The Secret Sauce to Winning in B2B? Be Unforgettable.

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Canberk (our paid media wizard 🪄) to discuss how B2B marketing is evolving in today's experience economy. If you missed our webinar (I won’t take it personally), I've compiled the key takeaways below—but there are some juicy details and campaign examples in the recording you won’t want to miss!

What is the "Experience Economy"?

Before diving into our takeaways, let's address what we mean by the "experience economy." We're not just selling services anymore. Services have been commodified, AI is democratizing (ahem, diluting the quality of) content and people are looking for meaningful experiences wrapped around what they buy.

Think about it: Why do airport lounges exist? Because the experience of sipping a free matcha latte in a beautiful space creates an emotional connection that the airline brand alone cannot.

In B2B, this means creating memorable, omnichannel experiences that break through the digital noise and connect with people on a personal level. 

5 Hot Takes from Our Webinar

1. Traditional B2B Marketing Is… Kind of Broken

Let’s be real: 50% of B2B buyers think most ads are boring. Yikes. Too many agencies are still running the same tired playbook, focused on spend over actual results, and forgetting there’s a real human on the other end.

Hot take: We tested the impact of using the word “AI” in our ads (every leadership team is trying to slap AI on everything right now). Because everyone is seeing so much trash content about “AI”, using it in ads actually reduces conversion rates. People ignore corporate speak, so stop trying to cram the B2B buzzword of the minute into your copy and make them really feel something.

2. Speak Like a Human (Please)

At the end of the day, marketing is just psychology. We’re trying to grab attention, spark emotion, and get people to care. But most B2B content sounds like it was written by a robot in a suit. Our experiments have proven that the less buzzwordy robot vibes we inflict upon our audience, the better the conversion rates.

Hot take: Be human. Be weird. Be funny. People remember what makes them feel something—and no one’s feeling inspired by “synergize cross-functional alignment.”

3. Test. Test. Test. And Be Okay With Failure.

Want better results? Test more but do it with intention. We’ve adopted a structured experimentation model that starts with real questions about our audience, not just “what happens if we change the button color.”

Hot Take: If everything you try is working, you’re not experimenting hard enough. 20% of experiments that work will bring 80% of your success—and that’s a feature, not a bug. Just make sure that you set a clear goal and build a framework to identify what’s working and why.

4. Experiences Matter

Our best-performing campaigns didn’t stop at the scroll. They turned into IRL moments that people actually wanted to engage with. Like our Severance TV show-themed campaign, which included emotional community nominations and wrapped up with live goats 🐐 and a dance floor (yes, really).

Hot Take: In the experience economy, the brands that win are the ones investing in community (giving expecting nothing in return) and creating unforgettable moments—blending digital with real-life magic to actually stick with customers.

5. Pipeline > Vanity Metrics

Impressions are nice, but pipeline is better. We shifted our focus to what actually drives revenue by tying paid efforts back to the CRM and tracking account-level patterns.

Hot Take: To prove marketing's value, especially in paid channels, you must connect everything back to pipeline impact. We’re setting realistic expectations and giving ourselves about a month to run experiments so we can really learn —then looking at patterns (not coincidences) of engagement that lead to qualified opportunities.

🔍 Audience Q&A Spotlight

We got some 🔥 questions during the webinar, and they were too good not to share. Here’s a quick look at a few that stood out:

Q: How do you get paid touchpoints to come up in multi-touch attribution reporting if you're not getting true campaign responses? If you're not leading to form fills, how are people qualifying for campaigns and showing up in attribution?

A: We do see hand-raiser conversions come straight from ad-driven form fills. Where we don’t, we lean hard into patterns over coincidences. With tools like Dreamdata (or even GA + your CRM — Canberk also suggested lower budget tools like Power my Analytics, Supermetrics, and Reporting Ninja), we can see when multiple people on the buying committee of a hot account have clicked on our ads right before finally converting.

