 6sense to identify accounts showing intent signals.
With his B2B campaigns, Heimlich says, “we identify [shadow buyers] by looking at IP-level firmographics, high bounce but high time on-site sessions, or repeat visits to specific service pages. Soft-touch email sequences that deliver valuable market insights, not sales pitches, are often the nudge that turns quiet interest into a booked call.”
There are other ways that shadow buyers might make themselves known, however unintentionally. They include the following:
- Multiple visits to high-intent pages like pricing, case studies, or product comparisons.
- Deep engagement with educational content without conversion.
- Spending a long time on your site and making repeat visits over time.
- Engaging in passive engagement with brand content on social platforms.
Today’s advanced technologies can be very useful in unearthing these secretive shoppers. But while ample tech tools exist to help detect shadow buyers, marketers should be cautious about whether to engage with them proactively and, if so, how to do it.
Engagement Without Alienation
The biggest mistake companies make with shadow buyers is treating them like traditional leads, experts caution. Aggressive sales tactics that work for active prospects can backfire spectacularly with shadow buyers, who value their anonymity.
“The subtle way is the right way,” Whittaker emphasizes. “Shadow buyers are put off by aggressive [calls to action]. Instead, we see strong improvements when we make the next step feel like their idea and we provide content that answers questions they didn’t ask or focuses on a problem they’re encountering.”
Instead of taking an overt or aggressive approach, focusing on providing value to these potential buyers can generate better results. This could involve the following:
- Sharing informative educational content, such as industry reports or product guides, that avoids being overtly self-promoting. Focus on content designed to help prospects understand potential solutions and how they might benefit from them. Consider the type of information they might need to help make purchase decisions.
- Retargeting based on the specific actions of prospects, focusing on behavioral triggers instead of demographic characteristics. For example, you might send someone who has visited a pricing page multiple times information on how to do ROI calculations instead of trying to schedule a sales call.
- Using engaging touchpoints like interactive tools, calculators, quizzes, and other low-friction tools that provide value while gently moving prospects forward.
These approaches are more problem-focused and directed to buyer needs rather than the traditional “buy, buy, buy!” approach that tends to alienate prospects.
And then, while shadow buyers exist in both B2B and B2C channels, they look and act differently and need to be approached differently, experts agree. Tailored approaches to B2B vs. B2C buyer differences and preferences can yield the best results.
Successful B2B shadow buyer strategies include the following:
- Industry-specific case studies and ROI data.
- Technical whitepapers and implementation guides.
- Peer reviews and third-party validation.
- Account-based marketing for high-value prospects.
Alternatively, in the B2C context, consumer shadow buyers typically have shorter research cycles than their B2B counterparts but are more influenced by emotional factors and social proof. B2C buyers are likely more engaged in comparison shopping across multiple brands as they consider personal fit and value.
Strategies that work best to engage B2C buyers include the following:
- user-generated content and authentic reviews;
- behind-the-scenes content and brand storytelling;
- interactive product discovery tools; and
- social media retargeting with lifestyle content.
The key difference between B2C and B2B environments, Heimlich says, is that “In B2B, shadow buyers are usually validating. In B2C, they’re emotionally warming up. You reach each group with precision, not pressure.”
The kind of engagement that both B2B and B2C shadow buyers require was simply not possible in an analog era. Today’s digital environment, though, offers ample opportunity to connect with and engage buyers in both categories.
The process of converting shadow buyers is an important one for today’s marketers to understand, but it can be onerous, even given the wide range of technologies available to help.
Conversion Strategies That Work
Converting shadow buyers requires patience and a fundamentally different approach than traditional lead conversion. The goal isn’t to accelerate the timeline but to earn potential buyers’ trust and remain relevant throughout their research. Gradual engagement works better than aggressive sales tactics.
“We make the next step feel like their idea,” Whittaker explains, advocating for what amounts to progressive disclosure—offering more detailed information as prospects demonstrate deeper interest, but without attempting to force form submissions at each step of the way.
Social proof also plays an important role in helping to build confidence among anonymous researchers. Shadow buyers will seek validation from peers and existing customers as part of their research process. This can occur via social media channels where interest can be discerned. But it can and does also occur offline.
These interested buyers are also likely to be turned off by companies that make their research difficult. For instance, hiding pricing information or forcing interested people to reach out for information, even if that only involves downloading a document, can be off-putting. Instead, companies that make pricing information clear and easy to navigate can break down barriers that could otherwise send these potential customers to competitors.
Timing is the most critical element of this process, experts say. Prospects shouldn’t be continually pushed to action; instead behavioral triggers can be used to help deliver relevant information at the right moment to allow shadow buyers to engage at their own pace.
In addition, adding the human element to these interactions can help, says Gianluca Ferruggia, general manager of DesignRush, a provider of a marketplace and review platform for agencies in software, app development, design, and marketing. He shares an example of a client in the healthcare tech industry. “We couldn’t connect with highly specialized buyers through standard demand generation or sales outreach, so we pivoted by enlisting practitioners—real decision makers in that vertical—to be our brand’s public faces.”
Marketers were being ignored, he says, “but once we brought physicians on board to lead webinars, field technical threads, and join relevant online forums, engagement shifted from passive lurking to direct DMs and warm introductions. Doctors wanted to hear from other doctors, not from marketers.”
The results proved the value of making more human connections. “Within two quarters, deals we sourced via these channels moved through the pipeline around 30 percent faster than our typical sales cycles, and the average contract value on these deals exceeded our baseline by roughly 20 percent,” Ferruggia says.
“Shadow buyers rarely declare their intent through gated content or site analytics,” Ferruggia notes. To make these connections, he says, “we built a CRM process where our team flags any opportunity that originated through nontraditional channels, like Slack intros, direct social messages, or peer-to-peer referrals driven by our expert evangelists. This simple checkbox, cross-verified in weekly reviews, showed us that pipeline velocity and deal values consistently spiked when an industry expert bridged that first conversation.”
Those connections, he says further, “were almost twice as likely to close compared to cold digital leads, even when the initial touchpoint wasn’t recorded in official marketing attribution tools.”
The key takeaway: “If you can’t capture the early signal with pixels, engineer human proximity and track its shadow, however imperfectly,” Ferruggia says.
The Future of Shadow Buyer Engagement
As privacy regulations tighten and buyers demand more control over their purchasing journeys, shadow buyer behavior is likely to become even more prevalent. It’s important for CRM professionals to develop a solid understanding of this group of motivated prospects and how they can be effectively nurtured without feeling targeted, using both analog and digital means.
“Specialized buyers don’t want to be sold; they want a trusted peer to cut through noise and uncertainty,” Ferruggia says. “In my experience, putting genuine practitioners at the front lines, then making evangelist influence measurable—even through an imperfect CRM flag—pulls these shadow players into the light far more effectively than any tech stack or campaign automation alone.”
The future, according to Ferruggia, belongs to those who can successfully engage the prospects they can’t see. “Those that develop these capabilities now will be best positioned to capture value from this hidden market segment moving forward. Those that don’t risk losing those customers to competitors that have mastered the intricacies of drawing shadow buyers out of the shadows.”
Linda Pophal is a freelance business journalist and content marketer who writes for various business and trade publications. Pophal does content marketing for Fortune 500 companies, small businesses, and individuals on a wide range of subjects, from human resource management and employee relations to marketing, technology, healthcare industry trends, and more.