How to Market a B2B Business Without Relying on Pay Per Click

Your marketing department is most likely spending more money than it generates. Pay-per-click and LinkedIn ads are your two biggest recurring costs outside of salaries — and the vast majority of B2B businesses cannot prove a single pound of return from either.

Marketing automation arrived around 2010, wiring demand generation to landing pages in the hope that browsers would fill in forms so that BDRs could cold call them for appointments. By 2016, Account Based Marketing was being bolted on top of the same broken foundation. None of it worked effectively, and for one simple reason: virtually 100% of buyers hate filling in forms. They always have. We knew this. The industry sold it anyway.

Most businesses are paying somewhere between £0.50 and £1.00 per click. Very few marketers are willing to calculate the real ROI and trace genuine attribution. The question is a simple one: which actual customers can you prove clicked a pay-per-click advert, filled out a form, connected with the company, and then bought something? If you cannot answer that, you do not have a marketing strategy. You have an expense account.

Understand Where You Are Before You Decide Where to Go

Businesses fail. That is a fact of commercial life. The more interesting question is why. CB Insights research attributes over 50% of business failures directly to poor marketing activities. That should stop you cold.

Our research and published figures from the FT and Harvard Business School tell a consistent story:

• 20% of businesses fail in the 1^st year
• 30% of businesses fail in the 2^nd year
• 50% of businesses fail in the 3^rd year
• 91% of businesses fail by the 10^th year

• 40% of all investor-backed businesses fail outright
• 75% of all investor-backed businesses fail to hit their own targets
• 95% of all investor-backed businesses fail to deliver an ROI to investors

And yet, the same patterns repeat year after year. There is a profound apathy inside SME and enterprise B2B marketing. The entrepreneurially creative people who could change things either do not get hired, or when they do appear, they get ignored — or quietly managed out for making everyone else look bad. If you have spent the last decade wondering why nothing is moving, this is why.

Yes, things really are as bad as they look. Possibly worse. But that also means the opportunity to pull ahead is enormous for the businesses willing to face it honestly.

The Reality of B2B Revenue

The average revenue per person per year for SaaS businesses — annual recurring revenue per full-time equivalent, or ARR-FTE — tells the real story.

The fact that most businesses are sitting at around £90k per head explains why so many keep going back for more investment, or simply go under. These numbers have not shifted in a decade. Which tells you something important: most new business is still being won by salespeople doing what salespeople have always done. Everything the marketing department built around them has not changed the outcome one bit.

Meanwhile, the budget imbalance has become extraordinary. Sales teams often operate on zero budget. Marketing, by contrast, commands extensive headcount and an average spend of around 10% of gross profit — with a staggering proportion of that locked into MarTech SaaS subscriptions that nobody audits properly.

MarTech did not just eat part of the budget. It inflated B2B go-to-market team sizes by roughly five times what they needed to be. Every year a new platform promised to fix the pipeline. Every year the results stayed the same.

The MarTech Infographic

As of 2025, the MarTech landscape has grown to 15,384 platforms — up 9% in a single year, and more than 100 times larger than it was in 2011.

Nearly half of all the SaaS platforms in the world are related to marketing. That is not a coincidence. B2B businesses have been the perfect customer for MarTech: anxious about pipeline, desperate for a solution, and willing to sign another subscription in the hope that this one will be the one. It never is. Because the tool is not the problem. The model is.

Business owners do not buy new solutions for fun. They buy them to increase profitability and expect a return. They are not buying a holiday or a new car. They are making a business case. And yet, for fifteen years, B2B marketers have been applying consumer logic to business purchases and wondering why the numbers do not add up.

Work Out Your True Gross Profit First

Everything in B2B comes back to gross profit. That metric has to sit at the front of any budget decision. The exercise is not complicated. Take your last ten deals and trace them back to their source.

Before you compare a pay-per-click cost against the gross profit from a deal, make sure you are including the entire marketing budget — every SaaS subscription, every tool licence, every salary in the department. All of it. Then look at the number.

