We spent $3,000 on ads. Vanity metrics almost fooled us.

Every B2B marketer has been there. It was more than halfway through the year, but our revenue and lead numbers were not where they needed to be. The question that we asked ourselves was: “What’s the fastest way to increase our volume?” 

The answer we landed on? Paid ads.

It wasn’t something that Tech in Asia Studios has tried before, but we had the extra budget and were willing to experiment. We felt that the ads, coupled with growing awareness organically via consistent B2B content like case studies, newsletter features, and socials would definitely give us the extra push. What could go wrong? 

The plan for the experiment was straightforward: Let’s run a social and search ad campaign concurrently to maximize top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) numbers (i.e., the awareness-stage traffic) and new leads coming into our pipeline as much as possible. 

For the social ads on LinkedIn and Instagram, we promoted our case studies and B2B landing page via carousels that summarized our services and our past works, sharing our achievements with past clients as proof of our expertise. We paired this with Google search ads, banking on keywords related to our services and target audience to maximize traffic to our landing page.

A social post on our work with Twilio which was boosted via LinkedIn ads. / Photo credit: Tech in Asia

We put a US$3,000 budget behind both ad channels, aiming to attract leads for our B2B marketing arm, Tech in Asia Studios. It felt like a solid, sensible approach. While it was a shot in the dark, it was better than taking no shots at all. We thought we could figure out the recipe for ads.

Spoiler alert: We didn’t.

Our hypothesis was straightforward: Paid ads would give us a short-term spike in TOFU traffic and leads, which would trickle down the middle of the funnel (MOFU) and eventually the pipeline. We expected that more of the right top tech accounts would discover us, engage with the chatbot on our landing page, and progress into marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and sales qualified leads (SQLs) territory.

A typical sales funnel consists of three main stages of TOFU, MOFU and BOFU. / Photo credit: Shutterstock

In July, our overall traffic shot up by over 4x for both month-on-month and year-on-year. The search ads in particular contributed 65% of that lift, generating several advanced sales conversations. On paper, it looked like the TOFU engine was working and starting to feed the MOFU.