'Ads are useless in B2B marketing.' There was a time when I believed that too.
And sure enough, nobody responded to the ad that said, "One search surfaces 1,000 influencers."
But when I changed the copy to "Finding lots of influencers won't do anything for your career as a marketer," that single ad brought in 100 consultation requests.
Customers didn't respond to the feature. They responded to the anxiety that hunting for influencers leaves nothing behind for their own careers. They responded to that feeling.
And content like this gets more powerful when it meets an ad algorithm. When you push content customers will respond to through Meta1 ads, the algorithm learns from the people who responded and finds similar people more precisely. Response improves, and the algorithm gets sharper. It's a virtuous cycle where the content teaches the algorithm and the algorithm carries the content further.
Ads were also stable. Instead of waiting for customers to search for us, we could go find them ourselves. Consultation requests that had been 40 a month on inbound alone held steady at 70-100 a month once we combined inbound with ads.
Looking back, I spent half my career absorbed in inbound marketing2, getting customers to come to us on their own through content and search visibility. I still often see content glorifying zero-budget marketing.3 Marketing that doesn't look like advertising is undeniably great. But I now believe that if you're a professional marketer, you have to know how to get results with ads.
I know from experience the synergy that happens when a marketer who's ready to fight it out in the market meets a team willing to invest boldly in expectation of a return.
각주
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The company that runs Facebook and Instagram; ads on both platforms are managed through a single system. ↩
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An approach where you create useful content (content marketing) and get it to show up well in search results (SEO, search engine optimization) so that customers come to you first. ↩
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For the record, SEO is by no means zero-budget marketing either. The people and hours spent planning and producing content, and the waiting period before results show up, are all costs. ↩
