Do any of these sound familiar?
- Your current paid media approach isn’t generating the right leads—campaigns are running, but pipeline growth is slow or unqualified.
- Your team is unable to show real business impact.
- Your paid mix feels stale, with budget spread thin across ineffective or oversaturated channels—but you don’t know what to change.
- Your sales team uses these three dreaded words often: “These leads SUCK.”
The instinct for many marketers is to try to fix the situation with incremental optimizations. Small changes can lead to big improvements if you know how to diagnose and fix the underlying problem; minor adjustments to the same approach are likely to give you more of the mediocre results you got before. The status quo won’t cut it anymore. The way to beat budget volatility and the ever increasing pressure to do more with less is to evolve your paid media strategy.
Here are six key mistakes we see marketers making—and how to fix them.
Mistake #1: Your targeting is too broad.
Many B2B campaigns focus on large targeting lists like “Global 2000 companies” or “enterprise technology buyers” that have been pulled straight from a published list or built based on basic firmographic and technographic filters.
Why it matters.
Large, undifferentiated audiences like this will yield low engagement and bloated customer acquisition cost (CAC). Why? Imagine your organization sells an employee performance management solution in a market dominated by a few top players. One of your biggest challenges is that your solution is relatively unknown. Segmenting the Global 2000 by HR titles may put your brand in front of thousands of people—but the vast majority of these would not be currently in-market or match your ideal customer profile (ICP).
What to do instead.
Instead of wasting your spend on audiences that have no chance of converting, focus on smaller, highly specific audience segments within your ICP that align with your business goals. Try breaking down targets by industries, company size, technology use, journey stage and individual buyer personas.
In the example above, finding and targeting HR managers and directors who have performance management intent would allow you to concentrate efforts on more likely buyers. Further narrowing by technographics or industry could allow you to further tailor your messaging and offers—leading to better engagement.
Mistake #2: Your channel data is not integrated.
To reach their audience everywhere with a consistent message, marketers put the same ads on multiple channels without having a way for actions in one channel to inform what happens in another.
Why it matters.
Doing the same motion across disconnected platforms and vendors leads to unnecessary redundancy, wasted media dollars and missed opportunities to continue the conversation beyond the first click. Let’s look at our HR example to see why.
Say you narrowed your list as described above and your goal is to target this more ideal audience with messaging designed to create awareness about your brand. You deployed these on display and paid social, where they have caused buyers to search your company and even click through to your site from a paid search result. Great!
Except, now these buyers are ready to learn more, but your display and social campaigns haven’t gotten the message. These warmed-up buyers are still seeing the same high-level messages—wasting your money and their attention.
What to do instead.
When using a variety of channels and platforms, it’s critical that your data is integrated and flows from one to the other. An ABM platform vendor that provides an orchestration layer or a customer data platform (CDP) can use data from any one of your channels to trigger a change to all your channels.
In the example above, buyers and accounts that had satisfied the criteria set for the awareness segment in any channel (or through a combination of activities across channels) would automatically be moved to the consideration segment in all channels—creating an experience that is not just consistent, but seamlessly enables buyers to continue on their journey with your brand.
Mistake #3: You stick to the same few channels.
Inertia often keeps marketing teams invested in channels because they are familiar—not because they’re the best option. Many campaigns continue to spend heavily on scale channels like SEM, paid social, content syndication and programmatic display, without exploring other options.
Why it matters.
Not all channels work for all audiences, and different platform vendors have different strengths and weaknesses. Scale channels, in particular, are great for awareness, but not for consideration and evaluation, when it’s important to catch your audience when they’re in “work mode.” Sticking to the same channel roster means you’re missing out on valuable touchpoints with your target audiences. If you’re not seeing the results you want with a particular audience or campaign, repeating the same motions isn’t going to fix it.
What to do instead.
Develop a strong understanding of each channel and vendor you use. Make sure you know what audiences and journey stages they’re best for and that you define channel-specific objectives. This not only helps you identify the right platforms and vendors for specific goals, but helps you ensure your messaging, offers and KPIs are tuned to each platform or vendor’s best use and work in concert to propel buyers along their journey and down your funnel.
For mid-funnel engagement, look for niche forums or industry-specific publishers and communities, or consider working with product review vendors to build better competitive targeting strategies. Marketing with these platforms can take on many forms and allows you to essentially “borrow” trust from established outlets. They’re also a great opportunity to reach your audience where they’re already looking for ways to do their jobs better.
