B2B Advertising: Best Practices for Paid Ads in 2025

Introduction

Paid ads used to be the flashy thing marketing did while sales pounded the phones.

In 2025, that separation is killing a lot of B2B pipelines.

CPCs are higher, buyers are more skeptical, and most B2B teams can’t afford to pour money into campaigns that generate a bunch of downloads but almost no meetings. Average PPC CPCs now sit around $5.26, with average CPLs at roughly $70 across industries, and B2B sectors often paying well over $100 per lead. PPC.co 2025 SEM report

At the same time, buyers are doing more homework on their own. Roughly 81% of B2B buyers contact vendors only after they’ve gathered information and are ready to talk, and 85% say they’ve already defined their requirements by the time they speak to a rep. Thunderbit B2B buying stats

So your ads and content are the first sales conversation.

This guide breaks down how to run B2B paid advertising in 2025 so it actually helps your sales team: which channels to use, what benchmarks to expect, how to set up campaigns that align with SDR outreach, and how to measure success in terms of qualified pipeline-not just clicks.

Why Paid Advertising Still Matters For B2B In 2025

Buyers Are Self-Serving Before They Talk To You

The old playbook assumed sales was the entry point. Today, that’s rarely true.

Recent research shows:

• 81% of B2B buyers only contact vendors after they’ve done their own research.
• Buyers are roughly 69% through their journey before talking to sales.
• 80-90% compile a vendor shortlist early and 78% deeply evaluate only about three vendors. Thunderbit / Corporate Visions

If your brand and message aren’t in front of those buyers while they’re researching, there’s a good chance you never get invited to the conversation-no matter how good your SDRs are.

Paid ads give you:

• Scale: You can’t cold call the whole internet, but you can reach big swaths of your ICP with well-targeted campaigns.
• Control: You choose the narrative. Instead of prospects reading only competitor content and review sites, they see your story, your numbers, your customer proof.
• Speed: Launching new campaigns around an offer or market shift is much faster than building organic traffic from scratch.

Paid Ads As ‘Air Cover’ For SDRs

For B2B sales development, think of paid media as air support for your SDR “ground troops.”

When it’s done right:

• Prospects see your brand on LinkedIn or Google.
• They click through to content or just passively absorb your messaging.
• A few days later, your SDR calls or emails.

That outreach feels a lot less cold. The prospect recognizes your logo, maybe the problem you solve, and they’re more open to a conversation. Even when they don’t convert directly from the ad, you’ve warmed the account.

This is especially important given that buyers consume an average of 11 pieces of content before reaching out and 90% say online content has a moderate or major effect on decisions. Sopro buyer stats / Thunderbit

Choosing The Right Channels For B2B Paid Ads

Every channel has a job. The problem in most B2B orgs is they try to make every channel do every job.

Let’s break it down.

1. Search (Google/Bing): Capture Existing Demand

When someone types ‘best SOC 2 compliance software’ or ‘logistics management platform’ into Google, they’re not casually browsing. They have a problem and are actively looking for a solution.

That’s why search consistently punches above its weight in B2B:

• Recent Google Ads data shows average conversion rates for B2B search around 3.04%. VenueLabs / DemandSage
• Industry-wide, Google Ads conversion rates in 2025 sit between 3.1-6% depending on vertical. VenueLabs

For B2B, use search to:

• Capture bottom-of-funnel intent (e.g., ‘[category] software’, ‘[service] pricing’, ‘[competitor] alternative’).
• Re-engage warm accounts (retargeting in search for brand terms or competitor queries).

Best practices:

• Focus budgets on high-intent keywords, not just broad informational searches.
• Align landing pages tightly with query intent (search ‘SOC 2 software’? Land on SOC 2 product page, not a generic homepage).
• Exclude existing customers where appropriate to avoid bidding against yourself.

