If you’ve been struggling to justify your ad spend, Kyle Poyar’s recent newsletter might be unsettling.
In “Paid ads are back,” Poyar reports that digital advertising moved from third to first among GTM channels used by software companies above $50 million ARR, citing the State of B2B GTM report.
That ought to get the attention of anyone responsible for producing pipeline, especially as organic search becomes a less dependable source of website traffic.
Ahrefs’ 2026 study of 300,000 keywords found that Google AI Overviews were associated with a 58% lower click-through rate for the top-ranking page. You can earn the ranking and still lose much of the traffic you were counting on.
Referrals and outbound can still produce valuable business, but when those channels leave a gap, the revenue target doesn’t politely shrink to accommodate it. We’re seeing that pressure in our client work, where paid distribution is becoming increasingly necessary to get in front of buyers.
So you end up spending more to reach people, then having to show that the extra spending is generating leads Sales can turn into pipeline.
And there’s a substantial amount of money riding on getting it right. Gartner’s 2026 research puts paid media at 31.4% of marketing budgets. That’s a broad benchmark drawn largely from enterprise companies, rather than a prescription for every software business, but it puts the stakes in perspective.
When advertising takes anything close to a third of your budget, you can’t afford to wing it. Your ads have to work, and that starts with getting the following decisions right.
It’s tempting to start with the mechanics. Should you spend more on LinkedIn? Revisit Google? Test Meta? Hire somebody who claims to have cracked the latest targeting trick?
First, look at the people you’re trying to reach.
Direct response marketers have understood the importance of the list for decades. Even a persuasive offer struggles when it reaches people who have little use for it.
B2B advertisers can make the same mistake behind a respectable collection of targeting criteria. Industry, employee count, revenue, and job title establish whether a company could become a customer. They tell you considerably less about whether it has a reason to investigate your offer today.
Suppose you sell integration software. Companies making acquisitions give you something specific to examine. They may be combining incompatible systems, struggling to consolidate reporting, or asking employees to move information manually between businesses.
The acquisition doesn’t establish buying intent. It gives Marketing and Sales a reason to investigate whether a problem exists and whether it deserves attention.
That’s a stronger starting point than paying to reach every operations executive who fits the profile.
If advertising is going to take more of your budget, you need to be particular about whom you spend it on. Brian Kurtz, in his book Overdeliver, discusses the 40-40-20 rule: 40% of a campaign’s success on the list, 40% on the offer, and 20% on the creative. That gives you a sensible place to begin.
You may have thousands of contacts who match your best customers by industry, company size, and job title. That makes them possible prospects, but it gives you little indication of which ones have a reason to consider buying.
You can buy contact information. Finding a relevant reason to approach those people takes more work.
AI-assisted research can help you examine that larger list for business changes that could create a need for what you sell. Depending on your business, those triggers might include an acquisition, an expansion, or a new executive with a publicly stated mandate.
Suppose you sell integration software. Rather than advertise to every operations executive in your database, narrow the list to suitable companies that have recently made acquisitions. Then identify the people responsible for combining systems and consolidating reporting.
Now Sales has somewhere specific to look, and Marketing has a reason to concentrate advertising dollars on those accounts.
On LinkedIn, you can upload the narrowed contact list and use Matched Audiences to target ads to the members LinkedIn can match. The audience must include at least 300 matched members, so you’ll generally need a larger contact list to begin with.
The trigger still needs checking, and it doesn’t establish buying intent. But it gives you a stronger basis for choosing where to spend than a job title alone. You’re putting the direct response principle to work: give the list serious attention before paying to put your message in front of it.
Once you’ve narrowed the list, give those people something useful enough to justify responding.
I received an email recently offering templates that were getting good response rates. The sender asked whether I wanted to see them, and I said yes. The reply contained no templates. Instead, I was told we needed 45 minutes together to tailor them to my business.
I’d agreed to look at some emails, and suddenly I was being asked to attend a sales meeting.
So, that's a no.
Think about that experience when you’re developing your own offer. What will the buyer get that makes responding worthwhile? Will it help them evaluate a problem, make a decision, or accomplish something they already need to do?
For an executive combining recently acquired businesses, that might be a checklist for spotting integration risks or a review of where consolidated reporting could break down. Explain what they’ll receive and make any commitment clear before they respond.
A demo can be useful to someone evaluating software. But asking someone to watch your presentation gives them little reason to act unless they already understand how it could help.
And whatever you promise, deliver it. If you offer templates, send the templates. You have a better chance of earning a sales conversation when the buyer’s first experience gives them a reason to trust you.
Your buyer needs to recognize something in the ad that makes it worth reading. The research you used to narrow the list should help you describe a situation they may actually be dealing with.
For the integration software example, “Connect your systems with our innovative platform” gives an executive another software claim to ignore. “Your acquisition closed six months ago. Why does consolidated reporting still take a week?” gives someone facing that difficulty a reason to keep reading.
Then develop the consequences. If employees spend days reconciling information from different systems, leadership may be making decisions with figures that are already out of date. The acquisition was supposed to improve the business, and now getting a reliable picture of its performance has become a job in itself.
That’s the agreement your creative needs to earn: the buyer recognizes the problem and sees why it deserves attention. Use what customers and salespeople tell you to make the description accurate, and test your assumptions rather than treating every acquisition as evidence of trouble.
From there, the offer should follow naturally. An assessment that helps identify what’s holding up consolidated reporting gives the reader a useful way to investigate the problem you’ve just described.
The headline, image, and copy should all support that progression. When the buyer understands why responding could help with something they care about, you’ve given the creative a job more useful than simply attracting a click.
As advertising becomes a bigger part of producing pipeline, the cost of getting it wrong becomes harder to absorb. You need a carefully researched audience, an offer worth accepting, and creative that gets buyers to recognize a problem. Then you need the media buying experience to put those pieces to work and understand what to change when results fall short.
That’s a substantial assignment for an in-house team already responsible for the website, content, email, events, and sales support. If your advertising has been struggling, expecting the same people to solve it with the same resources deserves a hard look.
Experienced outside help adds a fee, but managing everything internally has costs, too. Wasted media, missed opportunities, and months spent repeating unsuccessful campaigns all belong in the calculation. The question is whether the total investment produces more leads that Sales can turn into pipeline.
Start by getting another set of experienced eyes on the spending.
Our complimentary Media Budget Analysis helps identify where your advertising dollars may be going to waste and what we would change first. You’ll have specific findings to consider before committing more money to the current approach.
If you’re being asked to defend your ad spend while wondering how to improve the results, that’s a useful place to begin.
Request your complimentary Media Budget Analysis.