B2B Retargeting Techniques

Several months ago, a sponsor called to cancel. "We didn't get enough leads from your show." Fair enough. I offered to refund them. They declined, said they'd finish out the contract. Four months later, the same guy calls back wanting to renew. I literally thought he'd called the wrong person. "Actually, we've gotten a huge number of leads from you over the past few months." "Wait, what? Was your tracking broken?" "Nope. People just took a really long time to convert." This happens more than you'd think in B2B. Your buyers are listening to podcasts, reading newsletters, visiting your site. Then they disappear for months before suddenly showing up ready to buy. Most marketing teams would have killed that campaign after month one. "No leads = failure" right? Wrong. Your actual customer journey might be way longer than your attribution window. That "failed" campaign could be your best performer - you just can't see it yet. Before you pull the plug on anything, ask yourself: Do I really understand how long my buyers take to make decisions? Sometimes what looks like failure might just be impatience. Now, behold: stock footage of an hourglass.

To the founder who's refreshing their ad dashboard every 30 minutes... I KNOW that look. You just launched the campaign. The copy felt good. The creative slapped. You even double-checked your targeting this time. But 3 hours in, and… nothing. No leads. No surge. No dopamine. And you start asking the usual questions. “Is the offer wrong?” “Is our brand not strong enough?” “Should we switch platforms?” “Maybe we’re just bad at this.” I’ve been there more times than I’d like to admit. Here’s what I wish someone had told me earlier: Marketing doesn’t reward panic. It rewards patience. The right message takes time to find the right people. Algorithms need to learn. Audiences need to trust. Timing needs to align. And sometimes, you just need to stay in the game longer than your doubt can handle. The brands you admire? Most of them spent months talking to an empty room before the right people started listening. They didn’t pivot 19 times in 19 days. They iterated. They refined. They stayed. And eventually, they broke through. So if you’re in the fog right now, uncertain, questioning everything, know this: It’s not that your marketing isn’t working. It’s just not done yet. Give it time. Then give it data. Then give it fuel. We’re all building in the dark at some point. You’re not behind. You're just... early. #marketing

Last Tuesday, I watched a $1M software deal die in real time. The champion texted the AE afterward, "My team killed it. They loved the product, trusted the ROI, but said you felt too 'risky' for a company our size." Six months of perfect demos. Strong case studies. Pricing that made sense. But they'd been focused on one person while eight others were making the real decision. In B2B, deals often die from collective anxiety. Your champion can love your solution, but if the CFO, IT director, and three VPs have never heard of you, you're asking them to bet their careers on a company that feels invisible. What we call "trust" in B2B is actually cumulative familiarity across a buying group. It's not one person feeling confident, it's 6-8 people independently thinking, "Oh yeah, I've seen them around. They seem solid." This is where many B2B marketers leave money on the table. We optimize for the champions and decision makers while the real decision happens in rooms we're not invited to. Connected TV (CTV) helps solve for this. That CFO who questioned your pricing? Last night, they saw your 30-second spot during their favorite show. No laptop multitasking. No ad blockers. Just your brand message on a 65-inch screen while they're mentally relaxed. Your IT director saw your retargeting banner during their morning research. Your LinkedIn ad during lunch. Your CTV spot during their evening unwind. That's not multiple touch points. That's one familiarity campaign reaching different decision-makers in different mindsets. Our data at LinkedIn for Marketing shows this opportunity: - 94% of LinkedIn's professional audience can be reached via CTV, - 71% of CTV viewers aren't accessible through traditional TV, - CTV campaigns are 4.3x more effective at reaching B2B targets. Psychologist Robert Zajonc proved that mere exposure creates preference. We don't need to consciously process your message. Seeing your brand repeatedly in different contexts builds what behavioral economist Rory Sutherland calls "subconscious safety signals." When your champion walks into that second meeting, something's different. Your brand doesn't feel new anymore. It feels familiar. "Oh yeah, I've been seeing their ads everywhere" carries more weight than any case study. Because buying groups evaluate solutions and risk. Start building familiarity across ecosystems. Map your buying group. Understand where each decision-maker consumes content. Then orchestrate exposure across channels so by the time they meet to decide, you're not the unknown risk, you're the obvious choice. Because in B2B, trust is built through strategic, repeated presence across the moments that matter. #B2BMarketing #CTV #Trust #LinkedInMarketing

