B2B digital acquisition is a challenge.
There is no doubt about the benefits of Digital, significantly leveraging LinkedIn for acquisition. However, we must be clear that we are not discussing B2C acquisition, a fundamental growth lever.
Digital is fundamental for B2C. Essential, of course, for B2B, depending on your product/ solution, market/ accounts, and whether SMB / mid-market / Enterprise. Regarding value outcomes, you need to know that CAC is more challenging to determine.
The digital process on CAC is more straightforward to assume in B2C. In B2B, you must factor in multiple models to understand the ROI. You must plan your digital acquisition with a lens on attribution methodologies (attribution means understanding where / what sources your pipeline is created from. Ultimately, as in B2B, it can be challenging).
The problem with B2B is that it could be more precise about creating the correct type of campaigns to deliver actual sales outcomes. You must have a strategy that includes more than just direct lead gen (i.e., booked meetings).
It must encompass the customer journey from TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU (top, middle, and bottom funnel content). It must be designed on long-term leverage, nurturing, and prospect/customer touchpoints that build value in the overall pipeline.
It’s effortless to create a B2B digital strategy that wastes a lot of money on acquisition ad spending without clarity on whether it will drive revenue outcomes.
Creating a B2B Digital Roadmap
To be successful with B2B digital acquisition. You first have to create and design the roadmap.
I plan at least three months and ideally over a 12-month window. The plan must cover the digital experience at the top-of-funnel, middle-funnel, and bottom-of-funnel.
The key questions to ask at this stage:
- What investment level are you comfortable with allocating to digital spending?
- What are the core outcomes, i.e., brand awareness, deal velocity increase, direct lead generation, MQL growth, and pipeline retargeting?
- How will digital be embedded across other core channels and integrate with events, outbound, SDRs / Inside Sales, and brand marketing
- What channels to market? In B2B, LinkedIn is the number #1 channel for growth. But will you test others, such as Instagram (it’s easy to think it's a good idea to do this based on B2C, but it’s not always fit for B2B)?
- What content will you leverage to drive high conversions in gated content?
The core component of a winning digital strategy is built on content.
Content that motivates your prospects to enter your planned funnel. It’s effortless to start digital campaigns with poor content that will be ineffective. It's not rocket science to understand. However, it’s the area revenue leaders take for granted.
Your content strategy needs to be thoroughly thought through. If this is not done well, your content will be average and fail to cut through the noise.
Think about who you are competing against. You are competing against attention, which prospects have minimal. Your content on a digital platform has to be deep, granular, and thought-provoking—intensely focused on prospects' pains or gains—and entertaining to cut through the noise. It is not easy to execute.
Second point: building a landing page, gate content, and creating digital ads is easy. Marketing will see downloads and report MQL stats on the digital campaign. This is the fallacy of reporting. You will derive no value if this is your approach.
The most important aspect of the digital strategy is ‘What happens after they download and engage with your content?’ You have to map the nurture, follow-up, and acquisition process. It takes time.
Missing this critical step will fail to achieve ROI, creating a pool of lost leads and opportunities.
Homework: How to create your digital roadmap
Building a digital plan requires careful planning, strategic thinking, and deep consideration of outcomes. It can always be more straightforward.
With the right approach, you can execute effectively to generate direct leads and support deals in the sales pipeline.
Action steps:
Step 1 - Be clear about your go-to-market channels and the role of digital media.
- Analyze your strategic plan for events, outbound marketing, Inside Sales, content marketing, PR, Inbound, and Brand. Map a visual timeline of how the digital plan will support key marketing campaigns. For example, if you have a marquee event each year, what is the digital execution to build more value from your event presence?
- If you have a content team, brainstorm/workshop with all key stakeholders on the messaging, content plans, and angles of value to the prospect.
- Agreement on goals and what success looks like for campaigns. An awareness play, i.e., LinkedIn follower growth, direct acquisition through gated content and conversion to a sales meeting, or influencing current opportunities
Step 2 - Design for all layers of the funnel
- After completing the high-level timeline, the next step is to map out what content you need for each funnel stage. You will have decided to target the full range, i.e., the top, middle, and bottom, or pick a specific focus on one area.
- Decide on a timeline for rolling out your content distribution, launching at the top of the funnel and cascading the subsequent funnel stages into phase 2 and phase 3.
- Create a map of content that needs production: some text
- Top-of-funnel - ads, landing pages, eBooks and infographics
- Middle-customer stories use cases
- Bottom of Funnel - Datasheets, comparisons, technical deep dives
Step 3 - Map the digital experience workflow
- Using a tool to map the customer journey, build out what the acquisition funnel will look like after the gated engagement.
- Key workflows: some text
- Post download, what is the email sequence, what is the intent of the email sequence, and what actions do you wish them to follow
- What is the nurturing process after they have gone through your workflow? Are you planning to engage them for over 30 days? Decide.
- Managing drop-off. What is your plan for all leads that go cold? What is your drop-off to re-engage strategy (this will happen with digital B2B!!)?
- If you are scaling fast, get a partner and agency to help you be successful (budget permitting). Focus on helping to understand attribution, best practices, reporting, and ensuring funnel optimization is monitored and iterated not to waste money.
