How a mid-market AP automation vendor reached 2,400 finance ops leaders and cut cost-per-qualified-lead by 60%.

PayPath is an AP automation platform built for mid-market finance teams — the kind of company that has outgrown manual invoice processing but has not yet justified an enterprise procurement suite. Their ICP is specific: controllers and finance operations managers at companies between 100 and 1,000 employees, typically in manufacturing, distribution, or professional services.

The challenge they brought to us was a common one in B2B advertising: precise ICP, imprecise media. They were running campaigns across several large B2B media platforms that offered reach at scale but no meaningful vertical segmentation. A finance operations manager at a 200-person manufacturing company and a marketing coordinator at a 5,000-person tech company were both appearing in their "finance audience" segment. The former is an ideal buyer. The latter has no relevance to their pipeline.

The result was campaigns that looked fine on a CPM basis and were quietly expensive when measured against pipeline contribution. Their cost per MQL was $340 and their MQL-to-SQL conversion was below 8%, which suggested the quality of leads was low relative to what the numbers implied.

We proposed a 12-week category sponsorship on FinanceOpsClub's AP Automation hub. This meant PayPath's brand appeared on the category overview page, all individual AP automation comparison articles, and the product review pages for the software they compete with. Every reader who saw their placement was, by definition, a person who had typed "AP automation" into a search engine and ended up on a research site — active research behavior, not passive consumption.

We paired the category placement with a co-published sponsored research piece: a buyer guide to AP automation selection for mid-market finance teams. The guide was produced by PayPath but reviewed by our editorial team for accuracy and clearly labeled as sponsored content. It was promoted alongside the category placement and distributed to our FinanceOpsClub subscriber list.

The results reflected the quality of the audience. PayPath reached 2,400 verified finance ops leaders over the campaign window. Their click-through rate on the category placement was 3.4%, compared to 0.8% on their prior broad placements. Their cost per MQL dropped to $138. MQL-to-SQL conversion increased to 24%.

The sponsored research guide generated 680 downloads, of which PayPath attributed 47 to direct pipeline opportunities within the following quarter.

The campaign ran for 12 weeks. PayPath renewed for the following quarter.