2. LinkedIn Ads: Reach Buying Committees Proactively

LinkedIn is still the B2B paid workhorse:

• Roughly 89% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn for lead generation and 62% say it’s a top source of leads. Market.biz
• It drives about 80% of all B2B social media leads and is rated the #1 platform for B2B lead gen. Radiate B2B
• Average conversion rate across formats is about 6.1%, with Lead Gen Forms converting at 10-15%. Radiate B2B / Market.biz

LinkedIn excels at:

• Reaching specific roles (CFOs at mid-market SaaS, Directors of Operations in manufacturing, etc.).
• Supporting ABM: targeting named account lists by company and job title.
• Promoting thought leadership and social proof to people who weren’t actively searching for you.

The tradeoff: it’s not cheap. Benchmarks show paid LinkedIn CPLs averaging $408 in B2B. Sopro

You justify that cost by:

• Targeting only high-value ICP accounts.
• Measuring down-funnel impact on opportunities and closed-won, not just top-of-funnel leads.

3. Display & Programmatic: Awareness And Retargeting

Display gets a bad rap in B2B-and deservedly so when used as a pure lead-gen channel.

Recent benchmarks show:

• 0.80% average B2B display conversion rate.
• $130.36 average B2B display CPA. StoreGrowers / WordStream

That’s not where you go hunting for cheap MQLs.

Where display shines:

• Retargeting: bringing back visitors who hit high-intent pages (pricing, product, comparison, case studies) but didn’t convert.
• Account-based awareness: saturating key accounts with your story so SDR outreach lands warmer.

There’s a classic case study where a B2B company added retargeting and saw a 278% increase in conversion rate on requested demos within 60 days. MarketingSherpa

The playbook: use display to stay visible and nudge engaged accounts over the line, not to cold-prospect random traffic.

4. CTV/OTT: High-Impact ABM

Connected TV (CTV) and OTT aren’t just for B2C anymore. As digital gains share, CTV/OTT are among the fastest-growing channels:

• Local CTV/OTT ad spend is forecast to grow about 29.3%, with digital accounting for 53.7% of local ad spend overall. BIA 2025 forecast

For B2B, CTV is a niche but powerful ABM tactic:

• Run targeted account lists through CTV platforms.
• Show high-level narrative or customer story videos to exec-level buyers who may ignore email and LinkedIn.

It’s typically a later-stage layer once you’ve maxed out search, LinkedIn, and retargeting, but it’s a strong differentiator in crowded enterprise markets.

Building A B2B Paid Media Strategy That Aligns With Sales

If marketing is running ads to ‘get leads’ and sales is cold calling a completely different list, you’re just burning budget.

Step 1: Start With ICP, Not Channels

Before you touch Google or LinkedIn, get crisp on:

• Firmographics: industry, company size, geography, tech stack.
• Buying roles: budget owners, champions, blockers.
• Triggers: hiring patterns, funding, regulatory changes, tech migrations.

Then build one source of truth for target accounts:

• Pull from your CRM’s best customers and highest-velocity deals.
• Layer intent data if you have it.
• Get sales to review and annotate (who they love, who they don’t want to talk to again).

This master list becomes fuel for:

• LinkedIn Matched Audiences.
• Google Customer Match.
• Programmatic/ABM platforms.
• SDR call and email sequences.

Everyone targets the same core universe.

Step 2: Match Campaigns To Funnel Stages

Think of your campaigns in three buckets.

1. Awareness (Top of Funnel)

Goal: get in front of ICP accounts and educate them about a painful problem.

Channels:

• LinkedIn Sponsored Content (video, carousels, document ads).
• Display/Programmatic (targeting account lists).
• CTV/OTT (for bigger plays).

Offers:

• Ungated frameworks, checklists, or diagnostic content.
• Short videos with customer stories or ‘X mistakes’ style education.
• Industry benchmarks that make people say, ‘Yikes, we’re behind.’

No hard CTAs yet-you’re earning attention.

2. Consideration (Mid-Funnel)

Goal: deepen engagement and start a real evaluation.

Channels:

• LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms.
• Retargeting (display + LinkedIn) to visitors and video watchers.
• Search for more specific problem queries.

Offers:

• Detailed guides, ROI calculators, toolkits.
• Use-case specific content (‘Security operations for fintech’, not just ‘security’).
• Webinars with practitioners, not just product pitches.

