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The B2B guide to digital marketing

How to be a digital marketer when the internet wants your audience for itself

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Contents

01.
So you’re a digital marketer? What does that even mean?

The digital marketer title made sense in the 2000s, setting apart marketers with expertise in websites, search, email, paid ads and the social media channels that were just starting to emerge. It was a pretty broad remit even then.

Fast forward 20 years – to a world where the boundaries between offline and online have all but disappeared – and the traditional remit of the digital marketer is bordering on meaningless.

Take in-person events and conferences. Their value doesn’t just come from engaging attendees, but others too – through livestreams, social media, video highlights, and influencer coverage. A conference keynote might be watched by 200 delegates, then reach 20,000 through digital channels in the following months.

Why does the digital marketing title endure? Well, it’s a useful descriptor for those endlessly curious members of the marketing team with an analytical bent – the people that actually enjoy working with data, platforms, dashboards, tracking systems and algorithms.

While colleagues with a fluffier skillset were working on brand, messaging, or creative direction, digital specialists built their careers on understanding the machinery behind modern marketing, and trying to prove what did and didn’t work.

At Beneath, we find that digital marketing is still a commercially useful term. People search for digital marketing agencies, and buy services under the name. It’s seen as encompassing disciplines such as performance marketing, growth marketing, media buying, SEO, and social.

So for us, it’s a useful shorthand to signal to the world – including customers, prospects, search engines and LLM platforms – that we have deep expertise in building marketing programs and campaigns that can reach audiences no matter where they hang out, whether online or offline.

Crucially, it also signals our ability to evolve with changing channels, platforms, technologies and buyer behaviour. So as much as we have issues with the term, it makes sense for us to keep on using it.

But we do feel like the term digital marketing needs to take on new meaning in modern marketing. We explain why in this guide.

02.
Digital marketing is dead. Long live digital marketing.

Indulge us as we take a quick trip down memory lane. In the mid-2010s, at the height of the B2B content marketing boom, Beneath’s co-founders spent a lot of time evangelising content marketing on behalf of emerging marketing automation giants, who had a lot of skin in the content-marketing game.

One of the defining ideas of the era was that content should live on owned media – a website, blog or email newsletter. Social channels were not much more than distribution platforms. “Don’t build your content house on rented land” became the rallying cry. The thinking was simple: publish valuable content on channels you control, promote it through social media, and the audience would come.

It seemed good advice. Until it wasn’t.

We were certainly right to be wary of the risk of tech giants changing algorithms and acting in their own interests at the expense of content creators. But we didn’t anticipate the lengths these giants would go to build walls around users. We didn’t foresee social networks suppressing the reach of posts linked to brand websites, or search engines answering users’ questions instead of sending traffic to publishers.

Today, if you ask Google a question about process mining or cybersecurity, you’re likely to get the answer directly in an AI Overview. At the time of writing, around two-thirds of Google searches end without users leaving Google’s ecosystem, according to SparkToro research using data by Similarweb. That leaves just a third resulting in a click on the open web.

We’re operating in a world in which a handful of search engines, social platforms and LLMs command the vast majority of people’s time and attention. That means we need to meet audiences where they are, creating content that’s native to each platform.

This changes everything.

Turn up where your audience (and the LLMs) can find you

The job of a marketer has always been to be as present as possible in all the places our target audience spends time and pays attention, whether they’re actively in the market for what we offer or not. This maximises our chances of being considered when they’re in buying mode.

So we need to build our reputations on the rented land our audiences regularly visit. Whether that’s YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit and Facebook communities, Google or AI assistants – our job is to earn visibility where attention exists. Of course, optimising for Google now also means optimising for AI Overviews and AI Mode, which increasingly shape how people discover information.

Building such a presence – and earning mentions in trusted publications – does more than increase reach. It creates the digital footprint search engines and LLMs use to understand brands, our expertise, and our authority. It also gives customers, communities and influencers more opportunities to discover and talk about us.

One of the core jobs of B2B marketing has always been to ensure your brand makes the buying committee’s shortlist. Today there’s a challenge upstream of that – search engines and LLMs are building their own long list ahead of when buyers seek that information. Failing to get on that disqualifies you from ever making the buyer shortlist.

For digital marketers, success can no longer be measured solely by the traffic a website attracts. It’s now about building a reputation more widely. The more a brand is discovered, referenced, and discussed across multiple channels, the more visible it becomes to people, LLMs and search engines – creating a virtuous cycle of awareness, authority and influence.

