Here's what I think about running online ads for B2B companies in 2023

Let’s talk about online ads.

When I was responsible for the online sales of a large consumer brand, I used to hang out with a bunch of eCommerce folks on Twitter and everyone bragged about their amazing results. Their secret?

Facebook ads.

In the golden age of digital advertising – say, between 2010 and 2018 – Facebook ads and Google ads were the way to grow any online business. Their formidable reach and unmatched profiling capabilities allowed any marketer to serve ads to a highly targeted and responsive audience of billions of people, on the cheap.

Facebook and Google had access to an enormous amount of user and behavioral data, and they turned this data into targeting parameters that could be applied to a vast and very efficient ad inventory. The results were extraordinary: anyone with a basic understanding of how people behave online could leverage those parameters to profile their customers and serve them ads by taking advantage of that vast ad inventory.

As long as it worked, it worked like magic.

Then a few things happened.

Privacy concerns began to gain steam. In April 2021, Apple introduced its App Tracking Transparency (ATT) privacy policy with their iOS update, and it limited the amount of user and behavioral data that Facebook and Google could gather of every Apple customer, limiting their ability to profile end users, and effectively making them unable to serve highly targeted ads the way they were used to do. It was (and still is) a huge blow for them, but also for the small businesses using these platforms to reach their customers.

In an effort to one-up Apple, Google announced it would abandon third-party cookies, making it harder to track a user’s behavior and therefore collect precious data to feed their advertising engine. Google will disable third-party cookies in 2024.

All this is happening in addition to privacy regulations at government level (European GDPR, the California Consumer Privacy Act, and more) that are enhancing user privacy at the expense of tracking efficiency. It will only get worse.

What are the consequences for B2B businesses?

In concrete terms, a privacy-focused environment is causing businesses two orders of issues:

1. they are unable to target their audience with the same granularity and efficiency that they enjoyed even a few years ago
2. they are unable to track and measure user behavior throughout their journey

Issue #1 causes rising costs which, paired to ad saturation and increased competition, makes it difficult to get a positive return on investment.

Issue #2 causes lack of understanding of the buyer’s behavior, making it difficult to understand the impact of individual marketing activities, therefore posing a possible risk of investing in the wrong areas.

Issue #2 is what gives me more headaches.

B2B businesses are defined by longer and complex buyer journeys. Like, really complex. You might think your buyer journey looks like this:

When instead it probably looks more like this:

And this so-called journey can last for months, making it impossible for a marketer to track it and map out all the touch-points and all the interactions that the buyer has with a brand until they purchase their product.

It will only get worse. It is already worse if you’re dealing with European customers.

Attribution is another obvious headache. Google and Facebook are fundamentally unable to – and certainly not interested in – showing you how much of a sale can be attributed to anything else than an ad: if it's not possible to track a user across devices, across browsers and across apps, how is it possible to weigh how much a blog post, a trade show, or a viral LinkedIn post have contributed to a transaction.

At a first glance, these organic activities are all areas at risk of being underinvested by Marketing leaders and CEOs, as direct response advertising is easier to report to. It is easier for a CMO to show their ads performance to their CEO because they can directly tie it to specific conversions or sales. However, this narrow focus on direct response ads neglects the importance of brand awareness and the long-term impact of other marketing activities.

So what do you suggest a B2B business do?

Keep investing in ads.

Yes, I know. I’ve been doom and gloom for the whole essay and now I’m telling you to keep investing in ads. But hear me out.

You should keep investing in ads for three main reasons:

Ads give you reach

Everyone is still using Google and Facebook/Instagram to search for their next purchase, learn new stuff or simply connect with their friends. These are still the best places to access a large and diverse audience.

This also means that you are able to put your offer in front of people that have never heard of you: this is not something you can do very easily via organic activities.

Ads let you iterate faster

Say you are launching a new product or are serving a new type of customers. By solely relying on organic activities like SEO (Search Engine Optimization) it would take you months or even years of hard - really hard - work to generate enough traffic to gain momentum and get your initial feedback. Ads generate qualified traffic right away, saving time, money and enabling a shorter feedback loop that allows you to improve your offer much faster.

Ads let you retarget potential buyers

Even if measurement and attribution are worse than before, you can still retarget users who have previously engaged with your website or content. This allows you to re-engage potential customers who may have shown initial interest but did not convert.

Retargeting can be a powerful tool for nurturing leads and guiding them through the complex B2B buying process, ultimately increasing the chances of conversion.

So go ahead and invest some of your marketing budget in online ads, but don’t ignore the rest of your marketing activities, even if they are hard or sometimes impossible to track. Don’t rely solely on ads to drive conversions because the buyer journey is complex, long and more and more difficult to map out.

The current landscape of rising costs, increased competition, and privacy regulations requires a more comprehensive approach to marketing, even if sometimes it feels like you're flying blind.

Imagine the power of social media, where you can engage in conversations, build a community, and humanize your brand. Picture the influence of content marketing, where valuable information and resources establish you as a trusted advisor in your field. And let’s not forget the impact of a well-crafted PR campaign that lands your business in the media, capturing the attention of industry leaders and potential clients.

Sure, these activities might be trickier to track and measure in terms of direct ROI. But sometimes, the greatest value lies beyond immediate conversions. It resides in brand recognition, audience engagement, and the countless touchpoints that shape a customer's decision-making journey.

Customers seek authenticity, thought leadership, and meaningful connections: while they definitely help, ads are certainly not the only way to achieve these goals.