B2B Marketing Q&A: Channels, Brand Awareness and Attribution

Which channels should small and medium-sized tech companies use?

What online marketing channels would you recommend for small and medium-sized tech companies?

All right, so the two most important things to start with for any company are LinkedIn and Google Ads. That’s where you start, because Google Ads is the one that captures demand. So, people who are actively looking for something similar to what you’re producing.

If your category exists, then that’s the place to be. That’s a channel where people are actively looking for things, and you have to be there.

There’s no client acquisition funnel where somebody would purchase a product without, at some point, coming to Google. They might check blogs, they might check out you specifically, they might check out your competitors, but they’re going to look at you on Google, and you have to be there.

You have to think about what they’re going to find once they search for you, once they search for your product category or your product. It will be part of the acquisition funnel.

And LinkedIn is, well, if you’re a tech company and you have a clear firmographic fit, you know which companies are your target audience or what your total addressable market is, it’s the most accurate acquisition channel that we have.

People are putting true things into LinkedIn compared to Facebook. You know, if people put that they went to Harvard, it’s likely true. If they put it on Facebook, it’s probably not true.

So the accuracy is very, very high. And the targeting options there are first-party. They’re using data that people freely give to LinkedIn.

Facebook’s targeting options are more based on third-party data, which means if they come to your website and you have a cookie installed on your website, they’re using that data. But it doesn’t belong to them. It’s a third-party cookie. This is something that’s going to be phased out the more we go into the future.

So, in this way, LinkedIn targeting, for one, is very accurate. And on the other hand, you have the option to specifically select companies, specifically select people to see your ads. You have complete control over who is going to see these things.

What are the pillars of a B2B marketing strategy?

Okay. And what do you think about the pillars of a B2B marketing strategy?

Right. In a B2B marketing strategy, there are four things in most cases. It doesn’t apply to everyone, but in most cases, there are four things that you have to concentrate on. Every effort that you’re making to get revenue in the future is going to move around these four things.

One of them is demand capture. This talks about Google.

The second is brand awareness, because there are people who are not ready to buy at the moment. So you will need to create— they will have to know about you. That’s one of the most important parts.

Third is lead generation. Lead generation is for people who are close to making a decision, but they’re not there yet. You’re just making it easier for them to come into contact with you.

And fourth is just making sales’ lives easier.

We can go over them one by one.

Demand capture: this is the classic one. This is very close also to how B2C works. People are searching for you, you bid, you show up, they click, and typically the last-point attribution will be attributed to this.

So if you look at your analytics tool, Google Search is the one that will show up.

You might be doing billboards, or you might be doing TV advertising or whatever. Most of the attribution will be either direct, so people coming directly to your page, or they’re going to come through organic, which might mean they typed in your brand name and then clicked on what they found. And the third one is paid search.

Obviously, this is not true, because they will have seen your TV ads or billboards, and this all builds up, but it’s not going to show up in attribution. But demand capture is very trackable in this sense.

The next one was lead generation.

All right. So lead generation is more— it’s kind of demand capture, but for B2B.

A lot of times, you kind of know which companies are interesting for you. Not in every case, but lead generation is good if it’s linked to your product, or it’s linked to intent, buying intent, or it’s linked to your target audience.

What’s not a good lead-generation tactic, and this is typically what happens for most companies, is they create an ebook, people download it, and then they give this email to sales.

But obviously, this ebook might be “Trends in Marketing in 2025 OR 2024,” whatever. And there’s no intent in this. The audience might be a lot broader than your selected target audience. So, for this matter, it’s just not a good one. It’s not filtering enough.

But there are good lead-generation tactics. For example, a good one is an audit.

If you can offer your client that you’re going to do an audit of their channels, for example, or an audit of their problem, then you give them some value. You typically would do this for free, but you can uncover problems that your product would solve.

So it’s a good way for you to get into contact before they’re ready to buy.

The buying process, from a company perspective, is typically that somebody would have a problem. They’re triggered, they would start their research, and at this point they already have some companies in mind who they could buy from, theoretically.

They’re doing their research. And if they choose you without your knowledge, because they’re not de-anonymised until this point, they will click on “Demo,” or they do a free consultation, or they do the CTA that you have on your website.

But this is pretty late. At this point, a long time has already passed. You could have helped them make that decision.

So if you can put a step in between this, make it easier for them. It’s not like talking to sales, who want to sell me something, but something else, like real value. And typically value for free or for a lower cost, practically a very low cost.

Then, for them, it’s a good way for companies to show that they’re worth it.

What was the next one? The next one was brand awareness, right?

Brand awareness is probably the most important of all of this.

If there’s some misconception in B2B, then it’s just how important brand is. It took me a long time to understand how important brand is, because this gets thrown around a lot.

Most of the companies in your audience are not going to buy today.

If you’re selling software for task management, you would come up to them, salespeople would call around and ask everybody, “Hey, we’re selling task-management software.”

They would say, “Okay, thanks. I know this exists, but I’m not ready to buy right now.” Because either we’re not looking for one, or we’re using a competing product or something. But they’re typically not ready.

