A different way to think about digital ads in B2B: a content marketing perspective

Last time I wrote about running online ads for B2B businesses, I got a bunch of interesting feedback that I would like to address.

(The caveat here is that most of the feedback I got was from fellow marketing leaders with a solid background in performance marketing: if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail).

Some of the marketers I discussed with mentioned the importance of targeting specific audience demographics to maximize ad effectiveness. Others suggested exploring different ad formats to capture attention, such as video or interactive ads. Additionally, a few commenters emphasized the need for regular ad performance tracking and optimization to ensure the best return on ad spend.

Whilst this is all very true and appropriate, these suggestions are tactical: they don’t address the intrinsic reasons why ads performance has worsened (I explored some of the reasons in my post) and, therefore, they don’t propose an alternative approach to B2B online advertising. Instead of rethinking how marketers should consider digital advertising and its role in their marketing mix, they simply suggest to optimize it.

I propose another approach. My approach is to consider B2B online ads part of a B2B content marketing strategy.

Yes, digital advertising as a subset of content marketing. Let me argue.

First, some definitions.

Digital advertising

I’ll keep it as broad as possible: digital advertising refers to paid promotional messages that are displayed online.

These ads can have a variety of formats (from banner ads and video ads to native ads and social media promotions) and exist in a variety of platforms (from Google search results to TikTok, from LinkedIn to Instagram stories).

The primary objective of digital advertising is to grab the attention of target audiences, generate clicks or conversions, and ultimately drive revenue for the advertiser.

In other words, digital advertising is a marketing channel. One of many.

Content Marketing

Content Marketing, on the other hand, is a strategic approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, informative, and entertaining content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience. This content can take various forms, including blog posts, articles, videos, podcasts, infographics, and more.

The primary goal of content marketing is to build trust, establish thought leadership, and nurture strong relationships with customers by providing them something they find valuable.

Digital advertising and content marketing: what gives?

While online ads are transactional in nature, content marketing takes a more educational and customer-centric approach, seeking to provide value and establish long-term connections. The key distinction here lies in the intent and delivery of the message: digital advertising aims to capture attention to promote products or services, while content marketing focuses on delivering insightful content that addresses audience pain points and solves their problems.

Marketing teams are usually defined around functions, with one person/team working on digital advertising (also called performance marketing) and another person/team working on content strategy/production. Usually they both report to the Marketing Director or CMO. This is the usual structure for a B2B Marketing team.

I believe it’s a suboptimal way to grow a B2B business.

The problem with two separated functions

While it seems a reasonable way of structuring your marketing mix, having a digital advertising function separated from a content marketing function does not work in B2B. Because it’s hard. And because of misaligned incentives.

Sure, these two functions might very well collaborate. They might have plenty of alignment meetings where the content team will share what campaigns they are working on and the performance team will let them know how much budget they will allocate for those campaigns.

But the fundamental issue is that they have different incentives. Performance wants to show the CMO how many conversions can be attributed to them. They want to leverage the attribution numbers that Google or Meta provide to their activities. They want to do it because Google and Meta (and every other advertising platform) give them these tools.

The content team doesn’t have the same depth of attribution data, and 99 times out of 100 the little data they have access to shows that the performance team was responsible for more conversions than them. So what do they do, instead? They end up showing engagement metrics on social media, content downloads, clickthrough rates on their newsletter and page views. They end up showing and relying on different data points because they are easier to track and paint a brighter picture.

(Before moving on, let me clarify one important point here: this is not necessarily a content issue. Advertising platforms tend to naturally place more emphasis on their own contribution to a conversion, and have little-to-no interest in showing how a specific piece of content distributed "organically" (that is, via social media, SEO, PR and the likes) has contributed to a conversion. This has nothing to do with the quality of a content team's work and everything to do with the advertising platforms' interest in getting a larger slice of a company's marketing budget.)

So now performance and content don’t work towards the same goals. They are actually competing. I have seen it loads of time. I see it all the time.

Sometimes this misalignment is created by a CMO who gets pressured by the board to crank up their conversions before the end of the quarter, and performance can always pour more money into the Google Ads machine so that some numbers will eventually be up. Sometimes it’s just a miscalculation of sunk costs: having the content team create 10 LinkedIn posts seems more productive than having them spend 15 hours doing interviews for an in-depth industry report.

