The CMO’s Guide to B2B Advertising
Who should read this guide?
This guide is for CMOs and marketing directors looking for levers to majorly impact their company’s growth.
As a CMO, you have many tools in your toolkit. There’s so many possible avenues of distribution, nurturing, retention, etc. This guide is to make your life easier by simplifying decisions for one of those levers - advertising.
As such, this guide is just about B2B advertising strategies and team structure - not B2B marketing as a whole.
In particular, it will be most effective for people working at Series A+ B2B tech companies, or non VC-backed companies with at least 50 employees. We presume you have product market fit, and either have a sales team or an effective PLG funnel. Most people reading this guide are running ads already and want to make them more effective, but the advice will also apply if you’re starting advertising from scratch with VC funding.
Should you trust this guide?
There is a lot of misinformation on the web about what makes B2B advertising work. In fact, some of the biggest LinkedIn influencers give outright harmful advice.
Why should you trust this guide in particular?
Let’s start with some quick credibility:
I’m Kevin Lord Barry, the founder of Right Percent. I’ve been running B2B advertising campaigns for 12 years as my primary profession. I’ve spoken at LeadsCon, B2SMBI, and General Assembly, while also advising a number of VC portfolios.
Four years ago, I founded Right Percent to reach more companies with what I’ve learned. In that short term:
We’ve scaled over $100m in B2B ad spend for companies like DoorDash, Ramp, Rippling, Motive, Podium and way more.
Our team helped two companies scale early stage ad efforts all the way to IPO.
On average, our clients see a 46% reduction in cost per key KPI, while more than doubling their monthly ad spend. We’re able to get such dramatic improvements because most companies just don’t run B2B advertising optimally.
Basically, everything in this guide has been battle-tested at a level that most information you read online just isn’t.
What role does digital advertising have to play for B2B companies?
Everyone wants growth. More leads, more deals, more pipeline. Most of all, they want to generate more revenue and more profit for the business.
Advertising is a uniquely powerful channel for driving growth for two reasons:
You can get results quickly compared to most other marketing efforts.
If you find success, advertising is very scalable.
However, most B2B companies are not getting the most out of their advertising strategies.
The best measure of how useful advertising is for a company is its contribution to new revenue.
This means: Of all the new customers your company closes, how many came in primarily attributed to advertising versus other channels?
A lot of B2B marketers are skeptical that ads can work at scale, because they havn’t seen it work before. Because at most B2B companies, it hasn’t been made to work well. The average B2B company’s contribution from advertising is around 10%, from my experience. It can be so much more.
Here’s some quick benchmarks on contribution levels:
For Direct to Consumer companies, advertising often contributes to 80% of new revenue.
In the average B2B company, advertising contributes to 10% of new revenue.
In B2B companies with mature advertising efforts, advertising contributes to 30% - 50% of new revenue.
What separates the B2B companies that have made advertising work as a distribution channel at scale?
They’ve picked the right advertising strategies and channels for their target market.
They’ve committed to making creative that follows B2B best practices.
They’ve committed to creating offers and/or content that is appealing to target customers.
They’ve committed to building the marketing operations infrastructure needed to track and attribute leads and sign-ups.
They’ve hired or contracted the right talent for the roles they need.
In the rest of this guide, we’ll go over each of the five differentiators.
How do you pick the right advertising strategies and channels to reach your target market?
The strategy behind your advertising depends on the size of your target market. Not the TAM, which is the aggregated budget of your customers. But the actual number of decision makers out there who can see your ads and make decisions from them.
Examples:
If you’re targeting enterprise (B2Enterprise), your target market is going to be high ranking execs at Fortune 1,000 companies. There are probably less than 100,000 unique people in your audience.
If you’re targeting all construction companies (B2SMB), you have an audience size of ~1,000,000.
If you’re targeting all Uber drivers (B2MicroB), you have an audience size of ~5,000,000.
Below is a chart illustrating this dynamic:
Advertising works for all of the above market sizes, but requires very different strategies.
