Janhavi Nagarhalli

"Marketing isn't sending us quality leads," "Sales can't close the deal fast enough" – sound familiar?

With conflicting opinions and an ongoing blame game, sales and marketing are always at war, but the only thing getting killed is your chance to drive revenue. 52.2% of sales professionals find that sales and marketing team misalignment results in lost pipeline and revenue. 

We're here to tell you everything you need about B2B sales and marketing alignment to foster healthy collaboration and avoid losing revenue. This blog covers:

• Reasons for Sales and marketing misalignment 
• Why sales and marketing alignment is a must
• Must-try sales and marketing alignment strategies 

First off, What does Sales and Marketing Alignment even mean?

Sales and marketing alignment is the strategic integration and collaboration between sales and marketing teams to boost business efficiency and drive growth. It ensures that both departments eliminate silos by communicating effectively and working in tandem toward common objectives.

While operating in silos would’ve worked in the past, it’s crucial for B2B sales and marketing teams to unify their go-to-market efforts.

Why is B2B Sales and Marketing Alignment Important?

Here are 5 reasons why B2B sales and marketing alignment is important:

1. Deliver a Unified and Seamless Customer Experience

The B2B customer journey is non-linear and complex. With countless marketing and sales touchpoints to analyze and optimize, it’s no surprise that businesses still struggle to understand it. Plus, when your sales and marketing teams are misaligned, it only complicates the situation further. 

Aligning customer engagement across marketing and sales efforts leads to a more holistic view of the customer journey map and allows both teams to execute their strategies coherently while offering a seamless customer experience.

2. Improved Understanding of Your Ideal Customer

Sales and marketing interact with buyers differently, which means they have completely different understandings of their customers. For example, marketers have a more holistic understanding of aggregate buying behavior across a large number of buyers. but sales has more personal knowledge of each buyer. 

Sales understands the major pain points and objections buyers overcome before investing in a product. Marketing uses insights from market research, website analytics, and social media data to craft content aligned with the buyer's journey. By combining these insights, you'll gain a much better understanding of your customer. 

3. Clearer and More Productive Feedback

Let’s say marketing fails to inform sales about a lead they gain from a blog about SOC II compliance. As a result, sales doesn’t highlight the tool’s compliance feature, prompting your prospect to look for a secure alternative. 

When your teams are aligned, it opens doors to clearer communication. 

An open line of communication allows you to focus on refining strategies and keeps the team receptive to constructive feedback. 

For instance, when your sales team receives insight from their sales calls about your competitor's product being too complicated to use, marketing can use this to create content and launch campaigns that highlight your product’s ease of use. 

“Our strategic approach to teamwork entails focused measures at RecurPost. For example, the teams engaged in joint planning sessions for introducing a new subscription plan where such messaging was coordinated making the customer journey seamless.

Using a shared feedback loop in everyday meetings was effective. During a recent content campaign, sales generated customized messaging which ultimately raised lead engagement by 20% after one week.” – Debbie Moran, Marketing Manager at RecurPost

4. Improves Team Performance

When marketing and sales focus on divergent KPIs and metrics (Eg: Marketing focuses on MQLs and Sales focuses on revenue), there's much more room for conflict and blame.

When both teams align on metrics like "pipeline/revenue generation," it's in their interest to collaborate to optimize ROI and pipeline.

5. Higher ROI from GTM Efforts 

When the sales and marketing GTM motions are misaligned, you risk losing opportunities to close deals and create the potential for infighting among teams. 

Alignment between sales and marketing is crucial to executing a successful GTM strategy. According to Forrester when your company aligns on tech, processes, and people, you can see 36% more revenue growth and 28% more profitability. 

This is because smarketing empowers:  

• Better experience for each member of the buying group
• Engagement with more members of the buying committee
• Relevant, aligned messaging across marketing and sales channels
• Better brand recall and perception amongst buyers that your brand is an expert

Why is Sales and Marketing Alignment Difficult? 

While occasional disagreement between sales and marketing is natural, certain red flags indicate misalignment. There are many tell-tale signs for when your B2B sales and marketing teams aren't aligned, such as:

• The sales team repeatedly blames marketing for "low-quality" leads. 
• SDRs disqualify the majority of MQLs right off the bat. 
• Marketing collateral goes unused by the sales team. 
• Your marketing and sales team operates in silos

We believe there are 4 main reasons for this misalignment:

1. Lack of Strategic Function in Marketing

Marketing is often known just to write blogs and create pretty infographics while not directly contributing to revenue. It has always been seen as a service function instead of a strategic one. This is because marketers have a one-track mind to measure success – getting leads. 

Rather than ending their responsibility at leads, where they might not care about what happens after they are passed to sales, marketing must be held responsible for:

• New Customer Acquisition - all the way from getting leads to account engagement, opportunity acceleration and revenue generation
• Expansion and Upsell Revenue - engaging and educating existing customers to get additional revenue
• Retention and Churn prevention - Product Education to help customers realise value from the product and hence drive retention 

2. Misaligned Priorities

Even though sales and marketing have common goals of increasing revenue and improving CLV, they use different metrics to measure success, with sales carrying the major burden of bringing in revenue. An aligned strategy begins with the shared goal of prioritizing customer value. Use this commonality to jointly create campaigns that target the same audiences and accounts while ensuring an overlap in your teams' measurement and KPIs.

