Don't buy a list.
Build one.
We build content for the exact product you sell, distribute it through publications your buyers already read, and hand you a list of the people who showed real interest. Your sales team takes it from there.
Bought lists are still the default.That is the problem.
You pull 5,000 contacts out of Apollo, ZoomInfo, or a vendor with a friendly logo. The list looks great in a spreadsheet. Names, titles, emails, company sizes. Your team starts working it on Monday morning.
By Friday you have learned the same thing every B2B company learns when it buys a list. Half the emails bounce. Most of the rest never open. The few who reply do so to ask you to stop.
A purchased list is a list of names. What you actually need is a list of buyers, and buyers cannot be bought. They have to be earned, one piece of useful content at a time.
Build a list of people who showed interest in what you actually sell.
This is the alternative most B2B teams never get to try, because they do not have the publications and the content engine to do it themselves.
Take a company that sells enterprise cybersecurity software. The bought-list version is to pull every CISO out of a database, start dialing, and watch most calls go to voicemail. The built-list version is different. We write content for CISOs evaluating their security stack: threat reports, vendor comparison frameworks, compliance checklists.
The people who download that content are self-identifying as actively evaluating security software. The vendor now owns a list of CISOs who have shown specific interest in the product they actually sell. Translate that to your category.
"You cannot buy a buyer. You can only earn one."
Four stages. Built around the product you sell.
Build the content
Buyer's guides, ROI calculators, vendor scorecards, market reports. Tightly matched to what you sell, so the people it attracts are pre-qualified by their own interest.
Distribute through our publications
The asset lives inside a niche B2B publication your buyers trust. Precise paid placement layered on top extends reach to your exact ICP.
Capture with intent data
Every download is enriched with role, company, industry, traffic source, content engagement. Every lead arrives with full context attached.
Hand the list to your team
Delivered ready to work. Your marketing and sales team takes over from there. We built the list. You own it.
What qualified actually means to us.
A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is supposed to mean a person who fits your customer profile and has shown intent to buy. In practice, most vendors stretch that definition until anyone in the database counts. We do not. For us, a lead only counts if it matches all four of these, defined by you up front.
Location
Country, state, and city. Only the geographies you actually sell to.
Industry
Only the industries your product is built for, defined up front.
Company size
By number of employees. Set the floor and ceiling that match your ICP.
Role
Only the job titles your sales team actually wants to talk to.
If any of the four is off, the lead does not get delivered. It does not count toward the target. And you do not pay for it.
Pay per qualified leadWhat this looks like in practice.
B2B MQLs delivered for clients in the last year.
SBA loans and specialized business financing across South Florida.
US Century Bank, one of the largest community banks in Miami-Dade County with over $2.5B in assets, needed a list of small business owners actively researching SBA loans, not a generic database of small businesses. In partnership with Create180, we built a bilingual content ecosystem in English and Spanish, distributed natively across Yahoo, CNN Business, and Reuters, layered with targeted LinkedIn campaigns to the bank's exact ICP.
Marketing-qualified leads delivered to the bank's sales team
Consecutive months hitting monthly MQL targets, and counting
Of delivered leads matched location, industry, company size, and role
"Our sales team is more engaged with the leads we're bringing in, as they're closely aligned with what they're trying to sell. They're also more motivated and appreciative when working with higher-quality, sales-ready leads."
Beatriz Gonzalez · SVP, Marketing Manager · US Century Bank
Three reasons a built list outperforms a bought one.
A built list is opted in
Every person on it raised their hand for content about the product you sell. A bought list is a cold list of names who never agreed to hear from you. The difference shows up in the first sentence of the first call.
A built list comes with context
Sales gets a profile, not an email: role, company, what content they engaged with, what they cared about. Bought lists give you a row in a CSV.
A built list compounds
Every campaign adds more buyers to a database you own. Bought lists go stale the day you buy them and have to be repurchased every quarter.
This is built for a specific kind of company.
A strong fit if
- You have a marketing and sales team that can work and nurture a list of qualified leads.
- You sell a considered B2B product with a deal size of at least $60K a year.
- Your buyers are senior, specific, and research before they buy.
- You want to own the list of buyers who showed interest in your product, not rent attention from a data broker.
The wrong fit if
- You do not have the team to follow up on the leads we deliver. (Consider the Castleberry Flywheel instead.)
- You are a B2C company.
- Your lead generation budget is below $2K a month.
- You sell to a horizontal audience with no clear publication match.
What a Castleberry MQL engagement includes.
Most demand agencies rent attention on channels they do not own. We do not. Every Castleberry MQL campaign runs through our own portfolio of niche B2B publications, each one built around a specific industry and audience. The publication is what makes the lead trust the offer before they ever see your name.
Distribution through our own publications — the editorial channels we operate for senior decision-makers in your category.
Our pricing varies depending on your audience.
The things buyers ask first.
See what your list would look like.
Tell us your offer and your ICP. We will come back with the specific plan: the gated asset we would build, the publication we would distribute it through, the realistic lead target, and the timeline.