B2B Ad Strategy by Stage
There are a million articles out there written about the various stages tech start-ups go through. One common breakdown looks like this.
Seed Stage - This stage is from founding day until the start-up finds product-market fit.
Growth Stage - After a start-up finds a product-market fit, they try to scale as much as possible in this stage with large marketing investments.
Late Stage - After becoming a major player in your category, growth rates fall, and traditional marketing becomes more applicable.
One under-discussed subject is how digital advertising strategy changes by company stage.
It’s pretty common for people to give generalized advice that only applies to one stage and not the other.
In this guide, we hope to clear up what works in B2B ads for each stage!
Seed Stage
It is hard to make ads work in the seed stage. You don’t have the well-oiled sales funnel that bigger companies do.
In addition, If your ads aren’t working, how do you know it’s because you don’t have Product-Market Fit (PMF) or if your ad efforts aren’t good enough? It’s very hard to know for sure where the issues are.
Therefore, the primary purpose of seed-stage advertising is to learn about your customers and try to make breakthroughs.
Every incubator preaches the importance of talking to your customers to successfully grow your business. This is an extension of that.
So, in light of how important learning is, here’s our recommendation for seed-stage companies.
1. You have a bigger hurdle to prove your credibility in your industry. This means *content*, like ebooks, tools, guides, and checklists, is very important. Creating content your target customers will find insightful is your number one priority before running even ads.
a.The B2B content golden rules are
Only make content closely related to your target customer’s needs.
2. Only make content you can upsell into your product, meaning the content should be related to your company’s Unique-Selling-Proposition.
Do not try Product-Led-Growth at the start. You need to be talking to customers - you don’t learn enough when it’s just them using your software unmonitored.
Collect as much information in your form as you reasonably can.
a. Even if extra form fields decrease the conversion rate by 20%, it’s worth it for the long-term learning on how leads with different criteria react to your product and sales pitch.
b. On content ad forms, ask a question, “Do you want a demo call?” This will help establish which leads have buying intent earlier.
Best talent to work with at this stage: A mix of freelancers and FTEs. Focus on content marketing and maropps skills sets. This is too early for a traditional agency to be effective.
Growth Stage
Most of our B2B ad library is devoted to growth-stage companies, so we won’t spend too much time here.
Here’s what you need to know:
The playbook of growth stage B2B advertisers is large scale digital ad campaigns on Linkedin, Google, and Meta. These campaigns are generally direct response and have pipeline-producing goals. They typically promote offers in their ads of either content or incentives.
a. LinkedIn is usually better for B2Enterprise, Meta for B2SMB. Search for both when intent exists.
b. For the full playbook, check out our CMO’s Guide to B2B.
2. Budgets are generally set by aiming for as many new customers as possible under a $X CAC.
3. There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit, so ads, when effective, can scale a company rapidly.
Best talent to work with at this stage: Expertise is really important at this stage. Wrong decisions can cost millions of dollars in media efficiency. We highly recommend either working with an expert agency, expert freelancers or hiring seniors. Nothing kills high spend campaigns like low experience talent.
Late Stage
Late-stage B2B advertising is comprised of two elements:
Wringing out optimization improvements.
a. All ad campaigns decline in performance over time. This is normal and called audience fatigue.
b. Therefore, one big job of late-stage marketing teams is what we call “fatigue maintenance”. It’s just making sure you constantly present new creative and offers to your target audience Offers can be new ebooks, webinars, in person invitations, gift cards etc.
2. Testing step-change functions to improve results.
a. Companies often want to explore new areas for marginal growth at this stage.
One area is international expansion.
Another is running pure Brand campaigns at scale (This has a lot of pitfalls!)
Another popular pivot is testing PLG advertising.
As B2B companies get bigger, tracking and attribution also (hopefully) gets more sophisticated so analyses can be done in greater depth. Around this stage is when companies also complete their first successful lift tests.