3. Ownership of Customer Data

We can access customer data at our fingertips today but said data has minimal value when left in disparate systems. 60% of sales reps say marketing and sales don't co-own customer strategy and data, and 25% say customer data is still owned in silos by marketing and sales. 

For example, if you use CRM tools and marketing automation platforms, ensure they're easily linked. By uniting their data, both teams will gain more insight into the full process and a clearer picture of campaign efforts that drive the most ROI.

4. Operating in Silos

The most common challenge when aligning sales and marketing teams is balancing "healthy competition" and collaboration. 

When deals are attributed as "Marketing" or "Sales," it creates an "us" vs. "them" mentality between the two teams, and each of them is under immense pressure to perform. The elimination of silos and the establishment of a collaborative, cross-functional, and revenue-generating unified team is a key driver for future success as the typical buyer journey continues to evolve.

The best way to break down these silos is by having constructive conversations with both teams to answer the following:

• What does marketing need from sales?
• What does sales need marketing?
• What does the typical customer journey look like?
• What does our ICP look like?
• What does a qualified lead look like?
• What can each team do better?

"Given that many marketing and sales misalignments stem from in-fighting over attribution, a multi-touch attribution model that accounts for sales and marketing efforts can help." Joe Kevens, Director of Demand Generation at PartnerStack and the Founder of B2B SaaS Reviews

▶️Learn more about multi-touch attribution models here.

8 B2B Sales and Marketing Alignment Best Practices You Must Follow 

1. Agree on a Common Buyer Persona

Creating a sales and marketing alignment strategy without a clear understanding of your target buyer is like driving in the dark without headlights. Sales and marketing teams must collaborate to understand their buyers, tailor their messaging, and pitch accordingly to win deals.

"We create buyer personas in Cisco to identify the perfect buyer, the perfect person that we could target with a marketing message based on segments, job descriptions, and based on where a person is currently in the buyer journey." – Carola Van Der Linden, Global Virtual Marketing Manager, Cisco

2. Set Shared Goals and KPIs 

Marketers and sales teams have their eyes on different metrics and short-term goals. Getting them to agree may require a new focus point for both groups. Technically, marketing and sales teams share the same goal: converting new leads. However, this process can seem like two separate stages because of the perceived handoff from marketing to sales. Encourage your teams to think about the sales funnel as one process rather than two different processes.

"Concerning key KPIs for gauging sales and marketing alignment success– revenue growth, lead conversion rate, and customer acquisition cost are amongst the classic ones. To ensure these KPIs truly mirror the impact on revenue and customer satisfaction, I recommend organizations to use tools that track customer lifecycle value and provide a holistic view of the customer journey." Will Yang, Head of Growth & Customer Success at Instrumentl

The new sales-marketing relationship should be guided by shared metrics, which reveal an organization's data agility and ability to hand off real-time data insights. Shared metrics encapsulate the state of the current relationship, alignment initiatives, collaboration technology, and outcomes. They keep everyone on the same page and determine how to redefine the relationship.

3. Prioritize the Right Buyers with Account Scoring 

When you’re scoring leads based on their interest in your business, their current place in the buying cycle, and their demographic fit, you can ensure that your sales reps are talking to the right leads at the right time. Your marketing and sales teams should get together to determine score thresholds—at what score does a lead get sent to sales?

Scoring accounts also helps the marketing and sales team prioritize "sales-ready" accounts and work together to target a focused pool of targets as opposed to casting a wide, uncertain net.

Snowflake has a “one team GTM” with an account-based marketing strategy that combines intent data, personalized touchpoints, and collaboration between sales and marketing teams. This strategy has been successful in targeting and engaging key accounts.

▶️Check out our latest guide on Account Scoring here

4. Promote Clear Communication and Collaboration

Ensuring collaboration doesn't mean creating a Slack channel with SDRs and marketers or sending each other multiple links. There are many ways you can nurture a good relationship between both teams. Some ideas include:

• Joint meetings and training sessions
• A day where marketing shadows the sales team and vice versa
• Collaborative exercises where the teams work together

"A specific initiative that yielded remarkable results at Synthesis AI Studio was our 'Customer Journey Mapping' exercise, where sales and marketing collaboratively analyzed and mapped out the entire customer journey, leading to a more cohesive customer experience strategy.

Our pivotal moment was when we restructured our approach to product launches. By involving both sales and marketing from the inception stage, we ensured that marketing strategies were in sync with sales objectives. This alignment led to one of our most successful product launches, with a 40% increase in lead conversion rates." – Oliver Goodwin, Founder & CEO at Synthesis

5. Use Technology to Bridge the Gap

You must build a solid tech stack to manage your data and progress toward your smarketing goals. Here’s how Factors can help you propel sales and marketing alignment in your organization:

• Identify and engage with anonymous, high-intent accounts engaging with your brand across marketing and sales touchpoints 

• Identify points of friction and optimize conversions with AI-powered customer journey insights 

• Monitor marketing ROI with Revenue Attribution to scale campaigns that get results 

• Complete visibility of customer data and pipeline for sales and marketing teams by integrating with existing tools.

▶️Check out how Factors.ai helped Klenty increase conversions by 34%

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6. Ensure Consistency In Your Messaging

Unclear messaging creates a subpar brand experience–and hampers win rates. Both sales and marketing should understand and reinforce your product's value proposition. 

Your messaging must fall into three sections:

• What we do;
• How we do it;
• Why do we do it.

When what, how, and why are aligned, you have a filter to help you make marketing and sales decisions about your core message. 

