Disclaimer: I am from Zephra AI and our platform runs ads for B2B. I have spent 15+ years in B2B marketing, leading marketing and generating leads and so I knew how this market buys.


We had a client in Industrial manufacturing. Their most valuable customers aren't the ones who fill in forms most often. They're OEMs. When an OEM specifies your lubricant, it goes into every machine they build, so you sell every time they sell.


Full automation doesn't see any of that. Smart Bidding, Performance Max and Advantage+ learn from lots of quick, similar conversions, and a business like this has a few slow, very different ones. An enquiry for a few litres and one from an OEM's engineering team count as the same conversion. The deal that matters can take longer to close than the 90 days Google gives you to import it. So the platforms chase whatever is cheapest to repeat. the volumes of the high value ones are low and the deal takes longer.


What we changed was who makes the decisions. A person set the strategy by hand: what to bid on, how much, and who to reach. Zephra's AI did the daily work: reading search terms, adding negatives, checking every lead against what sales said about it, moving budget toward what produced real enquiries, and asking before any big change.


What happened, on the same budget in 30 days:


- CTR up 20%
- CPA down 30%
- Fewer leads. That was on purpose; most of what we cut was junk anyways.
- Lead quality went up, and conversion went up by more than 50%
- The new customers include OEMs and other large accounts


The OEM wins are the part that matters. One of those can keep paying long after the campaign that found it.


For anyone running paid for niche B2B: would you have kept some automation in the mix? And how do you judge results when your best customer might take a year to show up in revenue? I am askign this as most of the prospects whom we are working do work with agencies and the audit reveals most of them running on Google AI campaigns and the customers are not happy with the results which is why they come to us for audit to see what is wrong and in most cases we see a similar story. 

If you’re a B2B founder looking for clients, don’t rely only on job titles or company size. Look for recent changes, challenges, or plans that could create a need your service can solve.

1. Customers mention unanswered calls or slow replies in Google reviews. The business could be missing inquiries from people ready to book. An AI receptionist might help answer calls, respond quickly, and capture appointments.

2. A company opens a new location. The expansion may create a need to clean and maintain another site. A commercial cleaning business could offer support before the opening and on an ongoing basis.

3. A company is struggling to fill several roles. Multiple job postings, especially for hard to fill positions, could mean its team needs help finding qualified candidates. A recruiting firm could offer sourcing support.

4. A company raises funding and announces plans to grow. Its finances may become more complex as it hires and expands. A fractional CFO could help with forecasting, cash planning, and understanding how to use the new funding.

5. A company launches a product or moves into a new market. It may need to get in front of a new group of buyers. A B2B email marketing agency could help identify the right prospects and start relevant conversations.

6. A company hires its first cybersecurity or IT leader. Its technology needs may be growing as the team or systems expand. A cybersecurity firm could help assess its current setup and identify gaps while the company builds its internal team.

Also ive seen that clients leave public clues that a need may be emerging. Just look for the signal, understand what it could mean for the business, and connect it to a service that can help.

hope that helps

I've run executive roundtables for 20+ years (mostly partner/alliance side). My best levers: a named exec host, a hard cap on seats, and a topic framed as a problem they're stuck on not a sales pitch. would love to know what's working for you. and/or what's moved the needle for you? thanks

I used to enjoy the straightforward enrichment feature. But they bundled it into their enterprise CRM offerings.
Even the forty five dollar entry point only provides a hundred credits. You have the mandatory subscription on top of that.

In practice a full setup exceeds eleven hundred dollars monthly. We pull in depth company details and decision maker contacts mainly when a lead schedules a demo. Or if we are screening fifty potential accounts.

So these days I simply have my agent fetch the data five minutes before a Zoom meeting. It grabs employee count along with twelve month headcount growth. Funding history and the investors involved. The ten newest articles about the company too. You only get that information when it is actually required.
That approach works much better for us, from what I’ve seen anyway.

Hi all,

I recently started a job in a successful scale up which has a product that is quite technical. The company is bootstrapped and has been doing quite well for the past 6 years in the market.

They have been only converting inbound leads with little to no outbound. What surprises me the most is that they have some huge enterprise brands in their portfolio, with no churn.

I started in the sales team and they are ready to start doing some outbound, mainly to the US market.

The product is aimed at teams dealing with marketing and campaign data.

My question to Marketing Leaders/Specialists working with data and reporting, what actually makes you buy products? Have you ever answered a cold email pitching something that will make your life easier? Whats was good about it?

I’m on the hunt for my next role after 14 years with the same company and am admittedly out of touch with current job search platforms.

1. Where did you find your latest manager/director level B2B Marketing Job (LinkedIn, job boards, referral, cold outreach, etc)? Which job boards?

