Why B2B Paid Media Fails & How To Fix It

Your paid media is boring, it lacks innovation and you're measuring it completely the wrong way. Welcome to the next episode of our podcast. Today, I'm joined by Mary Carr, who's our Head of Paid Media & SEO. And this really follows on from the last episode where I was talking to Gabe and we were talking a lot about how the buying journey has changed, how the behaviors of the buyers have changed.

And I think it was Gabe there was quoting the stat that between 17 and 18 percent of the buying cycle is now self-serve. It's online. It's digital. So that really makes digital marketing and utilising all the channels more and more important and more critical to what what we're doing.

So, let's start with some definitions. As you know, I always talk about paid social. I talk about paid search. You always correct me and talk about paid media.

So, what do you put into that paid media bracket? Yeah, absolutely. So paid media, we see as one toolbox full of various different tools. Now, paid search and paid social, are one of many tools within that box.

So, the reason we don't like when clients or when people talk about one specific channel is they're already determining the solution that they want without really looking and stepping back at what they need. So we say paid media over, “oh, I really - want to do some paid social”, when paid social isn't actually what's going to be the most impactful for them. And also when we look at paid media, we want to bring in programmatic. We want to bring in private marketplace purchases.

You could look at the potential, of say, publisher partnerships. Or affiliate marketing, anything that you can pay for the exposure that your brand receives. Right. Okay.

So, I suppose it's about keeping your options open and blending across all the different channels. You also make the distinction between paid, for example, paid social or paid search and organic social or an organic search. Why, why do you separate those two things out? I mean, for me, they work completely differently.

Organic search, you're looking at how to manipulate an algorithm, whereas in paid search, you're looking more at how you pay for a placement, and the bid that you find profitable. When we look at paid social and paid search together, they work in very similar ways. They're real-time bid exchanges, where you have a price that you're willing to pay to be exposed to a certain set of customers, or people who meet your target parameters. Whereas organic search, you're going after a term, not necessarily a customer.

And with organic social - depends on the social platform. They all have slightly different algorithms. If you look at something like TikTok, which is a bit more consumer side, it works more like a search engine. Whereas the discovery element of Instagram works more as, like a feed, that's pushing things on you, rather than you recalling it.

So you're looking at using the platforms in different ways. So your mindset for paid activity is, “what is profitable, what can I afford, what customers do I want to get in front of?” Your mindset when looking at organic is looking at how do I manipulate the algorithm to a way that benefits me? Right.

And also when you step back up to the marketing strategy, they serve different purposes. Yeah. So for example, I often use organic social to do a lot of employee engagement, sort of, trying to attract people to the organisation and the profile, the social sort of aspects of the company, where I wouldn’t do that on paid, for example. Yeah, definitely.

I mean, there's things that just aren't profitable to do on paid, as well. And there's also your organic activity, particularly social, is for me, working with a lot of B2B clients, is using it as a window into your organisation, a window into your thought process, whether that be leaders in your business and doing great thought leadership pieces on social or be that, the insights and the work that you’re doing. It should be, sort of, a little peak behind the curtains, sort of that behind the scenes.

Whereas, when we look at paid social, you are pushing a product on someone, you are trying to generate leads. There is a tangible business outcome assigned to this activity. Whereas organic social we still - it still happens but if you come to me and say, I want to do organic social to get leads, I'm like, “No, you're probably best doing organic social, to build a brand and build some personality for your business, so people learn to love what you do.” Yeah, perfect.

Right, next area I wanted to explore is creativity. So it in the B2C world, it's it's apparent, right? You look to do your creative ads to get attention to to get sort of, engagements, et cetera. And I think the stats show that you have to spend ten, twenty, a hundred times more money, if you've got a mediocre ad, than if you've got a brilliant creative.

How does that translate into the B2B world? It creativity still key? Creativity is key. I think the issue is in the B2B world, people haven't valued creativity.