"There was one time that our sales and marketing team used different messaging. Once we noticed that, we created this guidebook for a shared language and developed a unified messaging framework. This involved joint workshops to ensure that marketing materials and sales pitches were aligned. Now, we come up with consistent messaging. This has improved customer understanding– we know that as there are as we've observed a drastic reduction in clients seeking confirmation about our offerings." -- Andre Oentoro, CEO of Breadnbeyond

7. Create Useful Sales Enablement Content

Even before talking to a salesperson, a prospect is more than halfway through their buying journey. Marketing teams create lead-generation content and campaigns to drive interest in their services and products.

However, they need in-depth insights from sales on the types of content your prospects care about. Customers aren't impressed by a landing page listing endless features, they want to know how your solution resolves their pain points, and who better to ask about customer pain points than your sales team? 

Encourage your marketing team members to shadow sales calls. While time-consuming, the exercise can provide customer insights for marketing initiatives and new content ideas. Marketing can also suggest improvements to sales call scripts.

Meanwhile, your sales team can also suggest new content ideas. If there's an urgent need for a content piece, request marketing to prioritize the subject in the content calendar.

8. Create a Systematic Process for Working With Leads

Sales and marketing operate on two different levels, with marketers focusing only on obtaining MQLs and sales focusing on closing SQLs. When you have multiple funnels and lead nurturing processes, both teams operate at different paces toward different goals.

Consider these aspects when reworking your process of working with leads: 

Routing: Where do the leads go between marketing and sales? 

Priority: What's the order in which we reach out to our leads?

Timing: How quickly should you reach out to prospects, how often, and over what timeframe? 

For example, leads from review or comparison websites can be contacted within two hours, while leads from lead gen forms can be contacted within six hours. 

It is also crucial to know at what stage each team must engage with the lead to avoid bombarding customers with information overload. To help divide engagement responsibilities between sales and marketing teams, you can use a "Fit & Intent" matrix.

• Fit is how well your product solves the needs of the customer.
• Intent is how motivated your prospect is to invest in your product

Here's the breakdown of how marketing and sales can handle each lead according to each quadrant:

Low fit, low intent: This area focuses on nurturing leads, which can be handled by either marketing or sales, depending on the lead source. 

Low fit, high intent: A lead in this quadrant wants more information to gauge if your product can help them. The marketing team has primary responsibility here, with support from sales as required.

High fit, low intent: This quadrant needs joint ownership and support from marketing and sales. Examples of this can include MoFU content, sharing pricing plans, or demo calls with sales representatives.

High fit, high intent: A lead in this quadrant is ready to buy, so it's time for sales to own the process and drive the conversion.

Align Your Sales and Marketing Team Today

Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither is B2B sales and marketing alignment. Only when sales and marketers work from the ground up to collaborate and understand their buyers while focusing on providing value to prospects – can you see tangible results.

Sales and marketing have seen a shift over the years, with account-based selling and account-based marketing taking the world by storm. But what if we could combine both these approaches? 

Enter account-based everything, a strategy that operationalizes sales and marketing efforts to target and convert high-value accounts.

This article provides a detailed overview of how to take the account-based everything route for long-term pipeline growth. 

Why Shift to an Account-Based Everything Approach?

While alignment is one piece of the puzzle, the larger goal for any organization is driving revenue. Sales, marketing, and customer success must work together across the customer lifecycle to drive growth. Everyone knows about ABM, but there’s a new kid on the block: account-based everything

Account-based everything, or ABE/ABX, is a strategy that empowers sales, marketing, and customer success to collaborate and focus on high-value accounts. It personalizes engagement, aligns teams, and maximizes ROI by tailoring efforts to specific target accounts, fostering stronger customer relationships, and driving revenue growth.

Think of ABE as a refined, all-encompassing version of ABM, where your company aims for a smooth transition between all phases of the sales cycle. The core principle of ABE is that every customer touchpoint is an opportunity to convey that your product is the best fit for them.

“The approach companies take with ABM today isn’t as personalized, and the focus is not much on the buyer experience, hence the new movement for "everything .” – Dan Renyi, Founder at Klear B2B

ABE ditches the siloed approach and helps align departments, identify and sync tactics, and segment personalization efforts.

To execute ABE, you’ll need specialized assets depending on the account you target. The resources required to fuel your ABE strategy with the right content can balloon quickly, which is why it’s so important to define your ABE strategy upfront and choose your target accounts wisely.  

Here's Gartner's framework for account-based everything. It's a great starting point for teams to gauge the extent of alignment and commitment required to succeed with an account-based go-to-market strategy. 

Here are 5 steps you must follow to implement an account-based everything program in your organization:

1. Align target accounts across teams

When marketing and sales don’t have a common understanding of target accounts and ICP, building pipeline can get tricky Creating an ideal client profile is a foundational, company-wide decision that impacts downstream sales and marketing efforts. 

You can start by identifying what a high-value account looks like and create a target account list of 100-500 such companies. You can conduct account research as per these aspects:

• Markets: Competitors, regulatory changes, regional developments
• Companies: Organizational hierarchy, financials, key initiatives and challenges

Once you have your list, you gain clarity on the accounts you need to focus on. 

While it’s one thing to know who your ICP is, it’s also critical to establish who doesn’t qualify as your ICP. 

Ensure you lay down proper specifications for who exactly comes under your ICP. For instance, if you’re selling a recruitment automation platform and a talent acquisition specialist reaches out to you, you’d prioritize them over someone in customer service or legal.

