Widely used bidding and targeting algorithms have left paid social advertisers with fewer levers to drive differentiated campaign performance in 2025.
One of those levers – and perhaps the biggest in B2B campaigns – is creative.
But this article isn’t about how to design beautiful, on-brand, high-performing creative elements.
It’s about building a testing process that helps you identify which creative is actually moving the growth needle and where to go from there.
This article covers:
Today’s creative trends follow shifting user priorities.
A few years ago, B2B buyers prioritized a product or service’s functionality above all other attributes, and high-performing creative reflected that.
Today’s B2B buyers are responding to relatable, value-driven partnership messaging and themes.
That shift could be a counter-response to the rise of AI, a reflection of the authenticity and humanity long embraced in B2C, a broader societal need to connect – or some combination of all three.
Whatever the reason, it’s clear that your creative needs to humanize your B2B brand.
When even LinkedIn is leaning hard into video, it’s time to get on board.
Social media and video content were high on B2B marketers’ lists to grab more emphasis late in 2024, per eMarketer.
Videos consistently record higher engagement levels for longer durations than text-only creative.
Creative needs to be creative.
B2B ad campaigns have always faced more of a challenge to stand out than more fun, product-based B2C campaigns.
Still, advertisers must feel emboldened to take big swings with humor, empathy, and personalization to stop users’ eyes and thumbs in social feeds.
Nearly half of users said they’d be more likely to look into the products and services of a brand whose creative impressed them, per Magna Global.
Now that you’re more familiar with today’s B2B creative landscape, we’ll move into the nuts and bolts of testing.
Dig deeper: Top 6 B2B paid media platforms: Where and how to advertise effectively
Here’s the flow we follow to test paid social creative at my agency.
Now let’s break down some details you don’t necessarily see in the graphic:
Get the newsletter search marketers rely on.
Regardless of the channel, we see some mistakes pop up over and over in legacy client campaigns.
Poor audience segmentation
These run the gamut between:
In general, aim for something big enough to accrue the scale that teaches the platform algorithms but discrete enough for you to pull meaningful insights about that audience’s preferences and behaviors.
Lazy creative
By this, I don’t mean just flat messaging, but:
Beyond the above, we often see over-segmented LinkedIn audiences – brands sometimes go a little overboard with the platform’s unique targeting options.
We also frequently need to course-correct for misalignment between funnel stages and user experience.
That could mean:
Before you launch anything, consider your audience’s buying-journey stage, then put yourself in their shoes.
Would you want to be bombarded with a big “Get a demo” message if you downloaded an infographic without a high-intent topic?
A few additional mistakes we see in LinkedIn campaigns are really just oversights in adopting new features. These include:
Dig deeper: 7 LinkedIn advertising pitfalls: Where your B2B ads setup might stumble
Over-segmentation of audiences is also a problem for Meta.
Still, perhaps an even bigger issue is creative that’s “optimized” so thoroughly for universal best practices that it blends right into the user’s feed.
And, yes, this is more common with B2B.
This is why it’s so important to take big swings and test new concepts, even if they feel a bit wild.
Simple iterations on a theme will result in ads getting stale quickly over time.
Avoid the sea of sameness and test bold messaging and out-of-the-box visuals.
Got a great, quippy client testimonial?
See if that raises CTR above your old brand tagline.
Dig deeper: How to get better results from Meta ads with vertical video formats
Great creative testing does more than point the way to high-performing ads.
It also helps you better understand your ideal customer profile (ICP).
That could mean identifying the messaging or media that resonates most – or, in some cases, uncovering new use cases or pain points relevant to the product or service.
Some examples of learnings we’ve gleaned from past tests:
These insights aren’t universal, but they gave us helpful direction in rolling out subsequent creative assets for those brands.
Even truly differentiated B2B paid social creative won’t achieve maximum impact without being backed by a solid structure and testing strategy.
If you take nothing else from this byline, make sure:
Good luck!
Dig deeper: How to combine Google Ads and LinkedIn Ads for comprehensive B2B campaigns
Contributing authors are invited to create content for Search Engine Land and are chosen for their expertise and contribution to the search community. Our contributors work under the oversight of the editorial staff and contributions are checked for quality and relevance to our readers. The opinions they express are their own.
Widely used bidding and targeting algorithms have left paid social advertisers with fewer levers to drive differentiated campaign performance in 2025.
