🍝 How To Get Your Brand Noticed On B2C Channels

Hey friend,

Like a lot of marketers, I started this year needing a way to reach our ICP on cheaper channels with better targeting and real measurement. Here’s what I was seeing from a bunch of new clients that came to us:

So in Q1, we decided to experiment with brand lift campaigns on Meta, Reddit, and YouTube (you know… those B2C channels that people swear don’t work for B2Bs) and saw a 15x lift in conversions.

Here’s how to set up brand lift campaigns like these on B2C channels and prove it works to your CEO.

The most pointless debate in marketing right now is brand marketing vs performance marketing. It causes unnecessary internal conflict and leads to poor channel execution that hurts growth.

In reality, you don’t need to choose between these campaigns. You can make them work together by asking:

"How do we build awareness with our ICP on channels where they actually spend time, so that when they DO start looking for a solution like ours, we're already in their consideration set?"

That's what brand lift campaigns (awareness-focused advertising designed to increase brand recognition and recall with your ICP before they're actively looking) solve.

And no, this isn't the fluffy "let's make a Super Bowl commercial" type of brand building. This is performance-driven awareness with measurable lift and clear ROI.

He's right. And that's exactly why we:

Before you start overhauling your entire paid strategy around this B2C play, I recommend looking for some signs you are ready for it 👇

If you're a seed-stage startup with $10K/month in total ad spend, brand campaigns are probably not your priority yet. You need to nail conversion-focused campaigns first.

But if you're seeing any of these three signals, it's time to test experiment with brand lift on B2C channels:

Trigger 1: Low Category/Brand Search Volume

Pull up Google Search Console or your search campaign data. Look at your branded search volume (people searching for your company name specifically) and your category search volume (people searching for generic terms like "marketing attribution software" or "PPC agency").

If your monthly branded search volume is low, you have a brand awareness problem. Not enough people know you exist, and not enough people are actively searching for the category you compete in.

Trigger 2: Retargeting Audience Size Is Plateauing

Open platforms like Google (and LinkedIn if you are there) and check your retargeting audience sizes over the last 6 months. If they're flat or declining, you have a top-of-funnel problem.

You can't rely on retargeting audiences forever. There's a finite amount of demand, and eventually you're going to hit that cap.

Trigger 3: LinkedIn Audience Penetration Is Stuck

This is the big one for most B2B companies. Go into LinkedIn Campaign Manager's forecasting tool, enter your ICP targeting criteria (job titles, company size, industries, geography), and look at your total potential reach.

If you're above 80%, you've saturated LinkedIn and literally running out of new people to show your ads to on the platform. 

That's where ICP-filtered audiences come in.

Platforms like Primer (our preferred tool) take your ICP criteria—company size, industry, revenue, job titles, geography—and build matched audiences that you can sync to Meta, Reddit, and YouTube.

Step 1: Rebuild Your ICP from the Ground Up

Stepping outside of traditional B2B channels into B2C channels takes some groundwork, as the native targeting on these platforms isn’t built for what you need.

When I did this at the start of the year, I went back to our closed deals from the last 12 months and analyzed:

When we analyzed our closed/won deals, the first point of contact was almost always a senior leader—VP or above. Now, we only target seniority levels that have buying power, and explicitly exclude anyone who can't influence purchasing decisions:

Targeting managers and ICs in the hope they'll "influence up" is delusional. They might engage with your ads (they're cheaper to reach and LinkedIn LOVES spending your budget on them), but they can't buy your product.

After you narrow this down, use Primer to build contact lists filtered by exact job titles and upload them as matched audiences to your platform. 

Our exact targeting criteria in Primer:

This found us 127k individuals that we could reach across LinkedIn, Meta, Reddit, and YouTube.

Step 2: Launch the Same Audience Across Multiple Channels

Next, set up the EXACT same ICP audience to every channel. Someone in your target market could potentially see you on LinkedIn one day, YouTube the next day, and Reddit the day after that.

Our channel setup:

This is what I call integrated multi-channel brand building, and it's way more effective than running siloed campaigns on each platform.

Step 3: Run Brand-Led Video Creative To Improve Brand Recall

Marketers get stuck on what videos to use for brand campaigns, but this play can work with minimal production budget (I'm talking iPhone + good lighting) if the videos are conceptually interesting enough for that people to actually watch.

Instead of running boring B2B ads with stock footage of people pointing at laptops, we created a video content series called "Marketing Metaphors."

Each one took a real pain point we know our ICP has (like wearing too many hats or being frustrated with their marketing agency) and turned it into a satirical 60-second video:

We launched these videos organically on LinkedIn first (with some hitting 50K+ views) and then used the best performers as paid ads across Meta, Reddit, and YouTube.

This is what integrated content strategy looks like: create something interesting enough to work organically, then amplify it with paid to reach your exact ICP.

Reddit deserves its own shoutout here because the economics were absurd:

We just kept it running in the background and because we were showing content that was actually interesting and didn't feel like traditional ads, people engaged with it.

Step 4: Set Up Holdout Groups to Measure True Lift

This is the critical part that made the whole thing defensible from a budget POV. We split our ICP audience into two groups:

Both groups could still find us organically, see our retargeting ads if they visited our site, or find us through search. The only difference was whether they were exposed to our proactive brand awareness campaigns.

This is what I found when I analyzed the data 👇

A 15x conversion lift from our ICP-targeted audience who saw our ads on Meta, Reddit, and YouTube.

Keith says marketers should think of holdout groups as a list of names you use to create two populations—a group that doesn't see your ads and a potentially exposed group that may have seen your ads.

Run this exact play if you want to start testing the waters for B2C channel expansion.

I’ll wrap this up with a simple question:

The same CMO you want to grab attention from at 9am on LinkedIn is the same person watching YouTube at 9pm. The same VP researching solutions on Google is also sending memes on Instagram at lunch.

So, what’s stopping you from expanding paid campaigns to target them on these channels and get your brand on their radar? 🤔

Hope you've found this useful and I'll catch ya in the next one!

Patrick 🤘

P.S. The most common mistake I see with brand lift campaigns is running them for 30 days, seeing no immediate SQLs, and killing them. If you can't commit to 90 days and proper measurement, don't start. And if you want help running campaigns on B2C channels, I can show you exactly how to roll this out for your brand… just hit me up for a chat!