Stop Targeting Everyone. How to Use the Power-Interest Grid for Smarter B2B Campaigns.

You get the brief. The product is a B2B HR software platform. The target audience is "HR professionals and business decision-makers at companies with 50 to 500 employees." You open the ad platform, set the job titles, pick the industries, layer in some relevant interests, set a budget, and launch.

The campaign runs. You get impressions, some clicks, a handful of leads. But the leads do not convert. Sales tells you the people filling in the form are not the people who can actually buy. The budget gets questioned. The campaign gets paused.

This is one of the most common patterns I see from marketers who are comfortable running campaigns but are still learning how to plan them. The problem is not the execution. The problem is that the audience was defined as a single group when the actual buying decision involves multiple people with completely different levels of power, interest, and motivation.

In this post I want to walk you through a framework I use to solve this before a single targeting parameter gets set: the Power-Interest Grid. I will use BetterHR (betterhr.com), a B2B HR and payroll SaaS platform operating across Southeast Asia, as the example throughout.

The Reality of B2B Buying

Why B2B Products Have Multiple Audiences, Not One

When someone buys a pair of shoes online, there is typically one person making the decision. When a company buys an HR software platform, there is almost never just one person involved.

Research from Forrester shows the average B2B purchase now involves around 13 internal stakeholders, with some estimates placing the full decision network at over 20 people when external influencers are included.^[1] A separate study found that 79% of B2B purchases require CFO or senior budget-holder approval,^[2] and 72% of purchases span multiple organizational functions including operations, finance, and end users.^[3]

The critical insight is this: the person who feels the problem most acutely is rarely the person who approves the budget. The person who approves the budget is often barely aware the evaluation is happening until a recommendation lands on their desk. And the person who will actually use the product every day has opinions that can either build internal momentum or quietly kill the deal.

This is why a single-audience campaign strategy fails structurally in B2B, not just tactically. You might be reaching the right industry, the right company size, and the right job functions. But if every person in that audience sees the same message framed the same way, you are almost certainly speaking well to one group and poorly to everyone else.

The fix is not to run more campaigns or spend more budget. It is to understand the buying group first, and then build your audience strategy around it. That is where the Power-Interest Grid comes in.

The Framework

Introducing the Power-Interest Grid

The Power-Interest Grid is a stakeholder mapping framework originally developed by Colin Eden and Fran Ackermann in their 1998 book Making Strategy.^[4] It was designed for strategy and project management, but it translates directly and cleanly into audience planning for digital marketing.

The grid plots people on two axes. The vertical axis represents Power: the ability to influence or approve a decision. In a B2B buying context, this means budget authority, sign-off power, or the ability to block or champion a purchase. The horizontal axis represents Interest: how directly and personally affected someone is by the product, how closely they pay attention to the problem it solves.

Plotting stakeholders on these two axes produces four quadrants, each with a distinct engagement strategy.

Manage Closely (High Power, High Interest) is your most important audience segment. These stakeholders are directly affected by the problem and have the influence to drive a decision. In digital marketing terms, they deserve your deepest investment: the most relevant messaging, the most nurturing, the most tailored content.

Keep Satisfied (High Power, Low Interest) is the quadrant most beginner marketers ignore entirely. These stakeholders have budget authority and final decision power, but they are not actively searching for a solution. They need to be reached, but with a completely different approach: business outcomes and ROI, not product features.

Keep Informed (Low Power, High Interest) are highly engaged but rarely control the final decision. In a B2B campaign, these are often the daily users of the product. Ignoring them is a mistake because they can create internal advocacy or internal resistance. But investing too heavily here at the expense of the other quadrants is the exact mistake that produces engaged leads that never convert.

Monitor (Low Power, Low Interest) requires minimal campaign investment. Track this group but do not prioritize it.

The Case Study

Staging the BetterHR Scenario

To make this concrete, I want to walk through a real example. I am going to use BetterHR (betterhr.com) as the case study for this post. BetterHR is a multi-country HR and payroll SaaS platform serving companies across Southeast Asia, covering payroll compliance across nine countries including Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, and more. It is a genuinely useful product that replaces disconnected spreadsheets and manual HR processes with a unified platform at $2.20 per active user per month.

