Ciente Editorial Team - Ciente

BlogsJuly 17, 2025August 27, 2025

Creative Strategy Meets Data: Fragmented Dashboards to Strategic Narratives

Creative strategy and data are assumed to be at odds. But in reality, their strategic alignment fuels campaigns that emotionally connect and convert.

Across the B2B landscape, creativity isn’t merely about coming up with fresh ideas. It’s just one piece of the entire puzzle in this data-driven landscape.

The missing piece is the fusion between your creative strategy and data, an aspect HubSpot excels at.

HubSpot understands that the true nexus of effective marketing strategies is rooted in creating solutions that resonate with its target audience. And even with a reservoir of customer data, it doesn’t just believe in crunching numbers to achieve its outcomes.

Instead, HubSpot infuses data-backed insights into its strategic frameworks, even ones that demand creative prowess.

The result?

Imaginative content that engages as well as converts. This seamless blend between creative strategy and data is the foundation of HubSpot’s success story.

Data isn’t the supporting act here, but becomes the backbone of creative decisions.

With a robust data-driven creative strategy in action, businesses can undertake informed but bold steps that shape the brand’s story. And bridges any remaining gap between the brand and its audience, something that no generic strategy can achieve.

It’s evident – Data can help elevate your creative strategy, not dent it.

As both industry giants illustrated, the wealth of audience data can amplify your creative prowess. You can take a chance on creating unique content because the business can deliver it to the most promising audience segment.

And this is what the audience seems to want from digital marketplaces, whether it’s a streaming service or an e-commerce platform.

In a landscape saturated with data, marketers are facing a new challenge. Initially, it was data scarcity; now it’s making logical sense of the data clusters.

And with data having become the heart of modern marketing strategies, there’s a need to unknot the complexities. Too much of it, across dashboards, platforms, and channels, can create real confusion and mess up the campaigns. It can subdue your efforts.

Instead, data must amplify and polish your strategies.

The solution here is to create a structure. One that doesn’t just collect data but offers it relevance and context.

This is the primary starting point. Owing to which, you aren’t just focusing on random data points, but the ones that matter.

Take Salesforce, for example.

Just like HubSpot, Salesforce is sitting on a goldmine of audience data. And its entire marketing roadmap is built on catering to customer preferences and delighting them.

Amidst all the available audience data, what takes precedence is user satisfaction. For this, they don’t rely on data alone. But it’s fusion with creative energy.

Salesforce leverages data to connect businesses with the relevant and accurate tools and solutions. Companies are matched with the most effective CRM tool and training resources for them.

It’s not just about data. But understanding the individual requirements of each customer and offering them exactly what they need.

Combining data with your creative strategy boils down to the customer experience.

Like any SaaS company, Salesforce has a plethora of solutions flooding the marketplace. But when you add data to the toolbox, your audience is more likely to receive content that aligns with their pain points.

It’s about orchestrating and polishing the entire customer experience. And introducing a data-driven creative strategy fosters a more customer-centric approach.

Not just promise it, but build on it.

But this shouldn’t be carried out based on intuition or gut feelings.

Each marketing effort must be backed by data intelligence.

This is why data-driven insights envelop the heart of business storytelling.

Data and creativity have never been siloed marketing functions. Marketing is aware of the 360-degree purview that data offers of the business and its clients. Because clean data provides informed insights and truth, adding context, turning inferences into statements.

Data is your creative compass; you can leverage it to direct a bucketload of data into focused storytelling.

How do you translate all the technical jargon into a macro story your stakeholders can get behind?

You cull through the datasets to weave a story that not only aligns with the buyer journey, but also nitpicks the inadequacies and cracks.

And this is how you can begin –

1. Skim through your data to gauge key insights.

There’s obviously a significant load of complex data at your disposal. And now, you must make logic of it all. To ascertain this, you can organize the data into themes and pinpoint what is relevant and truthful.

You cannot highlight every available insight; it must be purposeful for it to be actionable. Take a step back and gain clarity – is your business ready to tackle this particular challenge?

As you answer this, synthesize your data. And align the necessary ones under a single framework, ensuring consistency in your storytelling. There might be several pain points, but approaching the entire process from multiple angles might create a disjuncture.

However, a cohesive storyline will provide a comprehensive view into the buyer journey and their experiences. You must ask nuanced questions that dig deep into the frictions they could face as they progress through:

What type of lead was facing this particular problem?
Under what circumstances was the problem based?
At which stage of the funnel did they encounter the problem?
Are their decisions helping them move forward seamlessly or causing them to drop off?
What were the leads’ experiences?

Combining the answers to these questions could easily be your turning point.

2. Find the right tangent for your creative strategy.

It’s a known fact that data can help you segment your audiences. It tells you who they are, where they are, and where they came from.

Knowing your audience is a fundamental but primary step across this framework. It’s not just a necessity, but a prerequisite where all your campaigns emerge from.

So, once you’ve outlined who your audience is, you must unpack: what your audience needs to know to make their decisions. This will help you create an informed opinion and a roadmap on what you can do about it.

And it’ll also form the foundational basis for your creative strategy.

This way, you can simplify or dig deep into your story, based on the audience on the other side of the panel. You can frame it under a single lens, but also allow agility to expand or contract it.

Clarity will help highlight the key insights gauged from the data, allowing you to answer the most critical pain point. And your data should support every single layer of the strategy.

See, every buying committee and the decision-makers within it hold distinct perspectives. They have different priorities and motivations.

This could pose a crucial challenge for your marketing team. But by leveraging data to polish your creative strategy, you are embedding relevance and context. There’s clarity and cohesion to your claims.

And if it doesn’t indulge the outcomes you expected, there’s a creative clue in there as well.

Data should drive your every business story.

3. Let data inspire your creativity; don’t be boring.

Data shouldn’t be treated as a diagnostic tool. But that’s where marketing teams stumble. They look beyond data as a rigid and inflexible burden on creativity.

But when used the right way, it actually helps you deliver creative clarity.

Millions of emails are sent daily. But most of it’s just noise.

So, ensure that your content stands out and is considered amidst the clutter. You must step into the shoes of the marketing professionals you’re targeting to get a clearer view on how to.

Without this insight, the content mustered up could turn out monotonous and fail to resonate.

Don’t think content is created for the sake of it. It should embed intent and hold a purpose. This is what’ll build the connection, as Netflix did by tapping into the preferences of its intended audience.

But the tech landscape isn’t synonymous with the entertainment one. A majority of the content here does lean into being dry and cut-throat, straightforward.

Creativity is subjective or on a spectrum, you can say. It can be a flavorful graphic in a minimalistic email newsletter or a subject line.

All you must do is ascertain that your datasets aren’t dragging down the team’s artistic spirit. And actually uphold it. Ensure your marketing team is creative and data-literate.

It can be taxing, but that’s what must happen to establish a data-driven creative nucleus.

Balancing data and creative strategy: An example

Your brand website is where aesthetic vision and data-powered optimization converge.

Creatives in charge of the website focus on the look and feel. Meanwhile, data-powered marketing focuses on tweaking the site to enhance its performance and effectiveness. It’s a battleground with two conflicting perspectives:

The creatives who fear their work will be slaughtered by those focused on the metrics.
And the data “scientists” who question the point of artistic work that’s not generating outcomes.

This is where a balanced approach becomes imperative. The goal isn’t for a side to win but to streamline both perspectives.

A compelling design that doesn’t convert is a wasted opportunity. But a high-converting website layout that hampers the brand perception is just as damaging.

The same applies to email campaigns. Imagine a witty email that goes unopened or a robotic email template that erodes brand trust. Both can equally hamper your business.

The sweet spot? Collaborative iteration.

Creatives must understand data insights, and analysts have to respect the craft of storytelling. And the result is a campaign that connects and converts.

It’s all a matter of alignment and momentum.

And this is where the overall interplay between creative strategy and data boils down to precision.

Data helps sharpen your narratives, instilling cohesion in every strategic nook.