Digital Retargeting / Custom Audience Mapping
Custom audience targeting and retargeting using LinkedIn must form part of your B2B digital strategy. In short, you can pick specific accounts, web visitors, contacts in the pipeline, and customers and then run ads against them to create brand awareness.
Let’s be careful on this point.
It is not about using clickbait ad placements for these data sets or direct conversion acquisition.
The overall ambition is threefold:
- Drive ongoing awareness of your product/solution to these specific audiences, i.e., In an attempt to keep your brand at the top of your mind.
- Attract awareness from other buyer points within your prospecting and sales pipeline.
- Provide valuable content that will be interesting for the audience to consume. You can leverage different types of audiences for varied segments. An example would be if you run ads against prospects at the ‘meeting’ / qualification stage in your pipeline, offering content that will support that stage of the sales process. This could be product comparisons, customer stories, and insights into your view of the world and why you are different.
Building on those points, here are different strategies you can deploy to support lead generation and sales efforts:
A. Direct Acquisition
Upload all your accounts and contacts (not engaged) into custom audiences on LinkedIn. Create a specific strategic workflow for acquiring them as an MQL.
For example, a piece of gated content will be interesting for them to download. Mirroring the standard digital acquisition path, you should plan how to convert long-tail into a potential opportunity. Factor in how to nurture unconverted contacts with point C on retargeting and inside sales in parallel.
B. Sales Pipeline Support
Once per month, have your Head of Demand Generation update a custom audience with all prospects in your pre-pipe and sales pipeline. Run awareness ads against these contacts to provide ongoing awareness and engagement on your solution/product.
Research and find other contacts at accounts (outside of your deal contact), and look to influence other stakeholders with an awareness of what you do. Remember, the latest figures show that in a B2B sales deal, 14-16 people can be involved in a deal cycle.
C. Audience Retargeting
Create specific banner ads, landing pages, and assets to support retargeting visitors to your website and profiles. Important: Think through what journey the prospect will experience in your workflows. This whole process needs to be mapped in the digital design phase with a clear strategic blueprint/ process map of how to re-engage. The most significant error marketers make with retargeting is not thinking about the workflow in detail.
It’s easy to put up some ads with a banner. It’s hard to attribute what effect that has on your sales pipeline if you do not have a detailed plan for future conversion. Do not start with these strategies unless you are clear on a strategy.
It’s too easy to lose money otherwise with poor attribution for success.
If done correctly, custom audience campaigns can be extremely effective. Retargeting can be an excellent way to re-engage lost potential leads and a really clever way to broaden awareness in active deal stage accounts.
It matters if you are an SMB, mid-market, or enterprise.
At SMB levels, you need to think more about the digital funnel as a clear acquisition path if your onboarding and selling process can be more automated and you don’t require a sales cycle.
The strategies above are geared towards mid-market and enterprise accounts. They involve a thoughtful, long-term engagement process that helps close deals, drive new opportunities into the pipeline, and build awareness of your brand.
It can be impactful and a clever approach, but only a few companies do well.
A. Data Management
Data is the critical foundation for success. You need to assess, analyze, and be clear about what data sets you want to use. I suggest mapping out via white-board all the buckets of data you can potentially use;
- Website data
- CRM sales pipeline data
- Account and prospect data (segmented by vertical)
- Email newsletter data
- LinkedIn company page followers
- Twitter followers
- Other data sources
Draw out the overall purpose of experience and action for each data set: Influence, direct acquisition, awareness, conversion, or re-conversion (an old lost lead or lost MQL)?
Agree with relevant stakeholders on the correct data sets. This is a crucial first step.
B. Agree on outcomes and ROI
Look at your budget. What percentage will you allocate to run custom audiences and retargeting? Start small (it depends on your budget naturally) with a test-and-learn approach. At first, attribution outside direct acquisition will take much work.
You must allocate this budget line to brand spending to ensure you can justify conversations about ROI and effectiveness.
C. Asset creation
Map all the assets you will need to run multiple campaigns. The design requirements will differ for whichever strategy and approach you deploy. Engage with your content team to plan the assets required for the campaigns.
You can do this MVP if you want by simply retargeting and building sales awareness.
You only need simple banner ads and create a simple landing page specific to the audience they will land on. With the plan in mind, capturing some form of email may be impossible. It’s an awareness play.
D. Launch and iterate
If you have a clear plan, you have aligned on budget and outcome. The next step is the launch phase. Only launch by creating a careful monitoring schedule. At the start, pay close attention to metrics. If you understand the outcome / metric for each custom audience, you can measure it against spend.
Your goal is to measure whether your ads are driving the proper outcomes.
On the awareness side, this will be tough to attribute. I suggest keeping a scorecard linked to account intent or surge—how many views and engagements (downloads, etc.), looking at this against your target account profiles.
Aligns nicely with an ABM strategy.
Keep a scorecard for each segment you are looking to influence. Over 3-6 months, your task is to map data in the digital funnel against the sales pipeline. If you do this right, you will see the direct effects of the activity—on deals closed, more leads at the top of the funnel, or closed influence opportunities.
Now that you have a baseline understanding of digital marketing ensure marketing uses money wisely and doesn’t burn through cash. Digital spending always feels like a quick fix, but that is never the case. It is one of the riskiest spending categories when looking at the scale.