If they saw our ads a few months ago, great — they’re learning and warming up to the ideal. But if there are a flurry of actual clicks across the buying committee right before they raise their hand? That’s a signal. We're not going for the “marketing influences every deal” story here (while true, that doesn’t help us fine-tune our investments or demonstrate the pipeline impact of this particular channel)—we're looking for meaningful engagement with multiple decision-makers and influencers in the time period right before the conversion to meeting booked in order to call a win.

Q: How do you track if ads are driving pipeline when paid is often part of many touches in the full journey? What gets the "credit"?

A: At Sendoso, we're not battling for credit between sales and marketing. We're trying to understand and document what worked to forge relationships with as many people inside of our target accounts as possible so we can repeat it. This requires tight sales and marketing collaboration.

We use Dreamdata to map out all the folks inside a target account who clicked our ads around the same time, and then quickly went on to engage deeper. While we’re looking for patterns that show our ads are working (or not) to drive pipeline so we can make data-based decisions on budget and strategy, we’re also looking at the full account-level picture.

Sure, we track last-touch for opps, but what we care about is seeing the whole journey across the account and what’s working together to drive conversions, accelerate deals, boost win rates and increase deal sizes. That’s the story that matters. This is why, when an AE is actively working an open opp, we spend marketing budget to multi-thread that account with ads tailored to each persona in the buying committee. We don’t just stop at qualified pipeline — we’re partnering to drive revenue. 

Q: What formats work best for social-based ads? E.g., Thought Leadership? Testimonials?

A: We’re seeing success with repurposing webinars as document ads, with genuine thought leadership ads highlighting our team and community, with authentic conversational and video ads, with social proof from our customers, and UserGems retargeting. What surprised me (in the best way) was that some of our top-performing ads weren’t even about Sendoso—they were about marketers being marketers. Real talk, real pain points, real personality.

We've seen great success with:

• Human, conversational content (aka, write like you talk)
• Thought leadership that addresses pain points
• Fun, weird stuff that makes people pause mid-scroll (like our Cookie Monster campaign)
• User-generated content repurposed from our community (these have insanely high CTRs)

The key insight is that your paid social strategy needs layers. For top-of-funnel audiences, focus on the pain, not your product, and build trust. For engaged audiences, social proof and case studies work better. For remarketing, interactive demos and direct calls-to-action perform well.

How We Put These Insights into Action

At Sendoso, we didn’t just talk the talk - we flipped our strategy based on what we learned:

1. We segmented our audience based on pain points, not just demographics. Because different roles = different vibes = different messages.
2. We reused community content strategically, turning organic social posts into high-performing paid campaigns that felt authentic and drove significant pipeline.
3. We got weird (in a cool way). Cookie Monster? Iconic. Oompa Loompas? Yes please. Shrek? Not a hit... but hey, not every experiment’s a winner.
4. We connected digital campaigns to physical experiences, turning scroll-stopping ads into memorable IRL experiences.
5. We built a hypothesis and testing framework that allowed us to quickly identify what was working and scale it across campaigns.

The result? Our highest paid pipeline ever. And we’re talking sales-qualified pipeline, not just vanity metrics. The kind of numbers that make revenue teams do a happy dance. 💃🕺

Moving Beyond the "Gumball Machine" Mentality

Marketing isn’t a gumball machine (thank you, Jon Miller). We can’t just pump in more budget and expect more magic to pop out immediately. 95% of our target audience isn’t ready to buy yet, so we need to connect with them, earn trust and be memorable before we start selling the product. 

B2B growth in the experience economy is about thoughtful, human-first experimentation that makes us unforgettable—not throwing money at the same stale playbook.

Spend smart. Test often. Fail often. Be courageous.

Want to Learn More?

This recap is just the highlight reel. For all the juicy details—campaign examples, testing frameworks, and even more ways to craft memorable brand experiences—catch the full webinar here.

You’ll walk away with strategies to shake up your marketing, connect with buyers, and drive pipeline that actually moves the needle.

Got questions or just want to nerd out over creative marketing ideas? You can find me on LinkedIn. 😎