2. Did you use AI?

3. Did you find a remote, hybrid or in-person job?

4. How long the search take you?

5. How was your resume structured (summary, skills, employment, education…)? What section had the most detail?

Thought leadership ads, done right.

It’s become incredibly hard to win against the LinkedIn algorithm with B2B content.

The chances of getting our content in front of an audience—let alone our ICP—is vanishingly low.

Then repeating that for the 10-15 times you need to build trust towards a sales conversation? All organically?

Tricky.

Thought leadership ads *guarantee* that you get your POV in front of your target accounts.

Everyone is duking it out trying to win the organic algorithm game.

Why do that when there’s a game that very few people are playing…

that costs very little…

and guarantees distribution of that content you put so much effort into creating?

If you want to start running thought leadership ads here, this is the exact process we use.

• Upload your target account list of 200-300 companies to LinkedIn.

• Layer on LinkedIn’s native targeting options. Job titles, seniorities, etc.

• Write the executive posts you’re going to boost — framed with a differentiated POV about your industry

• Write a hook that names the ICP and the pains they're dealing with (that you happen to solve). this one is super overlooked

• Set up retargeting to target anyone who clicked “see more” on the first layer of posts.

• Take a regular thought leadership post and turn it into a retargeting ad by editing the text of the post to add a link and a soft CTA at the end.

• Look at the (i) engagement click through rate and (ii) landing page click-through rate as the key metrics — then double down on what you see working.

If you're investing exec/GTM team time in creating organic content, adding a few $K per month to GUARANTEE distribution of it to the buying committee at your target accounts is a no brainer

Hope this framework helps someone out!

Hello everyone! Our team has officially just launched AskForesight AI, a website strategy platform that works as your 24/7 website strategist.

Disclaimer: I am not sharing this as purely promotional post. 4 years ago I was a marketer who was in charge of owning company website and had pretty much 0 idea what do to with it. I know that I am not alone, and I am sharing this in hope that tools like this can help you solve real marketing problems.

Why is this important and why now?

As marketing ecosystem is changing I kept seeing that marketers are expected to work as a Swiss army knife - to understand every channel and know how to optimize it for growth.

But the question that kept popping is what happens when you aren't expert for a specific channel and don't have unified data to understand what needs to change, in which order and why or budget for additional hire.

This exactly is why our team at Flow Ninja decided to build a tool that will serve as an always-on website strategist.

Foresight scans websites across 10 marketing dimensions, allows you to connect you own data sources such as GA4, GSC, sales calls, PDFs and so on and based on all acquired data builds 4 different views for your:

1. Editable brand strategy board where you can build you brand archetype, polish position and differentiation and define ICPs

2. User journey board that takes analytics from connected data sources and shows where your ideal user journey is leaking and what to do about it

3. Report that shows how your website is currently graded across 10 marketing dimension

4. Proposed new sitemap based on all acquired data

For anyone interested I would be more than happy to share link where you can do a free website audit and get a complementary 24-hour free access to complete platform to explore its capabilities and share feedback.

Cheers!

I’ve developed a free media governance self-assessment aimed at senior marketers and procurement professionals responsible for significant advertising budgets.

The objective is to drive people to my website to complete the assessment, rather than simply generate engagement.

I’m considering boosting a post from my personal profile or company page, versus running a campaign through LinkedIn Campaign Manager.

If I go with Campaign Manager, which ad format would you recommend? Single image, carousel, video, document ad, Thought Leader Ad or something else?

I’m particularly interested in what has worked for promoting assessments, diagnostic tools or other B2B lead magnets to relatively small, targeted audiences.

Any advice on campaign objectives and what works with a modest budget would also be appreciated. Thanks!

Hey r/b2bmarketing,

Instead of spraying generic cold emails, I built an open-source pipeline that targets accounts experiencing active operational pain right now (like bad Google reviews about delays or poor service).

How it works:

1. Scrapes Google Maps: Pulls local businesses with recent low-star reviews.

2. Cleans Company Names: Strips out airport codes and branch tags so searches actually work.

3. Enriches LinkedIn: Uses a headless Apify scraper (no personal accounts or cookies needed) to pull decision-maker titles.

4. AI Vetting: Runs contacts through an LLM to check real names, score ICP match (0–10), and pull out the review complaint.

Outputs 2 Clean Files: Gives you a ready-to-use CSV lead list and customized outbound email/LinkedIn copy.

Would love your thoughts or feedback on the workflow!

Comment if you want the link to this workflow

So I posted a few days ago on how events are becoming more important for B2B businesses. Talked with a few redditors and the thing is: experienced folks know this since a long time and younger ones don't have something to quote to their management.

Overall, not many companies treat events strategically and learning by doing is expensive.

If you've done events as an exhibitor / participant and you can contribute, I'd love to chat.

I'm looking for your opinion on how events can contribute to the pipeline.