03.
From performance to brand: Awareness is a digital marketing KPI

The raisons d’etre of B2B marketing teams can be fairly – if a little reductively – thought of as longer-term brand building combined with shorter-term lead-generation and sales-activation efforts. Brand building is about developing awareness, image and a reputation, while sales-activation efforts tend to be about persuasion – setting out reasons to buy now.

Traditionally, digital marketers have been far more responsible for activating sales than building brands. They have naturally gravitated towards things that could be measured almost in real time – like clicks, leads and conversions. It’s like the old parable:

A police officer sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlamp.

“What are you looking for?” the officer asks.

“My keys,” replies the man.

The officer joins the search. A few minutes later, he checks: Are you sure you lost them here?”

“No, I dropped them over there,” the man says.

“Then why are we looking here?”

“Because the light is better.”

The digital marketer title made sense in the 2000s, setting apart marketers with expertise in websites, search, email, paid ads and the social media channels that were just starting to emerge. It was a pretty broad remit even then.

 

For years, digital marketers have been searching under the streetlamp. We’ve measured clicks, impressions, CTRs (click-through rates), CPCs (cost-per-clicks), bounce rates and form fills – not because that’s where marketing necessarily creates the most value, but because that’s where the light has been. Digital channels wowed us with visibility into short-term behaviour, while many of the forces that influence buying remained hidden.

The problem? Buying decisions don’t begin with a click. They start much earlier, often long before we spy on someone entering our marketing funnels. But a far less visible thing has to happen before we get to measure these types of outcomes. An audience has to notice you – even subconsciously – and get to know you. Maybe they see your name on a billboard, hear your CEO on a podcast, walk past your stall at a conference, or see your name in an LLM response.

Then months (and yes, sometimes even years) down the line, when they need something you’re selling, they recognise you during their research – hell, they might even remember you unprompted – and feel like they trust you.

It’s not that the metrics have become irrelevant. It’s that they describe a later part of the process while overlooking the critical steps that came before. If we want to build a successful brand, we have to start measuring what happens before customers appear on our radar.

04.
Strategy v tactics: The fundamentals that underpin digital marketing

The phrase digital strategy has always made us slightly uncomfortable at Beneath. As an agency that spends a lot of time helping businesses define their brand and product strategies, we’ve found that what many people call a digital strategy is often a channel plan.

Many digital marketers naturally gravitate towards tactical questions. Should we invest in LinkedIn? Is SEO worth it? Should we gate the asset? How do we show up in LLMs? All hugely important questions (and to be fair, they’re often the questions impatient clients or stakeholders want answers to from the get-go).

But before deciding how to go to market, it’s important to understand how the brand or product in question should compete.

A fundamental marketing strategy should:

  • Establish which audiences to target
  • Define what the product or brand should represent in the minds of those audiences (its positioning).

Ideally, this work should then be distilled into a strategic brand narrative that guides every campaign, message and creative decision.
In many organisations, this work will already have been done by brand marketers with the help of senior business leaders. In that case, the digital marketer’s job is to seek it out and use it.

If the strategy is sound – and we appreciate that’s a big “if” – it provides the context that should make every tactical decision easier. Suddenly, choosing channels, creating content and building campaigns becomes less about guesswork and more about bringing a coherent strategy to life.

If digital marketers are now expected to build brands as well as generate leads, we need to understand what that brand should stand for in the first place. Without that foundation, it will prove difficult to create campaigns that consistently build awareness, reputation and mental availability over time.

Marketing strategy is where we play and how we win in the market.

Tactics are how we then deliver on the strategy and execute for success.

05.
Generating today’s leads and tomorrow’s growth

The 95:5 rule was articulated in 2021 by John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. He argued that, at any given time, only 5% of B2B buyers are in the market for a particular category, while 95% are not. (These aren’t scientifically precise numbers, but they communicate the reality of the situation. As Mark Ritson acknowledged in conversation with Byron Sharp, Director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute: “it’s a bullshit number, but it’s a good bullshit number.”)

Meanwhile, marketing effectiveness gurus Les Binet and Peter Field have provided compelling evidence that investing in long-term brand building is necessary to ensure short-term sales activation efforts remain continuously effective. Without brand equity to leverage, your lead-generation efforts will eventually slow.