You can use this matrix to identify how to prioritize your inbound requests:

Marketing and sales should collaborate and agree upon the following questions:

When you answer these questions, all teams can work in sync to target the right accounts and provide a seamless buying experience. 

2. Analyze Marketing’s Role in Driving Engagement 

Once you have chosen which accounts to target, figure out how your marketing team will engage with each account. Should you engage with a prospect who visited your blog in the same way you would with a webinar attendee? 

The level of engagement required also varies on the stage of the funnel. For instance, you can initiate a nurture sequence if someone new to your website books a demo. If they've already invested in your tool, just email them product updates to keep them engaged.

Not to mention, it also depends upon the tier of the company you’re engaging with. When a Fortune 500 company and a seed startup contact you, it's obvious to focus on the big brand because it’ll significantly impact revenue growth. 

3. Focus on Engagement Quality

When marketing engages with an account, interacting with decision-makers alone doesn’t cut it. Quality engagement with end users, champions, and adjacent teams like finance, IT, etc. is equally important if you want to seal the deal.
Let’s say you’ve engaged with two or more decision-makers like the CEO and Director, your engagement quality is high, but if you’ve only been able to speak to one end user, you’d need to level up your game.  

You can use engagement scoring to gauge how marketing can best engage with high-value accounts in different customer lifecycle stages.

4. Drive Awareness Across the Customer Lifecycle

Marketing creates content on various topics for every stage of the customer lifecycle, whether it’s case studies, ROI calculators, or the help docs on your website. The ultimate goal is to drive awareness with product-led content, and you can categorize your content in “topic clusters” to share it with your prospects. 

While many organizations encourage prospects to schedule a demonstration, most buyers are not ready to speak to sales yet. 

Instead of pushing them to talk to sales, you can create high-value plays that are likelier to incite buyer participation and engagement. Offer something of value such as a custom report or a presentation with findings relevant to that particular account or their peers.

Once they’re solution aware, you need to make them “your solution aware,”. This is where sales can share their demo call insights with the marketing team so that they can create personalized content for the account in question. Some ideas include:

• Personalized sections in landing pages based on an ICP’s company
• A chatbot that recognizes the account
• Sharing templates that streamline their workflow 

5. Use Account Intelligence Tools

Leveraging an account intelligence platform (Hint: Factors.ai) can be a game changer in terms of how you engage with accounts in your pipeline and close deals. Here’s how we help marketing and sales teams implement account-based programs:

Our list-building and segmentation feature filters and segments visitors based on the type of companies or behavior you’re interested in. Plus, you also get MS Teams or Slack notifications any time an account that matches your ICP visits your site.

Sales teams can use this information to tailor email campaigns, sales calls, and other efforts to target those accounts individually and improve engagement and conversions

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You can prioritize accounts and close deals faster with our cross-channel account scoring feature that uses machine learning to qualify and target the right accounts based on website engagement, intent signals, and firmographics.

▶️Read our guide to account scoring 
Factors also offers users complete visibility of the account journey across known and anonymous users so you can identify touch points that improve conversion and optimize points of friction and drop-offs.

Our platform helps you determine engagement quality thanks to the ABM analytics feature which enables custom dashboard creation that ensures reliable account-level reporting across marketing campaigns & sales activities. 

Operationalise Sales and Marketing Alignment with Factors Today

Buyer expectations are at an all-time high, and it’s up to your business to refine its playbook to meet and exceed those expectations. B2B sales and marketing professionals should find a way to begin implementing ABE at their company to enable early engagement with multiple stakeholders and drive real results.

‍Book a demo to find out how we can help you engage and convert target accounts at scale. 

Are you tired of unsolicited, spammy emails in your inbox? Well, all that will (to an extent) end in February 2024 as Google implements new guidelines for bulk email senders to make your inbox safer and spam-free.

Google will require bulk email senders (people who send over 5,000 emails per day to Gmail inboxes) to follow certain best practices requiring strong authentication, easy unsubscription, and lower spam rates.

“It’s clear that email has become an essential part of daily communication. And whether you’re submitting a job application or staying in touch with a loved one, your emails should be safe and secure.” –  Neil Kumaran Group Product Manager, Gmail Security & Trust

Let’s dive into understanding these best practices and what these new policies mean for your cold outreach strategy in 2024.

Summary of Bulk Email Sender Guidelines

Here is a quick gist of Google’s email sender guidelines and the best practices they recommend for bulk email senders: 

1. Requirements for Authentication

Ensure email authentication for each of your sending domains at your domain provider by settling up the following:

• SPF (Sender Policy Framework): This basic authentication method verifies if an email was sent from an authorized server. Bulk senders need to configure their domain to use SPF.
• DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail): This adds a digital signature to each email, allowing Gmail to verify the email's authenticity and integrity.
• DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance): This builds on SPF and DKIM by providing reporting and enforcement mechanisms. Bulk senders must publish a DMARC policy that states what Gmail should do with emails that fail authentication.

• ARC(Authenticated Received Chain): it shows the previous authentication status of forwarded messages and previously failed authentication. Senders must use ARC authentication if they forward emails regularly.

Google recommends always using the same domain for email authentication and hosting your public website. Senders must have valid forward and reverse DNS records for these sending domains and IP addresses.

2. Requirements for Easy Unsubscription

If you send over 5,000 marketing and sales emails daily, your marketing and subscribed messages must support one-click unsubscribe.