This is where marketing teams truly fumble. They continue to perceive data as a diagnostic tool, not a facet that can foster creativity.

But creativity is only a single plot point in your entire marketing story. And the data in your palms could help you spotlight the defining aspect of your marketing endeavors.

Data offers clarity with precision – creative certainty, adding purpose and direction to your content. Precision doesn’t constrain creativity but motivates it. It narrows down the aperture so that your message hits where it actually matters.

Every narrative, message, and campaign gains a polished edge when powered with data. This way, your storytelling is driven by refined and informed insights, not dull logic or intuition.

It’s about being particular about which channels to prioritize and the message to push. Not because it feels right, but because the data backs it.

BlogsJuly 16, 2025July 18, 2025

Display Ad Networks: A Comprehensive Guide

Advertising is everywhere, on your phones and off them, facilitated by an interconnected network of websites, apps, and billboards.

Advertising is everywhere, on your phones and off them, facilitated by an interconnected network of websites, apps, and billboards.

This network is called the display ad network. However, when someone Googles the term ‘display networks’, they’re met with Google’s definition of the GDN, which says it’s a group of more than 2 million websites, videos, and apps where your ads appear.

But GDN isn’t the only display network, and there are far more options available to you as an advertiser.

While Google’s network might seem the most powerful of them all, it just has more inventory, and not all of it is good or premium. If you’re not exploring the options and are unaware of them, it’s time to widen your advertising horizons. Because those low-quality clicks won’t be fixed by just optimizing.

It’s by knowing and using the whole spectrum of what’s available to you. Because each display network connects you to a different audience.

Ad tech has become a driver of performance. But every network has to be used with specific intent and goal.

Before we dive into lists and what you should choose based on your goals, let’s look at the basic definition of a display network.

What is a display network?

The internet is full of empty spaces reserved for advertising. These are called ad inventories, and each inventory has a hierarchy based on the viewers.

The display networks exist to facilitate the usage of this inventory, which is usually owned by the network. For example, the Google Display Network owns the inventory on YouTube and some other websites.

And it gives a cut to the people or groups that join this network, creating intrinsic motivation for publishers, creators, and businesses. However, not all networks pay—Reddit ads and Amazon DSP being the major ones.

A list of 9 display networks: Pros Vs Cons

Here’s a tl;dr of the list in table form.

Category	Platforms	Why It Matters
Big Tech Ecosystem Ads	Google Display Network, Apple Search Ads, Amazon DSP, Facebook Audience Network	Covers premium, walled-garden networks with high intent and scale
Native Ad Networks	Outbrain, Taboola, Nativo	Shows how native differs from traditional display; blends content + ad
Programmatic Platforms	Amazon DSP, Nativo, Ad-Maven	Introduces automated bidding, scale, audience targeting
Performance/Budget Ads	Ad-Maven	Represents low-cost, high-volume but lower-quality traffic options
Mobile + App Specific	Apple Ads, Facebook Audience Network	Highlights mobile-specific ad delivery and targeting

Now, let’s dive into what the networks do for you.

Google Display Network (GDN)

GDN might be the most well-known display network, if not the most popular one. They are connected to over 2 million websites, videos, and apps. These numbers are impressive.

The scope of the network doesn’t end there; the network umbrella also has Gmail, YouTube, and the search results underneath it. And with the addition of campaigns like performance max, Google has empowered marketers to drive conversions and affect the bottom line.

This provides advertisers with a vast network to work with. However, the cost of running on GDN is often high, and the campaign budget can quickly increase.

Then there is the problem of quality and traffic. While Gmail, YouTube, and SERP bring good results, the same can’t be said about the broader network. Some ads are placed on arbitrary websites, and the clicks resulting from these can be poor, including little to no intent and bots.

Apple Ads

Apple Ads aren’t a network. But they’re one of the best ways to hold the attention of a large number of B2B buyers, who often purchase Apple products for their capabilities.

This is an unmissable opportunity for those who are building their SaaS apps and hoping to direct the attention of high-intent buyers. Plus, the viewership is premium. But like everything Apple, this space is protected by stringent privacy laws.

And the audience pool is limited to iOS users. If your product isn’t an app on the App Store, this space isn’t worth the hassle because the CPI/CPT is high compared to others.

Amazon DSP

Amazon DSP is a programmatic network platform that analyzes user behavior to serve ads to audiences. This network includes Amazon’s e-commerce website, Twitch, IMDb, Alexa, FireTV, Kindle, etc., and a few thousand third-party apps and websites.

Although there’s a lot of difference between programmatic and display ads, Amazon’s DSP is counted as a display network.

Amazon DSP is one of the most effective advertising networks, and it helps B2B and B2C marketers reach their buyers while they’re shopping. The network is known for high-quality traffic, and although it is a favorite of many e-commerce advertisers, it has been making waves within the B2B community.

And there are a lot of customizations available from Amazon’s side, giving a lot of control to advertisers. However, and this is big, Amazon DSP is quite expensive. And many report that the DSP is best for awareness-type campaigns and reaching a wider audience—it is not ideal for conversion.

They will give you the data but not the sale, which is a double-edged sword.

Facebook Audience Network

This might be the next big one after Google. They offer a variety of formats for the advertiser. These are:

Interstitial or full-screen ads
Native ads or ads that blend with their content
Banner Ads or the traditional display ads
Rewarded Ads or Ads in exchange for some prize

Facebook ads use hyper-targeting, and with their new updates, they’re asking advertisers to do nothing but use whatever data, copies, and everything in between given to them by Meta.

The network also uses Facebook quality data to target buyers.

There are drawbacks to the network: Advertisers have no control over where ads are placed on the internet. Yes, you can block some apps and websites, but that’s it, increasing the ad manager’s workload because Meta will decide where your ad should go.

This results in low-quality traffic and rising CPC costs.

Outbrain

Outbrain is a network that focuses on native ads and on driving performance that influences outcomes. They leverage predictive AI to display highly targeted, deep contextual advertising.

These advertisements are completely native. The creatives can either be a short video or a native display ad. Often, Outbrain is the best option for advertisers on a budget; it has everything you’ll need.

Global reach, integrations with premium publishers, and campaigns for awareness and discovery. But lately, Outbrain has become known for low-quality clicks. There is a risk of bot traffic and fraud. And the conversion rates have dipped due to low-quality traffic.

While the barrier to entry is relatively cost-effective, you must ensure the trade-off is worth it.

Taboola

Taboola is another native advertising platform. This network is known for its global reach and performance-focused teams.

While Outbrain and Taboola are direct competitors, it has better reach and premium inventory than Outbrain, collaborating with publishers like CNN, USA Today, Bloomberg, and Fox.

Taboola offers functionality and flexibility during campaign setups, giving advertisers control. But the network is plagued by similar problems: bot traffic and fraud clicks being the most prominent ones.

The CPC for Taboola is as low as $0.03 and as high as $5.

With this network, you may choose the trade-off between cost and traffic quality.

Nativo

Nativo is a pioneer of native advertising. Their focus has always been on providing a seamless embedded content experience. This philosophy helped them match the tone, feel, look, and context of the publisher.

The native advertising network is best for brands that want to provide a storytelling experience to their consumers and audiences. Their integrated analytics suite is considered one of the best in business, and their cookieless delivery is suited for modern privacy laws.

Nativo does many things right, but it can be very cost-intensive, which is not ideal for small advertisers and publishers. Their reach is also limited because of the premium experience they provide.

And the creatives need to be precise and grab the viewers’ attention—it requires creative storytelling.

Ad-Maven

Ad-Maven is the advertiser’s favorite for high-volume reach and aggressive conversion. This network is a low-cost alternative to other networks. Ad-Maven has a global reach and low CPC and CPM compared to its competitors.

There’s real-time bidding and auto-optimization for advertisers. They have a variety of formats and are budget-friendly.

However, the traffic is inconsistent, and many reviews complain about bots infecting the impressions and clicks, bloating the actual numbers of the campaign.

