75% of B2B ads are a waste of money - what about content?
Hi, Aaron from Postdigitalist here ✌️
A couple of days ago, I found this infographic:
Its source? A very recent report by LinkedInB2B and System1. According to the report, 75% of B2B ads fail to drive long-term growth.
A noteworthy detail: This study covered PPC ads, not the nice, "value-driven" content we produce around here.
But before signing off and assuming this is not about you (or me), let's analyze the report's findings a bit more in-depth. The reasons why most B2B ads fail are the same reasons why most B2B content marketing programs fail to yield significant long-term results.
Why most B2B ads fail
There are 3 major reasons why most B2B ads fail:
- Cultural irrelevance
- Feature-itis (or an excessive, monothematic focus on features above anything else)
- Risk aversion
How do ads work?
One of the best articles about marketing I've ever read comes from Kevin Simler's blog, "Melting Asphalt" and it's titled: "Ads don't work that way".
In it, Simler argues that ads (and brands) don't thrive through emotional manipulation, but by "cultural imprinting". In short, brands become social tools that customers use to communicate who they are and what they stand for. They're symbols customers use to invent themselves and reach the goals associated with projecting what they want to project.
"In a way, cultural imprinting is a form of inception, but it's much shallower than the conventional (Pavlovian) account would have us believe. An ad doesn't need to incept itself all the way into anyone's deep emotional brain; it merely needs to suggest that it might have incepted itself into other people's brains — and then (barring any contrary evidence about what people actually believe) it will slowly work its way into consensus reality, to become part of the cultural landscape."
In B2C environments, that's easy to detect and easy to instrumentalize. You just need the cultural awareness, research, and resources to pull it off. It can even be fun. My dream project isn't helping a B2B titan expand to a new market (sorry). My dream project is selling energy drinks to gamers.
No one gets fired for hiring IBM
In B2B, customers may not use brands to project that they're highly competent World of Warcraft players, but they can be used for fashioning oneself as an innovation-driven industry leader, or a highly reliable company with a legacy and a 100-year mission.
The fact that B2B customers still use brands for self-fictionalization is a bit of a dirty secret. But it also explains initiatives like the super expensive Cisco billboard at the Singapore airport.
Tim Soulo
Ahrefs' CMO Tim Soulo spotted the billboard last week and wondered what it was for.
Here's a direct quote, so your beautiful eyes don't have to be offended by LinkedIn's awful interface:
Help me understand something...I saw this GINORMOUS ad at Singapore's arport. I'm sure it's ridiculously expensive, but it practically says nothing. 🤷♂️ What's the goal of this ad?I have never bought anything from Cisco. And I'm sure 99.999% of people at the airport are like me in that regard.Which means that this ad is targeting maybe 0.001% of all travellers, who happen to be relevant decision makers at companies who might need to buy something from Cisco at some point.And what does it even say to them? "Cisco.. something-something... AI."Is this a pure branding play to stay top of mind for any relevant decision makers?
Some commenters mentioned the fact that, through this ad, Cisco is doing what the kids call "flexing". In short, they're reaffirming that they're a major industry player that can invest in this sort of exposure. They're a large, important brand, and working with them means having the best possible vendor.
Other commenters added that most of Cisco's ICP is already a customer. So this could even be a retention move. This ad reassures customers that Cisco is still the top, most powerful, and most popular choice. Beyond the rational arguments (reliability, scalability, integrations), large B2B brands are status symbols.
Companies often choose their vendors with the same underlying criteria as someone who buys a Louis Vuitton bag in an attempt to have the brand's "Old Money" glamour reflected onto them by association. Pretending that this isn't true has given most B2B marketing writing a certain dishonesty and flatness. That's why we discuss tactics far more often than we discuss fundamentals.
"It's called fashion, look it up"
I much prefer reading what marketers working in fashion have to say. In particular, what they have to say about branding. They understood that they are cultural actors and that the ornamental and subjective nature of what they promise is both a challenge and an opportunity.
Especially in software, it would seem to be taboo to admit that users are people and that, as such, they tend to make emotional decisions. People in fashion understand this, so they talk about “creative universes”, identity, and cultural anxieties.
