Updated September 2026
Paid social builds the demand that search catches later.
Search only works on people who already know they have a problem and roughly what to call it. Paid social and video are how a B2B startup gets in front of the people who don't yet. Done right, it's the reason branded search grows, direct signups climb, and every other channel converts better. Done wrong, it's a line item nobody can explain.
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Top of funnel is a real job, not a leftover budget.
Most early-stage B2B teams underinvest in awareness because it doesn't show up in last-click. Then they wonder why paid search is capped, why organic is flat, and why every deal starts with "never heard of you." The job of paid social is to make the market aware of the category and the company before the buying moment, so that when the moment comes, you're already on the shortlist. That's measurable. It just isn't measured in the ad platform.
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Five channels, five different jobs.
LinkedIn. The only place you can reach a defined set of companies and titles on purpose. Account-based awareness with target-account and customer lists, thought-leadership ads from the founder's own profile, and retargeting for everyone who visited pricing and left. Priced like it, worth it when the deal size justifies it.
YouTube. Education and demonstration for anything that needs to be seen working. Pre-roll on the videos your buyers already watch, long-form for retargeting, and the place where creator content gets a second life as paid.
Meta. The cheapest reach in the set, and surprisingly effective for developer and prosumer products with a strong visual demo. It's where creative testing happens fastest and where retargeting is nearly free.
X. Developers, founders, and AI-adjacent buyers still live here. Small budgets, promoted posts that read like posts, and amplification for launches and founder content.
TikTok. For products with a "watch this" moment and an audience under thirty-five. Low CPMs, fast creative decay, and occasionally the cheapest awareness on the list.
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How I run it.
Audiences built from your data. Target-account lists, customer lookalikes, activated-user lookalikes, site visitors segmented by intent. Interest targeting from a dropdown is how B2B budgets get wasted on the wrong people.
Two layers, always on. An awareness layer that reaches the ideal customer profile with education and proof, and a retargeting layer that catches everyone who engaged, visited, or signed up and didn't activate. Different message for each stage.
Founder and creator content as the creative. Organic posts from the founder that already performed, boosted to the ICP. Creator videos whitelisted where they beat brand assets. Screen recordings over stock footage, every time. Creator marketing →
A creative testing cadence. New concepts weekly, hooks and formats tested separately, losers killed fast, winners scaled. Every round teaches something about how the market hears the pitch.
Reach and frequency within the ICP. The awareness layer is managed to reach and frequency against the target list, not to clicks. Clicks are a retargeting metric.
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Measured like awareness, reported like a channel.
Awareness doesn't win on last-click, and pretending it does is how it gets cut. I measure it with the signals it actually moves: branded search volume and branded search lift against a pre-campaign baseline, direct and organic signups, conversion-rate lift on search and retargeting, and, where budget allows, geo or audience holdouts for a real incrementality read. Then it goes in the same weekly table as search, organic, and creators, with cost per signup and cost per paying customer, so it competes for budget on the same terms. If it can't show lift, it loses budget. That includes the channels I like.
Where this comes from
Background.
- Cross-channel budget ownership at Quadratic, where paid social sat in the same reporting table as search, organic, and creators, and blended CAC fell 60% quarter over quarter
- LinkedIn, Meta, YouTube, and TikTok campaigns for B2B technology and developer-facing products across in-house, agency, and consulting work
- Creator content turned into paid assets and tested against brand creative in the same accounts
Formats
An audience and creative setup sprint (four to six weeks), then ongoing management as part of a fractional engagement. How we work →