They really do see a massive distinction, big red line between B2C and B2B. And for me, I’ve worked across both. There isn’t. Good creative targeting the right customer, speaking to their challenges works, whether you're a B2B business, or a B2C business.

I think the issue we have with B2B, is people like to be boring if I'm going to be frank! People are boring with the creative that they put out. They're like, “oh, but we're targeting businesses.” And I'm like, “what is business?

”, It's not a grey blob. You're targeting a person, and you need to speak to that person. A good piece of creative that, (where) the messaging is on-tone, it's speaking to the challenges of the person. They’re scrolling, you imagine you sat there, you're scrolling through LinkedIn.

You're say, I don't know, a HR professional. You scrolling through LinkedIn, and you see an ad for a HR platform where it's speaking directly to your challenges. It's bright. It's standing out.

There is thousands of ads on LinkedIn. That's got thumb stopping ability and that's what we need to get to. There's great examples of B2B businesses doing fantastic creative that do lean a little bit more to the consumer side. And I think there's a lot that businesses can learn from consumer marketing in being creative and exciting.

It doesn't just have to be a static infographic saying, “oh, we've done a white paper, download it.” Because, there are a thousand ads like that on LinkedIn and your target audience are seeing a thousand ads like that a week. So, you're not going to stand out. So, you need to be creative.

We need to step away from thinking B2B is, add a third B to the end of that, and put “boring” on it. It's it's my biggest pet peeve, because you can do some really exciting stuff with businesses. I totally agree. There's something that, I can't remember the exact figures now, but it was a survey that ask consumers how many organisations they viewed as different.

And they didn't. They viewed them all the same. And then they asked the marketers, “how different are you in your marketing?”, and they said, “oh, we’re totally different.

” But the reality is, it's not. And it's getting that sort of creativity and you said it, sort of, appealing to the person, not the business. And I would say, if you if you read the content, it's not what you read, it's how it makes you feel. And if you see an ad that you smile when you see it, then you're more likely to stop and to go into that.

Exactly. You see a lot of businesses prioritising their firmographic data, over their demographic data. And they’re like, “well, I want to target businesses like this.” I'm like, “well, no, you're actually targeting to this HR professional” - who, let's face it, we can tell a little bit more about, who the HR professional is through their demographics.

They're more likely to be female, more likely if they're in sort of a decision-making position, or an influence on a decision-making position, more likely above the age of thirty. And just from those two pieces of information, women over thirty, you already know what the rest of their feed looks like. You already know what, likely their favourite TV show is. What they like to do in their spare time.

And you're much better thinking about that person that you're targeting, than that business that you're targeting. Because, you're showing up on her feed. You're not showing up on “business feed.” Yeah, you're not a grey blob speaking to a grey blob.

You're a person yourself, you're business has a personality, and it's speaking to another person who has their own wants, desires and motivations. And how does different media - Because you know, it used to be the day of the static ad, now it’s the carousel, now is the video. Do you blend across those different things? Do you have the same creative theme in different formats?

What's the best way to get, sort of attention? Yeah, I’d say a variety. Not everything works for every business. So, I mean, the big trend at the moment is a lot more low-fidelity content.

So, a lot more face to camera, a lot more authentic sort of, uncut, not very polished. That's what we see in the consumer side. And you've seen it slightly bleed over into B2B. I think businesses that do a really good job of that, are people like HubSpot, who really lean into that undone creative.

But in terms of your business, it's really - One. Deciding how you want to be portrayed, because there is going to be limits You do have a brand guideline that you have to be respectful of. Who you want to be, who you're looking to target, it needs to fit in, but stand out on someone's feed, which sounds like an oxymoron, but it needs to stand out because it's good creative, not stand out because it's boring, amongst a sea of interesting creative. We need to appreciate a little bit more in B2B, that we do live in the attention economy, and we (I) get a lot of businesses saying like, “oh, they're not my competition, - or, they're not my competition.

