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Jennifer Esty

Are UK VARs investing too much time and money in social media, at the expense of basic best practice?

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Analysis of the digital footprint of the UK’s top 100 value added resellers reveals the sector lags behind in implementing digital best practice—and may need to reconsider how marketing time and spend is allocated.

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What is digital best practice?

In a report commissioned by channel marketing experts, coterie, 61% of VARs were missing at least one basic digital best marketing practice. The most common failures were not properly curating their Google knowledge panel or their Google search engine results pages.

Why is this important?

90% of B2B buyers will look online before making a purchasing decision, failure to be found—and to provide basic information—means not even getting on the consideration list for new opportunities.

What should VARs focus on?

From the research, 69% of companies are doing a good job generating social content, specifically on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Social content strategies are labour-intensive and require ongoing investment, whether in internal or external resource. Whilst organic social content is important, companies run the risk of investing time and money publishing content in an echo chamber of existing contacts (customers, employees, suppliers and, yes, recruitment agents).

Prospects are harder to reach with organic social and for growth-focused companies this investment might need a rethink.

Conversely, only 35% of companies are doing a good job with onsite user experience. Arguably a conversion optimised website focused on prospect journeys will have a higher return on investment. Even if it is hard work to get right, positive UX only requires one-off investment every few years and should easily pay for itself.

What next?

To find out how you can outperform the top 100 UK VARs, and for more best practice tips, download the full report or contact us.

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    Your Digital Marketing New Year’s Resolution

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    Do these 7 things before January 31.

    The good news about these seven B2B digital marketing best practices is that they do not involve diets, giving up wine, or loads of investment.

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    1. Make sure your site is https

    In July 2018, Google started displaying a “not secure” warning in its Chrome browser for any site not using https. Over 70% of desktop users and over 50% of mobile users are on Chrome, so well over half of your visitors will see a “not secure” warning on every page of your site. Although a security warning isn’t the end of the world, it is distracting for web visitors and is an ongoing blot on your website’s user experience which will result in lost conversions and drip-drip damage to your brand.

    2. Buy your own brand name on Google Ads

    I know what you’re thinking: but I’m already P1 one for my brand name, why should I pay for it? First, are you sure? It’s worth checking that a competitor or business with a similar name hasn’t moved into P1 either through a paid or organic listing. Second, it won’t cost much. Third, it allows you to own more of the real estate on your search engine results page. Fourth, it enables you to control the messages that your prospects and customers see (I’ll bet your careers page appears as one of your site links, is that really relevant for prospective customers?).

    3. Claim your Google Knowledge Panel

    Google has two types of Knowledge Panels, local and branded panels. They’re really important for displaying key business information such as contact details and opening hours, plus they increase the amount of real estate you own on the search engine results page for your brand. Both types of panels can be claimed through the listing that appears on the right hand side of a desktop search results page, but if you don’t see one appear, you can open a Google My Business account and verify your business information. This will increase the chances of a local panel appearing; sadly there isn’t a way (currently) to do the same for the branded panels. Check out this excellent article from Yoast for a more detailed explanation.

    4. Check that your Google Map isn’t broken

    Google changed the Maps API and we’ve spotted loads of broken Maps, just have a quick look across your website and landing pages to make sure yours is still displaying correctly.

    5. Put your phone number at the top of your site

    Most B2B products and services are relatively complex and will ultimately require person-to-person selling. The best outcome of your digital marketing campaign is almost always inspiring a prospect enough to call you. So make phone numbers prominent on your website, ideally in the header(and as click-to-call on mobile).

    6. Set up remarketing on the Google Display network

    B2B products and services usually have a long consideration cycle: use remarketing as a way of staying in touch with your prospects throughout their decision-making process. A couple of pro tips: set the frequency caps at something reasonable, you want gentle reminders not exhausting in your face selling; and make sure you change the creative and messaging every few months to keep things fresh and interesting.