Here you can start using soft CTAs like ‘Talk to an expert’ or ‘See how companies like you are doing X.’

3. Decision (Bottom of Funnel)

Goal: get them to talk to sales, request a demo, or sign.

Channels:

• High-intent search (brand + category keywords).
• Strong retargeting to high-intent visitors.
• Direct response LinkedIn ads to engaged segments.

Offers:

• Product demos.
• Live consultations.
• Trials or pilots.
• Competitor comparison pages and ROI proof.

This is where you measure hard pipeline: SALs, SQOs, opportunities, revenue.

Step 3: Wire Paid Into SDR Workflows

This is where a lot of teams drop the ball. Leads come in from paid, and then… nothing good happens.

What ‘good’ looks like:

1. Routing: Paid leads go into the CRM with clear source, campaign, and offer details. SDRs know exactly what the prospect saw.
2. Speed-to-lead: AEs or SDRs follow up within minutes or hours, not days. Remember, 90% of buyers expect an ‘immediate’ response.
3. Contextual outreach: SDR emails reference the ad or content: ‘Saw you downloaded our 2025 manufacturing operations benchmark…’
4. Shared views: Sales can see which accounts have high ad engagement even if they haven’t converted-perfect warm-call targets.

This is also where an outsourced SDR partner like SalesHive can be a force multiplier: marketing drives the inbound/paid side, SalesHive SDRs work that same universe of accounts via cold calling and email, and both report into the same pipeline metrics.

Creative, Messaging, And Offers: What Actually Converts In B2B

Most B2B ad accounts don’t suffer from bad targeting; they suffer from boring creative.

There’s a reason you see examples where a company drops LinkedIn CPL by 80% just by changing creative and messaging, with no change in targeting or budget. When your ads finally say something prospects care about, everything gets cheaper.

Lead With The Pain, Not Your Product

Your ideal buyer is not scrolling LinkedIn thinking, ‘I wish I could see another ad about a feature grid.’

They’re thinking about:

• Missed targets.
• Security risks.
• Slow onboarding.
• Churn.

Your messaging needs to meet them there.

Bad: ‘Next-gen cloud-native observability platform.’

Better: ‘Your engineers waste 10+ hours a week chasing down incidents. Here’s how to get that time back.’

On search, this shows up in ad copy and landing page headlines. On LinkedIn, it’s your hook and visual.

Use Specific, Credible Proof

Vague claims don’t move serious buyers. Specific ones do.

Examples:

• ‘Cut average onboarding time from 21 days to 5.’
• ‘Reduced cost per qualified opportunity by 37%.’
• ‘Booked 153 meetings in 5 months for an HR tech client’ (a real SalesHive case study result).

Use:

• Metrics from your best case studies.
• Named logos where allowed.
• Third-party benchmarks to frame the problem.

Match Format To Message

Some quick format guidance:

• LinkedIn video: Great for high-level narratives, founder/exec POVs, and quick problem-teaser → CTA.
• Document ads: Perfect for ‘swipeable’ guides, frameworks, and checklists; they tend to earn strong engagement in B2B. Refine Labs benchmarks
• Carousels: Use for stories (before/after) or multi-part frameworks.
• Static single image: Fine for simple offers, but don’t rely on them alone.

Offers That Actually Earn A Click

In 2025, nobody is dying to give up their email for another generic ebook.

Better-performing offers include:

• Benchmarks and scorecards (e.g., ‘2025 SOC 2 readiness benchmark’).
• ROI calculators tied to real inputs.
• Short, tactical webinars with real practitioners (not just your product team).
• Mini tools or templates: scripts, checklists, dashboards.

If you’re going to ask someone to fill a form on LinkedIn (where CPLs are high), the perceived value needs to be significantly above average.

