Checklist · 1 page · 15 checks
Before You Spend a Dollar: A B2B Ad Launch Checklist
Most wasted ad budget never reaches an ad.
It gets spent on campaigns aimed at a list somebody built three years ago, or on traffic sent to a homepage instead of a page about the thing the ad promised, or on leads that sit in an inbox for a week while everyone assumes somebody else is calling them. By the time anyone checks performance the money’s gone, and the ads get blamed.
This checklist covers the fifteen things worth settling before you turn a campaign on. Ten minutes, five sections: your target list, your landing page, what happens to leads once they show up, what you’re committing financially, and how you’ll decide whether any of it worked.
How to use it
Print it or pull it up on a call. It’s written as “we” on purpose, because most of these aren’t marketing’s decisions to make alone. Who owns lead follow-up is a sales question. How long you commit the budget is a question for whoever signs off on it. And agreeing on what counts as a qualified lead now saves you the argument in month two, when marketing and finance are staring at the same dashboard and reaching opposite conclusions.
If you can’t tick a box, go fix that. Start with the list section. Everything else can be sorted out while a campaign is running, but a bad list can’t, and you’ll spend three months paying to reach people who left those companies two jobs ago.
Who it’s for
Anyone about to run paid ads to other businesses. It’s most useful if you’re spending real money for the first time, or if you’ve tried before and it didn’t work. The reason is often somewhere on this page.
Start with the guide
This is the companion to our beginner’s guide to digital advertising for B2B, which covers the formats worth knowing, how targeting works when your buyers are a small group, what to spend and what to measure. If an item here raises a question, the answer’s probably in there.
Both are free and neither is gated. No form, no follow-up call you didn’t ask for.
Work through it here
Tick as you go. Your ticks stay in this browser and nowhere else.
Most of the money wasted on B2B advertising is gone before the first ad runs. The list was old, or the landing page didn’t exist, or nobody decided who’d call the leads back. Work through this before you turn anything on.
Couldn’t tick them all?
Start with the list. Everything else here can be sorted out while a campaign is running. A bad list can’t, and you’ll spend three months paying to reach people who left those companies two jobs ago.
Media Gen Co. builds and verifies B2B target lists, including trade show exhibitor and industry directory data. Send us your list and we’ll tell you what shape it’s in.