While Ad-Maven provides high-volume traffic, the quality remains dubious.

Reddit ads

While not a network in the traditional sense, Reddit Ads is a powerful tool because subreddits are communities. And if advertisers can integrate themselves into these subreddits, they can create trust and direct high-quality traffic to their offers.

The tool is also very cost-effective, with CPCs ranging from $0.50-$4 CPC and $3.5-$15 CPM.

But again, advertisements on Reddit can be tricky. People there are opinionated, and downvotes may cause brand trust erosion. It’s a double-edged sword. The tracking is also not the best, but Reddit is adding analytics for businesses and brands to thrive there.

It is something to look out for.

A Quick Look at Ad Formats

Platform	Display / Banner	Native / In-Feed	Video / OTT / Interstitial	Audio	Social / Carousel / Free-Form	Premium / High-Impact
Google Display Network	Standard banners (300×250, 728×90)	Responsive display ads	In-stream (skippable/non-skippable)	No	No free-form (supports app)	No
Apple Ads	Banner-like (News)	In-feed (Search Ads show)	Limited (News)	No	Search + App Store promos	No
Facebook Audience Net	Banners, interstitial display	Native & rewarded video	In-app video & interstitials	No	No carousel (outside Meta)	No (standalone)
Amazon DSP	On-site & off-site display	Limited native-style	In-stream/out-stream	On Amazon Music	No	Shoppable video, AI Pause
Outbrain	Banner (widget thumbnail)	Native in-feed (stories, carousel)	Video (≤60s)	No	No	No
Taboola	Banner (widget)	Native in-feed (Carousel, Video)	Video (widget)	No	No	No
Nativo	Blended into feed	Native content (in-feed article)	Possible in-feed	No	No	No
Ad-Maven	Banners, pop-under, interstitial	No native in-feed	Limited video	No	No	No
Reddit Ads	Promoted image posts	Conversation posts, text ads	Promoted video (≤30s)	Not supported	Carousel (free-form conv.)	Takeover, First View, Category

Don’t stick to one network, experiment and find your fit(s).

Notice how each network is almost complementary to the other. They have cons, some glaring, but they make up for it by having reach or providing value, or being premium and expensive.

There’s always a trade-off to watch out for. Using only one will bottleneck your performance campaign because, just like all marketing campaigns, there is no one-size-fits-all.

Deploying display advertising solutions can almost seem like an impossible mountain. It’s not difficult, however, the complexity can be scaled with the right partner. One that can help you every step of the way.

BlogsJuly 9, 2025August 27, 2025

CMOs of the Future: Master Your Marketing Roadmap for Revenue Growth

Roadmaps promise to bring teams together. But its often treated like a checklist- a series of tasks on a deadline. This misconception has to go.

Bringing together every leader in the room is a tough job- all departments have their way of doing things, and none enjoys meddling.

And yet, the CMO and marketing leaders of most successful organizations need to bring these leaders together and create a smooth and efficient workflow. If a company must thrive against its competitors, this cross-departmental unity is vital.

From the product’s inception to its debut in the market, marketing leaders must craft cohesive strategies that help every leader be on the same page and operate at the same wavelength.

In order to do that, marketing leaders must rely on a roadmap.

Often, roadmaps are treated like checklists and disparate solutions, created to meet deadlines. There is no how, why, or what- just a when. This type of business thinking is detrimental to productive outcomes and sales of your product.

That is not to say you need to control everything down to the molecule, but enough that there is a cohesion of ideas and goals and wiggle room to change things in real-time.

This is the formula for a winning marketing roadmap.

A flexible strategy that adapts to your needs and aligns with every function in your organization.

Remember: A roadmap doesn’t fix the fundamental issues with organizational management. In the end, it is a tool. A powerful one, but a tool nonetheless. Its strength lies in opening channels for the actual solution: communication.

Marketing roadmaps are not mere checklists.

What is a marketing roadmap?

The B2B industry is a web of complex business functions, each serving a specific goal. However, without a cohesive vision and timeline, organizations would not be able to identify customer needs or provide the solutions needed to mitigate them.

To solve this key problem, strategists created a simple tool known as the roadmap that maps organizational efforts to a specific outcome on a timeline.

And no function owned the roadmap better than marketing. In the context of marketing, this roadmap is a start-to-end point of all business functions set on a timeline. It acts as a bridge between all tactical decision processes.

In simple terms, it is a strategic unifier that helps make sense of data gathering and market research to identify market needs and bring the product to market.

What are the benefits of a roadmap?

While the roadmap’s role is a unifying force, it’s not limited to it. It provides a molecular view into everything a leader would want to know.

The roadmap, if articulated and well-executed, will provide the following benefits (though there are more; here are six important ones)

1. Prioritized goals and drivers

The map provides a clear reason for why a certain plan exists, the way it should be executed, and the timelines it needs to follow.
It lists the drivers for each goal and the people in charge of making it happen.

2. Understanding Customer Needs

With the roadmap, you can tailor your campaign to your customers’ real-time needs.
Check whether the goals align with it.
Evaluate if the campaign is meeting those needs.
Craft and track KPIs that act as leading metrics of your campaigns.
Visualization of competitor and trend analysis

3. Windows Of Opportunity

A well-designed roadmap enables marketing teams to find new windows of opportunity in their market.
It has room to identify customer behavior and pivot or grow accordingly.
This could be as early as market research or late-stage market penetration

4. Managing Key Accounts

Often, sales and marketing might mistake two different ICPs as the key accounts- in short, a misalignment. The roadmap empowers teams to visually put their key accounts forward and reach sales and marketing alignment.
That means identifying them becomes easier
Tracking their behavior with your offers and messaging becomes smoother.
And helping teams attribute and define the behavior of key accounts.

5. Identification of Developmental Gaps

Each function of the roadmap also shows where your pitfalls are.
Whether campaigns are working as intended and if everyone is on the same page and working towards a set goal.
These could be product developmental problems with GTM motions that aren’t working as hypothesized.

6. Mitigation Plans

Once the developmental gaps are identified, the roadmap helps put mitigation plans in motion.
This could mean following a different path or identifying new technologies needed to execute the strategy.
Finding the benchmarks that have worked and which have not.
Providing a clear visual of which stage has the gaps and needs further refinement

And to top it all off, each function of the roadmap has a clear owner who can lead their team to achieve particular goals with a clear start and end time. Each roadmap function, though, has to be in sync with or else the purpose of the tool can be lost, becoming another “to-do” on your list.

How do you build your marketing roadmap?

Source: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08956308.2007.11657440

First, let’s break down a very common myth- the Excel template you downloaded with a few sheets is not a roadmap. It could have been part of one. But it absolutely isn’t the roadmap.

Roadmaps are visual behemoths that drive strategy and tactical decisions. They are complex pathways of contingencies.

There is the Foundational Roadmap that encompasses all of your organizational goals. From your products’ or services’ inception to their phasing out- yes, big organizations plan for this too- this foundational roadmap will include CEOs, CFOs, and other stakeholders. It gives them a clear view of what is supposed to happen at each stage.

And the marketing roadmap’s job is to translate these overarching company goals into actionable marketing strategies and campaigns.

The step

The steps outlined here might seem like an over-simplification of the process, because it is.

These marketing roadmaps are living documents that can be created by the person who’s working on organization-specific goals. We’ll try to codify them here, but we highly recommend trying your mixes.

Tools needed to create a roadmap:

The roadmap is a living document that should, with approval, change in real-time. You will need tools to create documents nested in documents. Some of these are: –

Aha.io
Notion
Airtable
Excel
PowerPoint

You will have to create your stack for bringing your document to life. Usually, a mix of all of these is the right way to go. However, there is a flaw in using these tools: they are prone to clutter.

All tools, especially the ones that should bring organization, bring clutter because it becomes difficult to track- you should make sure the document is searchable. The tools give you a chance.

