B2B performance marketing: Strategy, channels, and metrics that tie spend to revenue

This guide breaks down the channels that work for B2B (paid search, LinkedIn, programmatic and retargeting), the metrics that matter beyond CTR, and a practical measurement framework to prove ROI, even with long sales cycles and offline steps.

What is B2B performance marketing?

The "performance" part refers to paying for and optimising toward results (qualified leads, sales conversations, pipeline value, closed revenue) rather than simply buying awareness and hoping for the best.

This creates some confusion worth clearing up. Performance marketing (the strategy) is not the same as performance-based pricing (the payment model). You can run performance marketing while paying on a CPM or CPC basis. What matters is that you measure and optimise toward revenue outcomes, regardless of how you pay platforms.

Where does performance marketing sit within your organisation? It typically spans growth, demand generation, paid media, and RevOps/analytics. In high-performing teams, it's the operating model that ties all these functions together with shared measurement.

Why B2B teams adopt performance marketing

Four forces are pushing B2B marketers toward performance marketing.

Budget scrutiny is intensifying. CFOs want to know what marketing contributed to pipeline and revenue, not how many people scrolled past an ad. Performance marketing gives you the measurement infrastructure to answer that question with confidence.

Efficiency matters more than ever. When every pound is scrutinised, you need to reduce waste and scale what works. Performance marketing creates feedback loops that identify winning campaigns, audiences, and creative so you can double down on them.

Sales and marketing alignment is non-negotiable. MQLs that sales never calls back create friction. Performance marketing shifts the focus to shared metrics (pipeline sourced, SQL conversion rate, revenue influenced) that both teams can rally around.

Quality controls protect your pipeline. A lead volume strategy can generate impressive reports while delivering prospects that will never buy. Performance marketing forces you to track progression: MQL to SQL to pipeline to closed revenue. That transparency exposes quality issues before they waste sales capacity.

The full-funnel B2B performance marketing

Create demand

The goal here is category education and positioning: building awareness of the problem and establishing your company as a credible voice. This stage is about building mental availability so that when buyers do enter the market, your brand is already on their shortlist.

Primary channels: LinkedIn paid social, Reddit, Meta & Instagram (but only through utilisation of B2B curated audiences) programmatic display, content syndication.

Primary KPIs: Engagement rate on ICP accounts, Dwell time, site traffic from target accounts, brand lift.

Capture demand

The goal is to intercept buyers at the moment they're ready to evaluate options and guide them toward a conversion action.

Primary channels: Paid search (Google/Microsoft), LinkedIn retargeting, competitor conquest campaigns.

Primary KPIs: Conversion rate, cost per qualified lead, SQL rate.

Convert and expand

The goal is to accelerate pipeline velocity and increase win rates by staying present throughout the evaluation process.

Primary channels: Retargeting, email nurture (triggered by campaign engagement), sales enablement content.

Primary KPIs: Pipeline velocity, win rate, expansion revenue from marketing-sourced accounts.

Channels that work for B2B performance marketing

Paid search: Capturing high-intent demand

Keyword strategy matters. Organise keywords into buckets based on intent: problem-aware queries (symptoms they're experiencing), solution-aware queries (category terms), competitor queries (alternative to X), and high-intent queries (pricing, demo, buy).

Creative should match intent. A prospect searching for educational content doesn't want a demo CTA. A prospect searching for pricing doesn't want a whitepaper. Tight message match between keyword, ad copy, and landing page is what separates campaigns that generate qualified leads from campaigns that waste budget.

Measure quality, not just volume. Track lead quality by keyword theme and campaign, not just aggregate CPL. You may find that a keyword with higher CPL actually delivers better SQL conversion rates, making it more efficient when measured against pipeline.

LinkedIn and paid social: Precision targeting for demand creation

Build campaigns in stages. Start with thought leadership content that addresses problems your ICP faces (not product pitches). Move prospects who engage into consideration-stage content with proof points and methodology. Reserve direct response CTAs for audiences who've demonstrated genuine interest.

Test creative systematically. Performance creative is about identifying which hooks, proof points, and objection-handling messages resonate with your audience. Run structured tests: vary one element at a time, measure engagement and conversion, iterate.

Layer targeting for quality. Job title targeting alone often pulls in too broad an audience. Layer in company size, industry, seniority, and (where available) intent signals to narrow toward your Total Addressable List.

Programmatic display and retargeting: Efficient reach and nurture

Programmatic lets you maintain presence with target accounts at scale, while retargeting keeps you visible to prospects who've already shown interest.