The SEO landscape for B2B has shifted dramatically too. Following the Google data leak and the ongoing antitrust case, most B2Bs are beginning to understand why they have experienced such poor results from digital marketing. They listened to marketing making promises. Marketing never delivered and never analysed. Current demand gen, ABM, PPC, SEO — all of it is now proven to fail at any realistic budget unless you have very deep pockets. The general consensus is to build your B2B presence outside of Google entirely.

The Solution to B2B Growth

For once, it is not about buying more SaaS. Businesses need to stop, take stock, and ask an honest question about why new business has not been as forthcoming as planned — and I chose that word carefully. Not expected. Planned.

Start by looking inward. Ask the other people in the boardroom the most obvious question in the world: "How do you buy?" As individuals, every single one of us wants to get to know, like and trust someone before we hand over money. That is not a theory. That is how you behave. So why are you marketing to your prospects in a way that ignores it?

A new approach starts with CEOs putting themselves in the shoes of their prospects and building an infrastructure designed to serve those prospects before they become customers. Instruct your teams to treat prospects the way you would want to be treated if the boot was on the other foot.

Transparency is the foundation. Transparency to prospects, customers, partners and employees. That mindset change is what begins to shift your presence, both online and off.

We know from our research — and it is confirmed by 6Sense and Gartner data — that 83% of B2B buyers define their purchase requirements before they ever speak to a salesperson. They self-serve, self-educate, and calculate their own ROI in private. By the time they call you, they have usually already decided. Your job is to be visible, credible and helpful during that silent phase — not to interrupt it with a form.

Give them everything they need and wait for them to come to you. I know that sounds uncomfortable if you have spent years being told to go out and find the business. The cost of doing that — cold calling, PPC, automation, outbound SDRs — has been enormous and the results have been marginal. That is why we recommend starting the new strategy in parallel to whatever you are doing now. As one grows, the other shrinks. You do not have to stop overnight.

Rethinking Marketing: A Step-by-Step Summary

We identified in 2018 that marketing and SEO had already turned a corner for the worse. B2Bs needed video, podcasts and live streaming to communicate with their market in a way that actually worked. Content had to educate prospects — get them to know, like and trust a new vendor — before any commercial conversation made sense. Read more across our SEO articles and our guide to B2B performance marketing for the full picture on why organic and paid search behave so differently for B2B.

The core steps are straightforward:

• Stop listening to marketing and become sales-driven again
• Make your website open access — remove the forms
• Adapt your content to educate prospects, using video wherever possible
• Write articles structured around Who, What, When, Where, Why and How
• Broadcast a weekly live show on LinkedIn and convert it to a podcast
• Email market to your total addressable market
• Post 10 to 15 in-house adverts every day on social media to promote your content
• Do not repeat an advert within the same month

Where This Leaves You

I have spent thirty years in sales and marketing, starting on the phones at 18, running technology businesses, and watching what actually happens when companies follow the advice the industry has been selling them. I am not an academic. I built this methodology from watching businesses waste money on things that do not work.

You are a CEO or a founder. You are not expected to be a marketing expert. But you have been led to believe that you know enough about marketing, and that your CMO is simply an extension of your collective plan. The reality I see time and again is a CMO agreeing with everything the CEO says in order to keep the job. That is not strategy. That is sycophancy — and it does not pay the bills.

Spencer Stuart's 2025 CMO tenure study puts the average at around 4.1 years across S&P 500 companies — still the shortest of any C-suite role. In my experience with mid-market B2B, the effective window is much tighter: roughly three months to form a plan, twelve months to execute it, and three months working out the exit. Sycophants cannot sustain performance, and the tenure data proves it.

There is a complete plan and a proven strategy available to you, with everything mapped out from start to finish. But nothing changes overnight. No one can click their fingers and undo fifteen years of misdirection. The damage that has been done — by well-intentioned but commercially blind marketing — takes time to correct. For most businesses, it is almost like starting again. The difference is that this time, you will know exactly what you are building and why.