Creating the roadmap

1. Create your foundational roadmap.

This includes the steps you will be taking to execute your organizational goals.
Assigning each stage to an “owner.” This could be the CEO for executive tasks, and the engineer for basic-level stuff.
Map out each function’s final goal and timeline.

2. Nest the marketing roadmap in it.

Create a marketing roadmap inside the foundational one. This roadmap must reflect changes made to the foundational file.
Inside this file, list the functions of your team and assign an owner to each function.
Once set, create specific timelines and goals for the business outcomes you wish for.

3. Set your goals.

Create a SWOT analysis of your strategy and map it out based on the timeline.
Create trackable KPIs, leading metrics that are bound by time and have historically served to identify the lagging metrics. E.g., brand awareness, social mentions, ROAS, etc.

4. Create contingencies

Use the KPIs and SWOT analysis to create contingencies.
Prepare for communication failure and create metrics to identify failure. E.g., low CTR, lack of feedback, and social mentions.

If you think this is easy, odds are, you haven’t created a roadmap yet. Many successful products and marketing campaigns are built from roadmaps.

But again, this simple concept is quite deceptive. It often involves a clear understanding of your organization’s goal and cooperation from various teams. Without that, the roadmap is a vanity project.

Many organizations, however, have nailed the concept. They have realized that any roadmap is nothing but meticulous project management.

Roadmap Examples: Planning for Success.

AI has changed a lot, but one thing that has flown under the radar is this: CMOs are now large-scale project managers, weaving storytelling to drive revenue.

He says, “Product management is all about learning and adapting.” In this context, this quote by Lenny Ratchitsky makes ample sense.

And we can see that modern marketing has followed this structure. Great marketing is all about learning and adapting to customer needs and business priorities. And that’s what a roadmap does, it was originally a tool for the PM. Here are four great examples that will help you align your organization to its needs and priorities.

Netflix’s infamous roadmap- The financial side

Created by Gibson Biddle, the former VP of Netflix and former CPO of Chegg. He is credited with the rise of Netflix from 2m to 13m users.

In his medium post, he says, “The roadmap articulates the focus and organization of the product team. Completing the exercise is straightforward once the teams define the strategies, proxy metrics, and projects for their swimlanes. The roadmap is an artifact — an expression — of your product strategy.”

This tells us a vital thing: roadmaps are a simplification of organizational goals and outcomes, but only when organizations come together and define functions that will lead to their growth.

Yuriy Timen’s Grammarly Roadmap- The functional roadmap

Reforge has a comprehensive article on this roadmap. In essence,

The roadmap includes broad functionality and moving upmarket with the B2B offerings.
Getting constant input from the overall team and identifying the market opportunities.
This roadmap doesn’t take prioritization into account- other forums and sub-roadmaps do.
This one did not take stakeholder input into consideration.

Notion’s Roadmap Template- The Product

Nothing does nesting better than Notion. And this product roadmap is the perfect example of it. It looks very simple. It has basic Q1, Q2, and Q3 goals.

And while it is a product roadmap, personally, it is an actionable map that helps small teams manage their roadmap tasks and assign owners.

It has nested documents.
It’s easily editable.
Completely free
Customizable per individual tasks.
If it’s for purely marketing purposes, you will have to change this template.

Initiative Strategy- A roadmap for strategy

From Lenny himself, the roadmap is the perfect example of how deceptive roadmaps can be.

Once you see the template, you will find a few functions inside it. They are blank but in it: –

You can nest pages and turn them into wikis (the most powerful function of Notion for businesses)
Each function can be assigned to an owner.
The roadmap is stripped of the bloat so pervasive in living documents.
Only vital documents can be added here with specific owners, directly assigning each function to each “owner.”

Here’s more to learn about PM and marketing planning:

The above resources might be for a PM, but will remain timeless principles for marketing to come.

Marketing roadmaps are a simplification of organizational alignment.

Organizational alignment is not an easy task. It is natural for conflicting ideas and creativity to clash with each other. However, that is detrimental to organizations that need success.

Product launches, new marketing campaigns, and quarterly goals, however, need that alignment. Everyone needs to know what the bottom line has to be. But if it’s not visualized, employees will lose sight of it and fall into entropy.

Roadmaps are an antidote to this problem. But it will always be a visualizer. Change will come from leaders changing siloed systems.

The roadmap, excuse the wordplay, is just the compass leading there.

BlogsJuly 8, 2025July 18, 2025

B2B Buying Process: A Dynamic Relational Network

Popular frameworks underline the B2B buying process as linear. But in reality, it’s a nexus shaped by social dynamics, risks, and unknown variables.

Transparent wants and impulses drive a majority of B2C purchases.

But B2B buying is on a whole new tangent. It stems from multiple data points, risk evaluations, and a tangled web of relationships, often driven by internal politics.

The B2B buying process isn’t the linear and structured system you imagine it to be. It’s rarely even a system or a process, at least in the traditional sense. If organizational decision-making were this orderly, customer journey mapping might not require much precision and nuance.

And most marketers have come to recognize this.

The reality is far messier, complex, and dynamic. Rather than a line or a funnel, imagine the B2B buying journey as a network where invisible and hierarchical communications and influence flows intertwine.

Yet, marketing frameworks oversimplify these complexities. It’ll never be the single instantaneous act that most marketing lingo illustrates it to be.

This oversimplication isn’t harmless. But in the long term, it can hamper your strategy.

If you aren’t diving into who your buyers are, why they purchase, and how they arrive at decisions, you are working with half a picture.

What is the B2B Buying Process?

The B2B buying process refers to the overall decision-making that businesses embrace while purchasing a solution, from problem recognition to implementation.

However, it’s not a sequence of steps.

B2B Buying Process Framework:

But a tug-of-war between alignment and conflict across and within the organization.

Every B2B purchase is an evolving negotiation, not just between buyers and sellers, but between internal decision-makers. And consensus isn’t only desired, it’s imperative.

The theoretical framework is the only known fact about the B2B buying process. But the factual and descriptive details are often overlooked.

So, to draw even the slightest cognizance, let’s draw a bigger picture – the four fundamental elements in B2B buying:

Problem Recognition in the B2B Buying Process

You cannot spotlight the B2B buying process as an objective process. If you’re doing so, then you’re admonishing the buyer-seller relationships, i.e., interaction between people.

This is quite a subjective step.

Most often, even an organizational purchase wouldn’t stem from economic considerations. The purchase could be a response to a need or a problem. This is known as the buying situation.

The organization develops awareness for buying a solution. This is problem recognition – a dissatisfaction with the current goal attainment.

Because the currently leveraged infrastructure or methodologies are proving ineffective.

And this is what marketing puts to use.

Savvy marketers can motivate this organization – our solutions don’t just help you solve the problems. We help you amp up your goals for higher satisfaction.

Even your client organizations are under pressure to do better and deliver more value. So, they should be the ones with the motivation to do better (using your solutions). And if you, as a marketer, hit the right mark, you know it’s a done deal.

Problem recognition is simply the difference between the desired and actual level of goal attainment.

Understanding Buying Authority in Decision-Making Process

Purchase decisions are made by individuals within the organization.

And their level of authority over the decision-making process rests on several factors:

The technical complexities
How will the solution integrate with existing infrastructure?
Its urgency (need) for the business
Does the individual hold the necessary technical knowledge?
The individual’s position in the buying committee

Mostly, the buying authority the individual possesses directly aligns with their organizational responsibility.

And generally, there’s a tug between market expertise and product expertise when it comes to making buying decisions. It’s often the case that market knowledge takes precedence over technical knowledge about the solutions.

This could birth conflict between the buying committee and the department that’s leveraging the solution. So, B2B buying processes tend to involve both market and product variables:

1. Market v/s product variables – which is prioritized? It depends on:

Technical complexities of the solution
Importance of the solution as opposed to the business’s overall functioning
The number of alternative choices in the market

2. When does the buying committee hold more power?

Market variables take precedence.
Business starts to scale and enter fresher market territories.

3. When does the department (leveraging the solution) have a say?

Product variables take precedence.
The buying committee has less experience in purchasing and using the solution.

