B2B Performance Marketing: Complete Guide for Marketers

by Cat Hausler

8 Min Read

There’s no question that digital marketing is essential to the growth of businesses today. But so often, the term becomes a catch-all term for all forms of marketing. In reality, there are many different kinds of digital marketing.

For B2B businesses, an often overlooked marketing strategy can yield powerful results: performance marketing.

With a performance marketing strategy, you only pay for measurable results, whether it’s a click or a sale. This short-term marketing strategy can be especially helpful for B2B brands, because it generates quick results, allowing you to adjust your strategies and keep up with a rapidly changing market.

In this article, we’ll cover everything you need to know about B2B performance marketing.

What Is B2B Performance Marketing?

B2B performance marketing is a short-term, targeted marketing strategy that does exactly what the name suggests—delivers a performance-based return on investment (ROI).

In many ways, it works toward the same outcome as traditional marketing. The key difference is that you only pay once a campaign achieves the desired result. For example, you will pay when someone clicks on your ad and enters the pipeline as a lead, or when someone makes a purchase through the ad.

How Does B2B Performance Marketing Work?

B2B performance marketing leverages strategic initiatives to optimize measurable outcomes among business audiences. Here are the general steps involved:

Market Research: Understand your industry, identify your target audience, and recognize their needs, pain points, and decision-making processes.
Goal Setting: Define clear, measurable objectives such as lead generation, brand awareness, customer acquisition, or others pertinent to your business.
Strategy Formulation: Create a strategic plan encompassing suitable channels, considering the buyer’s journey stages.
Campaign Creation: Develop tailored campaigns with compelling messages and offers that resonate with your audience.
Tracking & Analytics: Implement tracking mechanisms to measure campaign performance in real-time, using tools to capture data on leads, conversions, engagement, etc.
Optimization: Use insights gained from analytics to continuously refine and improve campaigns for better performance.
Scaling: Once a campaign shows positive results, increase its reach to maximize ROI.

Benefits of Performance Marketing for B2B

For B2B companies, marketing is all about efficiency. A successful B2B strategy requires more sophisticated targeting to deliver results. Here are some of its primary benefits:

Targeted Marketing: It enables precise targeting of business prospects, leading to more qualified leads and higher conversion rates.
Measurable Results: Every aspect of a performance marketing campaign can be tracked and analyzed, providing clear ROI metrics.
Cost-Effective: It offers a cost-effective approach, as businesses pay only for successful actions, making budgeting more predictable.
Increased Brand Awareness: While the primary focus is on measurable actions, performance marketing can also boost brand awareness in relevant business circles.
Customizable Strategies: B2B performance marketing strategies can be easily customized to align with unique business goals and buyer personas.
Improved Customer Relationships: By offering relevant content and solutions, businesses can foster stronger relationships with their customers.
Scalability: With performance marketing, successful campaigns can be scaled up to reach a wider audience and increase impact.

That’s why this strategy can be so beneficial for B2B growth. Performance marketing for B2B companies essentially guarantees a growth-based ROI. Compared to other marketing strategies, the financial risk is much lower. You get exactly what you’re paying for—a guaranteed return on your investment.

Performance marketing is also short-term and data-driven, allowing you to adapt your strategy at a moment’s notice. The measurable performance of each campaign will tell you in real-time what’s working and what isn’t, so you can make the necessary adjustments.

B2B Performance Marketing Strategy

While performance marketing can be lower risk, going about it the wrong way can still lead to less-than-successful campaigns. Having a clear B2B performance marketing strategy helps you focus your efforts and produce the best results, time and time again.

Here are some steps to develop a performance-driven B2B marketing strategy.

1. Decide on Your Campaign Message

Whether you want to add more leads to the pipeline or build your B2B network, a well-defined campaign message can help you reach that goal. Your campaign message will shape the rest of your marketing moving forward, allowing you to better reach and resonate with your audience.

2. Plan Your Brand Positioning

With the campaign message in hand, it’s time to decide on your brand’s positioning. What can you offer to your target audience? In what way can you address their pain points? Think about what sets you apart from other B2B companies, from pricing to results.

3. Create Performance Targets

For your performance marketing campaigns to succeed, you need to set performance targets. Key performance indicators (KPIs) are measurable metrics you can set for each campaign that will tell you whether you’ve succeeded in your goals. For example, you can aim for a certain number of sales, increased website visitors or an improved conversion rate.

