Working across an even split of B2B and B2C clients over the past couple of years, it’s clear there are some obvious oversights being made when applying the same logic directly from one to the other.

While the strategy and planning for B2B and B2C campaigns are very similar, the tactics and executions that ladder up require a slightly different lens to get the most out of a campaign. Here are five key insights marketers should consider.

1. Channel diversification is key

Because of the narrower audience segments often associated with B2B products, we have seen an over-reliance on single-channel campaigns.

Most B2B marketing channels have a highly engaged audience, but a small percentage of the target audience is active on each channel in any given month.

The audience that uses a channel more than once a month, as a percentage of your target audience, is typically below 30 per cent. By running only one channel, the reach of your campaign is limited more than with a traditional one.

You can think about those channels like the lesser-used social media, noting that only 30 per cent of the Australian audience uses these four channels more than once a month.

At 30 per cent, you would need seven of these channels to hit 90 per cent of your audience.

That is a best-case scenario. If the channel penetration is lowered to 20 per cent, which you might see from some partnerships or content syndication, you would need 11 channels to reach 90 per cent of your target audience. Compared that to other channels with high audience penetration, where you would only need two channels to reach 90 per cent of your audience.

2. Audience inclination as a metric

Awareness activity is another example where, broadly speaking, the strategy is the same for B2B and B2C. However, moving towards the middle funnel requires a slightly different approach.

Using a channel’s attention or engagement rate is not the best metric for a B2B brand that is not doing an awareness campaign. Most of the time, the campaign must also move people into the sales funnel, even if they are not ready to convert.

In this example, videos are optimised for the weekend, with a higher completion rate than during the week. This is the opposite of the main objective of driving non-sales action. This is because the inclination to convert is much higher when people are at work versus at home. While view time might be higher on the weekends, the impact of the ads is lower, which seems counterintuitive.

This is why a channel like LinkedIn is so critical in a B2B campaign. This is the best channel for prospecting an engaged audience when they are inclined to take action. It’s also why we factor audience inclination into our planning for B2B campaigns.

3. Frequency issues on smaller channels

Similar to the number of channels needed with a low monthly user percentage, we also see that the lower the users, the bigger the skew towards lower frequencies.

The lower the number of users as a percentage of the population, the more skewed the usage is towards once a week or once a month, that is, less used platforms are also less frequently visited by those same users who visit them at all.

This makes sense, however, it does affect how often users see your ad. This is why we need to look closer at median frequency rather than average frequency. In this example of 10 users, the average frequency is the same, but with lower daily users, a small portion of the audience accounts for the majority of the impressions

Because only a small percentage of your audience use these channels regularly (at least once a week), the algorithms can end up spamming those users with higher frequencies to net out at the specified campaign frequency.

While we can’t look at the median frequency as a metric, we can break down our campaigns as granularly as possible and look at any offending ads that are responsible for higher average frequencies and assume that these are contributing to a poor median frequency

4. Confusing poor quality leads with spam leads

One of the areas we try to minimise as much as possible is the percentage of spam leads often driven by bots. This is done by applying our own bot detection script to our activity.

However, spam and bot leads are sometimes conflated with poor-quality leads. Trying to reduce non-marketing qualified or sales accepted opportunities too aggressively can have the opposite effect of limiting the efficiency of a campaign by adding too strict targets.

In this example, allowing for an increase in leads that were not accepted by the sales team actually improved the efficiency of cost per sales accepted opportunity.

It’s like a physical store trying to limit the number of people that are allowed in unless they tell the person at the door that they want to buy something today. Turning away anyone who wants to have a look around wouldn’t make any sense.

It is understandable that sales development representatives would become frustrated filtering through a high number of poor-quality leads, but this is why having an accurate automated layer before a lead makes it to a sales development representative will let some leads through that are higher up the funnel without wasting time.

5. Product awareness

There is a rule in marketing in general that, as a marketer, we can’t trust our own judgment or use our own personal experience because we are not the consumer.

This rule is often broken in a slightly different way in B2B, where there is often a false assumption that the target audience will know exactly what a product does.

Many B2B ads jump straight into a product feature or technical capability the audience may not be primed to receive.

When I joined Atomic 212, I was part of the core audience for a tool like Supermetrics or Dataslayer as a decision maker who uses it every day, but until I used it, I ignored the ads because I didn’t know I needed an “API connector tool with custom data pipelines” until I started using it.

It’s important to take a look at your own data to see if you see any of these five areas are affecting your own campaigns:

1. Channel diversification is key to reach all of your audience
2. Targeting should factor in your audience's inclination to take action
3. Frequency caps are probably spamming a small cohort of users
4. Allow some degree of poor quality leads to maximise efficiency
5. Don’t assume that your audience knows what your product does