• Unsubscribe links: Every email must contain a clear and readily available unsubscribe link. This link should be placed in a prominent location, such as the footer of the email.
• Preference centers: Bulk senders can offer preference centers where users can manage their subscription preferences and easily unsubscribe from specific email lists.
• Confirmation process: Unsubscribe requests should be confirmed promptly, and users should not receive further emails after opting out.

Google suggests that you only send emails to people who want to get your messages, so they’re less likely to report messages from your domain as spam.

3. Spam Rate Monitoring

You can track your spam rate using Postmaster tools. Ensure it stays below 0.10%, and avoid reaching a spam rate of 0.30% or higher.

Here are a few tips to avoid having your emails land in your receiver’s spam: 

• Don't mix different types of content in the same message. 
• Don't impersonate other domains or senders without permission. 
• Don't purchase email addresses from other companies.
• Some countries and regions restrict automatic opt-in. Before you opt-in users automatically, check the laws in your region.

Bulk senders who fail to comply with the guidelines may face various consequences, including reduced deliverability rates, warnings, suspension of email-sending privileges, or even legal action. 

How Does This Affect Your Cold Email Strategy?

Even if your sales/marketing team has these parameters in place, Google's refreshed bulk email sender guidelines signal that mass mailing prospects may slowly be on the decline. While this may sound like not-so-good news for your outbound marketing efforts, here's why this may actually be a blessing in disguise.

Email marketing, if implemented correctly, can continue to be one of the best B2B sales channels in your GTM strategy. The key, however, will be to adopt a systematic, intent-based approach as opposed to spray-and-pray tactics.

Let’s say you’re selling software that streamlines candidate assessment, and your buyer personas are hiring managers and CHROs.

If your sales team sends out emails to thousands of CHROs at random — without any insight into whether or not they’re in-market for your product, you’re bound to receive replies, if any, such as: “Sorry, we’re not currently looking to buy” or worse still, “unsubscribe 😠.” 

Not only does this high-volume approach result in little result from lots of effort, but cold outreach may also leave a bad taste in the mouth of prospects who may be looking to buy down the road. 

What’s the alternative to this? Intent-based, account-level outreach, of course! 😎

On average, only 4% of website visitors convert via sign-ups, but what if you could identify, qualify, and target the remaining 96% of anonymous website traffic with outreach based on intent? What if you could carefully research engagement amongst high-intent buyers and send them personalized cold emails highlighting exactly how your tool can meet their requirements?

Our experience working with hundreds of B2B teams finds that this results in far more conversions with far fewer emails.

Factors is an IP-based account intelligence and activation platform that:

• Identifies anonymous accounts visiting your website, viewing your LinkedIn, or interacting with your G2 pages 
• Qualifies high-intent ICP accounts based on firmographics and cross-channel engagement 
• Enriches sales-ready accounts with Apollo-fuelled contact data before activating outreach by integrating with your marketing automation platform. 

Here’s a little about how it works:

First, our account intelligence feature allows you to uncover anonymous traffic with IP-based intelligence & enrichment. 

Next, you can qualify ICP buyers based on their firmographics and score accounts based on their engagement across the website, G2, and LinkedIn intent signals. 

Finally, create a list of accounts ready to buy and send emails with a compelling pitch to win sales-ready accounts over in no time. Want to learn the basics of account scoring? 

▶️Check out our guide: An Introduction To B2B Account Scoring

‍

Wrapping Up

Google has taken a much-needed step to establish these bulk email sender guidelines. Whether you’re executing cold outreach or email marketing campaigns, you must monitor your bulk emails and ensure basic email hygiene to create a secure email ecosystem. 

If you want to ditch the cookie-cutter bulk email strategy and want to restructure your cold outreach efforts by focusing on high-intent buyers, book a demo with us today!

There’s no doubt that paid advertising is one of the best channels for marketing teams to generate and capture demand. Plus, we're seeing the rise of paid social media, with over 66% of B2B marketers acknowledging its impact on improving ROI. By targeting specific audiences and broadcasting your message across various channels, paid advertising can help drive the success of your campaigns.

However, running a few ads at random does not get you conversions. A strong strategy is key to maximizing ROI on expensive ads.

Let's dive in and look at how paid advertising can benefit your B2B company ⬇️

Google ads vs LinkedIn ads: Which one is best for B2B?

While many businesses advertise online, only a few do it well. It's especially tough when you have heaps of options to choose from. So, Google, LinkedIn, Search, Display, or a combination of all of the above? The choice isn't that simple, as each platform has its unique features and capabilities. In some instances, using either of the channels would be enough. For example, you should use Google Ads to target people based on their search queries, location, device, and more. LinkedIn ads can help create targeted ABM campaigns.

However, if you’re running a full-funnel campaign, you must use both Google and LinkedIn ads to their fullest potential.

Let's understand the differences between these platforms, how they work, their pros and cons, and which platform is better for your unique needs.