” I'm like, “yes, but your ad's going to be competing against theirs in auction… and you're competing for their attention.” And it's not even just that. You're not just competing against your peers in business, or your contemporaries in business. You're competing against scrolling on TikTok for an hour.

You're competing against looking at their own Instagram. You really, you do have to grab attention and make them care not only about your product or service, but about what what it can do for them and their self-interest. The attention economy isn't fighting good creative of one business, versus good creative of another business. It's fighting for attention where they could be watching TV.

They could be out for a run. They could be on TikTok. They could be on Instagram. They could be doing a wealth of other things, than looking at your ad.

So, you're also fighting against consumer brands. So if you're not leveling up to that consumer brand level, you've already lost. Yeah. And I find as well, everyone is so desperate to get their message across, which in a lot of cases, is not different.

They forget about the creative aspect or the visual impact. And when you're scrolling through the visual impact is really important, right? Yeah, definitely. You could have the best on-image copy in the world.

It could be really snappy, catchy, it could be funny. But if it's just in a grey, boring colour that just there's absolutely no reason for me to stop doing this (scrolling). that's what brands need to, sort of lean into. And like I say, look, you've got your brand guidelines.

You do have to be respectful of the parameters that have been set, but you can, social in particular, you can push it a little bit. You can create almost like a subcategory for social But, because you appreciate the challenges of that platform. So don't be safe? Don't be safe.

We see it in SEO as well. Like, you've got your brand colours, so you create a website that has very little contrast and just gets flagged for accessibility. So, I’m going to turn around to you and say, “I need you to change your brand colours because - Google can’t even reach your website.” So it's it's a constant battle.

There's a balance to be had. But, you can't completely put a line through that conversation. You at some point, might have to have it. Right, so let's turn now to integrated paid media.

So, again we tend to look at channels in isolation. But when I talk to you, you always talk about blending the different channels and getting a mix across the different channels. Why is that so important? I think because you don’t want to limit your options.

You don't want to say, “we do paid social, we don't do paid search.” Because it might not be right for your business. I think when we look at integrating the work that we do, it's appreciating that they all live within one ecosystem and they all feed into one another. One trend you see, particularly with consumer (marketing) is if you do a lot of paid social activity, you see a spike in your brand search, but it looks like your paid social activity is not really doing much.

You might get some video views, you might get a bit of traffic. but you can't see solid conversions from it, but then I actually look at my brand search, and there's been a lift since the activity started of X percent. So you can see how the paid social activity has impacted my my brand activity. And similarly, for for B2B, we know it's a slow sales cycle.

So, I think you see a lot of people very trigger happy with turning campaigns off within a few weeks, because they're not seeing what they want. And they're not looking at it more holistically. They're not taking a step back and saying, “is this ecosystem working?” “Is the selection of channels working?

” They can jump the gun and say, “it's that, that's not working.” It all comes into how we want people to measure paid media activity, how we want them to measure all marketing activity. Which is more holistic and look at the business impacts, rather than the marketing metrics. So when you are thinking in one channel, you are only ever going to think in that marketing channel’s metrics of success.

You're not going to think in your business metrics of success. Okay. So a couple of bits to drill down in on that. The first bit, you said about the eagerness to say, “that campaign's not working.

” “Let's do another one.” And it's proved time over time, consistency and longevity of a campaign works. We talked on the last podcast about that only 5% of your buyers are actually in market at any one time, 95% aren't. So you're marketing to them until they get into a buying cycle.

And if you keep switching out and I'm selling this product and I'm positioning that product and everything else, that doesn't get you that longevity and it's just a bunch of knee-jerk reactions, basically. So longevity (is) key? Longevity is key. I always say that you want to leave compaigns as much as possible.

You do not want to be constantly in there saying I'm optimising to appear like you're doing something to a client. I think that's a real danger you see across all parts of the industry is like, people want to seem busy and look like that they’re doing something. When in actuality, the best thing you can do for your client, is maybe guide them to be a little bit more patient. That is on value in and of itself.