4. And as the purchase’s monetary value increases, stakeholders gain more control over the buying process.

Searching for the accurate solution

The B2B buying process involves evaluating available providers. And this requires collecting and analyzing information.

The main objectives are to identify what is available and what is lacking, and second, to outline alternate choices.

It begins with a comprehensive search process:

Evaluating goals – is the organization satisfied with the current goals?
Finding the best alternative option. But the search often stops when the value of information collection increases. The buyer would not have all the market information to find the best alternative option or the most optimal one in the market.
Establishing preliminary evaluation criteria to shortlist the options. There are time constraints on the purchase. The buying committee must choose on the basis of the market information they’ve collected – selective perception.
Outline a list of providers. Before the search for additional information stops, the organization must ascertain that a particular number of alternatives have been identified. This must include familiar alternatives to fresher ones.

But knowing where the limits lie in this search is the buying committee’s task. As complex as it becomes, the cost of collecting information rises, too.

Making the final choice

Buyers must choose between all the alternative options. And it involves three stages:

1. Provider qualification.

This depends on a credible rating, financial strength, management capabilities, size and quality of their organization, years in the market, quality control, and performance standards.

Some organizations take the safer road. They don’t opt for newer, untested providers due to the risk they pose, while some undergo qualification procedures.

2. Comparing the solution against the required specifications.

Here, the focus is on specific constraints, such as solution features, quality level, pricing models, and delivery time.

3. Comparing solutions against each other.

Choose among the alternatives to find one that meets all the stated specifications. And one that will offer the highest level of acceptable value to the buying organization.

These four aspects establish a simple framework for the B2B buying process.

Observably, it all boils down to what really matters to the buyers: service, quality, and price. These drive every nitty-gritty of B2B decision-making.

It might not offer a granular perspective into organizational decision-making. But sets the stage for marketers to respond efficiently to this buying process.

There are several variables involved. And even the slightest glimpse into the window might help marketing set the stage to better their deliverables and offerings.

Challenges in the B2B Buying Process

Challenges in The Interorganizational Relationships

Stakeholders might share the same boardroom, but they don’t share the same urgency, need, or agenda. Given their differentiating position in the organization, this is a given.

Most often, they don’t even use the same vocabulary, which crucially impacts goal establishing.

Their understanding of success is distinct. And so is their threshold for risks.

This is where clarity really lacks.

Do you realize how many dyadic interactions a single buying committee would entail?

Both perspectives should be factored in: the interaction between the buying committee members and that with external figures (vendors, SDRs, etc.).

Most often, this isn’t even the complicated bit.

The decisions are driven by goal attainment, but constricted due to financial, infrastructural, or staffing insufficiency. However, it’s common across the marketplace.

What isn’t often paid attention to are the intricacies.

One of the vital influences on the B2B buying process is the organizational factor – on what basis does the buying committee decide?

Challenges in The buying committee and its members

At the nucleus, the buying process involves 6 to 10 decision-makers who have varied roles and authority.

The purview? B2B decision-making is a multi-dimensional journey businesses undertake to evaluate, select, and purchase solutions from another organization. This makes it crucial to understand the foundation of those involved in the buying process.

The fundamental roles in a buying committee:

Those who will leverage the solutions.
Buyers with the formal responsibility and authority to make the buy.
Influencing actors that directly or indirectly impact the decision.
Decision-makers who have the authority to select between alternative options.
Gatekeepers who control the budget, resource allocation, and information flow in and out of the buying committee.

Here, decisions not only converge but also collide. With multiple touchpoints (departments) that have a voice, the result is a contradictory and complex decision-making web.

This is what the B2B buying process ought to be. When the stakes are higher, every decision can have an impact. It affects the entire business, and that’s no joke.

So, B2B decision-making is slow-moving and collaborative, unlike B2C purchases. The buying committees hesitate, loop back, drop off, revisit competitor offerings, and restart.

It’s much more like navigating a maze instead of walking straight ahead. And there’s no neatness to this – it’s not a clear funnel, but a messy intertwining of wires that represents a personal set of interactions, power struggles, and progress loops.

How can marketing navigate this complexity?

But in an effective bottom funnel strategy, the buyer role is where the majority of the focus should be. They are the primary point of contact within the client organization.

Just remember that you aren’t marketing to this “buyer,” but through one. This means through their interpretation of your brand and their ability to advocate for you in rooms you’ll never enter.

Your messaging must survive the translation, the retelling, because without it, you’ve already lost.

Permeating through these layers is where marketing must make the optimum effort.

So, your deck isn’t even being heard in the pitch. It’s heard three hours later in a room where the buyer’s authority might not even extend.

Your priority becomes crafting such a campaign that survives the diverse chain of internal influences. The underlying effort and outcome rest on you.

Yes, things would be simpler if the buying committee were made up of those with defined roles and predictive behavior. That’s not even the slightest case.

You’re working against unspoken resistance and ambiguity, not confusion.

Confusion might be the most basic obstacle. But the wall is where marketers falter.

You must understand the nuances of a B2B buying process.

And it starts with the organizational structure of the buying committee.

The Key Marketing Focus for Engaging B2B Buying

Numerous variables dictate how you map your lead nurturing strategies targeted towards B2B buying committees. And those in turn influence the buying process.

The four fundamental ones are:

Technology
Tasks
Structure (workflow, authority, communication, status, etc.)
And people (interactions and interdependent dynamics)

These are the core facets of an organization. But also variables that transform depending on whether the business scales or grows.

They can also be perceived as subsystems that depend on and interact with each other to kindle unique buyer behavior across each organization.

So, it’s apparent that they make up the organization’s comms network, informing the buying committee members of:

buying problems
evaluation criteria
alternate providers

For your lead scoring to prove effective, defining these variables and their functions is imperative. Especially across the client organization you’re attempting to convert.

Technically, this is marketing’s problem to define:

Locus – with whom does the buying responsibility rest?
Composition of the buying committee
Structure of roles and authority within the buying committee

With this stance, we aren’t tackling the generic clutter of what marketers must do. They must target the internal uncertainty, rather than persuading the external layers of authority.

You aren’t merely offering a solution to a business problem. That’s not what the B2B buying committee focuses on.

B2B buying committees, in this uncertain marketplace, are risk-averse. You’re being interrogated against undefined fears. And the nightmare begins from here.

The discussion within the buying committee doesn’t happen in public calls. They are hushed and whispered in closed rooms.

It’s this group of decision-makers that defines whether the sale goes through or dies on the table.

How can marketing navigate the subterranean layer, i.e., the internal functioning of the buying committee? Especially, without pandering to the oversimplified models that continue to exist.

Marketing must understand that an organization’s internal social dynamics and interrelationships affect the buying “system” at large. And ultimately, your sales pipeline.

Identifying an organization’s buying committee is one thing.

But dissecting their power dynamics and influences is another story.

The Overlooked Facets of B2B Buying

Logic, ROI, and departmental alignment drive B2B decisions.

But this is yet another oversimplification.

What goes unnoticed is the emotional undercurrent that guides the final choice.

B2B purchases can be a risk to the organization. But it’s also a personal risk. Several decision-makers are hesitant to champion decisions that could backfire on them.

If the implementation fails and the solution flops, organizational relationships may turn sour. At this point, it’s not the contract that’s at stake, but also stakeholder credibility.

This makes trust, not mere persuasion, the true nucleus of B2B marketing.

The B2B buying committee’s purchase is built on this trust, not a one-pager or a demo. But through relevance built over time.

Your marketing messages must not only nudge them to make a decision but also defend it. Until your messaging communicates with the organization and individual, your marketing won’t be able to step through the door.

In simple words, B2B buying isn’t all logical, but equal parts emotional.

BlogsJuly 3, 2025December 8, 2025

Targeted Display Advertising: The Tidbits Beyond the Glossy Deck

In B2B, your targeted display ads may hit the right audience, but fail to connect. Precision alone won’t bolster your pipeline. Here’s why.

