CPM is the cost per 1,000 impressions — the standard metric for awareness-stage advertising. You pay for eyeballs, not clicks or actions. CPM campaigns make sense for brand building, retargeting warm audiences, and account-based advertising where you want to surround specific companies with your brand. For B2B startups, CPM-based campaigns work best layered with intent data or account lists to avoid paying for irrelevant impressions.
For example, if you're running LinkedIn ads targeting CTOs at 500 target accounts and your CPM is $35, you might pay $350 to get your ad in front of those 10,000 people — a deliberate, targeted brand play.
We use CPM-optimized campaigns for brand awareness phases and ABM programs, always against tightly defined account lists to control waste.
Relevant Cactus Services
We implement Cost Per Mille (CPM) strategies for B2B tech startups every day. Book a free 30-minute call to get a concrete plan for your situation.
Book a free strategy call →Demand Generation
Demand gen is the full-funnel marketing strategy designed to create awareness, generate interest, and drive pipeline for your product.
Lead Generation
Lead gen is the tactical activity of capturing contact information from potential buyers — gated content, webinar registrations, demo requests, contact forms.
Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
ABM flips traditional demand gen: instead of casting wide and filtering, you identify a list of specific target accounts and run personalized marketing just at them.
Intent Data
Intent data tells you which companies are actively researching topics related to your product — reading articles, comparing vendors, downloading relevant content — even before they fill out a form on your site.
Dark Social
Dark social refers to the sharing and discovery that happens in private channels — Slack communities, DMs, WhatsApp groups, private Discord servers, word-of-mouth — that attribution tools can't track.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
CAC is the total cost to acquire a new customer, including all sales and marketing spend.