In tech, we refuse to do that and talk about features and benefits, as if adopting a new tool was completely frictionless, and as if when faced with a problem, one's first reaction was to go out to the market to look for a solution, eager to compare vendors, fight for budget, and spend it.
I've seen it at large companies, I've seen it at scale-ups, and I've seen it at bootstrapped startups: The first reaction to inefficiency is not usually to go out and buy software. The first reaction is either trying to put something together with what you already have or simply enduring.
So, to sell software (especially in this context of tight budgets and increasing interest rates), you need significant emotional incentives, linked to the cultural sensibilities and aspirations of potential advocates.
Today, the illusion persists that the B2B decision-maker and the B2C consumer are not the same person, as if someone had a double mind, and considered buying a pair of pants and buying software as two diametrically opposed decisions. The stakes may be higher in one case than in the other - But the fundamentals that establish a brand as the top choice for denim are remarkably similar to those that shape a brand's reputation as the premier CRM.
Failing to operate under that assumption leaves tons of untapped branding possibilities. Incumbent brands that aren't afraid to project clear values and can connect with advocates (and with the teams around them) in a rich, personal way will have a clear advantage. Otherwise, buying committees will always favor those legacy options that can at least position them as responsible decision-makers.
Marlon Brando was once asked how he prepares for a character. He replied, “there is no character, there are just lines on a page.” Speaking of B2B SaaS, and taking a perhaps too-bold stance, one could say that there is no account, there are just consumers in an email thread.
Feature-itis
In a MarketingWeek article expanding on the study's findings, Jon Lombardo, the global lead at the LinkedIn B2B Institute explains that one of the reasons why B2B ads tend to underperform has to do with product's grip on growth.
While product-led growth is an efficient and highly scalable framework, its hyperfocus on features forces marketers to only have conversations "at the features level". Pain points & goals are only discussed as the introduction to a features conversation.
This conversation may be relevant to those in-market, who feel the pain addressed by the product very deeply and consistently and are taking direct action to alleviate it. But the resulting ads are irrelevant to most potential customers - not to mention, pretty bland.
There's a single exception that comes to my mind, and it's Squarespace's 2024 Superbowl ad, directed by Martin Scorcese.
Full disclosure: At Postdigitalist we're extremely partial to Martin Scorcese. It's company policy.
This ad does many things really well:
- Of course, it's beautifully directed, punchy and clever
- It shows many potential target demographics, showing that whether you're trying to stand out among social media-addicted millennials, elderly couples, or Japanese executives, a stunning website will do the job
- It's free from technicalities and jargon
Another brilliant feature this ad has is that it doesn't make the same old, non-differentiated promises as other B2B software companies. For instance, most software creatives today focus on either increasing revenue or decreasing costs. This seems reasonable and correct in this economic context, but the result is undifferentiated and vague messaging.
What about content marketing?
It's easy for us, organic marketing people to criticize PPC initiatives and other types of more "conventional" marketing. Especially when we're working with expensive products and long sales cycles. In most cases, ads don't seem to do much to nurture high-value accounts. The level of peer pressure created by the Cisco airport ad isn't attainable for most companies.But one thing's true: paid marketing and SEO motions can complement each other virtuously.
One of the 3 reasons why B2B ads fail has to do with not building a brand that resonates beyond the product.
Us content marketers usually don't perceive this as a flaw. So we just focus on crafting product-centric, BOFU content. And it works, it attracts and engages hot leads, and attribution can be pretty direct, so everyone's happy. But that's just leaving money on the table.
This gap, where the brand doesn't seem to stand for anything or be anything beyond the product, can be filled through awareness-focused content marketing.
Using the framework we introduced in our previous post, we could say that this awareness-focused content should be reflective, not extractive. We shouldn't focus so much on solving a problem, but on stories, ideas, and other brand-building "thought leadership".
And this awareness-focused content can foster brand loyalty while building high-scale, long-term pipeline, since most of your TAM isn't actively looking for a solution right now.
What do you think?
Join the conversation! What's the most common mistake you've seen in B2B ads? Have you had any positive experiences with your own ads? Are you partial to Martin Scorcese too?