4. Know Your Channel Mix

For B2B companies in particular, you need to be deliberate about which marketing channels to use, from paid social media ads to display advertising—read on for more about this.

Your target audience won’t be in just one place. Diversifying your channels will help you reach the most people. Think about where your ideal client might spend their time online, and use that information to target your campaigns.

5. Get Your Website Ready

Before you set your performance marketing campaigns in motion, you need to make sure your website is ready for a boost in traffic. The better your site is optimized, the more visitors you can turn into leads and sales. This means setting up a landing page with a clear CTA.

Pro tip: Make sure your Google Analytics account is running, so you can track clicks right away.

6. Create and Launch the Campaign

Once you’re ready, it’s time to launch the campaign. All your creative content—infographics, videos, etc.—should be tailored to the right channel. Different channels will have different segments of your audience. Think about which messages and imagery will best inspire those people to take action.

7. Measure and Optimize Along the Way

As soon as your campaign has launched, start tracking metrics. Performance marketing makes it easy to measure results, as you’ll start seeing the impact right away. If campaigns aren’t doing as well as they could, this is your chance to refine your advertisement or landing pages to get better results.

B2B Performance Marketing Channels

Like all forms of marketing, there are distinct channels you can use for performance marketing. Here are a few of the top performance marketing channels that work best in the B2B space.

Over-The-Top Advertising

Over-the-top advertising, or OTT advertising, takes place on any device that runs on an internet connection, like smartphones, TVs, tablets, and laptops. OTT advertising is especially effective for B2B marketing because it meets your audience on the devices and programming they’re most likely to use.

Whether in the office or while working from home, your clients are already plugged into these devices where they can easily come across relevant advertising.

Programmatic Display Advertising

Programmatic advertising, like banner ads, is placed in designated spots on websites, apps and social media platforms. To place these ads, you can go through a publisher who then places highly targeted ads based on their own audience data.

In today’s digital age, social media offers a huge opportunity to generate leads and create brand awareness through sponsored social media ads. For B2B businesses, the best platforms to focus on are Facebook and LinkedIn—this is where your most engaged audiences tend to spend their time.

Measuring B2B Marketing Success

To make the most of your performance marketing campaign, it’s important to determine which metrics and KPIs are the most relevant to your goals and track them. Performance marketing is one of the most data-driven strategies, which means the more information you can pull from your results, the better.

Here are some important metrics that offer valuable insight.

Conversion Rate (CR)

Conversion rate measures the percentage of customers who take a specific action, like signing up for a demo or submitting information for a newsletter.

Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS)

Return on advertising spend (ROAS) will tell you how much revenue has been generated as a direct result of your ad spending.

Return on Investment (ROI)

Return on investment (ROI) is the ratio between profit and investment—the higher your ROI, the more revenue your advertisement brought in.

Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)

Cost per acquisition (CPA) measures the total cost of a customer taking a specific action, like clicking on an ad, visiting your website or signing up for a free trial.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Customer lifetime value (CLV) is the total revenue you can expect from a customer throughout your relationship. The longer a client works with you, the higher their CLV.

Performance TV: The Ultimate B2B Performance Marketing Platform

When building an effective B2B performance marketing strategy, a few different channels might come to mind. But one you might have overlooked is Connected TV (CTV).

CTV advertising utilizes television content people access via smart televisions. Linear TV advertising tends to be broad and generic, designed to reach the average household, oftentimes to the annoyance of its viewers. These ads might reach the masses, but they can be far less efficient for brands. Not only are they expensive, but they also make it difficult to target a specific audience. Conversely, CTV brings the personalization of digital marketing to the broad reach of TV.

The result? High performance. About 80% of households view CTV content that can deliver personalized ads. For B2B businesses, it’s easier than ever to reach your ideal audience through the content they’re already consuming.

B2B Performance Marketing: Final Thoughts

If you’re ready to level up your B2B marketing, performance marketing is a great way to do it. B2B performance marketing helps improve conversion, all at a lower cost and with a higher ROI than other traditional marketing methods.

Performance marketing ensures that your marketing efforts are targeted and optimized to get you real results. For B2B businesses that use it the right way, this data-driven, results-oriented strategy can pay off.

If you’re ready to take on performance marketing with CTV advertising, we’re here to help you. MNTN Performance TV is an ad solution that will enable you to drive top CTV campaign performance.