For B2MicroB companies, who have the largest B2B audiences, you’ll want an ad strategy around using ad algorithms at scale on Facebook and Search. It will look a lot like D2C ad accounts, except Creative and Conversion events need to follow B2B best practices (more on best practices later in this guide).
For B2Enterprise, (audiences smaller than 100,000 individual decision makers), you’ll need to use an ABM or Demand Gen strategy focusing on LinkedIn and Search . See our article on Advertising to the Enterprise for more information, as well as our guide to ABM with LinkedIn ads.
B2SMB is in between and uses elements from both, leaning more towards the broad algorithmic approach approach on Facebook and Search. See our article on Advertising to SMBs for more information, as well as our guide to Vertical SaaS which often falls in this category.
This dynamic is true for all marketing channels, not just advertising. In the below chart, we’ve sorted all ad marketing channels by target market intent and number of decision makers in your target market. You can see some channels are clearly better for smaller or larger audience sizes.
For B2B advertising channels in particular, we can get even more granular in our advice.
In the first chart, we look at what ad channels are best for each B2B audience:
B2MicroB is the widest part of the triangle, B2SMB is in the middle, and B2Enterprise is at the bottom.
In the second chart, you can see how your targeting strategy should differ for each type of B2B audience.
For definitions of each of these terms, check out the B2B strategy guide link below.
For a deep dive into different targeting types, check out our overall B2B strategy guide, which defines and illustrates these terms.
The rest of this guide will focus on strategies and tactics that work for all 3 B2B types - B2MicroB, B2SMB and B2Enterprise.
How to support your ad team with effective B2B creative
No matter the audience size, there is one best practice for B2B advertising creative. You can make ads that work and don’t follow this methodology, but it’s always more effort and loses anyway 90% of the time.
So here’s the most important thing: Ads need to have a strong Visual Headline which positions the ad offer. A Visual Headline is text superimposed on the ad image or video. Example below:
The Visual Headline accounts for about 75% of ad performance.
In B2C, the product speaks for itself. If you’re selling a t-shirt or a toaster with an ad, people can see how it works instantly. It’s why UGC is so effective for B2C companies.
In B2B, almost all products are abstract. Its almost impossible to summarize what your product does or what the offer is through imagery alone. Thus, clear text is the key to performance.
To see how you can make effective Visual Headlines and Main Visuals, with plenty of examples, check out this deck. This is the deck you’ll want to share with your creative team.
How should you structure your creative team?
Copy: All ads start with copywriting before getting to the ad design stage. You need someone responsible for creating copy for every ad channel. This can be your existing marketing team or a dedicated copywriter. The important thing is that someone has responsibility assigned to them.
At Right Percent, we have copywriters that work solely on B2B advertising copy, but most individual companies can’t justify that expense.
Design: Because the most effective B2B ads are very simple, you generally don’t need a large media team, especially in the early stages. One designer who can work quickly in mocking up Visual Headlines into different formats will be sufficient.
At Right Percent, we have a number of designers working under our creative director to implement B2B ad best practices.
The process is then:
Write copy on a regular cadence: Whoever you assign to copy should come up with new ads for each Offer your company is promoting on a regular basis. Ads should be based around your Offer (see below section for more details). We recommend using a running Google doc for copy approval, but anything works.
Set up a clear copy review process: That copy should be reviewed by whoever needs to review it. We recommend setting one person to be the point of creative approval at your company. Multiple stakeholders being allowed to veto is usually inefficient.
Design the ads: The designer takes the approved copy and makes it into ads, which can then be tested on the ad platforms.
Final ad approval: We highly recommend not having multiple back-and-forth edits on any particular ad at this stage. If it’s not off-brand, just run it and let the platforms decide which ads are the best for you. If there’s something that’s not outright bad, but you’re not sure if you like it, just tell the designer to adjust that for the next batch.
The reason for keeping approval easy is not trivial. Most modern ad platforms work with a power law, where 5% of your ads get 90% of the spend and results. It is therefore vital to allow for quick testing of ads - you never know which ad will dramatically improve ad account performance.
The above process will put you leagues ahead of other B2B companies, as far as creating high ROI ads on a regular basis goes.
