Digital marketing for a £5m+ B2B: what to focus on, what to ignore

If you run a £5m+ B2B business across Rotherham and the surrounding areas, you probably already have some digital marketing in place. A website. A LinkedIn presence. Maybe Google Ads or some SEO work. Maybe an email list you do not use much.

The question is rarely "should we be doing digital marketing?". You already are. The harder question is whether what you are doing is actually moving revenue, or just generating activity.

In my experience, most £5m+ B2B businesses are spreading their digital marketing too thin across too many channels, with too little measurement, in pursuit of a strategy nobody on the team can articulate. The good news is that the fix is usually less work, not more.

What £5m+ B2B businesses get wrong

Four patterns I see again and again.

Doing every channel badly instead of two channels well. Website plus SEO plus Google Ads plus LinkedIn plus Instagram plus YouTube plus email plus events. Each one gets a token amount of attention and money. None of them gets enough to actually work. The marketing manager is exhausted. The owner is unconvinced. The numbers are mediocre.

Optimising for vanity metrics instead of revenue. "We had 15,000 impressions on our last LinkedIn campaign." Fine. How many of those turned into qualified leads, then opportunities, then deals? If you cannot answer that for every channel you are spending on, you are flying blind.

Treating it as a brand exercise instead of a sales exercise. For a £5m+ B2B with a relatively small target market, digital marketing's job is mostly to get the right ten or twenty companies to consider you when they have a need. It is not to "build brand awareness" across thousands of irrelevant viewers. Concentrated targeting beats broad reach almost every time at this size.

Buying tools before fixing the strategy. Every quarter, a new marketing automation platform, a new AI tool, a new agency. The strategy underneath has not changed. The tools cannot fix a strategy problem.

Where to actually focus

For a £5m+ B2B in South Yorkshire, three things will move the dial more than anything else.

1. A website that converts the qualified visitors you already have. Most of your digital marketing budget would be better spent fixing the website than buying more traffic. If 100 qualified prospects land on your site and only one fills in a form, doubling the traffic to 200 only gets you two enquiries. Doubling the conversion rate gets you the same result for less money and the lifetime benefit of every visitor that comes after. Audit the website for clarity (does the home page tell a £5m+ buyer immediately what you do and who for?), proof (testimonials, case studies, named clients), and friction (how easy is it to actually contact you?).

2. LinkedIn done properly, by senior people, not generically. LinkedIn is the closest thing B2B has to a free direct line to decision-makers in your target accounts. The £5m+ businesses winning on LinkedIn are the ones where the owner and one or two senior people post genuinely useful content weekly — original takes, sharp observations, named clients — and engage with the people they want to do business with. Not the businesses paying someone to schedule generic posts from the company page.

3. Email marketing to a list of people who already know you. Your past clients, your active prospects, the people who downloaded your guide, the people who came to your event. This is the most valuable digital marketing asset you have, and it is almost always underused. Monthly, useful, signed by you personally, not a corporate newsletter. The ones doing this well are running 5-10% open-to-discovery-call conversion on hot lists — orders of magnitude better than cold outbound.

What to actually stop doing

Things to seriously consider switching off if you are doing them on a £5m+ B2B:

Generic content publishing for SEO traffic that does not match your buyer. A blog post that ranks for "what is supply chain management" brings you traffic from students in India. It does not bring you £100k clients. Write for the buyer you want, not for the search volume.

Paid social on broad audiences. Targeted is fine. Broad B2B social campaigns are mostly money you will never trace back to revenue.

The agency retainer you cannot evaluate. If you cannot tell what your marketing agency actually delivered last month, and you cannot trace any specific revenue back to their work, end the retainer. Hire a fractional or in-house person you can actually hold accountable.

What this looks like in practice

Take Holistic Care 4 U — a care services business based in Rotherham, working across domiciliary, residential and training. When Taurai first came to me, the business had no real business plan and no working profit model. Busy day to day, but not building anything that compounded. Since we started working together, the business is back into profit, with a solid business plan and a clear methodology for growing margin. Marketing was not the magic in his story — disciplines were. But once those disciplines were in place, the small marketing effort he was already running started to compound, because it was finally aligned with a clear plan for who he wanted to serve and how.

“Working with Tim has been a game changer for our business. He has a real talent for cutting through the noise and helping us clearly identify what truly matters. What sets Tim apart is his ability to bring structure to our thinking—turning ideas into clear priorities and actionable plans. He doesn’t just advise; he challenges, guides, and holds us accountable to the standards we set. If you want a coach who will help you focus, think better, and actually execute, Tim is the one.” — Taurai Tongoona, Director, Holistic Care 4 U

One thing to do this week

List every channel and tool your business spends money on for digital marketing. For each one, write down two numbers: how much it cost last month, and how much revenue you can trace back to it.

The lines where you cannot answer the second number are your starting point. Either get the measurement in, or shut the spend down. Both decisions are better than the current state.

Are your sales and marketing actually working?

If this has prompted you to look hard at how your digital marketing is spending money and whether it is delivering revenue, the next step is to get specific.

Step 1: Get your data. Take 7 minutes to score your sales and marketing performance across the disciplines that actually move revenue. You will get an instant, personalised report on where the biggest gaps are. Score your sales and marketing →

Step 2: Let us talk. Book a 30-minute Discovery Call directly into my diary. We will look at your scorecard, walk through where your digital marketing spend is going today, and decide what to keep, what to fix, and what to stop. Book a discovery call →

Alternatively, if you are based in Rotherham or across South Yorkshire and want a quick chat first, call the office on 01709 242751 or email me at timcoleman@actioncoach.co.uk.