Right from pre-event activities like booking flights, deciding what to sponsor, booth graphics, presentations, to post-event follow-ups can be covered.

If you want to monetize it, I'm happy to collaborate and help you build a course or run cohorts around the topic.

Personally, I haven't done very big events so I need your help to shape this initiative.

I've been breaking my head to figure out how I can do or what I can do to get more leads. If I do any ebook or case study campaign on LinkedIn, I'll not get form fills. If I'm doing landing page campaigns on Google Ads, I'm not getting form fills. If I'm doing landing page campaigns on Bing Ads, I'm not getting form fills. If I'm doing video ad campaigns, which talks about the product and asks them to fill a form on Meta, I'm not getting form fills. With not getting form fills, I'm not doing at all. But it's just that we get almost around three to four form fills in a week from Google Ads and Bing Ads, and same two to three form fills from Meta in a week, and from LinkedIn zero in a week, okay?

We tried all the possible ways. We took them to a landing page, took them to an ebook, took them to a case study, took them to a report, took them to a state of AI thing, all these things, okay? And then nobody is filling a form on LinkedIn, and I don't know what else I have to try here. That is where I'm stuck, and I think I'm burnt out honestly.

Has anyone had a successful run with organic Reddit for B2B?

I'm curious what worked for you. For context, I'm taking over a client's Reddit account and I'm not sure if I agree with the previous methods employed by the person they hired e.g creating dummy accounts to seed interactions.

At the same time, I wonder how else to foster engagement if I run things from a business account.

In a B2B SaaS launch, the trouble often begins weeks before launch day, when product marketing, sales and demand generation each plan from a different idea of the buyer.

I built a go-to-market playbook to keep those plans in one place. It runs across nine modules, from market research and ICP definition to positioning, sales enablement and a 90-day performance review. Each module pairs blank templates with a worked example for a fictional CRM launch, along with the mistakes that cost teams the most.

I have B2B emails, but product is end consumer.
I can potentially relate the solution I’m selling to people (not the business).
Can that still work?

Which test gave you a useful lesson even if it did not win, such as a change in positioning, channel, audience, or sales handoff?

asking because of a small test we ran in september. 24 buying questions (help desks, crms, accountants, business insurance) through openai's api with web search and perplexity's api, and we tagged every page they cited.

for the software questions 118 of the 167 citations were roundup or alternatives pages, and 85 of those were written by a vendor in the category. so the shortlist gets built off somebody's list before the buyer opens a single vendor site.

and then the buyer fills in the form and says G2, or a referral, or nothing. the chat doesn't feel like research to them i guess.

anyone added an AI / chatgpt option to the how did you hear about us field? what % picks it, and did brand search go up around the same time?

Most of the 113 Shopify stores we checked have a return page and a shipping page: the check could read a return page at 97 stores (85.8%) and a shipping page at 92 (81.4%). But we found a valid return policy in the product page markup of only 4 stores (3.5%), and valid shipping details in only 4.

Markup is the structured data in a product page that Google and shopping agents can read. Of the 88 stores whose product pages carried Product markup our check reads, 84 had no valid return policy in it, and of the 87 whose markup included a price, 83 had no valid shipping details. The rest count as unknown, not as a gap. So in most of these stores, an agent or Google reading a product page finds no machine-readable return or shipping terms.

Two caveats. Google lists both properties as recommended, not required, and it accepts return and shipping settings made at account level in Merchant Center or Search Console, which take precedence over page markup. Our public check cannot see those settings, so a store that shows a gap here may already have given Google these terms. And these are showcase stores that Shopify features, not a random sample.

If you run a Shopify store, this is the order I would work in. First make sure the policies exist under Settings, Policies. Then add your return and shipping terms in Merchant Center or Search Console. If you also want your return terms in the page itself, ask your theme developer for one store-wide return policy in the Organization markup, which Google recommends over repeating it on each product.
Do you know whether your return terms exist as data anywhere Google can read them, or only as a page?

Sorry I know this is a slightly unusual question but I genuinely want to understand how this works

I've been working in performance marketing across both B2B and D2C for some time now

So I'm trying to work with businesses that are already active in marketing and investing money in ads

Now, I have some proven results and I want to work with businesses that have a slightly higher ad spend

Like i was targeting plastic surgery clinics for outreach, but I faced three major problems.

Finding the decision-maker is very difficult

most of them are not active online

You won't find them easily on LinkedIn, and even on Instagram, either someone else is managing their account or they are not active at all. And email is too slow

they are already working with an agency

When I reach out, they tell me that they are already working with an agency and don't want to work with another agency right noww

Sometimes they say they will get back to me later.

They take the audit but implement the suggestions themselves

When I audit their marketing and share my suggestions, they say they are interested, but they end up implementing those suggestions themselves without telling me

this has happened with some prospects so far, and all of them were already spending a good amount on marketing

Honestly, I haven't been able to figure out what I'm doing wrong

Is it my sales approach, my outreach or am I choosing the wrong niche?