It doesn't just have to be like, “oh, we changed this and we did that and a lovely list of what we did.” It can be the value you add, in your experience of knowing. Let's just leave this alone for a moment. You know, let's keep an eye on it.

We check it every day, but we don't have to change it. Your sales cycle takes 12 months. Why would we change something after four weeks? You see a lot of that.

I think the best analogy I have, and it is sort of links into like a personal one, is - I’m learning to drive at the moment. And the thing I struggle with, is I look too close to the road and not far enough ahead. And when you're looking really close at what's directly in front of you, you move the wheel more. So your steering is really unsteady.

But if I look down the road, you realise it's just really slight adjustments you need to make. So yeah, I was on a driving lesson and that sort of came it came into my head. I was like, that's kind of like what I always constantly have to explain to my clients. Is like, you need to be looking further ahead.

We can't be making multiple adjustments all the way, when actually it's just these slight little nudges that we make, to manipulate an algorithm. That's a really good point because it is, you know, so many times. It's like we want to run this campaign to get get some quick wins. Right.

There’s, you can get some quick wins but by doing the longterm thing, you get more sustainable wins and you also get some of those quick wins as well. So that that's the best approach. The other bit you talked about is, the different silos. So it's very common for clients say, “I want to run a LinkedIn campaign.

” So as you said, they dictate the channel they want to use and they are very sort of single-sighted in terms of it's just that channel, where (when) their target audience is actually using multiple channels. So if you're appearing on different channels with sort of, slightly nuanced messaging, Then, they can complement each other? Yeah, definitely. We want to create a sense of, if possible, social ubiquity or digital ubiquity.

You're everywhere, when we're searching our challenges, we see an article that you've posted, when we're on LinkedIn, we see creative and ads from you. When we see people talking about the best in the industry. You're there. When they're on Instagram, you're there.

You want this sense of, you are everywhere. Everyone is talking about you, this real buzz. So multiple channels, particularly social, is incredibly useful. I think people struggle with consumer channels, though.

It's still a battle I have daily. It's like, no, just give it a go. You know. Chances are, you're out very little if we run a very small campaign, and we don't have the the same sort of media spend (minimum spend), that we do on LinkedIn, which is quite high, particularly if you're a small business who's just starting out in marketing.

You can trial Instagram. Your audience is there, but I think linking back to kind of what you Gabe have said previously on the podcast, is because you can't measure it how you want to, you don't do it. So that that's a big reason people don't use consumer platforms because they can't measure it exactly how they want to. Even though they know their audience is there, they're like, “yeah, but - I can't use their business email address to target them.

” I'm like, “yeah, but you have their demographic data.” “We've done a whole strategy telling you where they are online.” Give it a go. Like, try it.

Right. So you made a good point there about how we measure things and how we see success, or measure success. And I think we've got to change our thinking a little bit on that. Because, there's been a real focus on direct attribution.

We run a campaign, we can measure it. We can see the return on investment. But it's not as simple as that. It's not a case of I see one ad, I click on it.

I fill a demo request, or I fill a “request to speak with a sales guy”. and it's a lead. The different channels as you were talking about are working together now. So where do you attribute a lead?

What sort of measurements, can we, sort of apply to paid media? Yeah. So direct attribution has been a bit of like, a blessing and a curse. Yeah.

In one, you know, in one regard, you can see more of what's happening within your your ecosystem, but on the same, you know, on the flip side of that coin, you are making decisions based on if you can or can't measure them, not if it is or isn't valuable. So we would always recommend, again, taking that step back, having that more holistic view. typically an MMM framework is probably better. It's really - it allows you to measure the business impact of your activity.

I don't want to measure if this got more click through rate, or if this got more leads. I want to measure if introducing this channel six months ago, say that's your your average sales cycle, got you more money. That's what I care about. And I think agencies in general, they're not caring enough about that.

