Buyer Signals & Ad Strategy: The New B2B Formula

Aug 13, 2025 · 34:51 · Webinar
Anna Tsymbalist Head of ABM · Influ2
Chris Willocks Head of Strategy · Radish

Key takeaways

Judge signals through four lenses — sequence, recency, consistency and relevance: an ad click means little after about two days, and a signal from someone outside the buying group matters far less than one from a decision-maker.
Match ad types to signal stage: early signals (new hires, funding, G2 competitor research) call for brand, problem and thought-leadership ads; later signals (pricing-page visits, forwarded emails, webinar attendance) call for case studies, demo promotions and versus-competitor ads.
Only about 16% of ads get noticed — 75% are ignored — and 'active attention' is measured as just one to two seconds, so basics like a visible logo, short copy, a clear CTA and brand consistency are non-negotiable.
Emotional ads are twice as likely to be remembered as rational ones, and faces are the simplest attention-grabber — heat maps show people look at a face first, which Influ2 exploits by putting SDRs' and executives' faces in pre-event ads.
New hires are an underused trigger: people entering new roles are actively researching tools and are more responsive to outreach, so ads timed to a job change land in a rare open window.

Chapters

Intro
The old B2B formula vs the new approach
Signals and the complex B2B buyer journey
Not all signals are created equal
Early and later signals
How to create ads that get noticed
Q&A session

Q&A

What platforms or tools should you connect to your tech stack to capture early signals, like a prospect looking up your competitor on G2?

G2 sells intent analytics on who is viewing your profile, competitor profiles or the category, which you can plug into your CRM. Funding signals come from Crunchbase, hiring signals from Sales Navigator and LinkedIn, and aggregators like Keyplay are emerging that combine intent signals to help build your ideal customer profile.Chris Willocks, Anna Tsymbalist

What tools can help construct an ideal customer profile (ICP)?

Anna doesn't recommend a specific tool; instead she analyzes all available data about her happiest customers — location, market, industry, employee count — and builds the ICP around accounts that stay, use the product correctly and have capacity to use it, optimizing for LTV rather than a leaky bucket.Anna Tsymbalist

Quotes

Honestly, people in communities, they say out loud what the issue is and what they're trying to figure out.Anna Tsymbalist
Buyers, they're not sitting there waiting for our ads. They're doing their own thing, they've got their own lives to live, and they're on autopilot.Chris Willocks
We're obsessed with saying accelerating instead of speeding up, and we're obsessed with saying leverage instead of use because we think it sounds clever and a little bit more sophisticated, but the reality is people just gloss over it.Chris Willocks
You want to be on that top five list before they've even started researching. And that's where memory comes into things.Chris Willocks
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