B2B Performance Marketing Strategy Mistakes: Top 5 to Fix

Episode Number: EP026

Working Title: B2B Performance Marketing Strategy Mistakes: Top 5 to Fix

Release Date: 22/04/2026

Louis: Lead friction is such a big thing and I think it’s one of those things that can kind of take people by surprise. ’cause it’s, it’s quite a difficult thing to think about unless you’re already in that zone.

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Maelien: Welcome back to the podcast. I’m Maelien

Louis: And I’m Louis. And today, because this is the 26th episode and we publish fortnightly, it’s a bit of a birthday episode, so we thought we’d take a bit of a step back and kind of cover what we think are the top five highlights over the past year.

Maelien: as we’re big fans of transparency and going against the status quo where it’s needed. Some of the highlights that we’ll be diving into will be more against the grain. So we’ll dive in and we really hope you enjoy.

Louis: So in at number five we’ve got creative is the new targeting, which is Meta’s latest marketing angle. And ironically, it was part of episode number five as well. The kind of general angle we were coming at this from was that it’s not just the new targeting. It’s actually always been a form of targeting. We talked through a case study where we worked with an animation agency and they had a really, really good, strong internal culture where they had an office dog and you know, did loads of great stuff with the staff to keep morale high and productivity good, and to kind showcase that culture, all of their ads included Ruby, the office dog. And the surprising thing that we found was that the profile of people inquiring was really interesting because they were all dog walkers and pet food manufacturers and, and basically they were all people that that kind of would resonate with ads with dogs in them. So that was kind of the main thing is that, you know, meta say that creative is the new targeting, but actually in terms of the people that will resonate with your ads, the creative content of the images and the videos will speak to a specific type of person.

Maelien: Yeah, and to expand on that, it’s worth talking about metas andromeda updates. How meta wants you to do things has largely changed. So before it would’ve been setting interests and targeting really specifically towards who you wanted to reach, and that was great. As part of that, the creative that you created and who it resonated with would’ve been a small percentage of that target audience. Whereas now how they want you to do it is largely flipped on its head. You can still do interest targeting and targeting in a similar way as you did before, but they’re really moving away from it, and it’s kind of shrouded in having to turn settings off to get to that place and instead now the creative that you put into the ads and what you say in it. That will be assessed and it’ll be dropped into a pool of people that they think is gonna resonate best with it. It’s important not only to get the creative right, but to make sure you’ve got multiple angles reaching people within your audience as well.

Louis: Thanks, Maelie Did you wanna reveal number four?

Maelien: Yeah. So in a number four, we’ve got the Goldilock zone for budget that we talked about in episode 12, and this is where it’s not too low, it’s not too high. It’s just right. So I think a great way to kind of visualize this is imagining a valley on a graph. So on the left where the budget is too low, you’re going to have a higher cost per lead. Then as it goes down into the middle, picture it as having a lower cost per lead, and then as it goes up on the right towards the higher budget, the cost per lead is again gonna increase. And the way I say to look at it like this is because if you imagine you have a budget of 10 pounds per day and you are using a certain platform, let’s talk about Google Ads to make it specific here. And they charge in five pound cost per click With two clicks a day, you’re gonna have really inconsistent leads on the monthly, but also, the platform you’re using, so Google here, is gonna struggle, which audience works, what elements of your campaigns work. So you’re gonna find yourself almost stuck in this place that you are gonna struggle to get out of, or it’s gonna take a long time to get out of and find the right approach.

Flipping to the budget being too high. Well, think of it this way, Google is gonna spend whatever you give to it, and what that means is. They’re gonna inflate up your cost per click, and that’s gonna trickle down into having much higher cost per leads. And so everything becomes more expensive, and that’s not the ideal place that we want to be. So what does an ideal place look like? That is your Goldilock zone, and this is where you find that you’ve reached just that exact point before everything starts getting more expensive and what that’ll translate into is the right CPC, a consistent monthly volume of leads, and everything’s just gonna work nicely from that point because you know you are getting enough insights, you’re getting enough leads, and you are at the right place in terms of spend.

Louis: It’s a hard one isn’t it? It’s because if you’re spending not enough money, you’re not learning fast enough, you’re not moving fast enough, and if you’re spending too much money, you’re paying over the odds. So there is a little bit of experimentation to do with finding out what that goldilock zone is.

So that brings us onto number three, which was also something that we discussed in episode 12, and this is that having a lower budget is more expensive, so you actually pay more for leads on a lower budget. A lot of businesses think, okay, well, we’ll spend a little bit on ads and think that that is kind of a cost saving exercise. Or maybe, you know, because less money is being spent on the ads, that it’s not as much of a air quotes, “waste of budget” as if they were to go, you know, to wade in and immediately spend a large amount. When you’re not spending enough budget every day, you’re still overpaying for leads and you are learning really slowly as well. Like Maelie said, Google is making the decision around can we generate clicks today rather than, can we drive the right level of clicks? And it also leads to things like running out of budget too early in the day, which is a problem if actually your best leads come later in the day and in the evening.

And I guess to throw some numbers into the scenario, it’s tricky because budget is always relative to the CPC. If you’ve got a low CPC, like you know. 20p, 50p, which you don’t see very often, but it still does exist. You might get away with spending a few hundred pounds a month and that being fine. What we usually say is that you kind of wanna be spending at least £1500 to £2000 a month at the very bottom end of your budget. That’s when you start to see performance kind of trickle through, and then from the kind of 3000 pounds per month budget and upwards, that’s where you start to see predictable repeatable results. I know I’ve said CPCA few times here, but it really does rely on your CPC. If you’ve got a 10 pound 15 pound CPC, then 3000 pounds a month is still gonna be a very small budget.

