The Challenge
Selling to the C-Suite, at Scale
Purchase-to-pay automation is a considered, complex sale. The platform in question helps global enterprises eliminate manual invoice processing, achieve end-to-end spend visibility, and stay compliant with increasingly demanding international e-invoicing regulations. The typical buyer is a CFO or Head of Finance at a mid-to-large enterprise — someone who isn't browsing casually, and who will involve multiple stakeholders before signing a contract.
The challenge wasn't awareness — it was precision. Reaching the right person, with the right message, at the right stage of a sales cycle that could last months. The campaigns needed to generate leads that were genuinely qualified, not just form fills. And every pound of budget needed to be accountable against a funnel that stretched from first click to signed contract.
Channel 01
Google Ads: Intent First, Always
Google Ads was the foundation. When a Head of Finance is actively searching for invoice automation software, digitisation solutions, or purchase-to-pay platforms, paid search is the most direct route to intercept that intent. But generic B2B paid search without tight controls burns budget fast.
Campaigns were built with detailed demographic and firmographic audience layers — job function, seniority, and company size signals applied across all ad groups to skew delivery towards decision-makers. Ongoing search query report (SQR) management was a constant discipline: irrelevant queries were negated systematically to prevent budget leaking to unqualified traffic.
The most significant technical implementation was the Salesforce offline conversion import. Rather than optimising to form fills alone, the campaigns ingested data from the client's CRM at every stage of the marketing and sales pipeline: lead, MQL, SQL, and closed won — each assigned an approximate value. This allowed Google's smart bidding to understand not just who was converting, but which clicks were generating deals worth acting on.
Optimising to pipeline value rather than raw lead volume fundamentally changes what the algorithm learns. Campaigns stop chasing volume and start chasing quality — and for a product with a 2m EUR annual contract value, that distinction is everything.
Retargeting was layered in for users already showing pipeline intent — those who had visited key conversion pages or engaged with content but not yet converted. Re-engagement campaigns with tailored messaging helped accelerate prospects already in the consideration phase and contributed meaningfully to assisted conversions.
Channel 02
LinkedIn: Building the Funnel from the Top
LinkedIn was introduced to build demand upstream of Google's intent capture. Not everyone searching for "invoice automation software" has heard of your solution first — LinkedIn's role was to reach the right people before they started searching, and to stay visible throughout their decision-making process.
Top-of-funnel activity centred on thought leadership and credibility: promoted whitepapers on finance digitisation trends, event registrations for industry conferences, and video content from senior company voices. The goal at this stage wasn't conversion — it was to establish authority with an audience that would eventually be ready to buy.
Audience targeting was built around job titles (CFO, Finance Director, VP Finance, Head of AP), company size, and industry verticals — manufacturing, retail, healthcare, utilities — where AP automation delivers the clearest ROI. LinkedIn's targeting precision at this level is unmatched by any other platform.
Remarketing was the engine room. Audiences who had engaged with top-of-funnel content — watched videos, opened lead gen forms, visited the website — were moved into mid and bottom-funnel sequences with progressively more direct messaging. Image and video formats were tested across these layers, with video proving particularly effective for re-engaging prospects who had shown prior interest but hadn't yet taken action.
In B2B, the buying committee can involve six or more stakeholders. LinkedIn's ability to reach multiple decision-makers within the same company simultaneously made it the platform of choice for creating the broad internal awareness that enterprise deals require before anyone picks up the phone.
Channel 03
Microsoft Ads: LinkedIn Audiences, Search Intent
Microsoft Ads was the final piece, added to extend reach across a search audience that skews meaningfully older, more senior, and more enterprise-focused than Google's. Microsoft's user base over-indexes in exactly the demographic this campaign needed to reach.
The campaigns were built using LinkedIn Audience Sync — Microsoft's unique integration that allows LinkedIn's professional targeting data (job title, company, industry, seniority) to be applied directly to search campaigns. The result: search ads served only to people matching the precise firmographic profile the client needed, combining the precision of LinkedIn targeting with the intent signal of active search.
This meant that even a relatively modest Microsoft Ads budget punched well above its weight, ensuring that spend was going to exactly the right decision-makers when they were actively looking for a solution.
The Result
A Consistent Pipeline. And One Deal That Stood Apart.
The account grew from £6k to over £20k per month as results justified each step of additional investment — a reflection of the trust built by consistent, accountable performance. Across the lifetime of the campaigns, the activity generated a sustained pipeline of qualified enterprise leads across the UK and Europe, spanning multiple sectors and deal sizes.
Among those wins was a deal that illustrated the true ceiling of what enterprise B2B paid media can deliver: a globally recognised household name, signed as a new client from approximately 50,000 EUR in total ad spend, with an annual contract value starting at 2,000,000 EUR. A 40x return, on one deal, from one campaign.
This is the case for proper B2B attribution. Without the Salesforce integration feeding pipeline value back into the campaigns, those 50k EUR would have looked like an underperforming lead generation budget. With it, the campaigns knew exactly what they were optimising for — and that deal was the proof.
The limiting factor in scaling the account was never the campaigns — it was the client's sales capacity to handle the volume of qualified opportunities being generated. That is the position every B2B marketing function should be aiming for.