One of those levers – and perhaps the biggest in B2B campaigns – is creative.
But this article isn’t about how to design beautiful, on-brand, high-performing creative elements.
It’s about building a testing process that helps you identify which creative is actually moving the growth needle and where to go from there.
This article covers:
Today’s creative trends follow shifting user priorities.
A few years ago, B2B buyers prioritized a product or service’s functionality above all other attributes, and high-performing creative reflected that.
Today’s B2B buyers are responding to relatable, value-driven partnership messaging and themes.
That shift could be a counter-response to the rise of AI, a reflection of the authenticity and humanity long embraced in B2C, a broader societal need to connect – or some combination of all three.
Whatever the reason, it’s clear that your creative needs to humanize your B2B brand.
When even LinkedIn is leaning hard into video, it’s time to get on board.
Social media and video content were high on B2B marketers’ lists to grab more emphasis late in 2024, per eMarketer.
Videos consistently record higher engagement levels for longer durations than text-only creative.
Creative needs to be creative.
B2B ad campaigns have always faced more of a challenge to stand out than more fun, product-based B2C campaigns.
Still, advertisers must feel emboldened to take big swings with humor, empathy, and personalization to stop users’ eyes and thumbs in social feeds.
Nearly half of users said they’d be more likely to look into the products and services of a brand whose creative impressed them, per Magna Global.
Now that you’re more familiar with today’s B2B creative landscape, we’ll move into the nuts and bolts of testing.
Dig deeper: Top 6 B2B paid media platforms: Where and how to advertise effectively
Here’s the flow we follow to test paid social creative at my agency.
Now let’s break down some details you don’t necessarily see in the graphic:
Get the newsletter search marketers rely on.
Regardless of the channel, we see some mistakes pop up over and over in legacy client campaigns.
Poor audience segmentation
These run the gamut between:
In general, aim for something big enough to accrue the scale that teaches the platform algorithms but discrete enough for you to pull meaningful insights about that audience’s preferences and behaviors.
Lazy creative
By this, I don’t mean just flat messaging, but:
Beyond the above, we often see over-segmented LinkedIn audiences – brands sometimes go a little overboard with the platform’s unique targeting options.
We also frequently need to course-correct for misalignment between funnel stages and user experience.
That could mean:
Before you launch anything, consider your audience’s buying-journey stage, then put yourself in their shoes.
Would you want to be bombarded with a big “Get a demo” message if you downloaded an infographic without a high-intent topic?
A few additional mistakes we see in LinkedIn campaigns are really just oversights in adopting new features. These include:
Dig deeper: 7 LinkedIn advertising pitfalls: Where your B2B ads setup might stumble
Over-segmentation of audiences is also a problem for Meta.
Still, perhaps an even bigger issue is creative that’s “optimized” so thoroughly for universal best practices that it blends right into the user’s feed.
And, yes, this is more common with B2B.
This is why it’s so important to take big swings and test new concepts, even if they feel a bit wild.
Simple iterations on a theme will result in ads getting stale quickly over time.
Avoid the sea of sameness and test bold messaging and out-of-the-box visuals.
Got a great, quippy client testimonial?
See if that raises CTR above your old brand tagline.
Dig deeper: How to get better results from Meta ads with vertical video formats
Great creative testing does more than point the way to high-performing ads.
It also helps you better understand your ideal customer profile (ICP).
That could mean identifying the messaging or media that resonates most – or, in some cases, uncovering new use cases or pain points relevant to the product or service.
Some examples of learnings we’ve gleaned from past tests:
These insights aren’t universal, but they gave us helpful direction in rolling out subsequent creative assets for those brands.
Even truly differentiated B2B paid social creative won’t achieve maximum impact without being backed by a solid structure and testing strategy.
If you take nothing else from this byline, make sure:
Good luck!
Dig deeper: How to combine Google Ads and LinkedIn Ads for comprehensive B2B campaigns
Contributing authors are invited to create content for Search Engine Land and are chosen for their expertise and contribution to the search community. Our contributors work under the oversight of the editorial staff and contributions are checked for quality and relevance to our readers. The opinions they express are their own.
It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for ‘lorem ipsum’ will uncover many web sites still in their infancy.
It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for ‘lorem ipsum’ will uncover many web sites still in their infancy.
The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making
The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for ‘lorem ipsum’ will uncover many web sites still in their infancy.
It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution
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