Every thought leadership article, LinkedIn post, webinar, PR story and AI citation that increases familiarity with your brand is an investment in future demand – a pathway to eventual clicks and conversions. This is why awareness should no longer be considered just a ‘brand’ metric. It’s one of the most important digital marketing metrics too. As we’ve seen, maintaining your position on the digital longlist is a prerequisite to making the buyer shortlist.

Start with the objective

This brings us nicely to business and marketing objectives. Your business might have the stated objective of growing market share, improving profitability, or expanding across Europe over five years.

Your marketing objectives should support these business objectives. This might be by generating pipeline, increasing brand awareness, launching a new product, or accelerating customer adoption. Before discussing channels or creative ideas, marketers need a clear understanding of what success looks like.

This knowledge should influence every decision that follows. Different objectives require different messages, budgets, channels and measures of success. We are then able to determine the balance between immediate sales activation and longer-term brand building.

Understand the audience

We need to understand the problems our audience is trying to solve, the different questions they’re asking, the barriers preventing them from buying, and what motivates them to act.

It’s also worth reminding ourselves that B2B buying is rarely an individual activity. Most purchases are consensus-building exercises involving multiple stakeholders with different priorities, concerns and levels of exposure to your brand.

For example, the internal champion – often the person who first discovers a product through search, social media or a recommendation – needs ammunition: case studies, product comparisons and answers to objections. The CFO or procurement lead, who may only become involved later, need confidence: commercial evidence, ROI details, or reassurance that the decision is low risk.

The objective isn’t to build a completely different campaign for every stakeholder. (That would exhaust most budgets.) Instead, we should build a campaign ecosystem where different people encounter the information they need at the moment they need it.

Choose the message before the media when possible

Once we understand our audience, we can develop a campaign message built around a clear value proposition. That core message can then be adapted into articles, videos, webinars, social posts, email campaigns and advertising while remaining strategically consistent.

In an ideal world, only then should we decide where to distribute it. Even when the answer to this question is blindingly obvious from the start, it’s always worth keeping an open mind.

Channel selection depends on where our audience spends time and how they behave there. Budget naturally influences those decisions too. If resources are limited, for example, expensive programmatic campaigns are unlikely to be the best place to start.

Yes, funnels are flawed but they’re still pretty useful

The traditional marketing funnel is an imperfect model. Buyers don’t move neatly from awareness to consideration to purchase. They flip-flop, lose enthusiasm and get distracted. Maybe they watch a product video then email a colleague for advice without getting a reply, then run into budget problems. Maybe they decide to use a junior hire for a year rather than invest in a solution.

Real buying journeys are messy. But funnels remain useful planning tools. Thinking in terms of awareness, consideration and conversion helps ensure we’re creating content that meets buyers wherever they happen to be. Better still, build your own funnel around the way your customers actually buy.

It might look something like this:

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Started a free trial
• Purchased
• Rolled the product out organisation-wide

A funnel can never map to reality but it can help us plan around it.

Match channels to buyer mindset

A procurement manager Googling ‘contract management software for procurement teams’ is actively looking for information – likely to solve a problem. The same person scrolling through LinkedIn a few hours later isn’t shopping for software, they’re catching up on industry news, connecting with colleagues, or taking a break. The buyer hasn’t changed, but their state of mind has. Too many campaigns disappoint because they ask a channel to achieve something it was never designed to do. It can be useful to see each channel as a representation of a different mindset.

gFor example:

  • Search and AI assistants: Buyers are actively researching, comparing options and solving problems.
  • Paid search: The buyer has demonstrated intent and is looking for a solution now.
  • LinkedIn: Buyers are in browsing mode, consuming industry news rather than shopping.
  • Facebook and Instagram: Buyers are socialising and looking for entertaining distractions.
  • YouTube and TikTok: Buyers are learning, discovering and exploring.
  • Email: While cold emails are likely to be an annoying interruption, emails people opt into are warmly welcomed. (As a relationship-building channel, email could be unmatched.).
  • Display advertising: Buyers are focused on something else but their attention can be fleetingly won with the right ads.
  • Review sites: Buyers are validating decisions and looking for reassurance.

 

Use your channels wisely

Performance metrics from different channels should inform the use of others where possible. For example, messages that get the most engagement in paid social can influence email headers or paid search copy.

