Advertising to the Enterprise
General B2B advertising is one thing. What about trying to land huge enterprise level deals from advertising?
What we know about Enterprise B2B Advertising
Right Percent has run advertising to enterprises for Ramp, DoorDash, Rippling, Wyng, and way more. We’ve architected and executed enterprise focused ad campaigns on LinkedIn, Search and Facebook that have driven 7 figure deals for our clients.
The name Right Percent comes from the fact that we’re experts at targeting the right percent of the global audience that is your target customer - and nowhere is this more important than in targeting large enterprises.
Enterprise target audiences are small.
We talk all the time about how a big differentiator of B2B vs B2C is audience size - B2B audiences are smaller.
This is never more important than with Enterprise B2B, where your audience of decision makers is often less than 10,000 people worldwide.
How does the small size of enterprise audiences affect ad strategy?
Advertising effectively to such a small target audience is hard.
Why is it hard to advertise to a small audience, besides the fact that there’s just less of them?
It breaks the iteration cycle that is key to ad campaign success.
This is a really, really important concept.
Here’s what I mean. Below is an example of data from a normal (non enterprise-focused) B2B ads campaign.
Based on this data, it looks like we would want to put more budget allocation in Campaign C. Differences between the number of sales aren’t statistically significant but the differences between cost per new opportunity is.
This kind of analysis above is the bread and butter of advertising optimization. Using data from the account to improve allocation of spend, learning which strategies and tactics lead to better results. It’s how an ad campaign can improve in efficiency continuously over years and months.
Now, take a look at this enterprise B2B focused campaign. It has less leads and opps because the target audience is smaller and more precise. I used the exact same conversion values to calculate this - but the smaller sample size
With the above data, not knowing the base conversion rate, you can’t make any decisions on which of the above campaigns should get more budget.
Add in the random variance you’d get in real life with smaller numbers, and you’ll see that the smaller audience and higher cost per lead breaks your ability to optimize campaigns for performance.
What makes this even more important is the impact of algorithmic optimization. Modern ad algorithms require a lot of signal-rich conversion data to work well - a typical enterprise campaign structure starves the algorithm of the necessary data.
What doesn’t work to fix these problems?
You might think that you can optimize on clicks or views, since you get so much more of them.
Ex: “If Campaign A gets twice as many clicks, it’s twice as good as Campaign B.”
However, unless you’re running a methodically organized brand awareness campaign, CPM and CPC are vanity metrics. On modern platforms they may have no correlation with the ability for ads to attract qualified leads. An ad that attracts clicks from lots of small companies or non decision makers will have a great CTR but a negligent conversion rate.
Optimizing for Lead or MQL on its own can also be a misleading metric. Some leads will convert to customers wildly better than others, as everyone in B2B knows.
What does work for fixing the problems in enterprise B2B targeting?
Create a reliable system of quantitatively valuing leads.
You’ve heard of lead scoring before. What we highly recommend for marketing is creating a quantitative lead value that can be determined within a few days of lead creation.
Variables such as the below can all go into this calculation.
Answers on the lead form (number of employees, title, budget, etc.)
Sales activity (did they open the email)
Geography
Site activity (did they watch the demo video, try the free trial if you have one)
You cannot optimize ad accounts based on closed won deals when trying to get enterprise deals. They take too long and have too many touches. But by creating a leading indicator lead event - one that you reliably know is worth $X - you can optimize on that and save the campaign.
Use a product strategy with full market coverage.
If you can *only* convert leads that have over 5000 employees, you’ll end up throwing out a large percentage of your paid ad clicks.
The very best enterprise acquisition focused ad accounts also have a path for smaller, less valuable customers to convert.
Something like the pathing below is common:
Biggest leads: White glove sales team
Medium size leads: Sent to other sales team
Small leads: Sent to free trial
If you throw out everything but the biggest leads, its harder to make advertising prospecting campaigns viable.
