Written by Ben Driscoll and Brandon Marcus
No marketing investment can get you in front of the right audience at the right time, quickly, and at scale, like ads.
That’s why paid media is the highest-cost channel in any organization's marketing budget.
And with tens of thousands of dollars at stake, you can't just set it and forget it. You have to understand what each channel can and can’t do and constantly test and optimize your campaigns.
So, how do you ensure your paid marketing resources don’t go to waste? Here are seven must-have elements of high-ROI advertising programs.
Aligning Your Paid Marketing Efforts with Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) Using First-Party Data
Paid marketing is often the most expensive line item in your budget, and aligning your efforts with your ideal customer profile (ICP) is critical to maximizing your ROI.
Analyzing first-party data, like demographics, sales notes, and the asset's prospects engage with, helps you refine your ICP and identify trends and signals that inform your paid media strategy.
For example, if you notice that a significant portion of your organic traffic is coming from search engines, but you haven't invested much in paid search, it's a clear indication that you should explore this channel further.
Even well-established companies often lack up-to-date ICP documentation, making first-party data analysis even more valuable.
I worked with a multi-billion dollar company that hadn't updated its ICP doc since its Series B funding round seven years prior. By digging into their first-party data, I found that 80% of their pipeline came from U.S.-based companies with 500 to 1,500 employees, primarily in the technology industry. This insight helped us refine our targeting and ad copy and improve our conversion rates.
Combining first-party data with third-party data, such as keyword research and total addressable market (TAM) information, can further enhance your understanding of your ICP, help determine what content they engage with, and inform channel selection. Tools like Google Ads Keyword Planner can help you gauge the demand for your product and estimate your TAM in search engines.
When defining your ICP for paid marketing, focus on key elements such as location, company size, industry, job titles, and their needs and pain points.
Align your targeting and tailor your ad copy to these specific characteristics that have historically converted and generated revenue for your business.
Investing time in analyzing your first-party data to sharpen your ICP leads to more effective targeting, better messaging, and higher return on investment for paid marketing campaigns.
Develop and set goals that align with your business goals
To build internal buy-in, support, and understanding for your ad efforts, align your paid marketing goals so they contribute to your company's key priorities, like pipeline generation or revenue targets.
This alignment with business objectives will demonstrate the value and impact of your work to leadership and help you secure the resources you need to succeed.
What are your company's overarching objectives?
Whether you generate pipeline, drive revenue, or increase free trial signups, ensure your marketing KPIs directly reflect these priorities. For instance, if your business focuses on free account signups, set a goal of achieving a thousand signups with a $100,000 investment.
Sometimes, your marketing goals should focus on metrics that feed into the ultimate business objectives.
For example, one of my clients prioritizes closed-won revenue (ARR) as their primary KPI. In this scenario, paid channels aren’t directly accountable for closed-won ARR – both sales and marketing impact the KPI and need to execute well to close a deal. With that in mind, we focus our KPIs a few levels up-funnel on pipeline generation because driving more pipeline will ultimately achieve our revenue goals.
Effective goal-setting requires analyzing data to identify key metrics that influence downstream success.
For instance, I had a client who needed to boost pipeline. We discovered that users who engaged with the product during a free trial, beyond just signing up, were 50% more likely to convert to pipeline. We set a goal to increase qualified, free signups, and engagement, knowing it would track with our pipeline goals.
Demonstrating how your marketing efforts contribute to key company priorities helps you secure the support and resources you need, improves internal buy-in for paid initiatives, and ensures your marketing efforts impact your company's revenue growth.
Determine which paid channels are right for you and what they can and can’t do
Choosing the right paid channels for your advertising requires a clear understanding of your ideal customer profile (ICP), the stage of the funnel you want to target, and each channel's strengths and weaknesses.
The channels you choose to employ depend on where your target audience spends their time, the level of intent each channel offers, and your specific business goals.
Paid Search
Paid search is a great place to start for most businesses because it’s the highest intent channel.
People are looking for something, telling you they’re looking for it, and receptive to clicking on an ad and taking action.
That makes paid search well-suited for targeting high-intent, mid to low-funnel buyers. It’s also ideal for product-led growth (PLG) and effectively drives demo requests.
Paid search allows you to target specific keywords, making it easier to create paid campaigns for high-intent searches and tailor your landing pages to match that intent. By offering significant control over keyword targeting and ad placement, paid search allows you to build focused ad campaigns and create personalized and efficient user experiences.
Paid Social
Paid social channels like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn are better for top-of-funnel engagement and content distribution.
Social channels, with a mobile-first approach, can create friction when promoting desktop applications or complex sign-up processes, which can make it harder to get signups. To mitigate this friction, you might need to simplify the sign-up process or focus on content downloads.
For B2B, LinkedIn offers excellent targeting options for reaching specific professional audiences, allowing you to target by title, company, and name. However, it's a high-cost channel with high CPM and CPC that requires higher conversion rates to justify the investment.
Other paid social channels, like Facebook and Instagram, can provide extensive reach and lower CPCs and can be effective if you know your ICP spends a lot of time on them. Although Facebook's quality for B2B can be poor, its reach and lower CPCs make it useful for broader engagement.
Prioritize channels based on your specific goals and align your KPIs accordingly. For instance, if your goal is to generate demo requests, paid search should be your primary focus due to its high intent and low friction.