Meanwhile, the performance of one channel can influence another. For example, a successful PR campaign or a series of thought leadership posts on LinkedIn may increase branded search volume on Google. Engaging social media content can increase direct website visits and improve remarketing audiences for paid advertising.

Understanding these interactions helps marketers avoid evaluating channels purely on last-click conversions (more on this later). It’s all about building a smart plan to meet your marketing objectives.

Thinking laterally to overcome campaign problems

Optimising a digital marketing campaign is rarely straightforward because so many variables can influence performance. A decline in conversions, for example, might be caused by poor creative, ineffective targeting, an uncompetitive offer, a slow landing page, seasonal demand, increased competition, changes to search or social algorithms, or even wider economic conditions. Often, several of these factors occur simultaneously, making it difficult to identify the true cause of poor results.

A common misconception about digital marketing is that iit’s entirely data-driven. In reality, the more complex the marketing environment, the more important experienced judgement becomes. The data tends to present symptoms. An experienced marketer interprets those symptoms, forms hypotheses, and tests them if possible.

06.
Sweat the algorithms

Whether we like it or not, effective digital marketing is about understanding and working with algorithms. Whether we’re trying to rank in Google, appear in an AI-generated answer, or reach buyers through paid social, machine-learning systems are constantly deciding which type of content, adverts or answers to surface. They’re analysing thousands of signals to predict types of information people are most likely to find useful or motivating.

For example:

  • Google or Bing – which web pages are most likely to satisfy a user’s query.
  • LLMs – which sources and answers are most helpful.
  • Social media platforms – which posts users are most likely to engage with.
  • Paid ad platforms – which people within your target audience are most likely to click or convert.

 

For B2B marketers, success depends on giving these algorithms the best possible inputs. This is daunting for beginners. The algorithms evolve continuously so continuous experimentation is necessary. Over time, marketers start to work out how different audiences respond, which formats perform best, and generally how algorithms react to different optimisation strategies.

It’s also important to recognise that no one outside the major technology companies fully understands how these algorithms work. Platforms such as Google and Meta publish some best practice guidance, but the precise weighting of the signals they rely on, and their decision-making processes, are never clear. Digital marketers can only test and observe, and keep up with learnings shared by peers.

07.
Build a portfolio of influential voices

For a long time, digital marketers primarily focused on optimising digital assets like websites, landing pages, content pieces, and campaigns. Now employees’ voices must be added to the optimisation list, as they are playing an increasingly significant role in how buyers – and AI systems – form opinions about a brand.

The received wisdom is that people prefer to hear from experts and founders rather than anonymous corporate accounts. Individual voices feel more authentic, relatable and trustworthy, the thinking goes. Social media algorithms have latched onto this idea and helped to amplify the reach of individuals over brands. On LinkedIn, for example, posts published by employees often reach much larger audiences than similar posts from a company’s own page.

Whether this is because people genuinely prefer authentic voices or because the algorithm now rewards them – or, more likely, both – the practical implication is the same. Companies need to think of their employees as an extension of their marketing team.

A sensible and resilient approach is to develop respected voices across the organisation. Founders and CEOs shouldn’t carry the entire burden. A distributed network of credible voices increases awareness and creates more signals for search engines and AI assistants. Every founder post, SME article, podcast appearance, conference talk and LinkedIn discussion helps reinforce a brand’s expertise and point of view.

It’s a far cry from the days when digital marketers were seen as channel managers. Today, they’re increasingly responsible for cultivating the influence that builds brands and drives future demand.

08.
Be brave. Put your budget chips on the table.

One of the toughest, most emotionally taxing aspects of digital marketing is deciding how and where to spend your budget. Platforms emerge then lose the favour of target audiences. Algorithms evolve, LLMs get updated regularly, audience behaviours change, and culture moves on. No marketing team has the time, budget or expertise to keep up and cover all bases with their budget.

Success comes from making informed decisions about where to focus. Peace of mind comes from acknowledging that some of those decisions will inevitably prove to be wrong.

The digital marketer’s job is to make calculated bets about where investment will create the greatest value, with an eye on marketing objectives. Then it’s about monitoring, experimenting, testing and using judgement to improve the odds. The goal isn’t to be right every time – it’s to consistently make more good bets than bad ones.

As Les Binet has pointed out, the more marketing operations become data led, the easier it is to subconsciously think of the buying decision as a deterministic sequence of actions and outcomes: do X and Y will follow. But marketing doesn’t produce neat, predictable chains of cause and effect. It simply changes probabilities.

