How to Use Advertising Strategically for Your B2B Business
Advertising can be tough.
As a B2B marketer, the go-to online advertising channels haven’t served me or my clients very well in recent years. In 2010, when Google search results, Facebook and Twitter feeds, and LinkedIn inboxes weren’t saturated, you could get a lot out of a small budget.
But, a decade later the world is different. (In so many ways!) The paid channels that used to serve me and my clients now often feel impenetrable and futile. Facebook feeds and Google search are expensive and, while they serve smaller-ticket consumer purchases, they don’t serve businesses who are selling to business users products that require lots of education and cost upwards of $10,000 / year.
It seems that people have bought and sold the idea that advertising serves B2C and B2B businesses equally. But, if you consider the difference between the purchases—the amount of trust and education required to close a deal, the level of investment, and the buying team, it’s pretty easy to start to see why an Instagram ad campaign for a sock subscription makes more sense than an ad campaign promoting an insurtech software platform.
Maybe this seems obvious, but I’m going to say it anyway—advertising must be used differently for B2B advertising. Where a consumer brand can use their ads to close deals and drive sales, B2B brands need to use advertising to educate, build trust, and start a conversation.
Advertising for consumer products is akin to dating on Tinder.
Advertising for B2B products is an old-school courtship. Use ads to educate and drive awareness about your business. Don’t be too eager. Help your buyer get to know you across social channels and search engines. Don’t go too quickly to the close, or you’ll turn the prospect off.
Use your budget wisely. I’ve seen companies spend thousands of dollars on Google ads, sending their audience to a Request a Demo form, only to get a bunch of unqualified leads that never respond to the follow-up.
Our clients often have anywhere from $500 - $2000 / month to spend on advertising. While it’s not much when compared to the big brands and VC-backed companies, if you’re smart, you can use that money for strategic efforts.
I’m not talking about getting impressions or likes. Anyone can boost those metrics. Instead, I’m focused on driving high-quality leads and using paid methods to boost organic search rankings for key industry phrases.
Here are three ways we use advertising, in a strategic way and on a small budget, to support lead generation and sales for ourselves and our clients.
Support Your Organic Search for a Specific Phrase Related to Your Business
Pairing paid efforts and content marketing is a no-brainer. And, no matter what Google says, paid search supports organic search. I don’t know if they are still skirting the issue, but we’ve tested the method and running paid search on key phrases boosts the organic performance of those phrases long into the future. I’m talking years into the future. And, that boost can happen with only a few hundred dollars in budget.
For example…
We publish a marketing planning template at the end of each year to help marketers start to map out the upcoming year. Last year, we spent $400 for four weeks on a paid search campaign promoting the guide. In that time we received 315 leads.
You might think that once I turned the campaign off the submissions would slow or stop, but they definitely did not. We received an additional 300 leads over the next four weeks and continue to get leads through the month of May. As of today, we’ve acquired nearly 800 leads from this campaign.
800 leads for $500. That’s a cost-per-acquisition of $0.50. Not bad
Right now Think Better Marketing ranks in the first organic position for “2020 marketing planning template” and the 12th organic position for “marketing planning template” when I search Google in Incognito mode. It’s a campaign that keeps on giving.
The requirements for a campaign like this are:
A timely and interesting piece of content that provides value to your audience
A specific, target-industry related keyword phrase that doesn’t have a ton of competition
A landing page and form
About $500 for advertising
A method to follow up and nurture the leads that you acquire
Drive Sign-Ups and Leads Using LinkedIn InMail Ads
When clients ask me about using social advertising for their B2B brands, I only recommend LinkedIn. I don’t find that B2B buyers are on Facebook looking to learn more about the next accounting or billing software platform. They are there to see pictures of their grandkids. Similarly, Instagram and Twitter haven’t resulted in any meaningful engagement, and more than not, on Twitter, I find that bots are the accounts that most often engage with ads.
However, LinkedIn has proven to be a good lead generation tool and I have lots of great things to say about LinkedIn.
The audience is primarily professionals and the topics they are interested in reading about while on LinkedIn are business-related.
The targeting is really great. You can target your ads based on criteria like Title, Company, Group Membership, Connections, Geography, Skills, etc. You can also target lists of contacts and companies that you have already in your database.
There are a variety of ad types. You can pay for ads to display in the sidebar, in the newsfeed, and in InMail.
LinkedIn isn’t saturated (yet). Which means that LinkedIn users are still listening when you advertise and the ads actually get engagement. This won’t be forever and I’m already seeing tools crop up that automate the outreach in LinkedIn which will inevitably reduce the engagement and trust in the platform, but I’ll save that topic for another time…
The platform integrates well with marketing automation and sales CRM tools like HubSpot.
For example…
One of our clients published a really valuable guide for their industry. In addition to promoting the guide through organic social channels and email, we decided to run a LinkedIn InMail campaign to acquire new leads, leveraging the guide.
What’s great about LinkedIn InMail advertising for lead generation is that your audience doesn’t have to leave LinkedIn to submit their information and receive your offer. You can embed a LinkedIn lead form in the InMail message and the viewer just selects “Download guide” in their InMail inbox, a form pops up that has already populated most of their information.
If you’re using a tool like HubSpot, you can integrate your LinkedIn and HubSpot accounts to push these new leads into HubSpot and initiate a nurture program.
In the example above, we ran the campaign for about six months with a budget of $1000 / month and acquired 153 leads. That’s a cost-per-acquisition of about $39. Almost all of the other channels that this client used to acquire leads had a cost-per-acquisition of over $500. And, most of these leads were qualified leads, because of our ability to advertise to such a well-targeted audience. And, a few ended up in the sales pipeline.
Success!
Support the Sales Team With Remarketing Ads
Finally, if you only have a few hundred dollars each month to run ads, I suggest running a basic brand remarketing campaign.
One of our clients focuses heavily on business development and outbound sales. To support the sales team and their outreach efforts, we run remarketing campaigns. This ensures that any prospects that the sales team is reaching out to, who visit the website, will be remarketed to. Over time, this builds trust and brand recognition with the prospects to support an easier sales conversation.
We only spend $200 / month—a small investment, but we’re able to attract sales prospects back to the site through display and can track their behavior, which allows us to report to the sales team on the engagement among their prospect-base and prompt outreach, driven by prospect interest and behavior.
There you have it. Those are some of the ways that we leverage paid channels to support lead generation with a small budget. We’d love to hear from you if you’ve seen success with other approaches or channels.