Google Ads

Google search ads appear when users search for specific keywords related to your business. Here are their pros and cons:

Pros of Search Ads

• Access to a larger audience when bidding on high-volume keywords
• Typically attract in-market leads as they're based on search intent
• Detailed analytics allow you to track clicks, conversions, and ROI effectively

Cons of Search Ads

• Popular keywords in B2B industries can be highly competitive, leading to higher costs per click.
• Demographic targeting is limited compared to social media platforms.
• Primarily text-based, offering less opportunity for visual branding.
• Lesser segmentation opportunities

LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn ads target users based on their professional profiles, interests, and behavior. Here are their pros and cons:

Pros of LinkedIn Ads

• Extensive targeting options based on job title, company size, and industry, allowing precise audience segmentation.
• Ideal for B2B marketing.
• Access to high-value prospects and decision-makers
• Account-based marketing opportunities
• Offers various ad formats, like sponsored content, text ads, and InMail, providing flexibility in messaging and creative presentation

Cons of LinkedIn Ads

• Relatively costlier than Google search ads
• Cannot identify high-intent buyers unless they click on the ad
• Greater risk of ad fatigue and decreased engagement over time
• Lack of in-depth reporting and analytics tools

How to use Google ads and LinkedIn ads in tandem for a successful paid advertising strategy

While search ads and LinkedIn ads have distinct pros and cons, integrating them into a cohesive paid advertising strategy allows businesses to use each platform's strengths and increase their reach, engagement, and conversions. Here are a few ways to do so:

• Use search ads to capture users actively searching for solutions, and LinkedIn ads to raise awareness and nurture leads at different stages of the buyer's journey.
• Retarget users who interact with your LinkedIn ads through search ads and vice versa, reinforcing your messaging across platforms.
• Use data from both platforms to inform targeting and messaging strategies, optimizing performance across the board.
• Broaden your advertising channels and reduce reliance on a single platform to mitigate performance variations and adapt to algorithmic shifts.

💡Read: How to Measure LinkedIn True ROI With Factors

How to execute paid advertising across the funnel

When it comes to paid marketing, most people start with Google, which provides a decent number of quality leads by capturing searches that show intent. However, it's essential to create a well-structured funnel that attracts the right audience and converts them quickly. Instead of having countless uninterested users, it's better to have interested ones heading in the right direction. 

Here's where LinkedIn retargeting helps you reach a high-intent audience from Google and target them on LinkedIn.

1.  Pick the right advertising channels 

Consider where your ideal customers spend their time online and choose platforms with the potential to reach them. Before selecting the right platform, consider your budget and advertising goals for your paid advertising efforts. By thoughtfully selecting the right mix of channels, you can create a cohesive and effective B2B advertising strategy tailored to your unique business needs.

2. Get a high-quality and high-intent audience.

When reaching an audience on LinkedIn, you have two options. You can either target a new audience or retarget an existing one. If you choose the former, you'll reach out to a completely cold audience that may not be familiar with you or your brand, making it more challenging to capture their attention. However, suppose you choose to retarget your Google ads traffic. In that case, you'll reach out to an audience that has already shown interest in your brand by searching for relevant keywords on Google, clicking on your search or display ad, and visiting your website. This audience is more likely to have high intent and be receptive to your message.

Ideally, you should invest in both options if your budget allows it. However, if you have to choose between the two, it makes more sense to retarget a warm audience that has already shown interest in your product or service.

💡Also read: Build Better LinkedIn Retargeting Audiences with Factors

3. Optimize ad spend

Many clients want to establish a presence on LinkedIn but find advertising on the platform expensive. LinkedIn's cost per click (CPC) and lead (CPL) are relatively high compared to other platforms. However, the quality of leads on LinkedIn is worth the extra cost.

If you have already advertised on other channels, you can use LinkedIn to enhance your conversion rates. Different channels can add relevant leads to your LinkedIn campaigns, which can be part of your mid-funnel strategy. Proper retargeting of high-intent traffic via LinkedIn ads can lead to increased conversions.

4. Convert more by staying on top of their mind

According to the marketing rule of 7, "a prospect needs to "hear" the advertiser's message at least seven times before they'll take action to buy that product or service."

A customer's journey towards making a purchase is not always straightforward. They may come across your business through a LinkedIn Ad, search for your business on Google, visit your website, leave, and stumble upon you again on LinkedIn. They may revisit your website before deciding to reach out or make a purchase. Retargeting helps push website traffic towards purchase.

💡Also read: How to Measure the Impact of Paid Marketing Using Factors

Paid advertising best practices

Paid ad campaigns are dynamic, and the right strategies can significantly impact your brand's success. To improve your efforts at online paid advertising, consider the following best practices:

1. Establish realistic goals

Having measurable goals allows you to track your progress and stay on schedule. Define your KPIs to measure lead generation, sales conversion, or brand awareness success. This will help you make informed decisions and optimize your ad spend.

2. Create compelling paid campaigns 

Your ad creatives must grab the attention of your target audience. Keep them engaging, informative, and visually appealing. Avoid using jargon or complex language. Instead, focus on the value of your product and how it can solve a problem for your audience. Create a strong value proposition that highlights your unique benefits. Stand out from competitors and guide prospects to take action with a persuasive CTA.

Source: LinkedIn

3. Personalize your campaigns

Retargeting is a great way to personalize your marketing funnel for each campaign and tailor your message to the audience of that campaign. 

For example, you have a search ad campaign targeting your competitors' branded keywords, which generates much interest. You can use LinkedIn and launch a retargeting campaign based on how you compare against them and what you offer that they don't. Running retargeting ads helps you identify what drives people to click and then adjust your LinkedIn ads to push them toward your offerings.

💡Factors helps you identify accounts that view your LinkedIn ads and visit your website through a search ad. You can use this information to personalize your cold outreach and focus on accounts with higher intent. 

