Tyler Jordan, CEO, Jordan Digital Marketing.
B2B SaaS marketing teams have a tough job: Find and engage a relatively niche audience, hold their attention throughout a long sales cycle, build a case that wins over a multi-person buying committee, and report back on how their efforts produced actual business growth.
The difference between companies that grow predictably and those that spin their wheels often comes down to which KPIs they actually commit to, how well they use their first-party data and how rigorously they tie each channel back to revenue.
In this article, I’ll break down four initiatives that we consistently tune up for our new clients—and just as consistently produce quantifiable pipeline gains.
1. AEO/GEO
AEO (or answer engine optimization), GEO (or generative engine optimization) and AI Search are all the rage these days, especially with B2B companies who understand that their buyers are increasingly likely to use LLMs for their buying research.
But mass interest isn’t correlated with mass expertise in AEO/GEO. The discipline does have lots of overlap with more traditional SEO (think: Google search results from a couple of years ago). You still need a technically sound website, a content strategy based in understanding customer needs and questions along the purchase journey, and placements on respected third-party properties.
There are key differences, however: Content that’s designed to be easy to read, with digestible chunks and bullet-point lists, is especially effective for AEO/GEO. Backlink quantity, an old SEO staple, is less important than getting your brand cited in a reasonable range of highly regarded outlets. And brand consistency and integrity is critical for LLMs to understand and reflect your business with accuracy, while in SEO, you could strike gold for particular keywords with a less comprehensive brand strategy.
It’s also critical to understand how LLMs retrieve information. AEO is better at pulling unique ideas from a page, while SEO covers the whole page itself as one topic. For AEO, it’s good practice to have page sections that cover distinct ideas because that’s much more how the retrieval works.
One very fast-developing strategy proving to be effective in AEO/GEO is query fanout—i.e., taking an original, high-level prompt like “what are the best CRM solutions” and drilling down into sub-prompts like “best CRM for enterprise brands,” “best email/CRM platform combinations,” “what CRM has the best integrations for fintech companies,” then creating content for each.
Understanding the difference between disciplines and adjusting your approach as new data in the highly dynamic AEO/GEO space comes in is critical to getting in the consideration set for your target audience.
2. Advanced Measurement
This one’s pretty simple. You (or your agency) need to measure what matters: not clicks, not leads, but quality leads, pipeline and revenue produced by marketing campaigns. Optimizing for leads alone is a great strategy for feeding your budget to Google, LinkedIn, etc. and letting those bidding algorithms find the cheapest (lowest-quality) users.
If you use KPIs that are close to the purchase event, you’ll find that the quantity of your signals drops—but any gains in those KPIs will have a direct impact on your business growth.
3. First-Party Data Integration
Once you have those KPIs in place, and you’re collecting that data in your CRM, you need to feed that data into your ad campaigns to train the bidding and targeting algorithms more about the high-value people you want to reach. Google’s enhanced conversions and LinkedIn and Meta’s CAPI (conversions API) are features that let you do exactly that.
Fill in the picture with offline conversion data (which is essential for knowing the difference between a lead that filled out a “Book a demo” form and a lead that your sales team nurtured to a successful close), and you’re helping teach the algorithms where to focus your budget more effectively. Again, your quantity will drop, and you’ll very likely end up paying a higher price for each lead—but in the end, you’ll pay less for each lead that turns into a genuine opportunity for your business.
4. Alignment Of Messaging With Stage Of Intent
Remember that long sales cycle I mentioned? Lots of B2B marketers make the mistake of trying to cut the line—for instance, asking people who don’t know your brand to book a demo rather than offering a free guide to a challenge they’re likely to have that your business knows how to solve.
Make sure your creative and messaging speaks to the exact stage your users are in—awareness/discovery/education early in the journey, consideration of a shortlist in the middle of a journey, and making/validating a likely purchase decision at the end. Plenty of marketers nail the first three initiatives on this list and botch this one, which has the same net effect: budget spent without pipeline to show for it.
Final Thoughts
B2B marketing can be a tough nut to crack. These four keys can help you go a long way toward making more of your marketing budget—with quantifiable results your CFO and CEO will appreciate.
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