A lesson from a DTC marketer to a B2B marketer

As you might know, I made the jump from Ecommerce to B2B Fintech back in March. After 3 years in DTC working for Manual and Bleach London, I joined Silverbird—a B2B Fintech—to head up their growth.

I didn’t intend to identify as a DTC Marketer nor a B2B marketer forever, and the offer from Silverbird ticked all the boxes. Heck, the way we get to operate in Growth feels a lot like B2C.

On the above point, I want to devote this post to describe a striking difference between DTC marketers and B2B/Demand Gen marketers. It’s effectively a lesson I managed to teach myself (now in B2B) after 3 years of working on DTC Growth.

Signal Optimisation for Performance Marketing

DTC marketers know they need to be optimising their paid media for Purchases, so they have that part figured out. Every junior marketer in the Ecommerce space knows that for their campaigns to drive sales, they have to be optimised for the Purchase event. 

Even though they don’t need to contemplate which event to optimise for, DTC marketers know how much the conversion event you choose to optimise your campaigns against matters – and wouldn’t dream about running paid ads differently. 

Furthermore, they obsess about signal optimisation. They want to ensure they send as many events as possible back to their channels, (and are angry at Apple for making it harder).

In contrast, B2B (and non-Ecommerce B2C) has all sorts of funnels – and the decision on which event to optimise for can make or break a B2B Growth Engine. 

You can have a sales funnel where it all starts from a form fill, a Product-Led / Freemium funnel where users get to trial your product, variations and/or combinations of the two, etc. Just like 2 Ecommerce orders can vary greatly in value, 2 signups or form fills can have vastly different business value. The difference here is that you don’t have the $ denominator to distinguish the two, so you have to do the work in identifying the correlation between certain parameters of the conversion and the actual business value. 

To explain this in plain terms, let’s say you are a SaaS software in the HR-tech space: The value of a form fill coming from a 500+ employee company (your Ideal Customer Profile) is very high, while a form fill from a solopreneur can almost be disregarded. This is a relatively straightforward example, but it can get a lot more complex than that when you layer multiple factors (e.g. Company Country, Nature of Business, Product Usage characteristics, etc.) on top of each other.

The above complexity is why I am a big proponent of starting from Tracking first and making sure you are collecting the right events and distributing them to your performance marketing channels.

Michael Lorenzos @michaellorenzos

The first thing I did in my last two full-time roles? Get a tracking expert in to ensure our frontend tracking is spotless and that the data flows seamlessly to and from the marketing channels. If that part is suboptimal, your perf Mktg spend is compromised.

You might be reading those lines and thinking: “come on Michael, I’ll just find whatever event is relevant and optimise for it”. 

2 things here: 

a)  you’d be surprised how many Paid Social campaigns are optimised for clicks or traffic - with marketers relying on Interest/Lookalike Audiences to drive relevant traffic to their funnel.

Michael Lorenzos @michaellorenzos

Don't do that

Why is this problematic? Essentially it’s like instructing your paid channels to get you the cheapest clicks for your budget and stripping away their Machine Learning prowess. You want to instruct the machine to maximise the intended conversions for your budget, not maximise traffic for your budget.

b) Choosing the event that’s relevant to your end goal and is also suitable for Performance Marketing is quite tricky. In most cases, you can’t optimise for actual Customers - as this is a conversion that tends to happen offline and the volume is quite low anyway. Your performance channels need signal volume.

Choosing the right event is a balancing act, here’s why:

When choosing your optimisation event, there are two factors that compete against each other. Correlation with business value, and volume. The two factors are almost always in negative linear correlation, meaning that the higher the business value, the lower the event volume.

Sometimes the only available events you’ll have will fall too much in either way of the spectrum - either high volume / low value or low volume / high value. Before you shrug and choose one of the available events anyway, zoom out of your performance marketing dashboards and think about your customer: what’s a common pattern between your high value customers? Is there a way to modify your funnel to better scout for this pattern? The event you want to optimise against might not even exist yet.

Let’s say that you are getting a lot of unqualified leads, because you are optimising for a Form Fill or a plain signup event. What can you do in that case?

Here are four approaches:

1. Your volume is low so you can’t afford to optimise for anything other than this event. In this case, you want your Ad Creative and LP Elements to do a better job in qualifying the prospect and possibly deter unqualified ones to reduce operational load. At the same time, you need to develop your internal processes in order to not waste any time with obvious unqualified prospects.

2. You identify certain parameters within the signup/form fill that result into a higher quality lead, typically from user input (e.g. Job Department = Engineering or Business Size > 50 Employees) and fire a custom event for the leads that meet them / fire the Lead event only for them.

3. You keep your conversion event the same, but introduce pre-qualification steps that prevent the event from being executed under certain conditions. Essentially you only “allow” the event to be submitted if the pre-qualification deems the prospect relevant. Added bonus of this approach? Reducing the operational load on your Sales/CX team - they will love you for it.

4. (Only applicable in Product-Led/Freemium funnels) You optimise for an event further down the acquisition funnel - e.g. a user performing X actions during their free trial. Product Qualified Leads, essentially.

With all of those approaches, you’ll end up receiving less optimisation events. This way you’ll reduce your signal volume, but you’ll then KNOW that the event you are sending back to the performance marketing channels is one of high business value, and one you want to be optimising for. Essentially you are telling Facebook and Google: “this conversion event is a strong signal for you to optimise your bidding against”.

Conclusion

The acquisition funnel is at the heart of your growth engine. It’s no longer a case of setting up the funnel first, and then simply driving traffic to that funnel. Your acquisition results can inform the funnel. If there is no optimisation event that can combine good enough volume with high correlation to business value, it’s a sign that you’ll either need to set up a new event in your existing funnel, or create a funnel step that will fix one of the 2 factors: a conversion higher in the funnel that will get you higher signal volume, or one that’s lower in the funnel that will increase the signal strength, without sacrificing too much volume.

Choosing the right conversion event for your paid media campaigns can be the difference between success and failure - don’t take it lightly.

Hope this got you thinking! Would love to hear back from anyone rethinking their funnel / optimisation event after reading this.