Maelien: And something that we see again and again here is people coming in with a mentality of, well, let’s just throw 500 pounds at it and see if it works. Instead, we’d recommend flipping that mentality and looking at it of how do we make this work? And the approach that we generally recommend here would be to just make sure that everything is set up incredibly well. So you’ve got really solid conversion tracking. You’ve done your research and found the really high intent keywords, and you’ve kept that really focused on the ones that are most likely to convert into leads that are gonna convert into business. This approach of looking at how can we make this work over a longer period of time, say three to six months, and then reviewing that data and seeing what’s working, you can find a strategy that is gonna turn into consistent pipeline.

Now onto number two, which is using friction to improve lead quality. And we touched on this in number 15 about improving pipeline. And episode 17 where we talked extensive on this with an episode around lead ads. So we’ve come to a place where everyone’s obsessed with lead volume, but there’s not enough of a focus on lead quality. And one area that we found is really useful to improve lead quality is through increasing the amount of lead friction. Now, what we mean by lead friction is how easy it is to fill in a form. So a form with just name and email address has super low friction. Versus a form that has way more fields and is harder to fill in, has much higher friction.

Now, if you’re in a situation where you’ve got loads of lead volume, but the quality isn’t there yet, then you’re probably going to have to sacrifice volume through increasing the lead friction. Now, we know that there’s two routes here. You’ve either got a landing page that’s got a form on it, or you’ve got lead ads.[00:09:00] Both of these can work. We tend to find that out of the gate, a landing page tends to work better, but in our opinion, we think that’s just because there’s already a level of lead friction that’s higher than a lead ad. ’cause people are having to go to the landing page and fill out a lot of the details manually versus on a lead ads and all the details fill in automatically, the lead friction is so much lower before they have to submit. One of the things that can be done here is looking at lead ads, is you can replace the email field with a work email. Now, why this helps is because versus an email that’s pre-populated, a work email has to be typed in, so it automatically adds a level of friction.

The second is through something that we call self-selection. And there was a great example here where we were reaching farmers. Initially the quality wasn’t great. They were reaching people that were farmers, but they were also reaching people that just didn’t fit or didn’t even realize that they’d filled in a lead form. And the way that that was fixed was through adding one simple field in. And that field was the question of what type of farmer are you? Are you a pig, a sheep, or a cow farmer? And through adding this question. When people self-selected that answer, they labeled themself as some kind of farmer and there was no option to select other. And this one simple change immediately made a massive improvement to the, the quality that they were getting through..

Louis: Lead friction is such a big thing and I think it’s one of those things that can kind of take people by surprise. ’cause it’s quite a difficult thing to think about unless you’re already in that zone. It does kind of come with a word of caution, maybe more so like a, an expectation management piece. ’cause as you said, there Maelie, you have to sacrifice volume to get better quality 9 times outta 10. And to do that, obviously that means that your conversion rate is probably gonna drop and your cost per conversion is gonna increase as well.

It is a more profitable move. It is a move that makes more commercial sense. But just keep one eye on the CRM as well so you can prove that it is, it is resulting in better quality because you’re moving into this space where you’re looking at improving the average value of lead rather than the the average cost per lead, because it’s gonna feel like a loss when you look at the average cost per lead, but if you look at the average lead value, it’s gonna look like a win. So just a bit of a, just a bit of a word of warning there, A bit of expectation management.

And then finally onto number one, drum roll please. Obviously, we’ve spared no expense for sound effects. This is the myth of attribution. We talked about this in episode three, where obviously as performance marketing specialists, we are huge advocates for having robust clean data to work from, but treating that data as the gospel truth is very dangerous. I’m pretty sure it was in episode three where we talked about how the conversion data in your ad accounts is gonna be different to your Google Analytics, which is gonna be different to your CRM and pushing for a place where all of the numbers in each of those platforms are gonna add up perfectly is, it’s a lost cause ’cause it’s never gonna happen.

The main thing is that you are capturing data for an idea of how different channels are performing and an idea of where to optimize to get better results. And what you’re not doing is, you’re not taking the data and going, well, Google ad’s says this, so it must be true. Or, Google Analytics says this, so it must be true. Or the CRM says this, so it must be true. Because each of those data have their own set of visibility. So you can imagine like one can only look sideways, one can only work forward, one can only look backwards. They’re all gonna see different things. So they’re all gonna tell a different part of the story.

Maelien: I think this is a great place to reintroduce contribution versus attribution. If we were to imagine the person that was behind the ad there, what journey would they have likely have taken? And obviously everyone takes a different journey here, but let’s imagine that they clicked on a LinkedIn ad, they had a conversation with a friend, and then finally they searched up the brand and got in touch and eventually became a customer. There’s lots of different steps here, and it’d be difficult to pinpoint which one was responsible for them to becoming a customer. And if we were to look at Google Analytics, then they’d say it was organic search as a result of them coming from a brand search. Whereas if we looked at LinkedIn ads, then they’d claim it was the LinkedIn ads that resulted in them becoming a customer.

But we know that that’s, really kind of simplistic. So instead, that’s where contribution comes into place. It realizes that each one of these steps is really important, and so we shouldn’t just focus on one area and really improving one area through looking at that attribution viewpoint. Instead, we should be looking at how can we improve everything that’s resulted in them becoming a customer.

Louis: And so that’s the end of the top five. I hope you enjoyed. If you did, please leave us a review. It helps us so much, and if you do have a topic that you’d like us to run through, whether you’ve got a challenge or you are working on something that could do with a bit of insight, we’re always happy to help. Just head to webmarketeruk.com/topic and let us know through the form there. I hope you have a fantastic next two weeks and we’ll look forward to catching you on the next episode.