    7. Use the LinkedIn Insight Tag

    Love it or hate it, LinkedIn remains one the most important platforms available to B2B marketers (and yes, recruitment agents). The LinkedIn Insight tag enables you to collect data on your website visitors and match them with LinkedIn’s formidable database of over 500 million users. You’ll need a Campaign Manager account to generate a tag and then you’ll need to add it to all of your digital properties (website and landing pages), plus set up some Matched Audiences. For more detailed help, check out our previous blog article on these features.

    And of course if you need any help, give us a call. We offer a free 30 minute consultation to qualifying businesses. But please don’t ask for diet tips or help with dry January!

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      300 Qualified Leads in 3 Months

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      Sharp Ahead provide digital marketing consultancy and lead generation services to YPO, the UK’s largest public sector buying organisation.

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      Our latest campaign for their Early Years range produced outstanding results in the first three months of its launch:

      • 300 qualified leads (and counting)
      • Cost per lead of less than £19
      • 82% opt in for further marketing communications

      The campaign focused on paid media and conversion optimisation, using a combination of search, display and social.

      It proved that YPO’s unique value proposition for this sector is servicing latent demand for high quality, cost effective products in UK nurseries, clubs and preschools.

      For more information on this campaign, or how Sharp Ahead could provide similar results for your B2B organisation, please contact Jennifer Esty.

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        Stuffed, Starved or Satisfied

        John Woods December 11, 2025

        Help yourself to a glass of bubbles and I’ll explain how you can apply your party planning skills to improve your LinkedIn Ads budgeting.

        Is the B2B Buying Journey Really Changing?

        Jennifer Esty September 3, 2025

        The B2B buying journey is changing at a fast pace, and B2B marketers must evolve their brand’s digital footprint now or risk obscurity in this new world.

        Your landing page subdomain: a conversion optimisation opportunity?

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        Every letter counts in a paid search ad. With only 140 characters of copy to play with in the main part of the ad – 80 characters for the body of the ad, and two 30-charcter headlines – it’s a constant challenge to craft an ad which achieves its marketing objectives within such tight copy limits.

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        So, we are always on the lookout for ways to squeeze a bit more meaning into a search ad. One component of the ad which is usually overlooked is the landing page subdomain.

        Although the landing page subdomain is invisible in many types of advertising, it WILL normally be visible in a search ad – Google shows the landing page subdomain as part of the ad copy. And it will often also be visible in the user’s browser after they have clicked.

        It’s a subtle feature, and many users will not notice it, but some will. Choosing an appropriate subdomain helps to build user confidence and will increase conversions. Conversely, choosing a subdomain that is confusing or distracting will undermine user trust and harm conversions.

        A Subdomain Case Study

        Recently we set up a new subdomain for one of our clients, YPO, the UK’s largest public sector buying organisation, in order to test a new set of marketing landing pages.

        For technical and analytical reasons which I won’t go into in this post, setting up a new subdomain was the best way to ensure we could get good, clean results from our test.

        The test itself was unrelated to the search ads in anyway so the only difference that users could see in the ads was the display URLs—and the only difference in the display URLs was the subdomains.

        In this case our original subdomain was the generic ‘info’ and the new domain for the test was ‘catalogue’ – which we chose as an alternative simply because receiving a free YPO catalogue was the call to action for the campaign.

        The test campaign, however, resulted in an unintended but extremely interesting outcome: changing the subdomain for the lead generation campaign resulted in a significant increase in the click through rate from our paid search campaigns.

        And by significant, we mean very significant. The new subdomain had a 51% higher relative CTR on a like-for-like basis.

        Now I would love to say we intended to achieve this impressive conversion improvement—but actually we were testing something entirely different at the time.

        However, we’re now reviewing our use of subdomains across campaigns and looking at them not simply as part of the technical set up, but as a conversion optimisation opportunity.

        Maybe you should too?

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          Stuffed, Starved or Satisfied

          John Woods December 11, 2025

          Help yourself to a glass of bubbles and I’ll explain how you can apply your party planning skills to improve your LinkedIn Ads budgeting.

          Is the B2B Buying Journey Really Changing?

          Jennifer Esty September 3, 2025

          The B2B buying journey is changing at a fast pace, and B2B marketers must evolve their brand’s digital footprint now or risk obscurity in this new world.

