he last two years have been rough for B2B marketing teams, with AI search hijacking almost all the organic traffic you used to get from Google. CPCs keep climbing in crowded categories, and on top of that, buyers are more sophisticated and harder to capture than before. They just don’t want to book a demo from your ad when they see it. They want to do it when they feel ready.
In addition, attribution has become the real struggle, with most of the top of funnel now invisible thanks to zero-click search and unidentifiable sources.
The bad news for lazy marketers: this is just the appetizer, and it will only accelerate over the next months and years. If you’re managing your paid channels without being proactive about new approaches and tactics, your competitors will eat you alive. This is a new paradigm. The old funnel logic, pushing a user from TOFU to MOFU to BOFU one forced stage at a time, does not work anymore. The buyer is sophisticated, the channels are shifting, and momentum matters more than ever.
Building Momentum
Building momentum means moving from observer to leader in your category. Not leader in the sense of spending more or pumping out more ads, but leader in showing something different with a strategy and a message people remember.
you are no longer competing for a ranking on Google, you are competing to be recommended. But most paid advertising playbooks are still missing the point and refusing to adapt.
That is what makes you stand out from the sameness of the crowd: your own playbook that others are not running, simply because you have not copied the same recycled, mainstream paid tactics from the pre-AI era.
Multichannel B2B Retargeting
Buyers are self-educating everywhere. Your core paid channels, Google Ads and LinkedIn Ads, are still relevant, but you need to follow them where they are. And not only this, when everyone runs the same play, you should just look where the others are not.
Most companies give little or zero attention to retargeting. They put 99% of their focus on capturing demand from cold audiences, even as CPCs increase and lead volume shrinks. They apply the same old marketing belief: if someone visited the website weeks ago, they must be ready to book a demo on Linkedin. Let’s be honest, this is pure marketing BS.
This is simply a misunderstanding of how B2B buyers actually work. They research across multiple platforms and communities. They consume every content format. And they decide when they are ready to buy, not when your ad tells them to.
So, If you want retargeting to work, your job is to make the buyer feel you are the obvious solution to their specific problem. Answer the objections of their entire buying committee. Make it as easy as possible to compare your product against other vendors and stay top of mind through their entire buying process.
Here is how we build it for our cllients:
Content layer. Start from your retargeting content. Understand their objections first, and what would move them toward you instead of another vendor. Produce a variety of content that removes friction and makes them feel safe moving forward. Don’t ask “what should we create?” Ask “what do they need to see?”
Format layer. Once you have the content, adapt it to multiple formats. This is the most underrated factor in retargeting efficiency, because it maximizes reach and exposure. Splitting the same message across different formats also protects you from banner fatigue.
Channel layer. This is where most B2B advertisers underestimate the multiplier effect of being present in more than one place. Spread your content and formats everywhere your audience logs in. Distribution is what increases deal velocity and pipeline.
Connected TV on LinkedIn
LinkedIn Ads Connected TV is still underrated, especially on the retargeting side. Most companies that come to us have never added it to their retargeting layer, even though the CPM and cost per reach are significantly lower than other formats on the platform.
That cost difference alone is the reason we recommend it. Reaching a warm audience on CTV is way cheaper than reaching the same audience through usual LinkedIn placements, and you get a format that stands out because nobody expects to see a B2B ad when they are watching their favorite show on Hulu.
If you think about it, every B2B playbook looks the same. CTV breaks the pattern while adding instant prestige. Unlike social media, you are not fighting for attention on the same feed. And the best thing is that you don’t need new production. Repurpose an existing video into a 30-second spot and it does the job perfectly. Our best performing ads for CTV are customer testimonials and interviews.
We’ve been running CTV for a year. One thing to be clear about: you can’t measure it on a direct UTM source. LinkedIn serves CTV through Amazon DSP, which covers inventory like Hulu, Prime, Disney+ and ESPN. If you want more inventory, StackAdapt and Adaptive are good options.
For measurement, you have three practical routes. Run a holdout, where one segment sees CTV and another does not. Run a brand lift study. Or track the impact on your organic and direct branded traffic. None of these give you a clean last-click number, and that’s the point, this is a momentum channel, not a direct-response one.
Deanonymizing Visitors From Google Ads Traffic
If you go to Google Ads it is basically for one job: a direct response channel to capture high search intent leads and drive revenue.
But with a buyer who builds their shortlist and considers many touchpoints before coming back directly to your website months later, you get more and more Google Ads traffic that never converts but is still a warm lead. Paid teams respond to this decrease in performance by pouring more budget in to compensate for the lack of conversions, or simply shut down spend.
What they don’t consider is that Google Ads is not only a direct response channel anymore. If you deanonymize that traffic at the contact and account level you can run different plays: adding relevant contacts to warm outbound sequences, sending a connection request from your AE on LinkedIn, adding it into account scoring in HubSpot or Salesforce as one signal within a larger GTM motion.
When sales acted fast on those signals we saw open rates improve by 33%. The reason is simple. The prospect showed a high-intent on your site researching information about your pricing or products. That context changes the outreach from cold to relevant, and relevant gets answered.
A few things worth being honest about before you build this. You need a system and process, otherwise it’s just expensive intent data sitting idle. Don’t treat it as a magic “I saw you on the site, want to buy my stuff” play. Account level insights are the most reliable, and you can reasonably connect to a person, but it is at best a directional data point. Attribution is hard even in paid search and harder still in a mid-market or enterprise motion.
This only works if sales is disciplined enough to act on the signals. Otherwise it’s just expensive intent data sitting idle. Most teams say they want signal-based outbound, but never change their sequencing, messaging or prioritization to reflect the context. If you won’t act on it, don’t build it.
Partnerships With Influencers on LinkedIn
B2B influencer partnerships are a big untapped opportunity, but only if they stay genuine and authentic.
The logic behind the play is that brand has become the new demand. The old playbook of building familiarity through ad repetition doesn’t work the way it used to. By the time a buyer lands on your site, they already have some recognition of your brand, or they wouldn’t be there. Visibility and trust are what drive demand now.
You can start small, with two or three influencers that you interview personally and agree on a number of posts upfront. Promote those posts through Thought Leader Ads on LinkedIn. Every post should be reviewed with as few edits as possible so it still sounds natural coming from the creator.
The most important factor of success is consistency. Look for engagements with at least a two to three month minimum, because one post gives you a spike while the real value comes from sustained presence. To connect it back to pipeline, use Clay to pull post engagers into HubSpot.
We ran this for a client in the pharmaceutical PLM space with five micro-influencers in the same niche. Branded search climbed steadily over the engagement period, with spikes in demo views and hand-raisers when multiple influencers posted in the same week.
Think Ecosystem
The mistake most teams make when they read a list like this is treating each item as a standalone experiment. CTV is a test. Influencers are a test. IP reveal is a test.
That’s not the point. The point is that each of these works significantly better when they work together. CTV warms the audience that your Google Ads retargeting then converts. Influencer content builds the brand recognition that makes your LinkedIn Ads more credible. IP reveal gives sales the context that makes outreach land. They’re not five separate tactics. They’re one ecosystem that compounds over time.
If you’re ready for an honest assessment of what is and isn’t working with your account, that’s what we do at Getuplead. Let’s talk.