I have worked on early-stage lead generation strategy in this space, and BetterHR is a product I know well. It makes a good case study here because it has exactly the kind of multi-stakeholder buying dynamic that makes single-audience campaigns fail.

The brief, as it would typically arrive, sounds simple: reach companies in Southeast Asia that need better HR and payroll software. But the moment you ask "who actually makes this decision?", the picture gets more complex immediately.

In practice, a typical BetterHR buying decision involves three distinct groups of people, each with a different role, different concerns, and a different relationship to the purchase:

Plotting the Grid

Mapping BetterHR Stakeholders to Their Quadrants

Now we take each stakeholder group and plot them explicitly. The placement is not arbitrary. Each position reflects a deliberate assessment of how much power this person has over the buying decision, and how directly interested they are in the product on a day-to-day basis.

Messaging Strategy

What the Grid Tells You About How to Communicate

Plotting the grid is not the end of the exercise. It is the start of the real work. Once you know where each stakeholder sits, you can decide what to say to them, how to say it, and what you want them to do next.

This is the part that makes the biggest practical difference. The same product, positioned differently for each quadrant, will outperform a single blended message every time in a B2B context.

A few things worth highlighting in this matrix. First, notice how the CEO messaging contains zero product features. No mention of attendance tracking, leave management, or payroll runs. The CEO does not care about those things at the awareness stage. They care about what the business gains. Leading with features when talking to a budget holder is one of the fastest ways to lose their attention.

Second, notice that the HR Manager content includes helping them build the internal business case for the CEO. This is a detail that most beginner marketers miss. The HR Manager is not just a lead to convert. They are an internal champion who needs tools to sell the idea upward. If your content gives them those tools, you are not just marketing to them, you are marketing through them.

Third, the operational HR staff content is not about conversion. It is about advocacy and reduced resistance. An operational HR team that is excited about a new platform will make the CEO's decision easier. One that is skeptical or anxious will create friction at exactly the wrong moment.

From Grid to Campaign Plan

Turning the Audience Map Into Your Campaign Structure

The grid and the messaging matrix give you everything you need to structure a proper campaign audience plan. Here is how it translates in practice.

Audience 1: HR Manager and HR Director. This is your primary acquisition audience. They are High Power and High Interest, which means they are both reachable through interest and job-title targeting and motivated enough to engage with substantive content. Target by job function (Human Resources), seniority (Manager, Director, Senior), and industry. Your goal is lead generation. Your content is deep and product-focused. Your CTA drives to a demo, a free trial, or a detailed case study.

Audience 2: CEO and Business Owner. This is your secondary audience, but arguably the most important one to get right. They are harder to reach because their job titles are broad and their interest signals are low. They are not clicking on HR software ads. Your best approach is a separate awareness campaign or a remarketing campaign targeting people who visited your site but did not convert, layered with seniority and company size filters. Content must be short, outcome-focused, and framed as a business decision, not a product choice.

Audience 3: Operational HR Staff. This is your tertiary audience. Reach them through content marketing, organic social, and low-cost awareness campaigns. Focus on usefulness and empathy. You are not trying to generate leads from this group. You are trying to build familiarity so that when the evaluation process begins internally, the product already has a positive reputation among the people who will use it.

Conclusion

The Grid Is the Brief

The Power-Interest Grid is not an extra step in the planning process. It is the foundation the brief should be built on before a single targeting parameter gets set.

Every B2B product has a buying group. Every buying group has different levels of power and interest. The marketer's job is to understand that structure and build a campaign that works across it, not around it, not through it, but across it.

The mistake of combining everyone into one audience and sending one message is not a targeting mistake. It is a thinking mistake. It comes from treating the brief as the audience definition instead of treating the audience definition as the output of a proper stakeholder analysis.

Start with the grid. Plot your stakeholders. Ask what each group cares about, what would make them act, and what role they play in the actual decision. Then build your audiences, your creative briefs, and your CTAs from that map.

That is what separates a campaign that generates engagement from a campaign that generates decisions.