They're caring about, did we run you run a successful campaign for you? I need to know if you're profitable. I need to make sure that your business is profitable. And that's something we we try and focus on a lot with our clients at the moment, is making sure what we're doing is profitable.

It might not seem like the most exciting in terms of the metrics we get from the campaign, we might have like, lower conversion rates and we might get less leads than we wanted, but we actually look back in six months and we're like, oh, those leads converted an X percent, and they were worth a total of £250K for the client. So yes, it was a profitable campaign. You do have to be patient, though, you've got got to appreciate your sales cycle is long. So if you are looking at particularly revenue generated, it is going to take us a longer time to come to that conclusion.

Now, MMM frameworks typically work in quarters, so we'd look back on the previous quarter’s activity. And then at the end of the year, look up (back) on the previous half a year, versus the the current half a year. So you're not going to get these end of month reports that say, “oh, click-through rate went up by two percent.” I mean, it's definitely useful and it's metrics that we would use to understand if actually our messaging is hitting, because that's what click-through rate’s and indicator of.

Or if leads are hitting, because you know, it is important to generate leads. You'll always get the martech team, the nurture team come to us, and like, “we need more leads.” “We need we need something to work with.” But that's probably more a comment on how useful that downloadable piece of content is, because leads can also be an indication that your audience just didn't really care about the whitepaper that you put out.

It might not be a comment on your paid marketing. You see it a lot, when you get like a, an ad that has a high click-through rate. So they’ve gotten to the landing page, where they can put in their email, but they don't convert. So your conversion rate’s low, but your click-through rate’s high.

You always get, “well, my PPC campaign can’t be working...” because, the last thing they want to do is maybe look a little bit inwards and think, “we might have produced a really boring whitepaper there, that no one actually wanted.” Yeah. It's it's all about that correlation.

So two things. One is that correlation at the high level, and you're right. The end goal is growth in revenue, growth in profitability, but then it's going down to the next level and saying, “right. By doing this activity, what is that total correlation?

” So I look at things like engagement rates, conversion rates into leads because I can get, we can run a campaign that gets more traffic to your website as you just said there, but are they the right traffic? Are they engaging? Are they doing something when they get there? So that's the sort of stuff that is the telemetry.

that's behind what you're doing, or the levers, I think you use that term. Yeah, definitely. Measuring on a micro level is not necessarily reflective of the overall image and the holistic image of your business. So a particular campaign might be doing really well and your agency turns round and says, like, “look at the click-through rate, look at - the leads that it generated.

” And you know, your agency’s sat there really happy with what they've done. And then six months later, you're handing in your notice, because actually, those leads were naff. They didn't turn into revenue. And it's all because you've sat and thought, I need a really good monthly report to give to this client to keep them on board.

So there is always a balance because we are an agency. We have to think of this business, but we have to think of our clients' businesses. And yes, giving a good monthly report is a nice, easy conversation to have, it makes you happy. It's really motivating.

It's a lot easier to give good news, than it is to give bad news. And it's a lot easier to keep going the way that agencies typically go, which is that sort of monthly cycle of, “well we ran this campaign, and this is what we achieved.” But sometimes you have to have the hard conversation. You have to be willing and ready to educate your client on what is actually going to be more impactful for their business, which is taking a step back, being more holistic.

And there is lots of different tests and measurement mechanisms we can put in place. So in the short term, we can kind of see the correlation between increased activity on paid social impacting say direct traffic, or organic traffic. And then we can look at the incrementality of introducing a new channel so, be that month-on-month, or year-on-year. You have to make adjustments for seasonality, but understanding the incremental gain that was had by, say, an extra £5K on introducing a new paid social platform.