In B2B, targeting your audience is no longer the tasking process it was once highlighted to be.

The use of sophisticated AdTech, intent data, and advanced ABM software has enabled marketing to pinpoint high-quality accounts with precision.

But many targeted display ads continue to underperform.

This has frustrated marketers. They are reaching the right people across their ICP, but they continue to be overlooked. CPMs look great, and CTRs are decent enough.

Yet the pipeline barely moves.

Where are marketers truly stumbling?

The problem is that most marketers continue to mistake reach for impact. Precision isn’t persuasion. And neither is hyper-targeting synonymous with relevance.

The blame falls on the tech, while the succeeding processes after the targeting are neglected.

This is display advertising’s blind spot – the opportunity to move beyond targeting the surface-level persona. The result?

Wasted spend, resulting in incessant ad fatigue and persistent buyer indifference.

In this piece, we unpack why hyper-laser targeting continues to produce low-impact engagement.

What is Targeted Display Advertising?

If you move beyond the glossy decks, the knowledge gap is apparent.

A Broad View

Shopify describes targeted display advertising as:

Targeting advertising refers to any advertising type with a clearly defined audience. You can base targeted advertising on customer data, focusing on people who show purchase intent.

Display advertising is positioned as a bridge that threads the disconnect between brands and their potential customers. But there’s a hurdle that’s been concerning the marketers: how do you cut through the visual noise rampant in the market?

And even if they cross this hurdle, building meaningful connections seems to be lost amidst the market clamor. What you need to do is communicate value.

Most ads are hollow pieces of catchy content and graphics. They sure might grab your attention, but do they inspire action?

The Narrower Perspective

The actual role of B2B display advertising is often misconstrued. And its definition lacks clarity. A direct definition would state that targeted display advertising across the B2B landscape refers to:

Display ads inventory, whether banner or native, to a user based on parameters such as company domain or name (IP or identity resolution), intent signals, CRM, or web traffic data.

It’s the perfect description. And that’s how targeted display advertising functions.

You’re not spending time or resources on random nuggets, hoping it’ll stick. But reaching out to your ICP – the accounts your sales team is actively seeking.

Let’s review the fundamentals of how display advertising is carried out.

Targeted Display Advertising: A Fundamental Framework

The recipe for effective marketing campaigns has one prerequisite: it should align with both your organizational goals and the target audience.

1. Identifying the Right (& Active) Accounts

Long before diving into ad creation and campaign execution comes establishing the right audience for your brand.

The three facets at the nucleus of this step are the right audience, the right time, and the right message.

To ascertain this, ABM-focused placements are imperative. Targeting the right audience shouldn’t involve aiming ads at random audience segments, but mapping buyers through their behavioral patterns and intent data.

This way, your reach isn’t just touch and go. But a personalized conversation.

This is crucial to add the maximum possible value across each stage of interaction.

Developing your ad campaigns on real-time analytics and behavioral profiles can refine your comms and elevate their relevance.

2. Creative & Conversion-centric Design

Marketing’s job is to communicate value. But it’s not a simple task.

You must engineer an intricate balance between aesthetic appeal and strategic conversion. You are orchestrating experiences through the ads that ultimately inspire the desired action.

Display ads for lead generation should be more than just attention-grabbing pieces.

Ask yourselves: do our ads provide value? This is something marketers must focus on.

They can ascertain this by leveraging different ad formats; one size doesn’t fit all. Each ad format is a unique canvas that can impact your brand in distinct and powerful ways.

Your ads are for the prospective buyer. The story remains the same, but the sequence differs depending on who is listening.

What’s your go-to storytelling canvas?

Static ads – Concise and immediate value proposition
HTML5 – Interactive experiences to improve engagement
Video narratives – Deliver compelling and complex brand stories
Other interactive formats – Transform passive viewing into active interaction

You may ask why focusing on the format is crucial.

Truthfully, advertising entails a lot of experimentation, just like any other aspect of marketing. With several formats available, you can appeal to different audience segments.

But this isn’t a one-way road. You must reroute to the traditional playbook and spotlight what needs tweaking.

This is where multivariate testing sweeps in. Through this, your creatives can go through refinements based on real-time performance analytics.

The end goal is clearly demarcating between what resonates and what truly converts.

3. A Consistent Brand Experience

An orchestra relies on different instruments to maintain the harmony. Similarly, an effective ABM strategy depends on cohesion across multiple channels.

Ascertain that you aren’t just running display ads, but curating a consistent brand experience.

Your multichannel ABM strategy should entail the same narrative. And follow prospects seamlessly across different stages of the buyer’s journey.

It should have an impact and elevate your visibility. Here’s how:

Consistent ad messaging across platforms for a unified experience.
Relevant and personalized creatives tailored for each stage from awareness to decision.
Strategic content sequencing to guide smooth transitions from first contact to final conversion.

You are not just personalizing the ad, but the entire journey. And aligning your story with the buyer’s needs at every step.

4. Display Ad Optimization

In a digital space stocked with raw data, not all metrics are meaningful or vital. The focus should be on what truly matters – actionable insights that drive informed decisions.

Your ad performance metrics must move beyond vanity metrics such as impressions or clicks. They are ancient history.

What your team really must truly adopt is mapping the entire buyer acquisition journey, using cross-channel attribution. It’ll help your team:

Assess the ad’s impact at every touchpoint
Identify your most effective conversion paths
Curate strategies that offer long-term engagement
Accurately measure ROI across channels

Reporting is just one of the steps, not the last bit. You must fine-tune your campaigns in real-time, transforming engagement signals into a strategic edge.

This is a generic framework. The nubs require changes as the marketplace upgrades.

Yesterday’s tactics can easily create blind spots today in this ever-evolving landscape.

To avoid this, you must consistently focus on display ad optimization to fit the relevant context. Remember, every ad is another touchpoint.

The real question isn’t whether your ads are reaching the right audience, and they probably are.

The actual concern is, why isn’t the targeting bearing any fruit?

Marketers tend to forget that ads aren’t meant for individuals, but for the overall buying process, from multiple stakeholders to building trust.

A static banner alone can’t do much here.

And given the complexity of the B2B buying process, it boils down to persuasion, connection, and precision.

Why is there a shift?

Fast-paced digital marketing is all about the 3Ps – precision, personalization, and purpose.

Yes, precision also takes the front seat in your advertising strategy, but it’s not the only one. You develop your campaigns and they go live, and then what?

Most of the time, the answer to this question is a long silence. Your team is just awaiting the performance results, but there must be another ingredient missing.

Why else does your hyper-focused targeting still fall flat?

Problems With Display Advertising Today

Your AdTech guide works. Your campaigns are streamlined. Your ads reach the targeted users. However, the engagement is where your performance plunges.

The yield? A shrug, or worse, ad blindness.

Here’s what is actually going on behind the curtains:

Mistake 1

A CFO at a target account might not even be involved in the problem your solution is trying to solve. Or they wouldn’t even be aware of the problem yet.

Just because an account fits the relevant buyer persona doesn’t mean they care. You are assuming relevance, not earning it.

Mistake 2

Your buyer is not looking to be sold to. If they have a problem, they want it solved.

Your CTAs echo lackluster slogans and reflect B2C approaches. With vague content and CTAs or surface-level value propositions, you come across another fish in the marketplace with no real value.

Mistake 3

In times when the slightest interaction is digitized, people are glued to their screens. While online channels have brought us closer, there’s also a mental barrier.

We are attention-deficit and spent. Overconsumption has become a buzzword.

Even on the advertiser’s part, retargeting is an optimal approach. But most brands overdo it.

By showing buyers the same ad 30 times in a week, you aren’t building familiarity but frustration.

When messages follow the same template and never seem to change, the campaign grows dull and repetitive.

Mistake 4

Marketing entails an entire funnel.

And there have been several reports illustrating the buyer journey as non-linear and messy. Buyers ghost you, jump through hoops, restart – this is what the real buying process looks like, even if it’s B2B.

