Consulting firms are one of the more awkward audiences in B2B paid media.
They look perfect on paper - senior titles in large companies, often in the same industries you're targeting - so they end up in most audiences by default.
Across accounts, we often see them take up 15 to 25% of delivery.
They click, they fill in forms, and on the surface everything looks fine. They rarely move beyond inquiry. The platforms are also very happy to keep finding more of them and spend budget there.
They can still influence deals indirectly. In a lot of cases they're probably advising clients who do end up buying, even if that isn't the same as converting. They sit close to the problem.
And because of seniority and company size, they're not cheap to reach either. You end up paying relatively high CPMs for activity that looks good but doesn't translate cleanly into pipeline.
Deciding what to do with them
Removing them entirely feels like a mistake, because they're too close to the buying process, but leaving them in core prospecting feels wrong too if they're taking 20% of spend and not contributing directly.
What we've ended up doing is a mix:
- Some clients: separate campaign, controlled budget
- Others: exclude from new logo prospecting
It gives you control over where the spend actually goes. It's more work - more campaigns to build, and more decisions to make.
The same thing happens with company size and region
Large companies tend to crowd out smaller ones, and the same happens between bigger and smaller regions. If you don't split things out, delivery drifts toward whatever is easiest for the platform to serve. That doesn't always line up with what you actually want.
Sometimes the fix is just separating audiences that behave differently, even if they look similar on paper.
