The B2B landscape is changing and digital advertising is a key part of this transformation. With Gartner predicting 80% of B2B sales interactions will occur in digital channels by 2025, adapting your business to this shift is critical to your success.
If you’re not an expert at navigating through digital marketing channels, it may feel like you’re steering your resources and time off course. That’s why thoughtfully investing in digital advertising can have a powerful impact on your B2B organization’s growth.
To help you understand the full potential of digital advertising, we’ll walk you through how a digital advertising strategy can fuel your B2B organization’s growth. You’ll also learn several best practices to help you get started.
Understanding Digital Advertising
At its core, digital advertising promotes your products or services online. However, when implemented effectively, digital ads shouldn’t feel promotional in nature to your audience.
The content leveraged in driving promotion early in the sales stage is referred to as ‘top of funnel’ content. This type of content not only builds brand awareness, but also provides educational and helpful information for your audience. This ensures you’re keeping your business top of mind while establishing yourself as a thought leader in your industry. And once a potential customer is ready to consider the solution you offer, you’ve already proven yourself to be a trustworthy partner.
Additionally, embracing digital advertising will better prepare your business for increasing demand for more modern B2B purchasing journeys. This growing shift towards a more digital, customer-centric approach means businesses need to be readily available online. Especially as 91% of B2B buyers feel purchase experience is as important as products or services.
Digital Advertising’s Impact on Growth
Not only does digital advertising help build brand awareness, but it also drives high-quality lead generation, ultimately fueling your business’ growth. And as we mentioned earlier, developing a more digital marketing approach is essential to meeting the needs of modern buyers.
If your B2B business isn’t leveraging Account Based Marketing, or ABM, you should be considering it. 84% of businesses using ABM say it delivers higher ROI than other marketing campaigns. By incorporating an ABM strategy you can target specific accounts and personas.
This streamlined approach and personalized messaging for your audience can help increase engagement and yield stronger ROI. By shifting from a blanket approach, you pool your efforts into focusing on the most promising leads, improving your chance for a conversion.
Imagine what combining ABM with your digital advertising strategy could mean for your business’ growth.
Selecting the Right Platform
With so many different advertising platforms available, where should you advertise? Selecting the right platform is a critical step in your digital advertising journey.
Be where your audience is.
The platform you choose should align with your target audience's online behaviors and preferences.
Evaluating the customer journey and analyzing where digital ads make the most sense is crucial for a successful digital ad strategy. Consider how you want your digital ads to support your customer journey at each step of the buyer's journey, as well as how they relate to your overarching business objectives.
For instance, if you’re looking for ways to increase website traffic consider creating paid social campaigns with the goal of improving brand awareness. Leverage top of funnel content, like a blog article, that directly addresses and resolves a pain point for your target audience.
In addition to content and your audience, budget should play a significant role in choosing the right platform. Each advertising platform will have varying degrees of costs.
Creating Effective Digital Ads
From our experience, many businesses will jump to creating digital ad campaigns targeted towards bottom of the funnel prospects. This isn’t necessarily wrong, but without properly introducing prospects to your brand – it’s likely your ad won’t make much of an impression. Doing this can also quickly lead to businesses using up all of their ad budget without earning any desired results.
To avoid this, you need to include campaigns targeting each leg of the customer’s journey. As we previously mentioned, a good digital advertising strategy will provide potential customers with useful knowledge and build trust.
Achieving this will require you to have an in-depth understanding of your target audience. You need to know their motivators and their pain points to craft digital ads that will resonate with them.
You may be wondering how this can connect to your B2B business’ growth. A 2022 McKinsey report found only 8% of B2B organizations are using highly personalized marketing. But of that 8%, more than half experienced growing market share.
And if you want to take this a step further, you can develop buyer personas. Buyer personas dig deeper into the intricacies of your target audience – revealing subgroups within that audience.
Leveraging Data for Improved Results
Data is your compass in the world of digital advertising. It helps you understand the effectiveness of your campaigns and informs necessary adjustments. Without it, there’s no way for you to know if you’ve reached your desired destination or if you need to adjust your course
Depending on your campaign goals, the metrics you want to track will vary, but the following data points are usually good places to start:
- Impressions - the number of users who see your ad
- Cost Per Click (CPC) - ad spend divided by the number of clicks your ad earned
- Click Through Rate (CTR) - the number of clicks your ad earns divided by the number of impressions
A/B testing is another way data can help improve your digital ad efforts. This process involves running several versions of one ad to test the effectiveness of different variables. Variables can include audience targeting, copy, and design. However, it’s critical to only test one variable at a time in order to understand what impacted your ad’s performance.
Accelerate Your B2B Growth Marketing Strategy with Digital Ads
To meet the expectations of today’s modern buyer, stay competitive, and drive growth – B2B businesses need to build a customer-centric digital advertising strategy.
This will include choosing the right platforms and creating ads that resonate with your audience at each step within the buyer’s journey. Once your ads are implemented, the work doesn’t stop there. Continue to make data-based decisions, test different aspects of your ads, and monitor their performance to ensure your campaigns are successful.
If you require any guidance executing or developing your digital advertising strategy, consider Aspire’s marketing services. We have extensive experience supporting digital marketing initiatives across a variety of B2B industries
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