Budgeting, Bidding, And Measurement For B2B Performance

Get Real About Benchmarks

Let’s set expectations using current data:

• Average PPC CPC: about $5.26 across industries, up from $4.66 in 2024. PPC.co
• Average PPC conversion rate: around 7.52%. PPC.co
• Average PPC CPL: about $70.11, with B2B and legal sectors frequently above $100.
• Average B2B Google Display CVR: 0.80%; CPA: $130.36. StoreGrowers/WordStream
• Average paid LinkedIn CPL: $408; PPC: $463 in broad B2B benchmarks. Sopro

These numbers are not meant to scare you-they’re the reality of 2025. Ignoring them just leads to bad planning conversations.

Start From Revenue, Work Backwards

Instead of asking ‘What’s a good CPL?’, ask:

1. What’s our average deal size?
2. What’s our lead → opportunity → closed-won funnel look like today?
3. What’s an acceptable CAC payback (12, 18, 24 months)?

Example:

• Average deal: $40,000.
• Lead → Opp: 10%.
• Opp → Closed: 25%.
• So lead → Closed: 2.5%.

If you spend $400 per lead and convert 2.5% to closed-won, your CAC is $16,000. That’s a 2.5x CAC: LTV ratio on a $40K deal-maybe fine, maybe not, depending on margins and expansion.

Now you know whether $400 CPL on LinkedIn is acceptable for you, not just in a vacuum.

Don’t Let The Algorithm Chase Junk Leads

A common pattern:

• Team sets ‘maximize conversions’ with a goal of cheap form fills.
• Algorithm discovers that broad audience + low-intent offers = lots of ‘leads’.
• SDRs hate their lives.

Fix it by:

• Defining primary conversions as demo requests, pricing requests, or high-intent hand-raisers.
• Importing offline conversions (opportunities, SQOs, revenue) from your CRM so Google and LinkedIn can optimize to qualified leads.
• Using Target CPA or Target ROAS based on meaningful numbers, not just ‘we heard $100 CPL is good.’

There’s even anecdotal evidence from PPC managers that removing Target CPA entirely can spike lead volume but tank quality, because the algorithm goes hunting for cheap-but-useless conversions. Reddit PPC discussion

Judge Channels On Pipeline, Not Vanity Metrics

For each channel and campaign, you should be able to answer:

• How many SALs/SQOs did this create?
• What’s the cost per opportunity?
• How many meetings did SDRs book with ad-engaged accounts versus cold accounts?

This is where strong SDR operations and clear handoff processes matter. If sales doesn’t log contact attempts and outcomes, you’re flying blind on the paid side.

Advanced Plays: Retargeting, ABM, And AI-Powered Personalization

Once you’ve got the basics working, here’s how to level up.

Always-On Retargeting Around High-Intent Signals

Retargeting is one of the highest-ROI plays in B2B when done thoughtfully.

Set up audiences for:

• Visitors to pricing, product, and case study pages.
• People who clicked from SDR emails to your site.
• LinkedIn engagers (video views, document opens, lead form opens).

Then build:

• Search retargeting (RLSA) for your brand and core category terms.
• LinkedIn retargeting with strong proof (case studies, testimonials) and direct CTAs.
• Display retargeting to stay visible and remind them of the problem you solve.

This is how you turn anonymous website traffic into booked demos instead of just pageviews.

True ABM: Same Accounts Across Ads, SDR, And Events

Account-based marketing isn’t just using a fancy ABM platform; it’s about orchestrating channels around the same list of accounts.

A simple but effective ABM motion:

1. Marketing and sales agree on a tiered account list (Tier 1, 2, 3).
2. Marketing runs LinkedIn + display campaigns only to those accounts.
3. SDRs prioritize outbound to the same accounts, referencing relevant content.
4. If you’re doing events, you cross-reference attendees with your ABM list and run pre- and post-event campaigns.

Results you’ll see when this is working:

• Higher reply rates on SDR emails.
• More meetings from target accounts.
• Shorter sales cycles because the buying committee isn’t starting from zero.

AI And First-Party Data: Your Real Advantage

As ad platforms bake in more AI, your edge is no longer ‘better targeting hacks.’ It’s better data and better creative.

Use AI for:

• Scoring accounts and leads: prioritizing who sees which offers.
• Creative testing: generating and iterating ad copy variations faster.
• Personalized outbound that mirrors paid messaging.