Building Rock Solid 3rd Party Audiences
In other articles, we talk about the methods of targeting, captured below. One of them is using 3rd party audiences with tools like Bombora or 6Sense.
If you are very confident in your ability to create audiences to target on the platforms, you don’t need to rely on feedback loops as much.
For instance, if you have a rock solid list of 10,000 quality decision makers you import to LinkedIn via API, you know that every click and every lead you get is one that you want. You don’t need to worry about dealing with low quality leads or about making sure the algorithm selects the best of your list, since it’s all good.
The issue with 3rd party targeting is that it exhausts quickly. It doesn’t take long to serve an ad or two or ten to everyone on the list, eliminating your low hanging fruit.
The way to solve this is to create a stream of high quality content that this audience loves. Good content fights ad fatigue like nothing else. You can keep serving content to an audience with a good ROI for a long time, and each content piece makes it easier for your sales team to close the client.
Knowing all of the above, which ad channels are best for Enterprise B2B?
First, check out our ad channels chart.
Taken a look? Great!
For digital advertising to enterprise clients, which is the focus of this article, there’s two channels that we find work at scale:
Google - Google works best for B2B companies in a market where customers have intent already and are searching for a product like yours. Google is the most competitive ad channel. It’s often hard for challenger companies to get a good ROI in a well established business niche. The more value you can capture per click, the more likely you are to do well on search. In addition, the better your business holds up against direct comparison to your competitors, the better you’ll do.
See our full guide to testing Google for B2B ads here.
LinkedIn - LinkedIn is best for targeting employees of larger B2B companies with specific attributes. Content ads work best most of the time, as opposed to direct to demo ads, and is the king in enterprise B2B.
See our full guide to testing LinkedIn Ads here.
Facebook - Facebook is almost impossible to make work at scale in enterprise, though you can sometimes set up efficient retargeting campaigns.
See our full guide to testing Facebook for B2B ads here.
Other Ad Channels - This can be Youtube, TikTok, Quora, Snapchat, Pinterest, Reddit, etc. We’ve tested these extensively and can work, but just don’t find as much scale as direct response B2B advertising. We don’t recommend testing them unless you’ve exhausted the main three ad options.
Other key differences for advertising to the enterprise.
The sales team leads the charge.
In the end, enterprise account acquisition is driven by the sales team, not marketing. This is unlike B2C or B2SMB, where the sales team, when it exists, is there as an additional part of the conversion path instead of a main driver of new business. This means sales should be brought in early to answer questions like:
Who is the ideal person for sales to talk to? From which type of companies, and any company in particular?
What kind of content is easiest for the sales team to upsell from?
Any other considerations on sales strategy.
Generally, the smaller the target market, the more important sales manual efforts are compared to large scale marketing.
The lines between prospecting and retargeting are blurred
In most ad accounts, prospecting and retargeting are considered different campaigns. The pool of people who have engaged with your company and the pool of people who have not.
With long sales cycles, the lines between these two is very blurred for enterprise targeting. Every user that enters your prospecting campaign will also be hit by retargeting before closing. This would be unheard of in B2C e-commerce or even B2SMB ads.
Even existing clients can be worth targeting! Often one division of a giant company will use your product, but other divisions still never heard of it.
Cohort analysis is even more important.
With long periods of time between lead create date and close date, you must measure downfunnel performance against the week you initially made your ad spend, not against date of the closed deal. Otherwise your weekly downfunnel data will have no tie in to your actual ad tactics and strategy.
The Takeaways on Advertising to the Enterprise.
Advertising to the Enterprise is hard, because you have less reliable conversions to iterate with.
You can solve that with one or more of these three methods:
Creating leading indicator conversion events that let you optimize performance with less downfunnel signals.
Use a full market approach to monetize non-enterprise leads when possible.
Build out rock solid 3rd party lists and lots of content to target your specific audience with.
That’s the 1000 foot view of what works! We hope you enjoyed this guide.
Spend more than $30k a month on ads, and want a free audit of your Enterprise B2B ad accounts? Fill out the form on our homepage.