There’s always a window of opportunity. There’s a window of opportunity of intent on their part.

Typically, this is like 95%, it might even be 99%. It depends really on the product. In mature markets, if the market has already existed for a long time, most of the people are going to be here, which means they’re not going to buy.

You’re not able to activate them. Activation meaning you show them, “Hey, we’re selling this,” and they would say, “Okay, I want to try it.” That just doesn’t happen.

If I go on LinkedIn and somebody’s trying to sell me accounting software, I’m not there. It might be something interesting. Or HR software for the employees: it might be interesting for me, but not right now. I’m not looking for it. If I were looking for it, I’d be on Google.

But I would have to— so that’s the other point.

Most of the people are not ready to buy. Which means, do you just leave them alone, or what are you doing with them?

Obviously, these people are not going to buy based on rational arguments. They’re not going to buy based on emotions. First and foremost, they’re going to buy based on memory.

And that’s the hard part, because you would have to be memorable. They would have to remember your name, but they’re subjected to hundreds of brands every day without much distinction, without much differentiation.

If you just look through your LinkedIn feed, you would see hundreds of companies there. They kind of look the same. You know, fancy logo, nice brand, everything. But how your memory works is a bit more complex.

For one, you save a brand name, ideally together with its product category, so what they’re doing.

If you have Salesforce, you put them away as a sales CRM. But if you’re not sure what they’re doing, you just see the brand name, it’s really hard to put it anywhere.

If it’s a new category, that’s just a completely different point. It’s hard to save that name at all.

So it’s very important that people remember you. That’s the whole point.

People rarely buy from companies they don’t know if there is an alternative. If your competitor is well-known and you’re not well-known, then you are selling as a commodity, kind of.

You’re selling as a commodity, meaning something you would buy from China, from AliExpress or any of these, Temu, whatever.

If you don’t mind buying it for the low price, you just want the best price-to-product ratio, which rarely happens, actually, then you’re fine. You can go to any Chinese market. You’re just buying it from there.

But if you want running shoes or a car, you typically want brands, right?

I’m buying running shoes from Nike, even though functionally they might be the same as Reebok. But I’m just not buying Reebok running shoes because, brand-wise, I’m somehow linked. I like Nike in this sense.

All right. The last point was about sales support.

Yeah. So this is for companies that are sales-led.

If you have a salesperson or a sales team in a company, then marketing’s job is often more focused on making this sale happen.

On one end, it can bring in leads, people who are interested, and sales can sell to them. But marketing is also there to warm leads up. It also helps them close sales that are already in the pipeline.

Some sales cycles are very long. It might take six months, twelve months, just to close a lead, from first contact to actual purchase. And marketing can be there all the time.

You can show up for these people at a regular frequency within these time periods to help push the client forward.

Also, how sales happens is, when a salesperson and a client go into a meeting room, there are three things that are important.

One: what does the client think about the product?

Two: what does the client think about the company, so the brand?

And three: what does the client think about the salesperson who’s standing in front of them?

That’s already the closing phase. And all three of these are somewhere on a scale from zero to ten.

The closer it is to ten, the more inclined they are, the more they like it, then the likelier it is that the salesperson can close. The moment they’re trying to close, “Hey, okay, this is the offer,” then the better for them.

The parts about the company and the product are something that you communicate beforehand.

You can show people, these specific people, for example on LinkedIn, information that you would want to convey or that you want them to know beforehand.

They should know your company very well by this point. They should know about the benefits of your product at this point.

About the salesperson, what they think about the salesperson, that’s a different thing. That’s something that typically you can’t really influence.

You can do Thought Leader Ads on LinkedIn, maybe, or help them with posting on social or LinkedIn organic posts, fine. But this is the one you can hardly push.

The other two are very susceptible to marketing effort, so you can push this forward.

Are LinkedIn Ads expensive?

Okay. And do you think that LinkedIn Ads are expensive?

Yes, no. Well, it depends.

This is typically an obstacle. Often, when we talk to clients about LinkedIn Ads, this is the first thing that would come up: “LinkedIn Ads are expensive.”

This is something that is ingrained in their minds. “Okay, but aren’t LinkedIn Ads expensive?”

Today I had a call where this was the first thing they wanted to talk about, but obviously LinkedIn was the right channel for them.

They’re not— so it doesn’t have to be.

It can cost anywhere from one EUR to five EUR per click, but that’s not necessarily the point.

When you compare it to something like Facebook, the accuracy, on one end, is low. Facebook is not good at targeting anymore because of the cookie— the third-party cookies are being cancelled, obviously. So they’re not going to be part of the future, and Facebook is using them to target accurately.

But also, they’re picking up intent signals. What are they doing? These people are checking out car websites, or so on. These are the pieces of information they’re using, but they’re not direct.

The information that LinkedIn is using is direct. So, in this case, for B2B, it’s very useful.

On the other hand, it can be very cheap on LinkedIn if you have a clear target audience in mind. You can use specific lists of companies, where only people on this list would see your ads, or a list of names.

It depends on what type of campaign you’re running, but LinkedIn is a lot less expensive than people would think.

