B2B positioning and offer: who your ads are for, and what you ask buyers to do

What do positioning and offer mean for B2B paid acquisition?

April Dunford’s book Obviously Awesome (2019) is the most widely used modern method. It builds positioning from a handful of inputs: the competitive alternatives buyers would otherwise use, the capabilities you have that those alternatives lack, the value those capabilities deliver, the kind of customer who cares most about that value, and the market category that makes the value obvious. Geoffrey Moore’s older template from Crossing the Chasm puts the result in one sentence: for a target customer with a need, the product is a category that delivers a key benefit, unlike the alternative.

Most positioning work stops at the sentence. In paid acquisition the sentence has to become settings: who LinkedIn targets, which Google searches you bid on and exclude, what the first line of every ad says, and what the buyer is asked to do. When a campaign attracts the wrong companies, the fault is often upstream of the campaign.

How do you define an ICP your ad platforms can actually target?

A B2B purchase is rarely one person’s decision, so the ICP should name the roles involved, not just the company. Who they are and what each needs is covered in the B2B buying journey guide; LinkedIn account and role targeting is in ABM targeting.

Company size changes who owns the ICP. In a small firm, the founder usually holds it in their head, and writing it down is the first job. In a mid-market firm, marketing and sales must agree it, or campaigns will chase one definition while sales qualifies against another. In an enterprise, it splits by region and product line, with a named owner for each.

How do you find your real differentiator?

Ask the customers who already chose you, not the leadership team. Five questions, asked of recently won customers with a salesperson in the room, reveal most of it:

1. What were you using or doing before you talked to us?
2. What made that stop being good enough?
3. Who else did you consider, including doing nothing or doing it in-house?
4. What made you choose us over them?
5. What nearly stopped you?

Code the answers into a small table: the alternative named, the trigger, the deciding reason and the objection. Patterns appear after a handful of interviews. The alternatives become comparison keywords and ad angles. The deciding reasons become headlines. The objections become landing page proof. If the deciding reason is something competitors also say, keep interviewing until you find one they can’t.

Why does a lower cost per lead sometimes mean worse results?

An operations consultancy runs two offers on LinkedIn at $12,000 a month each, to the same audience.

Offer B costs twice as much per lead and a third less per qualified lead. It also names who it’s for, which does part of the qualifying before anyone clicks. Still, 10 and 15 qualified leads are small numbers. The right decision is Review: keep both running, and judge them on proposals sent once the leads have had time to reach that stage. Run your own numbers through the cost per qualified lead guide, and see lead quality for how to define qualified.

How do you turn positioning into keywords, audiences and ad copy?

The “who you’re not for” row is the one most teams skip, and the one that most affects lead quality. See negative keywords strategy. What the landing page says about fit is in the landing page guide.

How do you test a new offer with small B2B volumes?

Offers are one of the few things worth testing at low volume, because the difference is usually large. Keep the test honest:

1. Change one thing. Change the offer or the positioning, never both at once; otherwise you won’t know which one worked.
2. Judge on the next sales stage. Qualified leads first, then opportunities or proposals once the leads have had time.
3. Set a minimum before you look. Agree in advance how many qualified leads each offer needs before a decision. Below it, the answer is Wait.
4. Respect learning. Changing the conversion action or offer resets what bidding has learned. Plan changes rather than making them weekly. See which lead stage to optimise for.

Frame the result as a decision: Act when the difference is large and the leads are old enough, Review when it looks promising but hasn’t matured, Investigate when sales reports something the numbers don’t show, and Wait when counts are too small.

Common failure modes

• Positioning only in the sales deck. The ads still say what every competitor says.
• An offer too easy to accept. Cheap leads, then a collapsing qualified rate.
• One offer for every platform. A demo request that works on search fails on cold LinkedIn.
• Changing positioning and offer together. You can’t tell which one moved the result.
• Judging offers on cost per lead. The cheaper offer usually wins that contest and loses on pipeline.
• No “who we’re not for”. Negatives, exclusions and disqualifying questions are never written.

What to measure next

Zephra creates and manages campaigns, audiences, keywords, creative and landing pages on Google, Meta and LinkedIn, and judges them on lead quality and business outcomes from CRM data or a spreadsheet, where configured. The B2B lead generation guide shows how the offer fits the wider loop.