B2B Paid Ads for SME businesses - Trends in 2024

Intro

Navigating the complexities of B2B Paid Ads has long been a challenge for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Limited budgets, resource constraints, and the need for highly targeted campaigns often make it difficult for SMEs to compete with larger corporations in the digital advertising space. As we move into 2024, new trends and regulatory changes are poised to significantly impact the way SMEs approach Paid Ads.

So what are you going to find here? We’ll dive into some of the main developments of 2024 related to platforms like LinkedIn. Additionally you will see how you as an SME can play into these developments. Finally; these 4 developments seamlessly play into the 4 step framework we have been using to help SME companies selling B2B to optimize their marketing strategy.

By understanding and implementing these trends, SMEs can overcome the challenges they have faced with Paid Ads in the past and position themselves for success in 2024 and beyond. Let’s delve into the specifics of these trends and how they can benefit your business.

Changes in regulations at Microsoft and Google

Yes, (pretty much) everyone in Sales & Marketing knows it by now. Changes in policy from Microsoft and Google has made it considerably harder to do outbound sales. Having changed their stance on spam rules, blasting out hundreds of emails is not gonna work any longer. So it becomes increasingly important to have a Marketing strategy that resonates! Having a strategy of pull rather than push will help you both by avoiding these changed spam rules AND will enhance your Outbound strategy as people recognize you.

But how do you implement such a strategy as a small B2B business (without a full-fledged Marketing team)? We’ll dive into how you can set up an omni channel marketing presence to be able to yield better results from both your Inbound and your Outbound marketing.

First things first; how would you rate the collaboration between your marketing team and sales team? Too often one sees that those do not work together enough. Marketing is focusing on a certain campaign with a certain ICP, while Sales teams seem to go the complete opposite direction. This would be our first recommendation though. Ensure they are on the same page when it comes to your:

1. ICP: We have seen that being granular here works best. Additionally, signal-based marketing has become more popular. What signals did you see with companies that recently became paying customers?

2. Challenges your ICP faces: Still our number 1 point when it comes to marketing. Often, buyers don’t know what challenges they have until they learn about them. You need to get in front of them and educate them. What challenges did your customers face? 3. Benefits your solution offers: Make sure that both your Marketing and Sales teams focus on the ultimate benefits (For us that means: Higher conversion rates, saving x amount of hours a month or expertise knowledge) rather than your features. Too often teams are not on the same page here.

4. Best way to get that message across: Depending on your answers on the first three points you will have to adjust your messaging. Keep it short and sweet for executives. Outline overarching goals, industry trends or how you help competitors. For ICs, focus on the challenges they face every day! And how you solve these.

The next step would be to look into Account Based Marketing or ABM. Based on these 4 points what characteristics or signals would you want to target and which companies (!) fit those. Don’t look at contact lists here (of actual people) that you may have already but look at company lists. People change jobs frequently and having an extensive contact list now may sound great but might be worthless in a year from now.

Now use that 4 step framework and your ABM lists to have your Marketing and Sales teams work in tandem. Show discipline and have Sales really focus on those accounts that work best. Personalized messages through email, LinkedIn and voicemessages yield the best results and will keep you from being marked as spam due to those changes in regulation.

And finally; start focusing more on Inbound marketing rather than outbound. As a former Sales Manager, I know this may sound unattractive. Higher initial investments (at least at face value for paid ads or SEO; the truth might actually be less obvious), longer sales cycles since you have to wait til somebody converts into a lead and less control. However, this change in regulation opens up a door of opportunity too. You can start working more strategically, focusing on your true ICP. The ones that close faster, have better adoption and are ultimately less likely to churn. It will boost the bottom line and probably make your teams happier as well by working with the right clients.

Popularity of Demand generation & the power of thought leadership to do so

Organizations realize that capturing Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU) leads alone is not enough these days. Traditional strategies of putting a lot of money into only Google (and potentially other Search platforms), targeting keywords signaling intent to buy are not producing enough results. People have become more knowledgeable. Buyers have more technology at their disposal (more on this later), therefore, search engines are not their only way to do research.

That’s why it is paramount that you position yourself as a thought leader in whatever space you’re in. Whether selling a service or product, you’re the expert. You know what challenges people face, how this impacts their day-to-day or their company’s bottom line and you know how to solve those pains. Showing that you have the knowledge to help your buyers is what is gonna drive results.

Additionally; research is clearly showing the value of thought leadership. Studies from for instance LinkedIn, Edelman and others has shown that:

Source: 2024 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report

So; what material that you already have can be used for such thought leadership? And if you don't, how to create this material? Look into your Customer Feedback and Testimonials: Leverage customer testimonials, success stories, and feedback to showcase real-life examples of your company's impact. These stories from customers you have already helped show the value you bring and the knowledge you have.

