Have you ever thought about why your campaigns are full of “leads”.. and empty of real results?
In B2B marketing, it is easy to fall into the“illusion of” clicks: dashboards beautiful, increasing click-through rates (CTR) and reports with charts on the rise, among other indicators. It seems that everything is going well. But when you pull the “fio of the” conversion, you realize: who clicked is not who decides.
The gulf between a curious lead and a real buyer is wider than many realize, and recent data from Dreamdata, a B2B attribution platform, shows why:
- The average journey in B2B marketing lasts 320 days (10 months and 2 weeks) from the first touch to the close of the sale.
- Only 1 in 100 accounts is actively on the market that quarter.
- 80% buyers already have a supplier in mind before starting the search.
That is, clicking is not deciding, and deciding takes time.
I share three more points that break a lot of market conviction:
1) Ads with thought leaders (Thought Leader Ads) have up to 2.3x more engagement than traditional formats.
2) 1/3 of the target companies get less than 3 impressions in 90 days. That is, we are wasting media where it matters most.
3) The journey between Qualified Marketing Lead (MQL) and Qualified Sales Lead (SQL) takes, on average, 107 days (3 months and 2 weeks). Large companies have 49% longer journeys.
The difference between attention and intention
Clicks mean attention, but attention does not pay the bills.
It is common for companies to celebrate when media campaigns bring a lot of hits or downloads. But when these leads pass to the sales team, frustration begins:
- “They don't have budget.”
- “Don't have autonomy.”
- “Nem know what they're looking for.”
An essential question was missing at the beginning of the strategy: what is the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and who, in fact, signs the contract?
The deception of channel-only campaigns
Another recurring mistake: developing campaigns for “quem navigates”, not for those who decide. This happens when the briefing is centered on generic segmentations, not on decision-making behaviors.
In B2B marketing, the buyer is rarely a single person. There is a committee.There are influencers gatekeepers. And they can all click. But few decide.
According to Dreamdata, the average time between an ad click and the revenue generated is 235 days (almost 8 months). This means that most of those who click do not even participate in the final decision.
What to do differently: sell to the decision maker, not the curious
If you want to sell to those who decide, start like this:
- Accurately define the ICP: position, sector, digital maturity, real pain.
- Work on two fronts: Account Based Marketing (ABM) for decision makers through surgical and personalized campaigns; and inbound for influencers through educational and distributed content.
- Create content that speaks the language of the decision maker: C-Level executives do not want to know how it works.
- Integrate marketing and sales with clarity of purpose: alignment is more powerful than automation.
The role of marketing is not only to generate clicks. It is to educate the market, position value and attract those who can really say yes. The rest is noise.
Working with B2B marketing is increasingly understanding that we do not sell to those who click, we sell to those who influence and to those who decide. And who decides, often, has been influenced months before the first conversation with sales.
So if your next campaign is designed with the people who subscribe in mind, not the people who interact, you will see the difference in results, sales cycles and the quality of conversations.
