Adding a B2B marketing channel is pointless if the team doesn’t know how to capture the interest it generates or assess whether the investment is paying off. In an on-demand webinar, Shaun Bruno, Senior Growth Marketing Manager at CallRail, and Colin Saunders from the agency Matter Made, explained how they choose channels, fund tests, and measure results before scaling spend. A promising traffic report is not enough to prove a campaign created incremental demand.
- Construire d’abord la conversion avant d’investir dans la notoriété.
- Choisir les canaux selon le comportement d’achat, pas par simple réplication.
- Aligner objectifs, métriques et date de décision avant de demander un budget.
- Vérifier les signaux encourageants avec un groupe témoin pour établir la causalité.
Build Conversion First
Shaun Bruno described how CallRail simplified its marketing mix around paid search and the landing pages needed to convert existing demand. The team then strengthened its measurement tools, refined its ideal customer profile, and developed consideration and retargeting programs before investing more in awareness.
This order matters more than simply replicating all of CallRail’s channels. According to Shaun Bruno, “but the key point is that you don’t need to run all these channels.” For him, the bottom of the funnel must support the demand created at the top. More reach will not fix a landing page, offer, or follow-up process that fails to convert interested buyers.
Choose Channels Based on Buying Behavior
Colin Saunders distinguishes between the buying journeys his agency observes for small businesses and enterprise accounts. For programs targeting SMBs and the mid-market where demand already exists in search, paid search allows you to reach people actively looking for a solution and establish acquisition benchmarks. Programs for large enterprises often require more education and time to engage a buying group, which is why his team relies more on paid social. He presents these approaches as starting points, not a universal split.
The choice also depends on what the buyer discovers after the click. Colin Saunders links positioning, offer, and creative: a demo request, an educational resource, and a product video do not serve the same needs. He recommends testing landing page creatives and content based on where the audience is in their journey, rather than expecting a single piece of content to fulfill all functions.
Get Alignment Before Asking for Budget
The speakers stress the need to define the business objective of a test before proposing a new platform. Colin Saunders outlines three conditions: identify the problem, agree on the metric and reporting cadence, and set a duration with a decision date. For a limited budget, he advises restricting the audience or geographic area rather than spreading spend across an entire national market. He also highlights the importance of linking ad data to CRM results. Completed forms can give an initial signal, but the team needs to know if those leads become opportunities and then customers.
Verify Encouraging Signals
The connected TV (CTV) example presented by Shaun Bruno illustrates this approach. CallRail first saw encouraging site visits and trial activity following a CTV pilot run via LinkedIn. However, he cautioned that exposure to an ad followed by a conversion does not establish that the ad was the cause. The team therefore ran a 60-day holdout test, with an audience eligible for CTV delivery and a control group that was not. Both groups received the same downstream campaigns. According to Shaun Bruno, this comparison was used to justify a broader rollout, with tracking of acquisition effectiveness as spend increased.
