3 Tips for Conserving B2B Advertising Budget

B2B advertising can be an expensive proposition, but time and again we see brands come to us with opportunities to gain business traction while lowering budgets or reducing wasted spend.

Here are three tips we often see brands can benefit from that should delight everyone from CMO to CFO and result in big improvements to performance metrics.

1. Measure and optimize for down-funnel events

This is the most advanced tip of the three, and it requires integrating your CRM data into the ad platforms. Once it’s connected, you can see which campaigns, ad groups, keywords, etc. have conversions further down the funnel, like opportunities and deals.

Here’s an example of how this info is helpful: You have a keyword that has produced a high volume of leads, but once you connect the keyword to your down-funnel data, you realize none of those leads were qualified or ended up as new customers. Without that knowledge, you would’ve thought it was performing well and put more budget towards it. Instead, you now know that keyword can be paused and save budget as it didn’t produce any positive results.

The next step beyond measurement is optimizing towards those lower-funnel stages. The most important consideration before moving to this step is data density. There needs to be enough volume being generated at those lower stages in order for the ad platforms to have enough data to optimize towards them efficiently. If the next stage after a lead is a marketing qualified lead (MQL) and the volume is there, start by moving the optimization to that. As time goes on and volume increases, you may be able to continue to move further down the funnel. The goal is to move as low as you can down the funnel.

The major ad platforms are leaning on AI to power automatic bidding and targeting. Advertisers who simply optimize to “leads” without any further qualification steps are at a greater risk of the ad platforms targeting low-quality leads that might have low CPLs but produce little business value. To get better results, you must feed the algorithms better data.

2. Use Facebook as a proving ground before braving the high costs of LinkedIn

LinkedIn is great for very specific company or role targeting, but the tradeoff is that costs are relatively expensive compared to other platforms. It can often turn into a money pit or be deemed a failure prematurely for companies just beginning to advertise without leveraging other platforms first.

Rather than launch out the gates with LinkedIn, it’s a lot cheaper and faster to run ads and test creative and messaging on Facebook. The people you’re trying to reach on LinkedIn are normal people who are also on Facebook. 

While Facebook might not have all the same targeting options as LinkedIn, its algorithm has improved, and there are still plenty of ways to reach the same audience. Our favorite Facebook tests are lookalikes based on existing customers or website visitors, retargeting campaigns, and relevant interest audiences.

Once you find messaging and creatives that work well on Facebook, you can then tailor them to LinkedIn knowing that they’re more likely to succeed. 

Note: If you’re not currently advertising on LinkedIn, but it’s a platform you might test in the future, set up an ad account now. Set up the insights tag so retargeting and conversion data starts collecting and can be utilized once the time comes to launch campaigns.

3. Lean on your sales team for feedback

Presumably, you’re leaning on things like lead magnets and offers for free demos and audits to bring people into your funnel. Your sales team is likely having conversations with those leads that can deliver insights into common pain points and popular offers or benefits you can address with ad copy tweaks, iterative content, or even brand new content.

If there’s a decent volume of leads that fall in your ICP, and your sales team can help identify themes from their conversations, you’ll be able to develop a feedback loop to bring in more of those leads without running a ton of extra tests to find effective messaging.

Are your budgets optimized?

With long sales cycles and higher cost per leads, B2B advertising is a complex and expensive endeavor. Make sure you’re saving costs where you can without sacrificing growth for your brand.

If you’re working with an agency, hopefully you’re already having these types of conversations. If not, drop us a line!