I get it.

And look: everyone wants the same end goal. Every CEO or CMO start with this ideal scenario in mind.

The ideal scenario of digital advertising and content marketing working together

Picture this: your content person is working on your next thought leadership piece together with your advertising person, both exploring possible angles to make it SEO-friendly and/or maximize reach on social media.

Your advertising person is finally free to work on the things that really move the needle, without having to report on performance campaigns for sales that would’ve happened anyway. Your advertising person would focus on generating awareness and drive people to read your white paper, download your industry research, watch your webinar or simply subscribe to your newsletter.

These people would then enter your marketing engine, where they would be exposed to your resources page, to your technical documents, to your customer stories, increasing their knowledge and their trust in your brand.

Imagine them being retargeted by your digital ads, enticing them to consume your latest industry outlook, or your new course. All of this created by your content marketing team, finally free from the curse of having hit numbers that are structurally worse than those hit by the performance team.

The ads serve as a gateway, capturing the attention of the target audience and leading them to the informative and insightful content that addresses their pain points.

This is what every B2B leader tries to implement.

99% of them fail at this. In the end, almost all of them give up to the chaos: the KPI's are not the same, the decision makers are too many.

Everybody knows it but nobody does anything about it. Because it’s hard. And because of misaligned incentives.

Now, this is where my proposal for a different approach comes handy.

A different way to look at digital advertising

Now, compare the misery we have just described to this alternative scenario:

• the content marketing team reports to the CMO/Marketing Director on both conversions/sales and engagement metrics driven by their work;
• the performance team reports to the Head of Content on two metrics: return on ad spend (ROAS) for the campaigns focusing on demand capture, and ROAS for the campaigns focusing on demand generation;
• content and performance work together (and report together) on demand generation.

The benefits for the CMO/Marketing Director are real:

1. she gets two teams/functions completely aligned on the very same objective, with aligned incentives and streamlined structure,
2. she gets one report instead of two. She gets one number instead of two. Everything is streamlined, easier to analyze and easier to understand. She is suddenly comparing apples to apples, instead of apples to oranges.
3. she forces the performance team to keep demand capture and demand generation separated, while forcing the content team to focus on making quality content pieces that move the needle (otherwise the performance team wouldn’t have any good content to drive traffic to).

This is a clearly better solution compared to the previous setup.

It addresses the root causes of the issue (strategy and goal misalignment) and introduces a clear incentive to collaborate: the KPI's are the same for both functions, and the decision maker is one. No room for competing priorities, no room for misunderstandings.

I would also add another benefit, although I am aware this is a bit controversial: having performance under content is a strong signal of where the marketing priority lies. It sends a clear message that creating and distributing value through content is the primary focus. This can help shift the mindset within the marketing team and ensure that content quality and value take precedence over short-term conversions.

Additional thoughts

One thing worth spending a few lines on is this: this is not an effort to downplay the importance of digital advertising. I actually do exactly this for a living, I like performance marketing, and I see there are incredible opportunities for B2B companies to grow via digital ads.

I just happen to believe that the most optimal way to create and implement an advertising strategy for a B2B business is in conjunction with a content marketing strategy.

And while this is not something marketers argue on, it is significant to point out that the failure rate is incredibly high. And so marketing leaders end up rolling back their plans.

A standalone, siloed digital advertising function might not be a good growth strategy for B2B businesses. It is expensive (boy, is it expensive!) and doesn’t build any meaningful marketing flywheel, which is what you as a CEO/CMO would want from your Marketing team. Especially teams with low budgets.

And look, not every marketer will agree with me on this, but I strongly believe that making content that educates an audience of potential buyers and turns them into customers is a much stronger long-term moat than building an efficient advertising engine. And while I regularly argue that ads are necessary and essential for every B2B Marketing team, I also reckon that ads are not immune from the law of shitty clickthroughs. Besides, in a world dominated by watered-down, obvious, chatGPT-powered vanilla takes, it is easier to stand out through original content than through an optimized ad strategy.

What do you think about this? Do you disagree with the view of digital advertising serving your content strategy? How do  you structure your Marketing team? Let me know! I’m happy to learn from you.