4. Measure and analyze

Track key metrics like click-through rates, conversion rates, CPA, and ROAS to make data-driven decisions. By setting campaign goals such as a target cost per lead or target conversion rate, you can track performance and analyze audience data like CTR and impressions to improve your marketing. 

Rev up your paid advertising game with Factors

While search and LinkedIn ads have unique features and capacities, integrating them into a cohesive paid advertising strategy allows businesses to use each platform's strengths and increase their reach, engagement, and conversions. Companies can optimize performance across the board by using data from both platforms to inform targeting and messaging strategies.

Thanks to Factors, you can gain a comprehensive view of buyer journeys, understand how your target accounts interact with your ads and determine whether your ad strategy is increasing revenue. Speak to our team today to optimize your paid advertising strategy in 2024.

The current state of B2B LinkedIn advertising

LinkedIn is the place for B2B marketers to engage with key accounts and decision-makers. Unlike traditional social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn has a large user base of professional users who include precise details of job title, seniority, and department. 

Simply put, LinkedIn is the perfect place to run ABM campaigns that educate the market about the problem you solve and how you solve it best. Whether you’re a small startup looking to promote your product to a new market segment or an enterprise aiming to build brand awareness, LinkedIn is the key. 

And while there’s no doubt that LinkedIn ads can help you attract high-qualified leads, there could be a few reasons why your leadership team might be skeptical of LinkedIn as a marketing channel:

1. LinkedIn ads are expensive: As of 2024, the average CPC of LinkedIn ads ranges from $4 to $6, which is relatively pricier for SMBs looking to add LinkedIn to their marketing strategy. The CPMs could also be higher, depending on how niche your audience is. 

2. Hard to measure ROI: LinkedIn only tracks ad clicks and impressions, which doesn’t give a complete view of how your ads impact pipeline. One such example includes demo ads, where marketers typically face low conversion rates, mainly because users are less likely to sign up for a demo call while scrolling through social media. 

3. Limited control over how you show your ads: LinkedIn campaign manager allows you to upload a target account list for your ABM campaigns. However, if you want to show your ads to specific accounts showing higher intent and aren’t present in your CRM, it’s an uphill battle of scouring your tech stack and integrating data to ensure your ads are displayed to the right accounts. 

So, does this mean LinkedIn ads aren’t worth it? No, quite the opposite. ❌

Ignoring the channel altogether is a major risk, as you’ll miss out on many high-value deals. While other platforms, such as Google ads, help convert 5% of the in-market buyers, you’ll still lose out on 95% of the opportunities by not directly engaging with key stakeholders.

Source: LinkedIn

How to do LinkedIn ads the right way?

If you want to make the most bang for your buck, invest in a solution that gives you a complete view of how LinkedIn impacts your revenue and helps you optimize your spend. 

At Factors, we currently offer LinkedIn attribution, which allows you to track how LinkedIn influences pipeline, but now we've decided to take it up a notch!

Presenting: AdPilot

AdPilot finally answers every B2B marketer's long-standing question: “Are we doing LinkedIn ads right?” We’ve built out an exciting set of features that can help you generate 2x ROI from your ad campaigns: 

Audience Builder

Manually building lists across Apollo and Zoominfo is tiring, and you also tend to miss out on accounts with high buying intent. Not to mention, your data is spread out across multiple tools. With our new Audience sync feature, you can sync all your data across multiple platforms to create accurate audiences on LinkedIn and target the right accounts without the extra effort. 

Smart Reach

Naturally, your audience list will include companies of varying sizes, and some are bigger than others. We audited 100+ LinkedIn ad accounts and found that 80% of your ad impressions are taken up by the top 10% of the accounts. Why miss out on potential revenue with this lopsided distribution of impressions?

With Smart Reach, you have all the power. You can control how ads are shown to your audiences so that every account on your list has the chance to view your ads and make the right buying decisions. 

💡Learn more about our research here: Resolving LinkedIn’s Frequency Capping Paradox

Campaign Automation

Advertising is all about pitching your product to the right people, be it online or offline. Instead of displaying your ads to prospects who aren’t currently looking for a solution, use intent-based impression control and allocate your ad budget accordingly to target high-intent and in-market buyers. 

LinkedIn True ROI

Do you remember the last time you clicked on a LinkedIn ad and booked a demo straight away? Neither can we because social media channels like LinkedIn never show the complete picture of how prospects make their buying decisions. So, how do you prove LinkedIn’s true ROI to leadership?
Since every ad click doesn’t equal revenue, Factors offers view-through attribution. This gives you a granular view of how target accounts view your ads and interact with your website, giving you an accurate idea of how LinkedIn affects revenue generation.  

💡You can learn more here: Measuring LinkedIn True ROI: Click vs View-through Attribution

LinkedIn CAPI

When you’re A/B testing your ads and finally find success, you naturally want to repeat the process and continue getting positive results. 

As a LinkedIn Marketing Partner, we could always pull LinkedIn data into factors for better reporting, but with the new LinkedIn CAPI integration, you can send conversion data back to LinkedIn Campaign Manager. Now, you no longer need to rely on guesswork to scale and optimize your ad campaigns. 

Join the waitlist today

No marketer likes to see their ad budget wasted on unqualified leads. Quit letting siloed data and inaccurate audience lists get in the way of your ad performance. With AdPilot, you can use data-driven insights to effectively target the right accounts and boost your LinkedIn ROI in no time. Speak to our team today to learn how AdPilot can be a game-changer for your marketing strategy.