The HR industry, for example, has a strong network of publishers with great reach. For our goal of reaching HR titles, we might consider a 3-pronged approach:
- Placing ads directly on SHRM. This is a trusted industry-specific publication with a large readership. The goal would be to drive brand awareness of your solution.
- Sponsoring a podcast on HR Daily Advisor. Another trusted industry publication. The goal, again, is brand awareness.
- Content syndication of 2-3 high-value assets across vendors like Intentsify and Netline. You fold this in, along with a follow-up email sequence, to boost brand recall.
Mistake #4: You’re not experimenting enough.
Testing and optimizing creatives is part of most, if not all, media strategies. Testing new channels and how those channels fit into the larger journey, not so much. The fear of “what if it’s worse?” keeps many marketers from seeking and finding an approach that delivers better results.
Why it matters.
The right media mix can significantly increase the impact of your media spend and boost the volume of high-quality leads in your pipeline—enabling your sales team to focus more effort on progressing viable opportunities down the funnel, and less time chasing people who will never buy. There are many levers to adjust besides ad creatives and segmentation—and this adjustment takes creativity and time, but it’s worth it.
What to do instead.
Set aside 15–20 percent of your media budget for experimentation. Use this spend to try out novel ideas—such as whether a smaller niche channel or a different vendor might bring in a higher percentage of high-quality leads than your old standby—for a set period of time. If your hypothesis pans out, increase your spend on the new approach. If not, move on to your next experiment. If this process sounds daunting, look for an agency partner with a breadth of experience across channels to help.
Mistake #5: You’re moving too quickly to SDR outreach.
B2B buyers prefer to conduct extensive research on their own before talking to a sales representative. But many companies still automatically trigger SDR emails or calls after a buyer downloads a single piece of high-value content or attends one webinar.
Why it matters.
When buyers don’t respond, Sales typically concludes that the fault lies in lead quality (“these leads suck”)—creating a ripple effect of missed opportunities and wasted effort fixing problems that don’t exist (i.e. adjusting your campaign to bring in “better” leads when the leads were not the issue).
If your target list is good and you’re getting initial engagement from your ICP, it’s more likely that these potential buyers just aren’t ready for that conversation. For example, content syndication is an incredibly important channel for building a marketable contact database. Getting your research report, on-demand webinar or ebook in front of your target audience is often an important first step for developing urgency for a solution like yours. But content downloaded off-property has a drawback—buyers are less likely to associate the content with your company than if they downloaded it from your own landing page.
If they don’t remember or know who you are, that SDR email is basically like a cold call.
What to do instead.
Put as much thought into what needs to happen after the first click as you do to getting the click in the first place. Again, understanding the nuances of each channel is important here. You may need to do several additional activations—including retargeting with additional content and nurturing through email—to get that content syndication lead to become sales-ready.
For a lead from SEM or display, it’s going to be extra important that your website reflect the messaging and branding from the ad. For example, if your ad leans on industry-specific messaging but your website messaging is more general, you could use personalization tools to update your page header for visitors from the ad.
Mistake #6: Your metrics aren’t measuring actual campaign success.
Incentivized to justify budget or because someone in the C-Suite set the goals, marketing teams often lean on volume-based metrics, like impressions or clicks. These kinds of KPIs are important for measuring and optimizing performance on individual channels, but don’t tell the full story.
Why it matters.
If you’re not measuring buying signals or contribution to pipeline, you’re not seeing your campaign’s actual influence on your company’s business goals. In addition, over-indexing on raw leads and engagement metrics like click through rate (CTR), impressions and time-on-page can be misleading and lead to flawed decisions.
For example, automatically optimizing the copy that gets the highest clicks might cause you to miss that a “lower” performing ad actually sent more ICP to your site and led to more return visits.
What to do instead.
Rather than starting with a CTR or cost-per-lead (CPL) goal on a single channel, measure impact to pipeline across your media mix. Work back from a target conversion action, such as requesting a demo or booking a sales meeting, that you know fills your pipeline and create a multi-touch attribution model that takes into account the combination of activities that lead to that action.
It’s important to remember here that not all channels and tactics drive direct attribution. In the example above where awareness ads led potential buyers to search the HR software company and click on an SEM ad to get to their site, the role of the display ads is invisible. It looks like paid search drove the traffic. This could lead marketers to shift more of their budget from display to SEM—and then wonder why their numbers are going down.
The Iron Horse insight.
With the evolution of AI tools, the buyer’s journey is changing fast. The most effective teams treat paid media as an evolving ecosystem. But even the best media planning strategy can fail without effective content, or dead ends in your web CX.