Position your current material the right way: going back to the example again of the customer testimonials. Make those relate with a specific audience! If your customer success stories are generic, rewrite them with a specific angle. That angle can either be how you helped them or the characteristics of that specific customer. Why? Cause if you were to read a story that is all about how financial services companies can benefit from omni channel presence or how we have helped a Tech company with 20 employees adopt a thought leadership strategy; that relates to people reading it. Generic stories on how Company ‘Random’ faced ABC challenges and were seeing 50% higher close rate due to your solution is not specific enough to make your buyers relate to it.

Use genuine stories and perhaps even an ‘influencer’ approach: Do you as CEO go to trade shows often? Or do you visit your customers regularly? Maybe your private life is very intertwined with your work life? If that’s the case; why not use that for your marketing strategy. All you need to do is not forget to document it (photos, videos, or just notes). That can then easily turn into content that you post consistently. The key here is being consistent! Pick a day and time during the week and just start posting. You’ll get the hang of it as you go. And with certain tools you don’t have to wait until it is that time & day, just schedule your content.

And finally: Have you already heard of Linkedin Thought Leader Ads? These were released already some time ago and companies are starting to tap into them. It is a great way to relate more with your potential buyers by not just using your company’s brand. Instead you will use your (or somebody else’s) personal brand! If you as CEO/Founder already established this, I would highly recommend trying it out. If you don’t, perhaps somebody within your organization does. Or perhaps somebody outside of the organization does! If you want some help on really getting this up and running, send over a connection request to our Founder. We would love to help!

And so, what to do if you don’t have this in place already?

Tap into your own Subject Matter Experts: Identify knowledgeable individuals within your company—product developers, customer support teams, or sales executives—who can share unique insights and experiences. Then see if they are willing to act as the thought leader experts. Are they good on camera? That opens up the door to produce video content or participate in online webinars. Which will give you incredible exposure!

Use other sources: Look; don’t use anything from your competitors. But see if there are trustworthy sources in your industry. For us as an example, we lean on the research done by LinkedIn quite a bit. Their research department focusing on the results from LinkedIn Ads are incredible for us. We can tap into their research (and cite them of course) and show to the organizations we work with that there are some real benefits. Now, that being said, you do over time of course want to do some research but in those early days, just see what is out there!

Changes in Technology

Well; another quite obvious observation is the emergence of AI. 2023 may have been the year of really trying and testing; 2024 needs to be the year where you really make it work. Or else you may find yourself overtaken by early adopters or lose out on efficiency. But how can you actually make AI work? What are the areas where it offers advantages and what are the limitations. We’ll explore some of those from our experience both from our own marketing and working on our clients’ campaigns.

Let’s start by outlining our own opinion on AI. It is perhaps THE single most important development for SME organizations in decades. Why? Because it opens up the door to expertise, resources and analytics capabilities that used to be reserved for big corporations. However, with the emergence of tools like ChatGPT and many more, much more niche AI tools, you’re no longer at that huge disadvantage compared to those big corporations.

BUT; you need to be mindful of the capabilities and intricacies of the current AI tools. What are the main capabilities of AI within Marketing (and what do we ourselves use it for)?

AI is great at brainstorming ideas. Just give it guidance (think of a framework similar to for instance STAR; what’s the situation - what is your task / role - what do I want you to do - what kind of parameters do I want you to adhere to to get to the result). Literally within seconds you have a bunch of ideas, greatly enhancing productivity. Secondly; you’re less likely to miss out on a specific angle. AI can give you potential risks to your strategy that you haven’t thought of. Or perhaps a great new idea that benefits your strategy. Secondly; you can give it input and let it analyze. Just give it your 5 most recent blog posts and ask it to analyze. What should be improved? Or what new topics should we pick?

And finally; ad inspiration. I want to focus on the word inspiration. There are a number of AI tools out there for marketeers, producing creatives & copy. However, these are not 100% accurate and you will have to adjust. However, they do provide a great entry point, again boosting your productivity.

So; do you also notice what is missing here? What’s missing here are the phases of determining your strategy and the final content production. You see; in our opinion (at least at the moment) AI cannot be the starting or the end point in the process of paid advertising campaigns. Coming up and finalizing strategy is still a human process for us. Then finalizing the actual creatives & copy we use for our clients is also still up to us humans. Why do we do that?

One example; we used AI to brainstorm about ads for our own company in the beginning. Which gave us some really good ideas. However, if we had just listened without any human interference, we could have been in serious legal trouble. Why? Because the word ‘LinkedIn’ is not allowed in the ads itself (headlines, copy, description). This shows that you need to review whatever AI is producing. Not just for copyright, but also for legal implications.

Secondly; please don’t use AI to write all of your content or determine your whole strategy. You’ll lose out on both the creative & strategic thinking. Sure, it can provide a great starting point. Or brainstorm about certain ideas. But no business has been built on a fully automatic pilot. At least; no good business. For some advice on prompts, just search on LinkedIn, there are a bunch of influencers out there (Like Steve Slaunwhite).