When you run an ad campaign on LinkedIn, you expect all the accounts in your audience list to view your ad, right? However, our research reveals a shocking truth: 80% of your ads are shown to only the top 10% of the accounts 🤯

The best way to avoid losing pipeline due to such uneven ad distribution is to use a tool that allows you to control how your ads are shown to your prospects and evenly distribute impressions across your target account list.  

In this article, we’ll explain how our newest feature, “Smart Reach,” can put an end to your impression distribution worries ⬇️

The Challenge

“Control is an illusion”  – a quote that most B2B marketers relate to when they launch their ad campaigns and leave it all to the algorithms to show their ads to the right people and accounts. A couple of accounts may have viewed your ad too many times, whereas many may not have seen the ad enough. 

Here’s an example to help you understand how impression frequency works on LinkedIn:

Suppose you have a target account list of 500 accounts, including SMBs and large companies, with the top 10 accounts being enterprises with 1000+ employees. Since enterprise companies have more employees that match your ICP, LinkedIn will more likely show your ads to larger companies, neglecting the rest of your account list. 

This causes a handful of issues like:

• Ad fatigue and underexposure to your ads: Since your ads aren’t evenly distributed across your account list, some prospects would face ad fatigue, whereas others may not have seen them enough.

• Losing out on potential deals: If a sufficient number of ads are not shown to the majority of your accounts, you risk missing out on high-value deals and costing your company significant opportunities.

• Wasted ad spend: If 10% of your accounts consume 80% of the impressions, there is much room for improvement in marketing efficiency.

A lack of frequency capping becomes a major problem, especially when launching brand awareness campaigns, where your main objective is to maximize reach. 

You could maneuver this issue by creating smaller audiences across different campaigns. However, the smaller the audience size for a campaign, the higher the CPMs - which again results in wasted ad spend. Not to mention, it would get increasingly tedious to manage multiple smaller campaigns. 

💡Check out our research in detail here: LinkedIn Frequency Capping: Impact Measurement

So how do you possibly win in this lose-lose situation? 2 words: Smart Reach.

“LinkedIn budgets can scale very quickly — and if you’re unsure you’re reaching the right people, you’re essentially setting your money on fire. With Smart Reach, we’ve been able to reach the largest spread of accounts visiting our website without putting too much undue weightage on larger accounts.” – Abhishek Iyer, Director of Marketing at Descope.

Introducing: Smart Reach 

Our newest feature allows you to manage the frequency with which your ads are displayed to each account, ensuring maximum reach, lower CPMs, and impact. Plus, with intent-based impression control, you can ensure that your ads are only shown to relevant and high-intent accounts. 

Here’s an example of how Descope uses Smart Reach  to improve its ad distribution:

We analyzed Descope’s LinkedIn ad metrics to examine how Smart Reach affects campaign reach and ad spend. Our research revealed that without setting a frequency cap, the ads reached 8214 accounts, and the top 25 target accounts consumed 35% of ad impressions. This led to an ad spend of approximately $4700. 

We set up a cap of 2000 impressions at an account level across all campaign groups to analyze whether there would be an impact on reach. After a month, we noticed the following improvements:

• Impressions consumed by the top 25 companies have decreased by 17% within a month.
• Descope was able to redistribute around 158,841 impressions that were earlier consumed by the top 25 companies.
• Ad spend was reduced by 22% ($1,000 less!), with CPM going down from $7 to $4
• The reach was reduced by only 6% 

This proves that Smart Reach not only saves your ad spend but also ensures that your reach remains intact. 

3 key benefits of Smart Reach 

Better reach per dollar spent 

Imagine investing a good chunk of your budget on LinkedIn ads, only to realize your ads don’t reach all the accounts in your audience list. Well, with Factors, you don’t have to imagine. Smart Reach allows you to redistribute impressions to reach more accounts per dollar spent, helping you make the most of your ad spend.

Intent-based ad distribution 

Saying that all prospects are equal sounds good in theory, but in reality, that’s not the case. Ideally, sales-ready accounts should receive more ads than others. However, after analyzing 100+ LinkedIn ad accounts, we’ve found that most ads are distributed to large companies. With Factors, you can configure Smart Reach rules so that the high-intent accounts who visit the pricing page, engage with G2 pages, open emails, etc., receive ads more frequently than others. 

Conversely, accounts that have already booked a demo or expressed negative interest in a sales email should be shown fewer ads. Factors empowers intent-based ad distribution to ensure an appropriate ad frequency for each account based on intent levels.

Avoid over and underexposure

Just like Goldilocks and the 3 Bears, there should never be too much or too little of anything, whether porridge or LinkedIn ads. Your high-intent prospects shouldn’t have to deal with seeing the same ad over and over again, but they should also see your ads enough times to consider your product for their needs. Smart Reach ensures that your impression distribution is just right – automatically showing the right frequency of ads to the right accounts. 

“Within a month of setting up our frequency capping rules with Factors, we’ve saved 216,448 ad impressions and reached the largest spread of accounts per dollar spent. We’re excited to scale this up in the future.”—Abhishek Iyer, Director of Marketing at Descope.

Join the waitlist today

Every marketer launches their campaigns, hoping their ads reach all the relevant accounts at the right time. With Smart Reach, you can make it happen. Factors AdPilot offers a comprehensive range of features that ensures you make the most of your ad spend while increasing revenue via LinkedIn ads. Contact our sales team to learn how you can use AdPilot to take your LinkedIn game to the next level.