Words: Alex Coe – Digital Director
Category(s): Campaigns, Content
Date: 21st January 2025
Nobody likes digital ads.
In fact, most people actively avoid them. Between skipping pre-roll ads at the first available second and ad blockers that banish them altogether, your prospects are sceptical, privacy-conscious and have become adept at tuning you out.
Combine this with increased stakeholder pressures, growth at all costs, and ‘engagement’ being valued as much as money (feed the algorithm, please). B2B marketers end up spending countless hours researching how to do more with less, get more clicks, get more leads, do better, be greater…
Then the engagement machine churns out advice to meet those needs: ‘How to write ads that actually convert’, ‘How to get more from your advertising budget’, ‘How to A/B test in 2025’…
But just for a moment consider that in trying to figure out how to win in the attention economy, we’re falling victim to it. It’s not that it’s necessarily bad advice – it’s good, but it’s all the same: ‘Speak to pain-points over features’, ‘Understand your target audience’, ‘Use concise CTAs’, ‘Don’t forget to optimise’.
As a result, we’ve created a landscape of ads that look, sound and feel identical. A marketing monoculture where differentiation is out, a favourable-looking graph is in. (And this is before we even think about AI just regurgitating everything that’s already been said before).
My take? Most marketing advice is designed to make marketers feel safe, not to make brands stand out.
I’ve managed hundreds of campaigns, and I’m seeing the same tired tactics slowly create less and less impact. So, here’s what I think you should be doing with your ads as a B2B marketer.
1. Stop marketing to datapoints
Your job when running campaigns isn’t only to make sure your spreadsheets have more green than red, it’s to make a person feel a thing and then do a thing.
Too many B2B marketers operate on the belief that prospects can be guided robotically through the buying cycle by data. Thinking about this in practice, let’s say you’re optimising for clickthrough rate and volume of submissions. The data in your test log might say that Ad 1 has a higher clickthrough rate and form-submission rate than Ad 2. Great, but it won’t and can’t tell you how either ad made someone feel.
Now, what’s a feeling worth? Consider that Ad 2 could have generated more revenue not because it was a data-driven masterpiece, but because it made a smaller and more valuable group of people feel strong enough to act decisively.
I’m not suggesting we abandon data. But we must stop confusing measurement with meaning. A prospect who truly resonates with your message – who feels seen, understood, and inspired – is worth more than a hundred lukewarm leads who clicked because you followed an optimisation playbook.
Which is where positioning comes in. Your positioning as a brand helps to communicate a worldview through every medium, including ad copy. When was the last time you considered how you want people to feel when they come across your brand’s worldview?
2. Tell a story
Humans are natural storytellers. Stories tend to ‘stick’. They grab attention, trigger emotions, and make your message memorable. You don’t need a novel, just enough to capture the essence of your value.
For instance:
‘Three months ago, Emma was stuck manually creating individual invoices. By the end of the day, her eyes were red, and her to-do list was longer than when she started.
Today? Invoicing takes 15 minutes, and she’s home by 5. Here’s how she did it.’
Stories like these turn abstract benefits into tangible outcomes your audience can relate to – an effective strategy in performance marketing. And importantly, they’re not about your product, they’re about the person using it.
3. To hell with optimised character counts
Say what needs to be said and not a character more.
4. Are you posing as someone else?
Every successful brand becomes a template. Whether it be Stripe’s minimalism, Apple’s white space, or HubSpot’s ‘friendliness’.
And inevitably, countless companies rush to copy them (no doubt fuelled by ‘brand gurus’ trying to appease their own engagement machine). The result? A parade of wannabe Stripes, using bold and high-contrasting colours, social proof, but keeping it simple.
Your (visual) creative is your ad’s first impression, and my advice is to consider if yours is a hodgepodge of ‘best practice’.
Think of it like this: Are you, like me, definitely not a hat person? Whenever you wear a hat do you think, ‘Oh no, everyone can tell I’m not a hat person!’ Forcing a hat feels awkward and uncomfortable. Maybe your brand isn’t a hat person, so don’t force someone else’s creative on to it. Figure out the type of person you want your brand to be, and portray that.
5. Write like your brand has a personality, because it does
The wrong tone of voice is the fastest way to kill an ad. And I don’t mean there is an objective ‘wrong’ tone of voice, but wrong for your brand.
You’ll often read advice to ‘write conversationally, don’t be too formal’. But what if your brand is formal? Your audience will expect your messaging to be aligned. Take these real-life examples from two hotel brands.
| The Ritz Mayfair |
| YOU CAN BE ASSURED OF PROMPT AND PERSONAL ATTENTION WITH ANY ENQUIRY. |
| The Kimpton Clocktower Hotel |
| Whether you have a question about booking or just want to talk about your grandmother’s shortbread recipe, we’re here to lend an ear. Get in touch in whatever way is most convenient for you. |
Both are great examples of on-brand communication. But imagine swapping them. Suddenly, The Ritz feels flippant, and Kimpton feels cold. That poor alignment would alienate their audiences.
And yes, you could argue this piece of advice is simply ‘know your audience’ repackaged, but I think it’s more nuanced than that. Both of these brands aren’t optimising this copy for their audience metrics, they are telegraphing to the world who they are, convention be damned. What, you think The Kimpton has a spreadsheet that marks the uplift in enquiries if they change ‘shortbread’ to ‘yorkshire pudding’ in their copy?
But what if you don’t know what your brand’s personality is?
Who or what your brand is means different things to different people: a promise, a point of view, an experience (and so on). The thing is, you can’t create ads that truly connect if you’re still unclear on what your brand really stands for.
At Beneath, we get it. We know how to strike that balance between creativity and strategy, whilst simultaneously staying true to your brand. Whether it’s through figuring out your positioning from the ground up, writing compelling copy or crafting tailored buyer journeys, we help B2B marketers create ads that connect.