Guide to Q4 for B2B Advertisers
There’s a lot of guides out there for how to deal with Q4 as a B2C marketer. But what about B2B?
I’ve gone through Q4 with 50+ B2B clients and here’s what I’ve learned.
If you have a product that can be impulse purchased or purchased as a gift - which is rare in B2B - you can treat Q4 just like B2C does, doing extra promotions and spending during BFCM weekend. This is maybe 2% of B2B companies.
For the other 98%, you want to use an anti-cyclical media buying strategy for attention based marketing on Facebook, Instagram and other channels you share with consumer.
There’s no need to adjust budgets or bids on Search or LinkedIn. On Search, either your business terms will have less traffic or they won’t, the budget you set won’t affect that (unless you share B2C keywords, in which case, analyze carefully). On LinkedIn, there’s not enough competition from consumer to matter.
Anti-Cyclical Media Buying Strategy
Take a look at this chart of Facebook+Instagram CPMs over time (it’s real data averaged from a bunch of RP clients).
You’ll see the same pattern on other consumer focused advertising channels like TikTok, Twitter, Snapchat, etc. CPMs are higher for everyone at this time. But in B2C, its worth spending anyway. Buyer intent is so much higher in this time period that you’ll make up for the higher CPMs with better conversion rates. B2B has to suffer the CPMs with no appreciable lift in conversion rates that I’ve ever seen in the data.
If you do the math (I can do it because I have actual data, you can’t because the chart is not that precise), you spend 15-20% more than the yearly average per impression during the Peak Holiday timeframe, and 15-20% less than the yearly average during the Golden Time. That’s an arbitrage of 40% of cost!
So, I recommend spending 20%-40% lower in a straight tranche from Nov 15 - Dec 10 and using that budget from Dec 15 - Jan 1.
Some quick notes:
I don’t recommend you cut more specifically on BFCM weekend, because adjusting your budget too often can hurt the algorithm and performance.
Also, this should be account specific. If cutting your budget that much would reduce your campaigns below a viable amount of conversions, don’t do it.
Accelerating in Mid-December
As you can see in the same chart, Mid-December is an amazing time to push B2B attention based ad spend.
Costs to serve ads are as low as they’ll ever be.
Potential buyers are in a good mood with not as much work to do, with more time to think and read things.
The rub is, if you’re a sales based organization, you need reps to be able to service these leads in the Golden Time. It’s a strategic discussion to have with the sales team, but usually there’s a few reps willing to schedule vacations on a different time and get more commission.
If you’re PLG, good news, the above doesn’t matter and the Golden Time has no drawbacks for you.
In Summary - B2B Advertising in Q4
1) On attention-based marketing channels you share with consumer, cut spend from Nov 15 - Dec 10 and accelerate from Dec 15 onwards.
2) You don’t have to do anything on LinkedIn or Search, unless you share search keywords with consumer terms.
This is the basics of what we’ve learned about advertising in Q4 from managing 50+ B2B ad accounts and $100M+ in B2B direct response ad spend.
Spend more than $30k a month on ads, and want a free audit of your B2B ad accounts? Fill out the form on our homepage.