Use programmatic for account-based reach. Upload your target account list and serve ads across the web to build frequency with decision-makers at those companies. This is particularly valuable for enterprise deals where multiple stakeholders need exposure before a conversation starts.

Retargeting keeps you in the consideration set. B2B buying cycles are long. Retargeting ensures you stay present as prospects evaluate options over weeks or months.

Set guardrails to avoid waste. Exclude converted leads from prospecting campaigns. Cap frequency to avoid ad fatigue. Segment retargeting audiences by intent tier: site visitors behave differently from content downloaders or pricing page viewers. Serve appropriate creative to each.

Metrics that matter

Platform metrics (directional only)

Use these metrics to diagnose campaign health. If CTR drops, something's wrong with your targeting or creative. But never let platform metrics become the goal.

Funnel metrics (where optimisation happens)

Conversion rate tells you whether your landing pages and offers are working. Cost per qualified lead (not just any lead) tells you whether you're efficient. MQL to SQL rate tells you whether your lead qualification criteria align with sales reality.

Optimise at this layer. If CPL is low but SQL rate is poor, you have a quality problem. If SQL rate is strong but meeting set rate is weak, you may have a sales enablement gap.

Revenue metrics (the only ones that matter long-term)

Pipeline sourced shows what marketing directly generated. Pipeline influenced shows what marketing touched along the way. Both matter for understanding marketing's contribution to revenue.

CAC and LTV:CAC determine whether your growth model is sustainable. High CAC relative to customer value means you're buying growth at a loss. Payback period tells you how quickly you recover customer acquisition costs, which is critical for cash flow planning.

Measurement and attribution: A practical setup

Minimum viable tracking

Attribution maturity levels

Level 1: Last-click with lead volume. This is where most teams start, and where most teams get stuck. It over-credits bottom-funnel touchpoints and ignores the demand creation that put buyers in-market. Risky as a standalone model.

Level 2: Stage-based reporting. Track performance by funnel stage: SQL conversion rate, pipeline generated, revenue influenced. This surfaces quality issues that lead volume hides and connects marketing to sales outcomes.

Level 3: Blended attribution with experiments. Combine multi-touch attribution with incrementality testing. MTA distributes credit across touchpoints; incrementality testing validates whether campaigns are actually causing conversions or just taking credit for them.

Common failure modes

Duplicate leads. The same person downloading multiple assets creates phantom lead volume. Deduplicate before measuring.

Misaligned definitions. If marketing calls something an MQL and sales disagrees, your funnel metrics are meaningless. Align on definitions before building reports.

A 30/60/90-day B2B performance marketing plan

Days 0-30: Instrumentation and baseline

Establish baseline metrics: current CPL by channel, SQL conversion rate, pipeline contribution from paid. These become your comparison points for everything that follows.

Identify quick wins. Often there are campaigns spending significant budget with poor conversion rates, or high-potential keywords with insufficient bid coverage. Address obvious inefficiencies first.

Days 31-60: Expand and test

Build a landing page and CRO testing system. Your conversion rate has more impact on efficiency than your cost per click. Structured testing (one variable at a time, statistically significant sample sizes) compounds over time.

Establish a performance creative testing loop. Creative fatigue is real. Build a system for generating, testing, and iterating on creative so you're always learning what resonates.

Days 61-90: Scale and validate

Segment by ICP fit. As you scale, quality often drops because you're reaching beyond your ideal buyers. Use ICP scoring to segment performance and ensure you're not sacrificing quality for volume.

Add incrementality experiments. As budgets grow, the question shifts from "is this working?" to "is this working better than the alternative?" Holdout tests and geo-experiments validate that your campaigns are causing conversions, not just correlating with them.

When to hire a B2B performance marketing agency

Plateaued efficiency. If CPL or CAC has flattened despite optimisation efforts, outside perspective often identifies opportunities internal teams miss.

Pipeline quality issues. High lead volume with poor SQL conversion suggests targeting or qualification problems that an experienced agency can diagnose.

Messy attribution. If you can't confidently answer "what did marketing contribute to pipeline this quarter," you have a measurement problem that's likely holding back strategic decisions.

Limited creative testing. Creative is often the biggest lever in paid media. If you're running the same ads for months, you're leaving performance on the table.

Questions to ask agencies

• How do you measure success? (The answer should involve pipeline and revenue, not impressions or clicks.)
• How do you ensure lead quality, not just volume? (Look for ICP alignment, lead scoring, and SQL-based optimisation.)
• How do you work with our sales team? (Performance marketing that ignores sales feedback is flying blind.)
• What does reporting look like? (You should see clear connection between spend and pipeline metrics, updated regularly.)