So all in all; AI is going to make lives easier, especially for y’all working in SMEs. It will democratize, in our view, many things related to marketing. No longer you have all these big corporations stealing the attention because you may lack some resources, time or in-house expertise.

Do be mindful though that these tools come at an expense. So you have to consider the frequency with which you will use those tools. If you believe you will not use it very often, it may be best to partner up with a provider that already has these tools such that you do not have to get those licenses yourself!

In case you do plan on using them regularly, we would highly recommend them. They have boosted our own productivity greatly and we have seen great results for the internal teams at some of the companies we are working with too! Managing your campaigns rather than the one-time setup: Why is it even more crucial with LinkedIn Ads in 2024!

Have you heard of the term ad fatigue? If not, you have most likely experienced it yourself already. Remember when you last opened up LinkedIn or another Social Media platform. You started scrolling through your feed and there it was again; a very obvious ad from a company that you have seen for the tenth time now.

So what did you do? Scroll right past it. Now if the company is paying by the impression, that’s a waste of money. Even if they pay on a Cost Per Click basis it will cost them money (LinkedIn’s CPC actually takes this into account)!

Becoming tone deaf for ads on these platforms is pretty easy, especially if there is no rotation in ads. You know they are an ad, since you’ve already seen them many times. So why would a person click after seeing it for the 11th time?

Ad fatigue is actually one of the biggest reasons why performance drops over time after you start using LinkedIn Ads. It may happen after a month or perhaps after 2 or 3 but it will happen inevitably. And nobody wants their performance to drop after such a short period of time and especially not on a platform where the CPCs are generally higher than other platforms.

Besides, if you’re already dealing with ad fatigue now, this could become an even bigger issue later in 2024. Your credibility is on the line and buyers expect more. They want to be educated. Not sold to.

So what can you do about it? You need to manage your campaigns. Regularly updating your creatives and copy in order to avoid the ad fatigue. Changing your audience (aka targeting) could be an option too but that is probably not the best way to go, as your ICP won’t change that much over time. And changing the ultimate asset is not a great idea either in order to avoid the fatigue as this will mean you have to spend a lot of time rewriting your blogs, whitepapers etc.

The best way to monitor for ad fatigue is to keep an eye out for the ad frequency. This metric tells you how many times on average ads in a campaign have been shown to one individual user. So if you have multiple ads in that campaign you need to divide that number by the amount of ads.

Now there is no single number that you need to adhere to. It depends, amongst others, on the ad type, whether this is a cold or retargeting campaign and the number of ads in that campaign. Below you find some of the guidelines that we stick with, however it is very hard to give you concrete numbers without knowing anything about your business. The best ad frequency also depends on your industry, people you target and many other factors. For some specific advice on your situation, reach out to us! If you are towards the higher end of the range or even beyond these numbers, you will have to look into refreshing or adding more creatives.

And as a final note; B2B deals with longer sales cycles than B2C. That requires a different approach and keeping this in mind is crucial for your success with LinkedIn Ads. In order to play into these longer sales cycles; think of it almost as education. The typical journey would be to start with elementary, graduate to middle, move to high, then go to college and perhaps end with an MBA or other post-graduate degree.

The same can be done for your LinkedIn Ads strategy. You will have your prospective buyers graduate throughout the journey into becoming a lead ro paying client. In order to go through the entire process you have some sort of graduation ceremony waiting for them after every step. This can be signing up for a blog post, followed up by short-form video, leading them into a whitepaper style document, for them to finally book a call.

And usually the job is not done there! Think about all those booked calls that don’t turn into paying customers (I would say at least 80% for most companies…) and how many of those people just stick with the status quo. However, sticking with the status quo is almost certainly not their wish and best-case scenario. They either don’t have the budget, time to allocate to implementing your solution or executive buy-in. Or perhaps it is any of the other 1001 reasons why they cannot move forward.

Stopping there and just calling it quits is not in your best interest! You need to stay in front of them, reminding them of their challenges. And how your solution can make their day to day easier. So make sure you have a sophisticated retargeting framework in place and manage this framework over time.

Conclusion

So; all in all, we believe that the current developments in 2024 will prove to be awesome for SMEs already using LinkedIn Ads and also for the ones thinking of starting their own campaigns. However, as the saying goes, failing to plan is planning to fail applies here too. You need a strategy in place in order to make the most out of the vast opportunities!

If you need some help on planning, executing and managing, give us a shout! We work exclusively with SMEs and would be happy to see if we can help you as well. You can book a call easily on this page or DM me (Founder at Alamere Digital) on LinkedIn if you just have a few questions!

And if you do decide to do your LinkedIn Ads on your own; I am sure you will see success. You can also sign up to our Company Page on LinkedIn to keep informed on any new blog posts we put out there with advice on LinkedIn Ads and more!