By aligning your paid marketing efforts with your target audience, funnel stage, and desired outcomes, you'll be positioned to leverage each channel’s strengths and maximize the ROI of your ad spend.
Set channel-specific KPIs to track success
Once you’ve chosen your channels, you need to set channel-specific KPIs that align with your business goals and the unique characteristics of each channel.
This ensures that each channel is optimized for the most relevant metrics, enables you to effectively track and optimize performance, and effectively report progress to CMOs or directors.
Context is critical when identifying the right KPIs, but commonly used metrics include cost per lead (CPL) and return on ad spend (ROAS). ROAS can be calculated based on pipeline or annual recurring revenue (ARR), depending on the business.
If your business goal is to grow pipeline, your paid marketing goal might be to achieve a 4x ROAS to enable you to scale pipeline effectively.
Paid social and paid search campaigns should have different KPIs due to their distinct objectives and user intent. For instance, paid social often focuses on content downloads and brand awareness, while paid search is more ROI-driven and tied to down-funnel metrics like leads and pipeline. So, cost-per-content download would be a logical channel-specific KPI for paid social campaigns focused on lead generation.
By setting channel-specific KPIs that align with business goals, you can optimize your paid marketing efforts, scale your pipeline, and ultimately drive growth for your organization.
Map out channel-specific CTAs that align with the assumed funnel stage
Your call-to-action must match the marketing channel, the customer's assumed stage in the sales funnel, and their needs at that specific touchpoint in their journey.
You can't take a "set it and forget it" approach.
As we’ve discussed, paid search is a mid-to low-funnel channel. Customers are typically in the research or decision-making phase and actively seeking solutions.
For paid search, you’d focus your CTAs on offering free trials, demos, product tours, and other tools that directly address the customer's search intent. If someone specifically searches for your company and your ad appears, they likely already know what they're looking for, so you’d serve them a demo CTA that aligns with their needs.
Since paid social is a higher-funnel channel where customers are less aware of your brand or product, CTAs should focus on providing valuable content that establishes thought leadership, raises brand awareness, and helps customers in their research phase.
You wouldn’t approach someone at a bar and ask them to marry you right away.
CTAs should meet prospects where they are and gradually guide them further down the funnel until they're ready to request a demo.
While first-party data on customer conversion patterns can inform your selection of appropriate CTAs for each channel and funnel stage, it's crucial to test different CTAs to see what truly resonates with your audience. Your data won’t always accurately predict performance, so continuously experiment with different messaging.
By aligning your CTAs with the marketing channel and the customer's funnel stage, and continuously refining your approach, you'll be better equipped to guide customers through their journey and ultimately drive conversions.
Ensure your lead nurture and sales ops process is ready prior to launching your campaign
Launching paid programs without the necessary infrastructure to nurture, convert, and close leads will result in poor outcomes and wasted budgets.
Before you launch any paid marketing initiatives, make sure your marketing operations, lead nurturing, and sales handoff processes are properly set up and ready to handle the influx of new leads effectively.
When a lead submits their information, they should enter an email nurture campaign that guides them through the funnel effectively. Additionally, lead routing and scoring mechanisms must be in place to ensure leads are routed correctly and assigned to a sales representative.
Collaborate with marketing operations and sales operations teams to ensure a smooth handoff of leads from marketing to sales. Engage with your head of sales to verify that the SDR team is prepared and equipped to promptly follow up with inbound leads generated from your paid campaign.
Testing, testing, and more testing
Testing best practices depends on several context-specific factors, such as your company's quarterly schedule, seasonality, and available resources.
You should always test your ad copy, landing pages, and CTAs post-launch to see what works and what doesn’t and continuously improve your paid search performance.
Ad tests are increasingly automated using AI and algorithms, particularly in Google Ads.
Responsive Search Ads now rely on providing multiple headlines and allowing the algorithm to determine what works best.
When testing ads, the primary KPI should be engagement metrics, like click-through rate. While conversion rates are important, multiple variables factor into them beyond the ad, such as the landing page experience. By focusing on click-through rate, you can isolate the effectiveness of your ad copy and make informed decisions based on that specific moment in the user's journey.
Your goal is to find the most effective approach through iterative testing and optimization. By continuously testing your ad copy, landing pages, and CTAs and creating feedback loops with your team, you can identify the strategies that yield the best results for your paid media efforts.
Communicate your wins and your losses
This sounds banal, I know, but throughout my career, I’ve seen paid marketing teams launch ad campaigns and disappear into their own world until the end of the quarter.
Then, everyone wonders why we missed our numbers.
I once got a promotion because every Friday, I proactively sent my team an update on our paid search performance, including our successes and failures and the reasons behind them. This open dialogue kept everyone on the same page and created a better working environment.
Share your wins, losses, and the lessons learned from each campaign to ensure everyone is informed about your performance and progress.
Being transparent about your campaign's failures is just as important as sharing the wins, as they provide valuable feedback that can inform future business decisions.
As a consultant, I've even had clients discover that paid search doesn't work as well for them as other channels like content and events. Ultimately, you need to focus on the channels that generate revenue, even if it means acknowledging that paid advertising or a particular paid channel may not be the most effective strategy.
By sharing both positive and negative results from your campaigns, you can align your efforts with your business objectives and keep key stakeholders satisfied with the progress and direction of your paid marketing program.
