Launch · Consulting
Paid Media & Performance Marketing: Search, Paid Social and Retargeting for B2B
Paid media is an amplifier, and amplifying a funnel that leaks is an expensive way to prove it leaks.
The problem
What this usually looks like
The account has one campaign, one ad group, several hundred keywords on broad match and no negative list, so budget is going to job seekers, students and competitors researching your pricing. The ads point at the homepage, where the visitor has to work out for themselves which part of the business the ad was about. The reported cost per lead counts every form on the site, including the contact page, and nobody has checked how many of those became a meeting. Every month the spend gets defended with a platform-reported conversion number the CRM cannot corroborate.
How I approach it
Before recommending any spend I check whether the funnel behind the ads can convert what they send, because paid buys volume and volume through a leaking funnel just costs more. Campaigns are then rebuilt around how buyers actually search and what they are being offered, with the negative keyword and audience exclusion work that keeps the wrong people out and has to be maintained rather than done once. Every campaign points at a page that delivers what the ad promised. Attribution gets reported honestly, platform numbers reconciled against CRM outcomes each month, with the gap named rather than quietly absorbed.
Scope
What I actually do
Assess whether paid is the right answer at all, and say so plainly when the funnel behind it will waste the budget.
Restructure the account: campaigns and ad groups aligned to intent, with match types, budgets and bidding that suit your deal size.
Build and keep building the negative keyword list, because search terms are where B2B budget leaks fastest.
Run audience hygiene on paid social, exclusions, suppression of existing customers and staff, and frequency caps on retargeting.
Design offer and creative separately for cold, warm and retargeting audiences, because those are three different conversations.
Align every campaign to a landing page that answers the specific promise in the ad instead of the homepage.
Set up conversion tracking through to the CRM so a reported conversion is a qualified meeting, not a page view.
Reconcile platform-reported results against CRM pipeline every month and report the difference rather than hiding it.
Deliverables
What you get
- Paid account audit identifying wasted spend by search term and audience
- Rebuilt campaign structure across search, paid social and retargeting
- Negative keyword and audience exclusion lists with a maintenance cadence
- Ad creative and offer set for each audience temperature
- Landing page alignment brief, or built pages, for each campaign
- Conversion tracking wired through to CRM outcomes
- Monthly report reconciling platform numbers against pipeline
Outcomes
What changes
- Budget stops being spent on people who were never going to buy
- A cost per booked meeting you can defend, not just a cost per click
- Ads and landing pages that make the same promise
- A clear answer on whether paid is worth continuing for your business
- Campaigns stopped on evidence instead of left running out of habit
Engagement
How we work together
Paid account audit with a wasted-spend finding and fix list
Campaign build and launch, then handover to your team
Ongoing paid media management with monthly pipeline reconciliation
Pre-spend readiness check before paid runs behind a new offer or launch
Questions
Straight answers
When is paid media the wrong answer?
When the funnel behind it leaks. If leads are not answered the same day, if there is no qualification, if there is no follow-up for the buyer who is interested but early, or if nobody can tell you what a booked meeting is worth, paid spending just buys you more of a problem you already have. It is also the wrong answer when the addressable market is small enough that a rep with a list and a phone reaches it faster and cheaper.
Search or paid social for B2B?
Search captures demand that already exists, someone is looking for what you sell right now, and is usually the first thing to switch on. Paid social creates demand among people who were not looking, which costs more per click and takes longer to pay back, so it makes sense when the search volume for your category is thin or already saturated. Retargeting sits behind both and is cheap, but it only works if enough qualified people are arriving in the first place.
Why does the platform's reported result never match our CRM?
Because they measure different things. Platforms count conversions inside their own attribution and view-through windows, model some of them, and credit themselves for touches the buyer barely noticed. The CRM counts what became a meeting and what closed. Both numbers are useful; the mistake is pretending they are the same one. I report both side by side and name the gap, so decisions get made on pipeline rather than platform self-assessment.
How much budget do we need to start?
Enough to produce a decision-grade signal in a reasonable window, which depends entirely on click costs in your category and how many clicks it takes to produce one meeting. A budget that generates a handful of clicks a week will tell you nothing for months and should not be started. I would rather size the test against your numbers up front, with a stated kill criterion, than start small and quietly keep it running out of hope.
Related
Services that usually go with this
Marketing, SEO & Demand Generation
Marketing built by someone who has to live with the leads it produces.
Sales Funnel Design & Build
A funnel is an operations problem, not a graphics problem.
Landing Pages & Conversion Rate Optimisation
Most conversion problems are message problems, and most sites do not have the traffic to test their way out of them.
Hiring instead of contracting? See the full-time roles, or the ATS-formatted resume.
Contact
Tell me what you are hiring for
- Call: +1 519 278 5085
- Email: tim@timarmstrong.ca
- Based: London & Southwestern Ontario, Ontario, America/Toronto (Eastern Time)
- Availability: Available nationally across Canada, on-site, hybrid or remote
- Serving: London · Stratford · Woodstock · Kitchener: Waterloo · Cambridge · Guelph · Brantford · Sarnia · Chatham-Kent · Windsor · Toronto · Mississauga and Canada-wide