Due to higher stakes and personal politics, B2B buying is even more complex. But advertisers tend to shrug off these nuances.

And this is where their timing goes wrong. Pushing a display ad about a product demo when the prospect is still in their awareness stage is alienating, not merely an error.

It’s a premature approach.

With the right one, you can work wonders for your brand.

Bolster Your Display Ads Targeting: What Can You Do Better?

Stay on top of your buyer’s mind.

The digital space is cluttered with irrelevant content and data.

To create an impact, brands must spare no effort in their strategies. From visually compelling content to ad placement, the purpose is to stay at the top of the minds of the right decision-makers.

But in their rush to elevate their visibility, they overwhelm the general browser with multiple ads. This ruins the user experience, instilling a negative brand reputation.

With targeted display ads services, your brand wouldn’t be one of them.

Where do you begin from?

Ad placement that follows a strategic roadmap.

Position your ads in spaces where your targeted customers naturally come across them. This avoids overwhelming users and creates genuine interest in your solutions.

Persuade buyers, not overwhelm them.

Let’s face it – businesses without any strategic ad placement saturate digital spaces with content.

Does it actually serve the purpose? Not quite.

Instead, the user moves in the opposite direction from the one the brand hopes for. It is only through thoughtful placement that you can avoid disrupting the user experience and truly enhance it.

Your ad shouldn’t merely be seen but become an interactive touchpoint for potential browsers.

It’s about building meaningful interactions that guide prospects toward consideration.

Guide prospects from initial interaction to conversion.

The changing pace and trends in digital marketing demand a holistic approach.

It should smoothly guide prospects from the awareness stage to the final conversion. The downside of fragmented marketing efforts is drop-off rates.

What’s the right direction to take here?

A full-funnel strategy to instill a more cohesive buyer experience.

With this, your prospects will experience a consistent and interconnected journey across multiple platforms and touchpoints.

The overall journey shouldn’t seem too mechanical. It should instead be a fluid and integrated experience. And meet your audience no matter where they are.

To effectively ensure this, you must maintain:

Visual and content coherence
Platform-specific minimal design
Personalized messaging for each funnel stage
Clear but original CTA.

This full-funnel display ad presence will not only maximize your brand recall. But also help shorten sales cycles and offer in-depth performance insights.

Protect your brand against ad fraud.

Protecting your brand and reaching your audience go hand-in-hand. And bot-generated traffic and fraudulent clicks have become utterly common.

It’s time to ensure that your team has an advanced security strategy in place.

The starting point would be to work with premium inventory providers using multiple layers of verification processes.

This way, your brand data is not only protected, but your AdTech regularly monitors traffic quality and provides transparent reporting on ad placements.

Retaining your brand’s integrity and transparency.

Integrate with your MarTech stack.

Your MarTech stack is the nervous system of your digital marketing strategies.

To improve the performance of your ad strategies, orchestrate a more integrated route.

Primarily, your strategies should align with your in-house CRM systems, MAPs, business intelligence dashboards, and advanced analytical tools. This remains a must.

Given how targeting is not really the fundamental challenge, a holistic approach is the need of the hour.

Every ad becomes a data point, and every interaction is an opportunity.

Targeted Display Ads Amp-Up Your Marketing Efforts.

Display ads aren’t mere wallpapers.

Wallpapers are consumed only for their aesthetic and visual appeal. But display ads must motivate. And guide prospects toward the conversion funnel.

But all of this requires finesse.

Targeting display advertising doesn’t work on its own.

Your ad tactics must be centered on connecting your brand message and story to the most promising audiences. Impact, resonance, and action – all go hand-in-hand.

Display advertising isn’t just a marketing channel or a quick communication tool.

It’s an entire ecosystem that purposefully disseminates your core brand narrative to convince hesitating prospects.

BlogsJuly 1, 2025December 22, 2025

A Complete Framework for Brand Awareness Tracking That Proves ROI

Brand awareness tracking is the hardest thing a CMO can prove ROI for. But it can be done. All it takes is a multi-tier approach

Although brand awareness is one of the most important aspects of brand building, the intangible nature of this KPI has always been one of the biggest challenges a CMO faces. The CFO and CEO may question their reasons for increasing the budget towards brand awareness and ask to bring direct ROI from it, which is a tall task.

Brand awareness takes time to come to fruition. However, top leadership should know that it is an investment that shows dividends down the line.

It is not for businesses and organizations looking for short-term growth and full-time failure.

The brands that do take on this patient yet rewarding path will face challenges in tracking awareness. Many organizations still believe brand awareness is part of the TOFU. That is a very reductive perspective, and the mistakes brands make in tracking this KPI stem from this misconception.

There is a solid framework that you can use to track the metrics of brand awareness, crystallizing the data you get from it, and providing ROI.

All you need is to understand what brand awareness actually means for you.

What Is Brand Awareness?

Brand awareness is often conflated with people in the TOFU of brand interaction. While the view isn’t wrong, it’s a limited one.

Branding and its related awareness run deeper than the funnel- it’s becoming a mainstay in your audiences’ memory and being thought of in buying scenarios. This type of awareness comes from being synonymous with your offers and having a clear perspective.

But it also comes from exposing your brand to your prospects consistently at every stage of their journey.

B2B vendors must capitalize on brand awareness and invest in it. The buyers have a list, and brand awareness is a foot in the door.

The Role of Brand Awareness in Capturing Buyer Mindshare and Brand Equity

From Awareness to Authority: The Path to Brand Equity

If you had to take anything away from this blog, it would be this: brand awareness actually serves brand equity.

The world is full of things that are taking attention away from your buyers. Whether that’s the allure of a new Rolex watch or a cheaper alternative to your B2B SaaS offers.

Then there’s social media- a constant stream of information that is personalized to empower or feed the fears of your audiences, prospects, and potential buyers.

Digital distractions necessitate brand equity- when your potential buyers hear your name, they should know what you do and have an emotion associated with it. And it also means owning part of their mindshare.

Eliciting a response that translates to knowing, identifying, and possibly sales.

Measuring Mindshare: Are You Part of the Conversation?

What Is Brand Mindshare and Why It Matters in Marketing

Mindshare is nothing but the ability of your buyers to think of you in your ideal buying scenarios.

Let’s run a thought experiment. But unlike Schrodinger, we’ll keep it straight.

Think of brands associated with the following words:

Advertising
Team Communication
Athleticwear
Cloud Computing
AI
Ridesharing

Whatever brands popped into your head while reading this list own mindshare in your brain. They have owned that category in your head. And they didn’t get there by accident; it was all by design.

Through deliberate marketing and gaining brand equity, these brands have made themselves synonymous with certain solutions, products, and offers.

PS: Bonus points if you thought of Ogilvy and Nike for certain words. That’s the power of equity. The brand, its symbol, and its value become one with its meaning in the consumer’s mind.

An organization that can do this gains mindshare, completing the loop.

However, brands without awareness will not even enter this loop. And it’s a long-term loop. Not a short one.

It starts at the very beginning of the consumer’s journey.

Why Traditional Funnels Fail: The 95-5 Rule and the Case for Brand

One of the best things to come out of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute (we highly recommend you check them out) is their analysis of the 95/5 rule in marketing.

It isn’t a rule per se, rather it’s a general trend in B2B marketing. It says that 5% of your intended buyers are in-market to buy and 95% are out-of-market.

Researchers have also realized a crucial problem that matches this stat. Marketing teams have been aggressively marketing to the 5%. And that is a competitive pool with very little attention.

Marketing to the 95% Who Aren’t Buying (Yet)

Why are brands so eager to capture the 5%?

There are essentially two reasons:

A company is just starting out and needs sales.
Organizations with short-term success plans.

For them, the 95% is a waste of time and money. But here’s where they are wrong.

Selling and Marketing, while part of the whole, are distinct. You should sell to the 5% but marketing must account for the rest of the 95%.

This is the crux of brand awareness: building a relationship with the buyers before your sales reps talk to them and giving them value in return.