How to support your ad team with Offers
Offers are the most underused and underappreciated lever in B2B ad performance, and it’s not even close.
People associate Offers with e-commerce style, “buy one get one free” marketing messages. But the category is so much broader than that - it’s offering different things to your audience to see what they respond best to.
Check out our full guide to Offers here. But in short:
Everything you promote with an ad is an Offer, whether you think of it that or not. Some example Offers that B2B companies can use:
a.) Click this ad and schedule a sales call
b.) Click this ad and get access to a demo
c.) Click this ad and get an eBook
d.) Click this ad an get an incentive.People treat Offers as an afterthought, but all B2B ad campaigns should be based around an Offer at inception. It affects all the most important levers on an account:
a.) Creative needs to be made for each offer.
b.) Conversion events may need to change for each offer.
c.) Landing pages will often vary by offer.
d.) It can also affect targeting (CMOs vs Junior Level Employees are going to respond to very different offers).
As CMO, you need to make sure you have a plan of what Offers to test over time, and a plan to execute on those offers.
If you only use “get a demo” as your offer, you will eventually hit ad fatigue. Almost all B2B ad accounts that contribute a large % of new company revenue rely on either content or incentives in their advertising.
Gated content, like eBooks, templates and tools are still incredibly effective if you have a sales team to work the leads. The trick is to make content that:
Is hyper targeted to your most qualified audience.
Directly related to your value prop (so sales can actually upsell from the content)
Shows people how the content can make their life better. The best content makes it obvious to imagine using it to improve outcomes.
Value is much more important than length. Some of the most effective content pieces in RP history were quite short, but packed with useful information.
Here’s some examples of effective content Offers:
The third Offer type is incentives. Incentives mean offering the user something in exchange for giving you something of value, like a demo. It can be a product incentive (like Google giving away AdWords credits) or a straight gift card.
Incentives have a tacky reputation but work very well at scale.
The reason offering gift cards in exchange for demos works, is that it’s not actually about the money. Your biggest competitor is not other companies, its inertia. Incentives get people over inertia to actually show up for the sales call instead of putting it off.
While you do get some lower quality leads just looking for a gift card, it’s far outweighed by the improved MQL-Demo rate from qualified users.
If possible, offer an incentive related to your vertical. Like if you’re targeting restaurants, offer a gift card to Restaurant Depot - not Amazon.
How to assign these tasks?
One person should have the task of planning and creating effective gated content. This is usually someone on the content team, but they should work hand in hand with your ad channel managers to make sure the content fits the criteria for ads. Make a new piece of content every 1-3 months.
One person should have the task of planning and creating incentives, such as product credits or gift cards. This person should coordinate with the sales team, the biggest stakeholder for any incentive project.
There are great SaaS products out there to help manage gift card incentive programs.
How to track and attribute your advertising efforts
Attribution is very important for any kind of advertising. While B2B ad attribution can be challenging, it is very possible to get working smoothly. In a mature advertising organization, you can directly attribute about 70% of closed deals and infer the other 30% from the data.
For a full walkthrough on how we look at B2B advertising data, check out this deck.
In short, the key to tracking advertising is making sure information on the lead record successfully moves down your funnel. SQLs, Opportunities and Closed Won deals need to retain the source information from the lead.
The most common set-up for tracking is:
Users sign-up on a lead form or PLG flow on your website. The form also captures the UTM tracking information in the browser URL.
Yes, this means the “default” landing page or Offer approach for advertising should be some kind of gated sign-up, not ungated content. There are other approaches for ungated content we’ll go over below. You can’t really attribute people until you have some information about them.
The lead form transfers all the user answers and UTM information into Hubspot or a similar tool. For more mature companies, data also goes directly into a marketing database.
Leads are then sent from Hubspot (or similar tool) to Salesforce (or similar tool). It is very important to make sure Hubspot is transferring over all the data to Salesforce correctly.
When the sales team updates lead records into SQLs, Opportunities or Closed Deals - you have to make sure the original source information is retained on the new records.
This is the low hanging fruit of attribution and gets you 50% of the way there.
The next question: How do you account for multi-channel attribution?
