UK media buying for B2B marketers

A considered B2B purchase involves an economic buyer, a champion, an operator who will live with the decision, a finance approver and usually a risk or security veto. They have different questions, different fears and different media habits, and only some of them behave like the persona your campaign was built around.

LinkedIn addresses this well for the members who are professionally active there and are reachable during the working day. It addresses it poorly for the finance approver who does not read LinkedIn, and not at all for anyone in the evening.

The alternative is not better targeting. It is different targeting with a different failure mode: reaching the household rather than the person, and accepting that some of the impressions go to people who are not in the committee at all.

Connected TV is the strongest. Consent-chained marketplace segments — intent topics from company surge data, firmographic decision-maker segments — are delivered against streaming households, layered over city geography and a frequency cap. Where at least one segment matches your audience strongly, the compiled plan is graded person-level and scores 85 out of 100. Where matches are weak it drops to household at 65, and where nothing matches it falls back to geo-city household targeting at 60 rather than pretending.

Addressable television is a household proxy at 55, fixed: Experian Mosaic groups and occupation attributes intersected with postcode districts. You are buying homes whose profile over-indexes on the attribute you asked for. That score does not move however good the brief is.

Out-of-home is a property of a place rather than of a person, graded geo-cohort at 50: office buildings and rail stations at commute hours, because business professionals are known to be there. Audio sits at 65, content-level, buying the shows a business audience listens to rather than the audience itself.

Business segments are licensed data and carry a CPM uplift of roughly £2.50 on intent topics and £3.00 on firmographic segments. On a £20 media CPM that is 12.5 to 15% again, and it is the number most often missing from a proposal.

The audience is also small, which raises the media price independently. A narrow business audience in one city competes for a thin slice of inventory, and clears well above a broad national buy.

Both of these should appear on a plan before approval rather than in reconciliation afterwards. If a proposal quotes a media CPM without naming the data cost, ask for it.

The honest measurement position for B2B surround activity is that a four-week flight will not close a pipeline that takes two quarters. Agreeing what evidence the first campaign is expected to produce — before it runs — is the difference between a second campaign and a post-mortem.

What is usually achievable: deduplicated reach across the channels, observed response on your own property matched to the campaign's key, and a view of sequential exposure. What is usually not achievable in one flight: a causal claim about revenue, because the conversion volume and the window rarely power it.

The trap is accepting a last-click report at the end. It will credit search and starve the channels that created the demand search then harvested, which is precisely backwards for a surround strategy and will get the strategy cancelled.

Account-list matching is the capability B2B marketers ask for first and it is the one we do not have: there is no CRM connector and no account-list ingestion today. Audiences are defined semantically — sector, seniority, firmographics, geography — and compiled into segments built from the same underlying data.

Account-level outcome reporting is likewise absent. You will see campaign outcomes rather than account penetration.

If matching a named account list is the whole requirement, this is not yet the tool, and saying so now is cheaper for both sides than discovering it in week two.