This can be through advertising, emails, and social media. This pool of 95% is more open to your ideas than the immediate buyers. And that’s because there’s less pressure on them to buy and more to observe and learn.

This long-term strategic approach builds a brand and improves sales efficiency.

How Strong Brand Awareness Makes Sales Easier

Consumers are more vulnerable than ever.

They have been lied to, and false promises have left them jaded. Buyers’ regret decisions that don’t yield them the ROI they were promised during their interactions with sales.

Now, they have stopped answering calls or, worse, get extremely annoyed when someone does reach them- they have heard the pitch before. Why listen to it again and again?

Brand awareness mitigates this problem. When a brand markets to its audience without the expectation of sales, it builds trust.

Consistently give value, and you will build a foundation in the minds of your buyers for a specific problem you are solving.

Because make no mistake, buyers are choosing vendors based on a single metric: trust. In fact, 71% of consumers buy because they trust a brand.

As millennials and Gen-Z become the buyers of today, brand awareness will be the differentiation factor. And will affect referrals moving forward- referrals are still the lynchpin of marketing.

How to measure brand awareness: A 3-Tiered Approach to Tracking

The Brand Resonance Framework: A 3-Tiered Approach to Tracking

But how will you prove brand awareness when it’s targeting an audience that isn’t in-market? The executives will question your decision.

Your CEOs and CFOs need to know that there is a list of vendors. And entering this list is a long and arduous game. But it can be tracked. Our 3-tiered approach provides a 360-degree view of brand awareness and helps you make sense of the spend and deliver tangible ROI.

Tier 1: Direct Signals (What People Tell You)

Feedback is crucial for brand awareness to thrive. It shows brand perception. But in this stage, it isn’t only about the feedback.

It is also the number of consumers who have provided feedback.

There should be a healthy ratio of feedback to sentiment. F: S.

If you have 10 people sharing their opinion with you and it’s all positive, it won’t matter if the people visiting your website or page are in the thousands.

There should be a good ratio of: –

Impressions
Feedback
Sentiment Score.

There’s a simple formula to this.

Brand Engagement Rate (BER) = (Total Direct Feedback / Total Brand Exposures) × Sentiment Score

Where:

Total Direct Feedback = surveys, reviews, direct comments, sales conversations mentioning brand familiarity
Total Brand Exposures = impressions, website visits, content views
Sentiment Score = weighted average of positive/negative feedback (scale of 0 to 2)

Tier 2: Digital Footprints (What Their Actions Show You)

Feedback and conversations present themselves in different formats. And the digital footprint is a tangible window into these conversations.

These are your:

Impressions
Click rates
Open Rates
Dwell time + Page Depth
Website navigation
Downloads
Shares
Branded vs Non-branded searches.

These are trackable metrics. However, many marketing teams don’t discover what these data points say about their brands. The data always tells a story. And you can uncover it with this formula.

Digital Engagement Score (DES) = (Σ Weighted Actions / Total Exposures) × Engagement Quality

Where:

Weighted Actions = sum of different digital actions with varying point systems (e.g., download = 5 points, page visit = 1 point, share = 3 points)
Total Exposures = impressions, ad views, content views
Engagement Quality = average engagement depth (time spent, pages viewed, completion rates)

Tier 3: The Digital Ecosystem (What the World is Saying)

Let’s pull up the Edelman report again. 79% of modern consumers (mainly Gen-Z) share feedback and interact with social media.

This stat should excite brand managers. Since consumers are more vocal on websites like Reddit, G2, TrustRadius, and other niche forums.

This gives brands a direct view into the verbal conversations people have about their brand (or lack thereof).

For this, you would need to create a custom scoring model and give it arbitrary scores based on your brand’s needs.

This scoring can be derived from the following questions:

Is the consumer having positive conversations?
What is the aggregate sentiment of the consumers?
What problems are they facing while interacting with your brand?

The formula, while seeming simple, needs a vast understanding of human behavior, scoring, and analysis of data across touchpoints.

This needs a human analyst or an AI.

The formula is:

DEIS=Total Relevant Mentions × Average Conversation Sentiment

Where:

Total Relevant Conversations =volume of conversations analyzed.
Average Conversation Sentiment= mean sentiment score derived from analyzing multiple discussions, indicating the overall positive, neutral, or negative tone of those conversations.

Tying it All Together: How to Calculate Brand Awareness ROI

The tiers, no matter how sophisticated they are, will need to tell a larger story to your CFO and CEO.

Brand awareness does translate to ROI, but it will depend on how you empower your own brand.

The creative risks you take
The product/service you sell
The conversations you’re part of
The conversations you’re not.

All of these factors will affect whether your brand awareness campaigns are working. But once the feedback and conversations become the norm, you can prove ROI by bringing it all together.

Unifying the tiers.The Composite Brand Awareness Score (CBAS) Formula: CBAS=(w1×BER)+(w2×DES)+(w3×DEIS)

Where w1, w2, and w3 are weighing factors. They are percentages that must add up to 1.0, helping you prioritize your tier based on the outcome of your campaign.

Connecting the score to financial value
1. Value Per Awareness (VAP)= Monetary value assigned to each point of the CBAS.
  1. It can be calculated by Average Customer Value × Lead-to-Customer Conversion rate. (in %)
1. Total Brand Investment (TBI)= This is the total cost of a particular campaign.
Once you have that, you can use this formula to bring it all together.
Brand Awareness- ROI Formula: BA-ROI(%)= [(CBAS×VAP)−TBI]/TBI ×100

This will calculate your Brand Awareness ROI based on the financial value generated through brand awareness campaigns, minus the investment cost, as a percentage.

With this framework, you can prove that awareness impacts the bottom line.

And the bonus here is, if the cost outweighs the sale or the graph begins dipping, you will know that your campaigns need tweaking.

Top Tools for Brand Awareness Tracking

Tier 1

Survey and Feedback
1. TypeForm/Survey Monkey- Perception and Sentiment
1. Qualtrics- Advanced Sentiment Analysis
1. HotJar/Clarity- On-site feedback and user recording
1. Intercom- Customer Conversations and support feedback analysis.
Review and Social Listening
1. TrustPilot/G2- Tech/Service review sites.
1. Mention.com- Brand mentions in real time
1. Sprout Social/Hootsuite insights- Social media listening and sentiment
Sales Listening
1. Gong/Chorus- Sales call analysis for brand familiarity mentions
1. Hubspot- One of the best CRMs for customer analysis.

Tier 2

Web Analytics
1. GA 4- The full-funnel tracking of the user on your website.
1. Hotjar/Clarity- Behavioral patterns on websites/apps
Content Performance
1. BuzzSumo- Content Engagement and share tracking.
1. SEMrush/Ahrefs/Moz- Branded search volume and keyword tracking
1. Google Search Console- To track rankings, branded search, clicks, and impressions.
Email
1. Brevo- Crafting and analyzing email campaigns
1. Hubspot- All Email functionalities
1. Mailchimp- All email functionalities

Tier 3

Social Media Monitoring
1. Brandwatch – Social listening across platforms.
1. Sprinklr- Social media monitoring and analysis
Forums and Communities
1. Reddit Analysis tool + Reddit AI – Analyze your brand’s mentions and discussions
AI-analysis
1. Zendesk AI- Analysis across all customer touchpoints
1. Power BI Copilot- One of the most powerful AI analysis tools.
1. Lexalytics- Turn NLP into insights and value.

Brand is Not a Campaign, It’s a Condition

For many organizations, brand awareness is just a campaign. But your buyers have changed, and they will not buy from you unless they know you.

But brand awareness needs to be a constant effort. It’s basically building trust and responding to feedback. If there is no feedback, then brand awareness becomes all the more important.

It is a continuous process of listening to your core customers’ needs and demands and providing a solution through value-based interactions.

Measuring it is the easier part. The difficult part is getting started with brand, design and awareness. All you need is a trusted branding and design partner to bridge it for you.