Only about 𝟱% 𝗼𝗳 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝘁𝗮𝗿𝗴𝗲𝘁 𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱𝘆 𝘁𝗼 𝗯𝘂𝘆 right now. The remaining 95% are "out of the market". They might follow you, download a lead magnet, or silently watch without ever engaging. They’re passive for now, but not irrelevant. This is what’s known as the 𝟵𝟱–𝟱 𝗥𝘂𝗹𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝗕𝟮𝗕 𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴. Expecting instant results after launching a lead magnet, running an ad, or sending outreach emails (with endless follow-ups) is simply naive. You and your competitors are all fighting for the same 5% of buyers, the same small pool of attention. And the reality is, they’re already being bombarded by options. So the key isn’t doing more. It’s doing things 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆, with thought, timing, and emotional intelligence. That’s how you stand out even among the 5% by showing clarity, consistency, and confidence instead of desperation. But that’s also how you quietly prepare for the 95% who aren’t ready yet. So, start by 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗿𝘂𝘀𝘁 around your personal brand. 𝗧𝗿𝘂𝘀𝘁 grows into 𝗿𝗲𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽. 𝗥𝗲𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽 turns into 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘁. And 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘁 becomes 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 naturally, not forcefully. Thus, you don’t just attract the 5% who are ready to buy. You also become a 𝗽𝗼𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗽𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗻𝗲𝗿 for the 95%. So, when they finally decide to buy, 𝘆𝗼𝘂’𝗹𝗹 𝗯𝗲 𝘁𝗼𝗽 𝗼𝗳 𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗱.

Marketing is a game of repetition, and nowhere is this more true than when it comes to repeat visitors. Here's a real example from 3 months worth of data from a Storybook Marketing customer running a PLG motion. When looking into their site analytics, returning visitors made up less than 10% of traffic, yet accounted for nearly half of all new account setups. This is in no way an anomaly, and I'd encourage you to look at a similar view in your own data. Yet, in many of the B2B demand gen programs running today, marketers are attempting to convert audiences on the first interaction, usually in the name of hitting a lead gen target. By simply allowing audiences a chance to learn on their own, and focusing on repeat visits, you could be increasing conversion rates by more than 3x like this client. A highly controllable version of this is leaning into retargeting within your paid program. Instead of trying to convert everyone at every touch, use a portion of the budget to simply educate, entertain, and create curiosity - focusing on consumption over immediate conversion. Those initial non-converting interactions can then be leveraged into a much better conversion rate with a warmer audience, and a much higher MQL to pipeline rate too. There's real power in a little bit of patience.

B2B ads are slow They seem instant. You get impressions, clicks, content downloads on the first day. But it takes weeks to generate a pipeline. B2B sales cycles take time and so do ads. Don’t start changing tactics too soon: - LinkedIn campaign is doing poorly in the first few days? It can turn around, most people don’t even go to LinkedIn every day - Campaign is doing well one week, and bad another? Leave it be for 2 more weeks and then assess - Campaign ran for a month so everyone has seen it? 90% of your audience didn’t even notice it - LinkedIn campaign has been live for the whole 2 weeks and there are still no generated deals? Yeah, that just doesn’t happen You need to do 3 things to get quality conversations from ads: 1) Get noticed (name 3 ads you saw yesterday, you need several touch points to be remembered) 2) Appeal to the biggest pain (which is different for everyone, so you need content variety) 3) Wait out internal buyer committee thinking while staying on top of mind Can’t do it in a couple of weeks. If your sales cycle is 3+ months, the time commitment is even longer. Ads are one of the fastest ways to grow, but it is not instant. 

Somewhere along the way, we forgot the point. Marketing exists to build trust. But we turned trust-building assets into lead traps. One ebook download and suddenly buyers get 15 emails, 4 LinkedIn requests and an SDR chasing a meeting before the prospect even knows if they have a problem. And then we wonder why conversion rates fall every quarter. Dreamdata’s LinkedIn Ads B2B Benchmarks shows the average customer journey is 211 days from first touch to closed-won. A report from HockeyStack on B2B Customer Journey Touchpoints shows about 2,000 impressions and 200+ touchpoints to close a $10–20K deal. If the journey is that long and that complex, why do we act like every top-of-funnel action is “signal to buy”? Because companies reward speed, not trust. Here’s what happens when you flip the mindset: Measure: • trust signals (repeat website visits, content engagement consistency) • pipeline lift, not lead count • time-to-SQL acceleration, not MQL volume Execute: • ungate 70% of educational content • reserve forms only for true consideration assets • run retargeting to nurture, not pressure • let sales enter the conversation only when intent is obvious Result: Prospects don’t feel hunted. They feel helped. And when buyers feel helped long enough, they choose you - even at a higher price. Trust is slow at the beginning and compounding at the end. Most companies give up right before it compounds.