A final thought. Take solace in the fact that research suggests brands whose share of voice exceeds their share of market are more likely to grow. And the size of that gap roughly predicts how fast. So even when spend isn’t optimal, every bit of spend on brand is still likely to help.

09.
Attribution: Don’t feel you have to fake it anymore

For years, marketing as an industry did a sterling job of convincing itself that if something couldn’t be attributed, it probably wasn’t worth doing. This mindset rewarded activities that directly preceded clicks while undervaluing the less tangible work of building brands, reputation and trust. We optimised what we could measure, not necessarily what mattered most.

The idea that we can assign a precise proportion of a sale to a specific marketing activity feels increasingly fantastical as traffic to websites is choked. Before buying, a B2B prospect might have seen a relevant LinkedIn carousel, listened to a podcast interview, read a feature in an industry magazine, asked ChatGPT for recommendations, searched Google for a brand, and then requested a demo. How much credit do we attribute to each interaction? Simplistic models give way too much to the last touch (Google in this scenario). But the honest answer is that we rarely know.

Rather than obsessing over perfect attribution, the time has come to focus even harder on whether marketing is increasing branded search, pipeline, revenue, share of voice, and other leading indicators of demand.

Attribution models are designed to help us assign credit to sales in different ways. Historically, digital marketers could choose from:

  • First-touch attribution – all credit goes to the first interaction.
  • Last-touch attribution – credits the final interaction before conversion.
  • Linear attribution – attempts to spread credit evenly across every recorded touchpoint.
  • Time-decay attribution – weight goes to interactions that happened closer to the purchase.
  • Position-based (U-shaped) attribution – first and last touch get the most credit, the remainder is distributed across the middle.
  • Multi-touch attribution – Algorithmically distributes credit across all touchpoints based on which historically influence conversion most.

 

At Beneath, we’re fans of Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM). Rather than trying to credit individual clicks or campaigns, MMM takes a top-down statistical view, analysing aggregated data over time to understand how changes in marketing activities contribute to marketing outcomes. It isn’t practical for every organisation, but where it’s feasible, we think it provides a more realistic view of long-term marketing effectiveness than relying on attribution models alone.

10.
Yes you can measure brand-building progress

Digital marketers tend to be the most data-literate people in marketing. Now they have an opportunity to apply these skills at the brand level – and become even more interesting at dinner parties in the process.

For years, brand building was seen as the more glamorous, creative side of marketing. But today’s digital marketers have the tools and skills to both measure and build brand growth. Instead of just answering questions about attribution or conversion rates, they can start addressing arguably bigger questions like: Are more people becoming aware of us? Are we easier to discover? Are we becoming an unforgettable brand?

This is exciting. Digital marketers are uniquely positioned to connect data points, identify patterns, and build evidence for what’s really driving growth. Measures to look at would include:

Measures to look at would include:

  • Branded search volume – Are more people actively searching for your company or products?
  • Share of search – Is your brand capturing a growing proportion of branded searches within your category?
  • Direct traffic – Are more people navigating directly to your website because they already know who you are?
  • Share of voice and mentions – Are journalists, influencers, customers, and industry experts talking about your brand more often?
  • Social engagement – Is your content reaching new audiences and generating meaningful conversations?
  • AI visibility – Are LLMs and search engines increasingly referencing your brand and content?
  • Mental availability – When buyers think about your category, do they think about your company?
  • Pipeline and revenue trends – Does sustained investment in brand activity correlate with stronger commercial performance over time?

 

None of these metrics is perfect in isolation. But together they can paint a detailed picture of whether your marketing is succeeding.

11.
Don’t be a slave to the ‘rules’ of marketing

The fundamentals of good marketing – understanding the market, segmentation, targeting, positioning, and building distinctive, memorable brands – remain as important today as they were decades ago.

But the digital tactics we use to execute our marketing strategies must evolve. From gating every white paper (please don’t do this), to never building on rented land, marketing is riddled with remarkably sticky conventional wisdom – some of it was right for its time, some of it wasn’t.

The most effective digital marketing will be built on a combination of strategic, long-term thinking and technical expertise, continually adapting as technologies (yes, including AI) and buyer behaviours evolve. It’s a broader remit and challenge – but it’s a much more exciting one.

If you’re a digital marketer, congratulations. You’ve just been promoted.

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