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🛠️ They Spent $1 Million on B2B Influencers: Here’s What Worked (and What Didn't)
Plus: it's time to make B2B content less boring
Hey there!
The AskCMO team spent the week digging up the best B2B marketing tools and trends so you don’t have to.
And the best part? You can catch up on all of it in the next 3 minutes.
In today’s Tools & Trends roundup:
Can Marketing Intelligence Supercharge Your B2B Content Strategy? ⚡
How B2B Marketers Are Winning With New (and Old) Marketing Channels in 2025 🔬
They Spent $1 Million on B2B Influencers: Here’s What Worked (and What Didn't) 💸
It's Time to Rethink How We Measure Experiential Marketing 📏
How to Make B2B Marketing More Impactful (and Less Boring) 🥱
All too often as marketers, we have tons of data at our fingertips, but struggle to connect the dots. How do we interpret the links between website analytics and actionable insights about competitors, trends, and audience sentiment?
Marketing intelligence platforms bridge the gap by tracking competitor activities, spotting content opportunities, and showing exactly what resonates at each buying stage.
🗝️ The key takeaways:
Don’t just track website visits or email opens but also competitor moves, emerging industry trends, and audience sentiment to create truly differentiated content.
Marketing intelligence tools help spot gaps in competitor content, highlighting high-potential topics they’ve overlooked and enabling you to proactively capture attention.
Effective platforms combine quantitative metrics (engagement rates, share of voice) with qualitative insights (competitor messaging style, audience reactions) that help you take strategic action.
Use insights from competitors to identify content gaps, establish your unique brand voice, and proactively position your brand in underserved market areas or formats.
GoDaddy’s Super Bowl ad dominated the conversation by embracing a B2C mindset. CMO Fara Howard shared key insights from their success, specifically how to engage audiences by prioritizing entertainment, authenticity, and relatable storytelling. In case you didn’t catch the ad live…
🗝️ The key takeaways:
Your buyers aren’t just businesses, they’re people who consume content daily. GoDaddy reached them on TikTok, Instagram, and at the Super Bowl, just like consumer brands do.
The campaign was based on a genuine entrepreneurial fear, small business owners worrying about appearing professional online. The message was relatable and impactful.
Instead of a traditional endorsement, actor Walton Goggins actually used GoDaddy’s platform to launch his real business. That partnership makes for authentic buzz and cultural resonance.
GoDaddy didn’t treat the Super Bowl as a standalone event but as the launchpad for a sustained brand narrative that extended impact well beyond game day.
HubSpot surveyed 1,700+ B2B and B2C marketers to pinpoint what's working best and what's set to dominate in 2025. With budgets shifting towards brand awareness and authentic storytelling, smart B2B marketers are blending tried-and-true SEO with influencer partnerships, short-form videos, and targeted social media to maximize their returns in 2025.
🗝️ The key takeaways:
Over 70% of marketers plan to target Millennials, and over 30% are prioritizing Gen Z, while interest in Gen X and Boomers has dropped significantly.
SEO and paid social content ranked highest in ROI. Short-form videos (30%) and image-based content (29%) were the most popular formats.
Influencer marketing is booming, especially through niche creators. 28% found the best ROI from Facebook influencers, followed by Instagram (22%) and YouTube (12%).
Despite the rise of AI search, nearly half of marketers reported increased organic traffic. Marketers are adapting by adding structured data, FAQ sections, and regularly updating older content.
Marketing is moving away from tactics that prioritize volume, like SEO-focused blogs and generic outreach, toward high-value, highly targeted content and experiences. Kieran Flanagan thinks that the marketers who thrive will focus less on volume metrics and more on creating targeted, authentic, and genuinely useful experiences. Exactly what AI can’t easily replicate.
🗝️ The key takeaways:
Invest in high-value content channels like podcasts and YouTube to build deeper trust and lasting attention. Use AI to remix and amplify that content efficiently.
Shift your paid media to incremental impact, prioritizing creator-led campaigns and high-quality video that clearly contributes to revenue growth.
Make outbound marketing personal using AI-driven customization, like unique, instantly responsive billboards or hyper-personalized email campaigns.
