Three things I tell B2B founders about paid media

The same three opinions keep coming up in every call with B2B SaaS and AI founders I take. I figured I'd write them down so I can stop repeating myself and send them the article instead. 😊

I run a B2B paid media agency. That means I spend most of my week on intro calls with founders and marketing leaders trying to figure out whether their existing paid program is salvageable, whether they should start one from scratch, and what to do about the ABM platform a consultant talked them into buying.

Different companies, different stages, mostly the same three conversations.

These are the three things I find myself saying on almost every call.

Google Ads works for B2B. You just can’t run it like B2C.

I get the "does Google Ads even work for B2B" question constantly, usually from a founder whose previous agency burned through $40K on broad match keywords.

Of course it didn't work. That's not Google Ads not working for B2B. That's running a fresh B2B account like it’s a mature ecom account.

B2C accounts can absorb broad match and Performance Max because the volume tolerates noise.

B2B can't. If your average deal is $40K and your sales cycle is 90 days, every irrelevant click wastes $20-$100.

It’s not just the money. It’s also time. There are only so many relevant searches per day. If you are wasting budget on irrelevant informational queries, it means you miss out on many of the best searches.

The accounts that work in B2B look almost nothing like what Google's reps and documentation push. For B2B, you need tight match types and aggressive negative keywords.

If you talk to a Google rep, they will tell you to turn on broad match and launch Performance Max, which is seriously terrible advice. Either these reps are incentivized to churn and burn new advertisers, or there is no nuance to their instructions and they give high-end B2B lead gen accounts the same advice they’d give to a large ecom store.

Almost every founder who tells me Google Ads doesn't work for B2B is describing an account that hasn't done this. It's not that the channel is broken. It's that the account is being run on autopilot by a generalist. I wrote the longer version of this argument here if you want the full case.

ABM is a great strategy and a terrible product category.

The second thing I find myself saying is that ABM works as an approach and almost never works as a product.

The approach is real. Pick a finite list of accounts you want to win. Build creative for those specific people.

Sequence touches across the channels they actually use. Coordinate sales and marketing on the same list. That works.

What doesn't work is what most companies mean when they say "we're doing ABM," which is "we bought a platform with intent data and a heatmap dashboard."

The platforms aren't the strategy. They're an infrastructure layer that works only if everything sitting on top of it, like the targeting list, the creative, the sales follow-up, and the channel mix, is already in place.

If those things aren’t in place, the platform is a waste of thousands of dollars a month.

If they are in place, the platform perhaps helps with reporting, but is usually not necessary.

We build account-based campaigns with just precise account lists, LinkedIn Thought Leader and company sponsored post ads, and targeted Lemlist outreach sequences. I can show you case studies of 19x pipeline-to-ad-spend ratios using this approach. No ABM platform involved. I wrote about this at more length here if you want the full unpack.

Industry vertical matters more than people pretend

The third thing I keep saying is that generic B2B paid media advice is mostly wrong, and the specific reason it's wrong is that it ignores which vertical you are in.

"Optimize your bidding strategy" and "improve quality score" are the kind of recommendations that fill a SaaS marketing blog and tell you almost nothing about what's actually going to move pipeline in your business.

The real leverage is vertical-specific and lives one layer down from those generalities.

In fintech specifically, the leverage is three things.

First, compliance-aware creative. If your product touches institutional money, the kinds of claims you can make in copy are tightly constrained, and an agency that hasn't worked with that constraint will write ads that get rejected or get your account flagged (or worse).

Second, ICP segmentation by AUM tier and firm type. A solo placement agent, a $200M family office and a $20B asset manager are not the same buyers. Treating them like one audience is how you end up with a 0.2% conversion rate on otherwise good traffic.

Third, patience with longer sales cycles. Fintech sales often take 6-12 months. Advertisers that pull budget at month three because "the numbers don't justify the spend yet" are misunderstanding what advertising is supposed to do.

I built the inbound marketing function at Preqin when I worked in-house. The paid media program was extremely successful, and we built it out of nowhere within a year to…well, I shouldn’t specify the ROAS, but it was extremely high.

I would have liked to scale it faster and accept a lower ROAS, but even though it was during ZIRP, it was a UK-based company, so the approach was more conservative.

The longer version of this thought process is here, with more on how we approach paid media for fintech specifically.

These three things are not even contrarian inside the small group of people who actually run B2B paid programs at scale. They feel contrarian only against the diffuse cloud of agency marketing copy and LinkedIn thought leadership that fills the space.