63%
of hidden buyers spend more than an hour a week consuming thought leadership
The people who can sink your proposal won't take your call, but they'll read your thinking.
Edelman and LinkedIn asked nearly 2,000 professionals, including the decision-makers you never meet, how thought leadership shapes who they buy from. The report covers thought leadership broadly, not newsletters alone. We pull out what it means when the expert is you.
71%
of hidden buyers say they have little or no interaction with sales teams
95%
of hidden buyers say strong thought leadership makes them more receptive to sales and marketing outreach
79%
of hidden buyers are more likely to back a proposal in an RFP when the vendor publishes quality thought leadership consistently
You know the person who called you. You've probably met their boss. The 2025 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, the seventh from Edelman and LinkedIn, is about everyone else in the buying group: the people in finance, legal, procurement and operations who may never use your work day to day but can still stop the deal. Edelman calls them hidden buyers.
A service firm has more of them than it thinks. The COO who has to live with your recommendations is one. So is the CFO who looks at your retainer every renewal, and the procurement lead who compares your proposal with two others you'll never see.
Edelman defines thought leadership as content that offers expertise, guidance or a distinct point of view. That covers far more than newsletters, and the report doesn't study newsletters on their own. A newsletter from a firm like yours fits the definition, so we translated each finding into what your issues should do.
63%
of hidden buyers spend more than an hour a week on thought leadership. 64% of target buyers do the same.
The people you never meet read as much as the people who hired you.
63% of hidden buyers spend more than an hour per week consuming thought leadership, on par with 64% of target buyers.
The usual assumption is that finance and procurement only read the contract. Edelman found the opposite. Most of them spend more than an hour a week reading, and somebody's thinking fills that time.
That changes who belongs on your list. Most firms send their newsletter to the one contact they work with. The finance lead who approved the budget probably reads too. So does the operations head who sat in on the kickoff, and the partner who asked the sharp question in the final review. Most of them already read every week. Make sure some of that reading comes from you.
71%
of hidden buyers have little or no interaction with sales teams
They won't take your call, so your thinking has to get there first.
71% of hidden buyers say they have little or no interaction with sales teams. 95% say strong thought leadership makes them more receptive to sales and marketing outreach.
When the owner does the selling, this is the whole problem in two numbers. You can't get a meeting with the CFO who will review your proposal. You can get into her inbox.
Edelman calls thought leadership a Trojan horse, because it builds credibility with hidden buyers before anyone sells them anything. A newsletter does that on a schedule. Every two weeks, the person who will never take your discovery call sees your name next to an idea that helps her do her job. By the time your proposal reaches her desk, she has read you a dozen times.
79%
of hidden buyers are more likely to champion a vendor in an RFP if it publishes quality thought leadership consistently
The reader you never met can argue for you in the room.
79% of hidden buyers say they are more likely to advocate for a proposal during the RFP process if the vendor consistently produces high-quality thought leadership. 51% of hidden decision-influencers say it helps them convince C-level executives, and 52% say it helps them persuade other members of the buying group.
Look at the word in the middle of that finding: consistently. One brilliant article doesn't earn the vote. A steady record does, and a newsletter is a steady record by design.
The other half of the finding is about ammunition. The hidden buyer who likes you still has to convince a CEO and a few colleagues, and she'll do it with whatever you gave her. Write issues she can forward. A clear argument, a fact with its source and a sentence she can repeat in a meeting will do more for you in that room than your capabilities deck ever will.
57%
of hidden buyers prefer quick takeaways over dense reports
A short issue every two weeks beats a white paper once a year.
57% of hidden buyers prefer quick takeaways over dense reports, and 65% prefer content with a more conversational, less formal tone. 60% associate a unique format and design with higher quality.
Thought leadership gets ignored when it runs long, sounds like a committee wrote it, and shows up once a year as a forty-page PDF. One of Edelman's own content strategists says a short, insight-packed post is more likely to land with a hidden buyer than a research report.
A white paper takes months to write and reaches the people who download it. A 600-word issue takes an afternoon and reaches everyone on your list, twenty-six times a year. The hidden buyer gives you a few minutes. Spend them on one idea, written the way you'd explain it across a table, in a format she starts to recognize as yours.
41%
of hidden buyers say the safest choice is what matters most at the moment of purchase
Knowing their business beats being the safe choice.
All things being equal, only 41% of hidden buyers say the safest choice is what matters most at the moment of purchase. Far more prioritize understanding of their business challenges (85%), understanding of industry trends (76%) and domain expertise (74%). 53% say strong content can outweigh brand recognition alone.
This is the biggest finding in the report for a firm your size, because it takes away the famous name's best argument. Nobody gets fired for hiring the big firm, and still fewer than half of hidden buyers rank safety first. They rank understanding first: of their business, of their industry and of the work.
Fewer than half of them put the safe choice first. Most want the firm that understands them.
Your newsletter is where you prove that before the pitch. Write about the trend their industry is arguing over, and say what you think it means. Edelman found that 86% of hidden buyers favor perspectives that challenge their assumptions. The owner's name on the issue carries exactly the expertise they are looking for.
Put the people you never meet on the list.
Start with your current clients and look past your main contact. Who approved the budget? Who sat in on the kickoff and said nothing? Who will review the renewal? Ask your contact who else would find your issues useful, then invite those people to subscribe.
Then send them something worth part of that hour every two weeks. Keep it short. Make one argument. Say where the facts came from. Write it yourself, or let us write it with you.
The firm that wins the vote you never see isn't the one with the biggest name. It's the one whose thinking was already on the table.
We write newsletters that keep businesses talking with the people they serve. If this piece connected with something you've been putting off, tell us what you sell and we'll tell you honestly if a newsletter will help. Start or fix yours
Source: 2025 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, Edelman and LinkedIn, the seventh annual edition. The report page describes the sample as nearly 2,000 global professionals, including both visible and hidden decision-makers. A companion Edelman article gives the sample as 1,934 US business decision makers, with data collected online through the LinkedIn platform in March and April 2025. We read Edelman's published key learnings and summaries and checked the figures above against them on October 23, 2026: the hidden buyer article, the challenger brand article and the content strategy article. Edelman and LinkedIn sell services related to the subject of their survey. None of this is a WTF Growth client result.