Did you know that the average time a LinkedIn ad takes, from first impression to B2B revenue, is 320 days? And 235 from ad engagement. Are you giving your campaigns enough time to work?
- Most companies in my sphere do not have enough, surprise, surprise! - patience. However, I do achieve success with retargeting ads, which, as you might expect, work faster.
But even with retargeting, you have some serious drags on your success – firstly, the economy, which is slowing, flat, or even in reverse, depending on where you are. Secondly, your brand – the biggest brands in the world only have to put out mediocre ads, and they will still get good results.
But a
small startup with an unknown brand, needs to hit it out of the park every time
to connect with the customer. Plus, it’s fighting against the adage ‘no one
ever got fired for buying IBM’
I guess you’d change that to some variation of Microsoft today.
But the point is that it's very hard to convert a lead for a small company with
little or no brand awareness.
However, that’s not to mean it’s not impossible! Companies
like Zscaler, where I worked, did this – but it was not due to marketing alone.
They had an outstanding product, which can make up for a multitude of sins. We also
have a dynamite sales and marketing team.
On the contrary, if you are dealing with a poor or not well-established
product market fit, it's easy for a company to become sucked into a viciously
accelerating churn cycle 'whirlpool': Company loses customers at an alarming
rate, so it needs to ramp up sales and marketing efforts (cue unrealistic
promises), which speeds up churn, and so on.
How do you avoid such a situation? Make sure that you
have virtuous feedback loops from sales and marketing to product and back. And that
you have a strong culture of psychological safety. If you have a culture of ‘shoot
the messenger’, then no one in senior management will be aware of these
problems until it's too late.
How did I get so interested in this topic, I hear you
ask? Well, actually, I’ve been very busy on various platforms trying to
crack the code of how SEO is changing with AI, in the b2b space.
I feel like I’m getting there! Since my organic blog and
web traffic have increased more than tenfold in the last year!
If you look at this chart, you can see what’s driving AI
search – I would say for B2B it skews a little heavier towards LinkedIn and Quora.
So I’ve been super active on these channels, and I’m getting over 50 b2b
questions a day on just Quora, for instance.
I recently did an entire audit of all my
social media engagements across all my key channels (Quora/LinkedIn/Reddit) to see what the trends are
When I fed it all into AI, these were the top topics:
AI-driven GTM &
the new search stack
How to win with AI Overviews/AI Max + LinkedIn/Quora/Reddit; practical
playbooks, not theory.
Demand gen that
actually drives pipeline (esp. in tight markets)
What to cut/defend/double-down on, sequencing experiments, and real metrics
(demo-rate, win-rate, payback) — not vanity MQLs.
Sales psychology
& decision-enablement content
Buying signals, persuasion without pressure, and case studies that sell
(HBS-style narratives over “advertorials”). Quora hits on buying signals,
mass outreach, and monetising lists point here.
MarTech/ABM stack
& accountability
HubSpot/SFDC + Demandbase/6sense choices, clean ops, SLAs with sales, and
agency performance models (pay-for-performance vs. retainers).
Trust engines:
community, authenticity & micro-influencers
Turning brand communities and creator voices into a qualified pipeline; founder
POVs and no-BS thought leadership resonate with the LinkedIn crowd.
Over the next few months, I will dig into these topics in much more detail with a focus on each one every month.
It’s great to see that what you are asking me very much aligns with what I am good at, and what I have a strong understanding of – so the algorithms are working!
What are the patterns? – Once again, thanks to my AI agent for compiling this, based on all the research I fed into it from all my channels.
- Uncertainty + urgency → People want growth now, but budgets are tight.
- Confusion about tools & tactics → Which platform, which channel, which metric to trust?
- Fear of wasting time → Nobody wants to spend months on SEO, or money on ads, only to fail.
- Craving clarity & confidence → They want straight answers, practical hacks, and a sense of control in a messy marketing world.
In short, my audience is looking for shortcuts to certainty in an increasingly erratic and noisy world.
Truth is, there are no true shortcuts—only sharper strategies, faster feedback loops, and the courage to test and adapt quicker than the next marketer.
And the winners won’t necessarily be the ones with the biggest budgets, but the ones who move sharpest, fastest, and smartest.
That’s where I come in. If you’re tired of guesswork and want to turn confusion into clarity (and pipelines into revenue), you’re in the right place.
No comments:
Post a Comment