Leverage AI to enhance customer experiences, enabling real-time, personalized responses through chat and email. Implementing AI in inbound communications has shown conversion rate lifts between 50%-200%.
Don’t make the mistake of spreading your efforts too thin across multiple acquisition channels. You’ll just end up wasting time and budget. The key is focusing on the one or two channels with the highest probability of success, then scaling them relentlessly.
🗝️ The key takeaways:
Find a product-channel fit. The best companies grow by aligning their product’s natural strengths with a channel designed for mass adoption.
Identify your distribution advantage. Does your product drive user acquisition via built-in sharing, social virality, or meeting clear existing demand?
Match to the right channel. Some products win through SEO and paid ads, while others thrive on word-of-mouth, partnerships, or viral loops.
Scale aggressively. Once a channel shows promise, increase investment by 50%+ instead of 10% to see if it holds at scale.
After investing over $1 million sponsoring B2B influencers, Ahrefs uncovered key lessons to make influencer marketing actually drive real revenue. If you've wondered whether influencer marketing can truly deliver for B2B, this article has answers.
🗝️ The key takeaways:
Align campaigns with low-friction offers. High-investment products rarely convert directly from influencer shout-outs. Instead, promote free, high-value offers (a free tool or useful resource) to capture leads effectively.
Vet creators manually. Subscriber counts don't always equal quality. Closely check real engagement metrics (comments, reactions, audience authenticity) and choose influencers whose audiences match your ideal customers, even if follower numbers are smaller.
Pricing varies drastically, but negotiation helps. Influencer pricing is unpredictable. Typical costs range from $500 for smaller creators up to $10,000+ for high-engagement influencers. Always negotiate clearly, especially if you’re committing to multiple placements.
Measure beyond immediate results. Influencer marketing rarely drives instant conversions. Track brand awareness and engagement metrics, and treat initial placements as experiments to optimize future investments.
MQLs have long been the go-to metric for evaluating B2B events, but what if traditional metrics are outdated and missing critical insights? Marketers should adopt advanced measurement methods that capture attendee behavior, sentiment, and real buying intent.
🗝️ The key takeaways:
Traditional metrics prioritize quantity (like form fills) over quality, missing high-value leads who don’t fit rigid criteria but show strong engagement signals.
Use behavioral data and statistical analysis to create metrics like "Likelihood to Attend," "Likelihood to Return," and "Likelihood to Purchase," so you can tailor marketing efforts to segments that truly matter.
Brands adopting sophisticated, data-driven event metrics can better predict outcomes, optimize resources, and drive stronger conversions from experiential marketing.
We’ve all faced an empty content calendar. But what if audience research, not creativity, is the solution? The best content isn't about chasing trends or guessing, it starts with truly understanding your audience. Use research insights to fill your content calendar and eliminate guesswork for good.
🗝️ The key takeaways:
Find “content triggers”. Scan your audience research for real questions, pain points, frustrations, and specific language your prospects use, then create content addressing these issues directly.
Use structured approaches like "Problems → Solutions," "Misconceptions → Reality," or step-by-step guides to translate triggers into clear, compelling content.
Quickly test content ideas by checking search volume, analyzing competitor gaps, or using an importance matrix to prioritize efforts that meet genuine audience needs.
Turn every major content piece (webinars, blogs, reports) into multiple smaller formats like social snippets, email content, or podcast talking points.
Brendan Hufford thinks B2B companies waste millions on ineffective content because their marketers are stuck checking boxes instead of truly connecting with customers. Great B2B marketing isn’t about boring products, it’s about daring to have real conversations that make customers feel seen, not just sold to.
🗝️ The key takeaways:
Focus on humans, not SEO tools. Effective SEO isn’t about technical expertise, it’s about writing compelling copy that genuinely engages readers.
Get closer to your customers. Spend at least 30 minutes daily listening to real customer conversations, instead of relying solely on analytics or keyword research.
Prioritize resonance overreach. Forget chasing impressions. A targeted post generating a few qualified leads beats viral content that doesn’t drive meaningful business outcomes.
Become a "deep generalist". The most valuable marketers excel across multiple interconnected disciplines like copywriting, visuals, analytics, and customer research, not just one specialty.
That’s it for this week,
Speak soon,
The Ask CMO team
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