          Prepare for Summer

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          Subheading

          The special offers on Pimms and invites to school sports days can only mean one thing: summer holidays are around the corner.

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          Whether you’re going abroad or spending the summer watching the World Cup, make sure your digital lead generation campaigns keep working even when you’re not.

          AdWords Campaigns

          If you have Google AdWords campaigns running, download the Google AdWords app (not AdWords Express). This handy app gives you top-line campaign information including:

          • Stats
          • Bids and budgets
          • Real-time alerts and notifications

          Also, to ensure you don’t overspend on your media budgets, use AdWords’ handy budgeting tools. You can set daily and monthly budgets and if your business is seasonal, have a look at last year’s summer stats to make sure set appropriate levels of budget so your competition doesn’t get the edge while you’re away.

          Remarketing

          Remarketing is a great way to stay in touch with your already engaged prospects (and stakeholders) while you’re away. Google, Facebook and LinkedIn all provide opportunities for staying in touch with B2B prospects using display remarketing.

          Take the opportunity to refresh your ad copy and creative before you leave; think about directing them to some evergreen content or a post-summer event. Also, consider the frequency of your remarketing ads (no one wants to be stalked by your ads all summer).

          And finally, remember that brand search ads in conjunction with remarketing make for a positive experience for prospects ready to reengage with you.

          Schedule Your Content

          Not all of your potential customers will be on holiday, so don’t let your content go stale while you are away. You can schedule content for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media platforms. There are loads of tools you can use, including HootSuite, Sprout Social and TweetDeck.

          Also, make sure you’re promoting an appropriate CTA—don’t encourage people to call you if the phone lines won’t be properly staffed or offer a free trial if your presales team are all wearing their cagoules on a beach in Cornwall.

          Using Facebook

          With Facebook Pages Manager you can view and respond to comments and private messages from your phone (as well as see Page Insights), and Facebook Adverts Manager allows you to edit your ads and budgets, get notifications of when ads are finishing and keep an eye on your spending.

          (LinkedIn if you’re listening, we’re still waiting for an app version of the Campaign Manager!)

          Still Send Emails

          Now that you’ve cleaned your email lists following the Great GDPR Scare of 2018, don’t forget to keep your customers and prospects engaged over the summer.

          Most email platforms will allow you to send emails scheduled for a specific time. Marketing automation platforms also allow you set up automatic email sends based on user behaviour.

          Take the time to put a content plan in place that aligned with your social posts and remarketing campaigns and with a little luck no one will ever know you were away!

          Think About Your Website

          As with email, most content management systems (CMS) have an option to schedule content. Nothing screams ‘I’ve gone on holiday and don’t care about you right now’ like outdated seasonal content on your site.

          If your website CMS doesn’t have a schedule function, consider putting your best performing content on the homepage whilst you’re away, or at least don’t leave up information about an out-of-date event during your break.

          Analytics

          Google has a Google Analytics app which is reasonably good for basic monitoring and will allow you to at least get a high-level view of your activity, especially useful for answering ‘quick’ questions from your MD whilst you’re away.

          Again, keep in mind seasonality and remember many sensible people like you will also be on holiday so volume (though hopefully not performance) may dip.

          Finally… Check with Your Sales Team

          Make sure there is a plan in place to deal with inbound leads. If you have a small sales team who are also on holiday, make sure someone will be monitoring the group email address and the phone won’t go unanswered.

          If unfortunate scheduling means there will be days when no one can manage calls from prospects, or customers for that matter, consider enlisting the help of a call handling agency to get you through the holiday season.

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            Stuffed, Starved or Satisfied

            John Woods December 11, 2025

            Help yourself to a glass of bubbles and I’ll explain how you can apply your party planning skills to improve your LinkedIn Ads budgeting.

            Is the B2B Buying Journey Really Changing?

            Jennifer Esty September 3, 2025

            The B2B buying journey is changing at a fast pace, and B2B marketers must evolve their brand’s digital footprint now or risk obscurity in this new world.

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