How should B2B companies advertise on social media?

How do you advertise on social media for B2B companies, especially if you’re talking about tech companies, for example?

Yeah. So the issue with social media is that you have people who don’t have intent.

These people don’t want to buy. They’re not there to buy. They’re there to check their friends out. They’re there to check who has a new position, or who’s doing better than them, or these kinds of things. People are just very self-centred in this sense.

And we’re just scrolling. I’m scrolling on social media very fast. I just don’t have the attention. And I might even have more attention

per post than the average.

So the issue is, if you want to send any type of message, you have a very small window to grab their attention.

The limit is like two seconds. That’s what we’re calling the hook of any social media ad. If they’re not staying more than two seconds, then they’re likely not going to be able to take away anything from this ad.

For example, on LinkedIn, if you’re using a video ad, you have a metric called “View,” and that’s telling you that the person stayed longer than two seconds on the website.

If you compared all of our clients’ data, you would see that typically about 25% of impressions end up in a view. So most people just scroll through, not even two seconds.

And that’s not atypical. That’s what you expect to happen.

If you’re well targeted, they already know you, they know you personally, for example, the percentage is going to go up.

Some webinars you would see where people— their faces— these are working well, so they would have a higher view rate. But typically, it’s very low. So you have a very small window of attention that you need to grab, for one.

The second thing is: what can you communicate within this time frame of five or six seconds?

Even if they stop, they’re going to go further. They’re not going to spend their day reading all the text that you’re putting there.

They’re going to first look at the image, look at the headline, look at the description of the ad, maybe.

But the image itself has to be well branded, for one. If you’re using social media ads, they have to know who the company is.

You would have to be distinct enough that within two seconds they can say, “Okay, this is HubSpot,” or “Salesforce,” or whatever.

You have this time to make sure they know your company name, or remember that this was an ad, like refresh a memory structure in their mind.

The second thing is, they should be able to link what the product is doing. So, Salesforce equals CRM.

And third, if you have the time, then a benefit.

The problem is, typically, when you’re using parts of a TV ad in a social media environment, that doesn’t go well in most cases because the point is somewhere in the middle.

If they’re good, then in the first seconds, at least, they’re so well branded that people know who did the ad. That’s good enough. From a memory-refreshing point of view, that’s fine.

But if you’re just getting to the point in second number ten, that’s not for social media. You’re wasting— most people are not going to get there.

The function of brand awareness is in two parts.

One of them is creating memory structures in the minds of your users, so they remember you, they know who you are.

The second one is refreshing, because people will forget. People will forget about you.

So you have to show up with an ideal amount of frequency. Let’s say four times a month at least, some touchpoint, to be remembered.

How is B2B attribution changing?

Good. Okay. How is attribution going to change with time? How do you think it’s going to change without cookies?

Yeah, this is a tough one.

Attribution is an issue everywhere. It’s an issue because most attribution models take the last click.

Especially in B2B, you would not see most of the funnel in any attribution software.

There are multiple devices that people are looking at. There are multiple people who are looking at your website, let’s say. The website is kind of the anchor.

If you come to the website, you’re being tagged by the UTM. So you’re the person who came through this ad, or this campaign, or through LinkedIn, or through Google.

You would see, okay, they came, had these touchpoints.

In an ideal scenario, back in 2018, you would see this: they came from Facebook, then retargeting happened, and so on and so on. They searched on Google by brand name, then they converted and became a paying customer.

Now this is not happening. It’s happening less and less.

What would typically happen is companies would look at the data, and they would find that most of their traffic or paying customers are coming through brand, meaning they searched for their brand name, or they came through organic, or they came through direct.

Typically, Google Search would show conversions or paying customers in a way that you can say, “Okay, this client came from Google Search, and it’s worth it for us to attribute this.”

But it’s not working anymore for other channels.

If you have a Facebook campaign or a LinkedIn campaign for B2B, this would not happen. People would see an ad, or they click on the ad, and this cookie would disappear by the time they come to a conversion.

But obviously it had some effect, because you need those touchpoints. Most sales in B2B are not a one-touchpoint thing.

It’s not the question of which ad brought in the client, or which was the first touchpoint within the funnel. It doesn’t really matter.

If you ask a client, “Hey, where did you hear about us?” once they become a client, then the ideal answer should be, “I don’t know. I knew about you. I saw your webinar, and I saw you on LinkedIn, you posting, the CEO posting. And when I was doing research on Google Search, you guys were there.”

This is the ideal scenario. You should be everywhere.

But the attribution models are not showing this. This is already visible for B2B. It’s not visible for B2C yet, and that’s why it’s hard for companies to understand.

Just because you see the attribution for Google doesn’t mean you should put your money there, because Google doesn’t happen without people knowing you.

If you just show up on a Google search, but they’ve never heard about you, and they’ve heard about the other companies who are there doing their job, then you’re going to have a hard time.

They’re not going to pick you just because you’re there. That’s not enough.

You would have to resonate, and they would have to know you.

Good. Thank you for your time, and see you next time. Bye.