And then we look at the lift that has generated, versus same time last month, versus same time last year and versus same time last quarter. And we can see the value in that additional maybe leads, or additional revenue, depending on how quick your payback is. So I think it comes back again to your analogy of driving the car, and looking down the road rather than in front of you. If you're so focused on the month you're in, you're actually not getting that incremental value month on month, and creating that sort of continuity, and that sort of compound performance.

Yeah, you'll get to the end of the year and you'll have done a lot, but achieve nothing. Yeah, yeah. We'll have twelve monthly reports, to be like… “oh, we did all these campaigns,” but actually when we look back year-on-year, at where we've seen significant, meaningful improvement, there won't be any, because you've not - Your whole mindset hasn't been on significant, meaningful improvement. It's been on you know, delivering nice results that make everyone happy in the short term.

Yeah, yeah. So if you had to leave everyone with one, valuable, Mary tip, of how to sort of maximise paid media and SEO, what would that be? I'd say don't let over measurement dictate your strategy. Right.

Let - I mean, people don’t like this, because we, (everyone) wants to be very data-driven. But there is a value in your instinct. You know who your customers are, you know where they are and we can get you data to back up who and where they are and where they are online, what they engage with. So, lean on it a little bit more.

You don't see as many instinctual marketers as you used to. You see a lot of people, who say “data driven”. But again, produce twelve monthly reports because, that's what the data said that they should do. Just don’t let measurements stop you from making choices that you know are going to be valuable for your business, but maybe not necessarily valuable for the the current campaign you're running at the moment.

Yeah. We always say that marketing is an art and a science, but we've got to remember, it's a balance of those two things, and we've got to, we've got to do it. Yeah, definitely. The other measurement part is, I feel like it’s safeguarding people against using, not only their common sense, but leaning on their experience as a marketer.

Yea. They're like, “oh well, I can't measure that”, or “the data doesn’t support, this that and the other.” And you're sort of, outsourcing your own thought to ChatGPT, or to Google, or to Google or to an Excel spreadsheet to say, well… “Oh, well, the Excel spreadsheet said I shouldn't do that.” I'm like, “but you've got 15 years experience in B2B marketing”, and you're telling me that this this formula in Excel is more important than the 15 years of experience you have.

Lean on your experience, lean on your instinct. Yes, back that up with data, but have multiple hypotheses of how you can grow, learn and test for your clients, and then let the data back that up after, not first. Yeah, and test is a key thing there, because if you don't experiment, you never move forward. Right?

You just try and optimise what you already doing, rather than trying to find the next thing to do, and the next place to go. Yeah, definitely. I really recommend people sit down and just list out what it is you want to learn about your client, learn about the industry, learn about their current messaging, or the way that they position themselves. Write that out and design tests around learning that particular thing.

And that, that's always a great place to start because you can take those learnings and feed them into a much wider strategy. So say you want to do some value proposition testing, you have three very distinct value propositions. You can create a paid social campaign with multiple assets speaking to each of those VPs (value propositions). Run them against one another, within the same audience.

And I can already, I can then tell you which VP that audience resonates with (them). And you can take that, and that learning and feed it into other parts of your strategy, feed it into some of your email copy, feed it into some of your website copy. And that's another point on the integration, right? Is, you can't look at it as, “we do paid media and SEO.

” you have to look even further back and say, “we do digital marketing and we have the self-sustaining digital marketing ecosystem, that benefits our business.” Right. Yeah, totally agree. Mary, thanks for that.

That was brilliant. I think we could talk for hours. There's an awful lot of ground that you've covered on that, and lots of different areas. So, I'm sure we're going to be inviting you back for another another session.

No, I’d be more than happy to come on. It's being great and yeah, I'd love I'd love to know what the audience want to hear more about, because I am a known-rambler, and I could chat for hours about each one of those topics. That's brilliant. So if you enjoyed this podcast, if there's anything that Mary has sort of discussed, and you'd want us to drill-down on then, please don't hesitate to drop us a line and let us know and then maybe that’ll become, the next Mary podcast.

Thank you.