Are you looking to reach more businesses with your products and services? One way you can achieve this is through a B2B paid media strategy.
But what exactly can you expect from a B2B paid media campaign, and how can you achieve the best results?
Check out our article below to learn everything you need to know about B2B paid media strategies and how they can help your business grow!
B2B Paid Media Tactics
When developing a B2B paid media campaign, it’s important to think about what your customer is trying to achieve. Remember that you are not only advertising to a person, you are advertising to a business. This means that you’ll need to provide more information than a typical B2C campaign. Depending on your goals you may focus on either of these two results:
B2B lead generation
Lead generation is all about discovering which customers are suited to your services or goods and figuring out the best ways to draw them to your business. Is this with a valuable infographic, a white paper, or a free consultation? You’ll need to think about ways to draw your customer in by adding value.
A business-to-business paid media strategy can vastly boost your lead generation and help you attract a large number of potential customers to your site. This is achieved in a range of methods such as PPC advertising and search engine optimization.
B2B brand awareness
Building brand awareness is a vital step in any marketing strategy, especially if you want to show clients you are a business that they can trust. A business with high brand awareness will be perceived as a popular and trustworthy source of goods and services.
Paid media can be an excellent tool for building familiarity between you and your business clients. This will ensure that they rely on your business to offer them the services and products they require!
Combine brand awareness and lead generation for maximum results!
Understanding Your Target Customer
Before you start any digital marketing campaign, you will want to ensure you are targeting the right audience. Here are just a few methods you can use to help understand your audiences and improve your b2b digital marketing efforts:
Review buyer personas
Buyer personas are an excellent way to determine what drives your potential customers to a particular business. This insight can then be used to determine an effective digital marketing strategy that can help you attract the ideal customers to your site.
Important questions to ask your B2B buyers are:
- What is their job title?
- Are they the decision-maker?
- How can you help them convince the decision-maker?
Think about where the buyer is in the marketing funnel
A marketing funnel can be used to help you identify the steps a business customer may take when making a purchase. We break the funnel into 3 stages:
- Awareness Stage. The customer becomes aware of your business.
- Interest and Consideration Stage. The customer knows their problem and is looking for solutions.
- Purchase Stage. The customer is aware of solutions and is making their decision.
Knowing where a customer is in this funnel can help you implement a targeted paid advertising strategy. This will improve the likelihood of them choosing your business.
What media channels are B2B audiences using?
Knowing which search engines and social media channels potential customers are using is a brilliant way to improve your B2B advertising.
Social media advertising
Social media marketing has traditionally been seen as a B2C marketing strategy, but it has proven to be an effective technique when advertising your goods and services to other businesses. Business owners and decision-makers are using social media just like the rest of us.
It’s important to remember that not all social media platforms are the same, so you’ll need to cater your content to the platform you’re using. To do this, you will need to identify which social media platforms your target audience is using.
When creating your social media strategy, it’s important to think about where your business decision-makers spend their time. It’s easy to get caught up with the latest platform, but really consider where your audience is.
Not all platforms are created equal. For example, we’ve found Facebook and Instagram work really great for brand awareness, while LinkedIn Ads performs better for retargeting lead generation campaigns.
It’s important with social campaigns to continuously test and measure against your KPIs.
Paid search strategy
Paid search ad campaigns can help you promote your business to business customers that may be interested in the goods or services you provide. A fantastic procedure to achieve this is through the use of Google Ads. It truly is one of the best lead generation strategies we implement.
However, to get the most out of search engine advertising, your marketing team will need to know which keywords businesses use. Knowing your negative keywords is even more important!
Establish Goals and A Marketing Budget
Create trackable goals and conversion metrics
Establishing trackable goals and making sure you have a way to measure your success is a fantastic way to track how successful your B2B marketing is. You should also take the steps needed to track metrics such as:
- How many clicks is your website getting?
- How frequently do people engage with your posts?
- Which methods brought the most visitors to your page?
Setting a budget
Setting yourself a budget is the best way to establish achievable goals.
We recommend you use the highest budget you can afford. Higher budgets will give you more data to make decisions. If your budget is too low you can risk not gaining information or making any sales.
If you’re deciding on a few different strategies it’s best to do one well first. Expanding too quickly will create mediocre results.
Try to consider what elements of your media strategy are most important to your business. Not only will this help you balance your budget, but it can also produce the greatest results as you improve strategies that may be lacking.
Analyze your results and test ideas
Analyzing your results and test ideas through focused questions and conversion metrics will provide you with the insight you need to adapt your b2b paid media strategy.
Knowing which methods are garnering results and which are lacking is an important process in determining the success of any B2B marketing campaign.
Bonus
Retargeting campaigns
B2B customers tend to make purchases more slowly than B2C customers. This means that the “buyer journey” can often be longer. You’ll often find that a customer will browse your products/services but leave your site without making a purchase. Retargeting strategies are a way to remind past visitors about the products and services you provide.
It’s important to get creative here and think about what can convince your potential buyers to come back to your website. We’ve found that testimonials are an effective strategy.
There are a few ways to run remarketing campaigns. Two ways are email automation and paid ads. We love using retargeting as part of our B2B paid media strategy.
Landing pages created for your targeted customer
Ideally, you will want prospective customers to be instantly greeted by relevant content. This means that you will want to adapt your landing page to suit the needs and wants of your targeted customer so that they can find the services they require with minimal effort.
Check out our guide on crafting a successful landing page to ensure that your site offers visitors a fantastic first impression.
In Summary
Establishing a B2B media strategy can seem overwhelming at first. But, getting it right will be one of the best to attract and retain business customers. If you want help evaluating your B2B paid media strategy or creating one, get in touch with us today!