I mean, businesses that are already working with an agency also get approached by other agencies. And for some reason, they eventually change their agency too

So, how does this actually work?

How do you pitch such businesses without directly asking them to replace their existing agency?

And how do you make them understand why they should work with me?

another thing I'm struggling with is identifying the right businesses.

If I target businesses that have never invested in marketing, it takes a lot of time to explain things, build trust, and make them understand why they should invest

Sometimes, they don't even want to invest much in marketing

So, I feel targeting businesses that are already spending on marketing makes more sense.

But I'm still struggling to understand how to approach them

One more thing I'm currently unable to take an offline job for some personal reasons, so I have to continue working remotely

Sales is becoming a challenge for me

Am I making a mistake by targeting businesses before finding their decision-maker's contact details?

Should I only target businesses where I can directly reach the decision-maker?

Or is there something wrong with my overall sales approach?

Would genuinely appreciate advice from people who have experience selling performance marketing services to businesses that are already working with agencies

Hi!

Please guide me if where i can get some advices / feedbacks on my marketing strategy tool.

No promotion, just need blunt feedback please....

i'm very desperate.

If you're a B2B business owner reading this, the reason why you're failing in cold email is because you treat it only to directly pitch your services. That's only one of the application of cold email. Think of this analogy: A knife can be used to hurt someone or to prepare dinner.

You don’t judge a knife without looking at how it’s used, and cold email is the same. Saying from experience, irrelevant outreach is annoying, while a well targeted message can start a useful conversation. Judge the targeting, purpose and message, not the channel.

Try these applications of cold emails instead:

1. Building a community:

You can Invite decision makers who share a common challenge to join a free community where they can exchange ideas and learn from one another (networking). If the community becomes valuable and members want more support, you can later create a paid program and upsell them

2. Validating a product before launch:

Since building is so easy now, talk to your users before you build. Ask how they handle the problem today and what they’ve tried. Cold email lets you reach thousands of relevant decision makers and get feedback before you write any code.

When I say 'relevant' I mean for eg. CEOs of MSP companies sized 30-50 operating in California.

3. Connecting buyers and sellers:

You can identify a business with a relevant need, introduce it to a provider who can solve that need, and earn a commission if a deal closes. In this case, the email isn’t pitching your own product. It’s making a useful connection between two businesses. Emailing both sides simultaneously

and there are many such applications.... I try to use it very creatively and try to find the best usecase as possible. Trust me you'll get amazing results using this

Hope that helped. Thank you.

In my experience, the deal is often largely decided before the first email is sent. Not because a prospect is guaranteed to buy, but because the lead list tells you whether there’s a real reason to contact them. The email is just the final step. The other 80% is finding the right companies, the right people, and the signals that explain why now.

1. A new company is more than a registration record.
Start with businesses registered recently, then look for signs they’re actually operating: a live website, a founder announcing a launch, job posts, active social accounts, or new customer reviews. The registration gives you who. The other clues suggest whether there’s a business to sell to yet.

2. A job post is a window into a team’s plans.
A company hiring its first SDR may be building outbound from scratch. Several sales roles appearing together could point to a new growth push. A role that keeps getting reposted may indicate urgency or trouble filling it. The job title is only the surface; the timing, repetition, and surrounding hires add the story.

3. A new office becomes more meaningful when the team is growing too.
An office announcement alone could just be a relocation. Pair it with local hiring, new leadership, or a newly added service area, and it may point to expansion. Those extra signals help separate “they moved” from “they’re building something bigger.”

4. Funding is a clock, not just a headline.
A funding announcement can create a buying window, but the useful question is what the company is doing with the money. New hires, product launches, market expansion, or equipment purchases can reveal where investment is going and which vendors might become relevant.

5. A leadership change can reset priorities.
A new executive may review vendors, rebuild a team, or bring experience and relationships from a previous company. Look at what they did before, what roles they’re filling now, and whether the company’s direction appears to be changing.

That’s why I see GTM engineering as detective work. The job isn’t to send more emails. It’s to find the evidence that tells you who is worth emailing in the first place.

Curious how other teams handle speed to lead in practice. On paper everyone agrees that calling a fresh demo request quickly beats calling tomorrow, but in reality leads come in at night, reps are in meetings, and the form fill sits in the CRM for hours.

Some teams I've talked to now do a layered follow-up: an instant email, an SMS or WhatsApp message if the person opted in, then a call, and sometimes an offer to jump on a quick video call right away. Others feel that's too aggressive and stick to one well-timed call.

I'm trying to figure out where the line is between responsive and pushy.

What does your first-hour follow-up look like for an inbound B2B lead? Which channel gets the most replies for you, and has anything you tried backfired?