The answer: Manually look at your attribution data and decide on a model that fits your business.
If you have Hubspot, download a report of all lead “touches” before close. This will tell you which sources and content appear, and in which order users click them.
If you have an internal database, it’s even easier. You or a data analyst can query the same data, pull a list of all closed deals, and show clicks from all sources.
Then you can model the difference between first touch attribution (which means the first click the person came through gets the credit), last touch attribution (which means the last click the person came through gets the credit), or any-touch attribution. Usually, one of these makes the most sense for any particular company.
This will get you 70% of the way to tracking where new customers came from, and that’s enough to make most ad decisions with.
One cheat code to sanity check your attribution is to have someone on your team run a VLOOKUP in Excel with all of your leads and all of your closed deals. If you find matching names, emails and companies that are not properly attributed, you’ll catch it there.
What if you don’t want to gate content?
Many marketers nowadays believe gated content is old-school, and modern marketers shouldn’t gate content. While this may be true for general website content, this couldn’t be further from the truth in advertising. Gated content is the backbone of the most successful campaigns we’ve observed.
That said, for some use cases, gated content is not the best fit. For instance, gated content is sometimes less effective when targeting certain verticals like software developers. It’s also useless to gate content if you don’t have an efficient sales team to follow-up on leads.
Most importantly, some audience sizes are too small or too elite for gated content to effectively reach.
For instance, if you have a list of just 1,000 VIP executives that your sales team is already reaching out to, ungated content would be the better approach.
Here’s another version of the audience size graphic, showing how it affects content strategy:
This is assuming you have an efficient sales team to reach out to content leads. Without that - you really shouldn’t run content ads at all. Focus on Incentives instead.
In situations where you’re not attributing ad performance through lead forms, you’ll want to measure account performance through lift tests. For an in depth discussion of this targeting style, check out our article on Brand Building Through B2B.
How do you find effective advertising talent?
In general, you want to hire people with experience scaling B2B ad campaigns from where your company is now, to six figures or higher of monthly ad spend.
This is (perhaps unsurprisingly) a rare skillset. Out of 100 resumes you receive for a B2B marketer or advertiser role, I’d say 5 will meet this criteria
Why should you insist on experience scaling ad spend to high levels? It’s very common for B2B generalists to end up in charge of $10,000 monthly budgets on LinkedIn and Search, which comprise of some retargeting campaigns and brand search. This is not in the same ballpark as knowing how to scale campaigns to the point where they have a high impact on your new pipeline. The B2B marketing generalist skillset does not have a lot of overlap with the B2B advertising skillset.
Experience scaling B2C ad spend to six figures monthly is actually very helpful. At the same time, people with B2C advertising experiences generally struggle with generating qualified leads. In B2C, you only have to worry about intent. Ex: Does someone want to buy your product? In B2B, you need to worry about intent and qualification, and that’s mostly new for B2C folks.
If you want to make ads work, there’s really no substitute for direct B2B advertising experience.
There’s three sources to find talent of his caliber:
Hiring: In your job listing, ask for candidates with experience scaling spend to $100,000 or more monthly. Then your questions should focus on whether that person really did the work or was just on the team. Find out how they think about creative, conversion events, and targeting. Compare their answers to other candidates as well as the guides we put out at Right Percent.
Freelance: There are excellent B2B advertising contractors out there. You’re generally looking for the same thing as when you hire, except you can afford to be more channel specific. For instance, you might want someone you hire to be able to run FB, Search and LinkedIn. While a freelancer can be a hyper specialist in LinkedIn, for instance, enabling better performance on the channel.
You can find excellent B2B freelancers through Right Side Up.
Agency: There’s a handful of decent B2B ad agencies out there. Right Percent is an option for you if you’re currently spending at least $30k per month on B2B advertising and want to scale results. We help clients significantly improve B2B ad performance, managing strategy, execution, creative, and reporting. To find out if we’re right for you, check out this business deck going over how we work.
That’s it! We hope this guide has been a useful resource for you, and wish you and your team good luck! For all of our public guides, feel free to check out the rest of our resource base.