63% of B2B buyers say that brand reputation is what gets you onto the shortlist — before they ever click, scroll, download, or take the meeting. Not because of the funnel. Not because of the perfectly timed ad. And not because of that one whitepaper you promoted last week. But because of how often they saw you before they even needed you. And yet — if you look at how most companies operate — their entire demand strategy is built around capturing people when they’re ready to buy, instead of earning a place in their minds before they’re even in market. Campaigns start when pipeline shrinks. Content goes out when urgency spikes. Brand becomes a priority when Sales says “people don’t know who we are.” and then eveeeeeeeeryone runs in a panic to build a story that should have existed months ago. This is the fatal flaw: We try to build trust on a deadline. But trust doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t show up in the same quarter you launch a new campaign. It doesn’t respond to urgency. It responds to repetition, clarity, and consistency — none of which can be rushed. If you’re only showing up when you have something to sell, people notice. If you’re only visible when you’re behind on targets, people sense it. Aaaaaaaand if you disappear when things are going well, people forget you the second they see a louder competitor. The brands that win in B2B — especially in high-ACV, long-cycle, trust-first environments — are not the ones with the best targeting or the most aggressive follow-up. They’re the ones that showed up when no one else did. They’re the ones who were there early — when the buyer was just starting to feel a problem but wasn’t ready to solve it. And they’re the ones who invested in mental real estate long before the RFP ever got created. So if you’re wondering where to invest this week — don’t just optimize your outreach or pump more into ads. Ask a harder question! → What are we doing to be remembered by the people who won’t need us for another 6 months? Because in B2B, the most valuable pipeline doesn’t come from who you convert — it comes from who already trusts you when the time is right.

By the time a B2B buyer reaches out to talk to a salesperson, 81% already have two or three vendors in mind. They've spent months visiting websites, reading content, listening to podcasts, asking colleagues for referrals, and building a business case internally. Nobody in your sales organization knew they existed during that entire process, and that research phase represents about 80% of their buying decision. I keep meeting B2B CEOs who put their entire marketing budget toward the moment a buyer raises their hand. Paid search, cold outreach, SEO. All of it targets the 3% to 5% who are actively shopping right now. When you show up cold at that stage, you're competing against companies that have been on that buyer's radar for months, companies a colleague recommended, companies whose content kept appearing wherever the buyer was doing research. You're entering a competition that started long before you knew it existed. The compounding is what makes the patience worthwhile. When you invest consistently in educating your market, the work you do this year starts producing pipeline next year as those early-stage researchers move into active buying mode. The cycle builds on itself. I've built millions of dollars of pipeline this way and it does become predictable, but it takes months of consistently showing up where your buyers are doing their research long before they're ready to talk to a sales team. There are no shortcuts around how B2B buying works.

Checking your B2B ad metrics every 10 clicks and panicking about conversions is the fastest way to kill your marketing strategy. [For most brands, I'd add 50, 75, 100, and 150 clicks, if not more, to the list as well] Some B2B marketers are sabotaging themselves with unrealistic expectations. I really hate to see it - for their company's sake. B2B buying cycles can be LONG - EVEN if you have a "short sales cycle. Buying cycles and sales cycles are NOT the same thing. Expecting immediate conversions from every campaign touchpoint shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how purchase decisions actually happen. When we obsess over daily metrics and make reactive changes, we're treating B2B marketing like it's a consumer impulse buy. It's not. Smart B2B marketers focus on: ↳ Setting realistic timeframes that match actual buying cycles ↳ Measuring leading indicators, not just final conversions ↳ Understanding the full customer journey, not isolated touchpoints ↳ Giving campaigns enough runway to actually perform Marketing can absolutely fuel growth for a good product, but even the best marketing can't fix: ↳ Misaligned expectations from leadership ↳ Unrealistic conversion targets ↳ Arbitrary timeline pressures Stop promising your team that paid media will deliver overnight miracles. Start educating them on what B2B marketing actually can (and can't) do. Give your campaigns room to breathe. You might benefit from the fresh air. #Marketing is not magic; it's a means of communication. #demandgen #demandgeneration #b2b #b2bsaas #saas #paidmedia #advertising