This is exactly the philosophy behind tools like SalesHive’s eMod, which uses AI to transform templates into highly personalized cold emails based on public data about the prospect and their company.

When your emails and ads are both personalized and aligned, prospects feel like you actually understand their world-because, in effect, the AI has helped you do the homework.

How This Applies To Your Sales Team

Let’s bring this back to practical sales development.

Scenario 1: SDR Leader With Stagnant Meeting Volume

Your SDRs are working hard, but meetings aren’t growing and connect rates feel random.

How paid helps:

• Upload your best-guess ICP accounts to LinkedIn and Google.
• Run awareness and retargeting campaigns that explain the problem you solve, not just your product name.
• Give SDRs a view of which accounts engaged with ads.

Now reps can:

• Prioritize calls to ad-engaged accounts.
• Reference the specific content prospects saw (‘I noticed a few people from your team downloaded our 2025 compliance checklist…’).

You haven’t changed SDR headcount or activity targets-you’ve just made their world warmer.

Scenario 2: Marketing Team Floods Sales With MQLs, SDRs Are Drowning

You’re getting hundreds of leads from gated content, but SDRs complain they’re low-quality and conversion to opportunities is terrible.

How to fix it:

• Change optimization goals from ‘any form fill’ to high-intent actions (demos, pricing requests) and import opportunity data back into the ad platforms.
• Create lead tiers: Tier A = high-intent hand-raisers, Tier B = content engagers, Tier C = low-fit.
• Route Tier A to SDRs immediately; Tier B into nurture sequences and ad retargeting; Tier C into light nurture only.

Now SDRs spend their time where it counts, instead of churning through everyone who downloaded a checklist.

Scenario 3: You’re Scaling Into A New Vertical

You’re strong in SaaS but want to break into manufacturing or financial services.

Paid ads give you a faster path to:

• Test vertical-specific messaging and offers.
• Identify which job titles and company sizes actually engage.
• Generate initial case studies and customer proof in the new segment.

Sales can then:

• Use those early wins and content in cold outreach.
• Refine scripts using real response data from ads.

This is how you avoid months of SDRs ‘learning the hard way’ with cold calls only.

Where SalesHive Fits

If you don’t have in-house SDR capacity-or your team is maxed out-this is where a partner like SalesHive plugs in.

• Marketing runs campaigns on search, LinkedIn, and display to your ICP.
• SalesHive’s US-based and Philippines-based SDR teams call and email into the same account lists, referencing the exact campaigns and content prospects have seen.
• Our research teams keep your target and contact lists clean and fresh, so you’re not paying to show ads to the wrong people.

The result: fewer dropped balls between ‘lead’ and ‘meeting booked,’ and a much clearer line from ad spend to pipeline.

Conclusion + Next Steps

Paid advertising in B2B isn’t getting cheaper or easier. Average CPLs are up, CPCs are higher, and buyers are more skeptical. But that also means the bar is higher for your competitors.

If you:

• Treat paid media as an extension of your SDR team, not a separate universe.
• Align on ICP, offers, and account lists across marketing and sales.
• Optimize to qualified opportunities and revenue, not just lead volume.
• Invest in creative and messaging that actually speak to buyer pain.
• Use retargeting, ABM, and AI to squeeze more value from the attention you’re already paying for…

…then paid ads become one of the most reliable ways to feed your team a steady diet of warm, qualified conversations.

Your practical next steps:

1. Audit your current paid programs against the benchmarks and frameworks in this guide.
2. Get sales and marketing in a room to define shared ICP, offers, and qualified opportunity metrics.
3. Stand up or tighten always-on retargeting around your highest-intent signals.
4. Build a quarterly creative testing roadmap instead of ‘set and forget’ ads.
5. If your in-house team is tapped, explore an SDR partner like SalesHive to make sure every high-intent click has a human follow-up.

The platforms will keep changing. Algorithms will keep evolving. But the fundamentals won’t: the teams that win are the ones that use paid ads to start real conversations with the right people-and then have the sales muscle to turn those conversations into revenue.