The B2B landscape is changing, and digital advertising is a critical part of this transformation. Gartner predicts 80% of B2B sales interactions will take place through digital channels by 2025, so adapting the business to this change is critical to success.
If you're not great at navigating digital marketing channels, you may feel like you're manipulating resources and falling off course. That's why careful investment in digital advertising can have a huge impact on the growth of B2B organizations.
To help you understand the full potential of digital advertising, we'll walk you through how a digital advertising strategy can drive the growth of B2B organizations. You'll also learn a few best practices to help you get started.
Understanding digital advertising
The core of digital advertising is promoting products and services online. However, if digital advertising is implemented effectively, it should not feel inherently promotional to the audience.
Content that is leveraged to promote promotions early in the sales phase is called “top of the funnel” content. This kind of content not only increases brand awareness, but also provides viewers with educational and useful information. This allows us to always keep our business in mind while establishing ourselves as an industry opinion leader. And when potential customers are ready to consider the solutions you offer, you've already proven that you're a reliable partner.
Additionally, by adopting digital advertising, businesses will be able to better respond to growing demand for more modern B2B purchasing journeys. As digitalization progresses and there is a growing trend towards a customer-centric approach, businesses need to be able to quickly access online. Notably, 91% of B2B buyers feel that the buying experience is as important as a product or service.
The impact of digital advertising on growth
Digital advertising not only helps increase brand awareness, but it also promotes quality lead generation and ultimately business growth. As mentioned earlier, developing a more digital marketing approach is essential to meet the needs of modern buyers.
If your B2B business isn't using account based marketing (ABM), you should consider it. 84% of companies using ABM say ABM has a higher ROI than other marketing campaigns. By incorporating an ABM strategy, you can target specific accounts and personas.
This streamlined approach and personalized messages to audiences can help increase engagement and increase ROI. By moving away from a comprehensive approach, you'll be able to focus on your most promising leads and increase your chances of conversion.
Imagine how combining ABM with a digital advertising strategy could impact business growth.
Choosing the Right Platform
With so many different ad platforms available, where should you advertise? Choosing the right platform is an important step in your digital advertising journey.
Stay where your audience is.
The platform you choose should match your target audience's online behavior and preferences.
Evaluating the customer journey and analyzing the areas where digital advertising makes the most sense is essential for a successful digital advertising strategy. Consider how you want digital advertising to support the customer journey at each stage of the buyer journey and how digital advertising relates to your overall business goals.
For example, if you're looking for ways to increase website traffic, consider creating paid social campaigns aimed at increasing brand awareness. Use top-level content in the funnel, such as blog posts, that directly address and resolve target audience issues.
In choosing the right platform, not only content and audience, but budget must also play an important role. Each ad platform has a different level of cost.
Creating effective digital ads
Based on our experience, many businesses will jump to create digital ad campaigns targeting the lowest funnel prospects. This isn't necessarily wrong, but if you don't properly introduce prospects to your brand, your ads may not leave much of an impression. If you do this, companies will quickly use up all of their advertising budgets, and they may not be able to get the implementation results they expected.
To avoid this, you need to include campaigns that target each stage of the customer journey. As mentioned before, a good digital advertising strategy provides potential customers with useful knowledge and builds trust.
Achieving this requires a deep understanding of your target audience. To create digital ads that resonate with them, you need to know their motivations and challenges.
You might be wondering how this will lead to B2B business growth. According to a 2022 McKinsey report, only 8% of B2B organizations have highly personalized marketing. However, of that 8%, more than half have experienced an increase in market share.
If you want to take this a step further, you can develop buyer personas. Buyer personas delve deeper into the intricacies of your target audience and reveal subgroups within that audience.
Leveraging data to improve implementation performance
In the digital advertising world, data is the compass. It helps you understand the effectiveness of your campaigns and make necessary adjustments. Without it, there's no way to know if you've reached your intended 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 a good place to start.
- Impressions: The number of users who viewed your ad.
- Cost-per-click (CPC) - ad spend divided by the number of clicks your ad gets
- Click through rate (CTR) - the number of clicks your ad gets divided by the number of impressions
A/B testing is another way to use data to improve digital advertising efforts. This process runs multiple versions of a single ad to test the effectiveness of various variables. Variables include audience targeting, copy, design, etc. However, it's important to test only one variable at a time to understand what impacted ad adoption performance.
Accelerate your B2B growth marketing strategy with digital advertising
To meet the expectations of modern buyers, remain competitive, and drive growth, B2B companies need to build customer-centric digital advertising strategies.
This includes choosing the right platform and creating ads that resonate with your audience at each stage of the buyer journey. Once an ad is implemented, the work doesn't stop there. Continue to make data-driven decisions, test different aspects of your ads, and monitor their performance to ensure your campaigns are successful.
If you need guidance on implementing or formulating a digital advertising strategy, consider Aspire's marketing services. We have extensive experience supporting digital marketing initiatives in various B2B industries.
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