B2B Marketing: Where to start? With Rohit Ahuja

Help a B2B Founder, Expert Series

Hi all –

I’ve been speaking with a bunch of experts on all things B2B Startups. Topics include:

• How to set up a BDR team

• Where to start with B2B marketing

• What’s in a sales playbook

• …and a lot more

If there’s a particular topic you’d like me to find experts to talk with, please reply to this email - and/or head over to the NEW “Help a B2B Founder” website to source free expert conversations.

What I’ve found is that expertise doesn’t go viral - viral “hot takes” go viral, and those are often counterproductive. This newsletter & the “Help a B2B Founder” brand is dedicated to finding true experts and digging deep into what works, what doesn’t, what matters, and why.

This week, I’ve been having conversations with B2B marketers - today’s topic is, “Where to start with B2B Marketing?”

Special shoutout to Rohit Ahuja as the primary source for this week’s interrogation. He’s a freelance B2B marketer with 15 years of experience. (Ro’s email is ro@roahmarketing.com)

B2B Marketing is f*cking confusing

You’ve probably seen the viral hot takes on B2B marketing:

❌ Google Ads don’t work

❌ All paid ads are dead

✅ Start a podcast, build your personal brand

✅ Create a category

✅ Focus on organic social, build a media company

✅ SEO is the way to go

I believed these takes… until I tried them.

And until I saw multiple companies who ignored these hot takes and got 90%+ of their customers (not just “leads”) from Google Ads.

I realized a few things from this:

1. People who are good at “content & brand” will make good content about why content works (and because they’re good at content, it will SOUND right without necessarily BEING right)
   

2. In order to make opinions go viral in startupland, you need to go to the extreme - and say that “Google ads are dead” vs. a more nuanced take, like “you can’t scale Google ads beyond a certain point cost-effectively”
   

3. Founders (me included) WANT the best content to win, because we want to be rewarded for being smart and looked at as “thought leaders” – which means we’re more likely to believe things like “ads are dead” as ads seem low-class. (Plus, we believe they don’t work on us.)

Now that I’ve seen Google Ads work in a bunch of different environments - when all of startupland seems to think they don’t work at all - I needed to talk to people with real expertise in the trenches.

Primer on B2B Marketing

Let’s start with the basics.

There are people who fit your ideal customer profile (ICP).

And there are people who are actively searching for a solution - who have “purchase intent.”

There are ways to target people who fit your ICP. This is generally through social media.

And there are ways to target people who have purchase intent. This is generally through search.

And there are ways to *pay* for access to these people (usually via ads), as well as ways to get organic reach you don’t have to pay for.

Which leads to this stupidly obvious 2x2 matrix:

You: “Thanks professor. So WTF do I do?”

Where to start, with Rohit Ahuja

Ro says: “Start with bottom-of-funnel search ads. These are people who are actively searching for a solution. In the course of ~3 months, you can ‘train’ Google to generate high-quality leads and get those leads at an acceptable cost.”

Here’s how Ro helped me think about this:

There are people who are actively searching for a solution. They’re typing something in Google with purchase intent - something like, “Customer Onboarding Software.” Or, “QA Automation Software.”

These terms have more purchase intent than someone searching, “how to onboard a customer.”

Which is why they’re called “bottom of funnel” - they are people who are considering buying something.

Start there, because that’s the lowest of low-hanging fruit.

If you have questions on B2B Marketing (ads specifically) - respond to this and I can pull together a Q&A! These were my main questions to dig deeper into Google ads:

Does this work for every B2B startup? 

Honestly, if Google isn’t working for you at all, blame your marketer, not Google. There’s always some low-hanging fruit.

How much can you scale this? 

This is going to depend on how nichey your startup is. You might hit a ceiling at $10k monthly ad spend - or you might be able to scale to $100k per month in ads. It all depends how many people are searching for your particular topic.

So, you just scale this until you hit the ceiling?

In general, yes - and you can build a massive company just off of Google ads. However, there are two reasons to *not* scale this until you hit the ceiling:

1. If Google ads are bringing the wrong kind of customer into your sales funnel. With Google ads, you target based on purchase intent, not necessarily ICP fit. For example, you might be getting a bunch of SMB buyers inbound but you’re looking for enterprise. In this case, you can leverage your CRM data on who’s qualified & who isn’t to train Google to find better-fit searchers… which means you won’t scale Google ads to the ceiling, you’ll just keep it at a certain spend level to bring in only high-quality bottom-of-funnel searchers.
   

2. To layer on SEO or other demand-gen tactics. If search is super promising, you want to keep scaling it, but you probably also want to start layering on SEO work. SEO work will help you achieve your revenue goals a few years from now - and reduce your customer acquisition costs then. Your future self will thank you - but it is probably worth prioritizing getting bottom-of-funnel Google ads.

PS - working on another article about demand-gen.

Can you figure this out yourself?

You can, but you’ll waste a lot of money first. I wasted a LOT of client money on ads before I got good at it. I recommend working with a B2B marketing freelancer, not necessarily an agency. You can find good freelancers at MarketerHire.com.

I recommend starting external, and as you get bigger taking it in-house. External gets pretty expensive as you scale (usually charging a retainer plus a percent of ad spend) - which winds up being 3-4x as expensive as an internal resource.

How do you vet out a freelancer / agency?

A few ways:

• Ask how they measure success. The further down-funnel they go (e.g., CAC or cost per sales-qualified lead), the better. If they just talk about “cost per lead”, that’s a red flag.

• Do they specialize in Google Ads? Or do they specialize elsewhere? If they are deeply specialized in Google Ads, that’s great - most agencies specialize in something, but you want to make sure it’s the exact platform you’re looking for.

• How much experience does the person who’s going to be working in your ad account have? This is critical - most agencies will put someone very junior actually in the ads - all their experienced people “train” the junior people to make the agency scale. I recommend finding freelancers who are going to be in your account deeply, rather than agencies that are going to put someone inexperienced in your ads account.

• Talk to 3-5+ options, and get references. Ask:

  • How long have you been working with them?

  • What results have you seen?

  • What challenges?

  • Major successes?

Hope this helps! Would love your feedback on this approach.