Imagine if your business-to-business sales team had a fast and efficient way to uncover hidden opportunities long before your competitors do.
Think of the advantages you could achieve by influencing your customer’s buying preferences early in their decision process.
This article explains four straightforward steps to give your sales team that important edge.
It’s the third in a series that demystifies how B2B companies can get started with online display advertising.
The first article explained the benefits of online display advertising for B2B sales teams.
The second showed how advertisers can target individuals in companies without knowing names or contact information.
Speed matters
It’s a big advantage not to need names or contact information for the people you want to reach. The advantage is especially valuable to companies that sell high-ticket solutions.
As the cost, complexity, or novelty of your product or service increases, the number of sales opportunities is likely to shrink. Fewer companies are likely to need what you offer. Fewer can afford it. And fewer are likely to have it in their budget.
Finding good prospects for such offerings can be like searching for a few needles in a big haystack.
You must identify the small percentage of people who are actively looking for a solution like yours.
You must also find the needle fast. It’s a race between you and your competitors to get to it first.
The alternatives are slower and more labor intensive
Until recently, it was a long and arduous process to reach your best prospects.
First you had to list the companies you want to target. Then you had to research contact names in the job titles you want to reach. Then you had to find email addresses and phone numbers for those contacts.
With that information in your database, you were ready to start the time-consuming task of cold calling or emailing.
When you were well into your outreach process, you would discover that 20% or more of your contact information is inaccurate.
People change jobs often. They may no longer be the right person to target.
Deliverability is a bigger challenge than you expected.
These days, it takes about six hours of cold calling to book an appointment for a single sales conversation.
Take a shortcut
While your competitors are laboriously sifting through all the hay, you can be on a faster track.
Thanks to new but well-proven technologies, online display advertising requires only a modest commitment of time, effort, and resources. You can put your message in front of the right people fast.
Getting started with online display advertising involves a four-step process with your chosen ad technology platform. Let’s say you’ve chosen to work with Kwanzoo.
Step 1: Target the accounts and the individuals you want to reach
You profile your ideal target accounts, and you share your description with Kwanzoo. If you want to target specific accounts, you provide that list too.
You can target locations within an account. Suppose you want to reach people at IBM in Rochester, Minnesota, and you don’t care about any other IBM locations. Or you want to reach people at all IBM locations in five states. You can do that.
You also specify the job function, job title, and job level of people you want to target. Do you want to reach senior design engineers in the auto industry? Plant managers in food manufacturing? Finance executives with the title of VP or higher? You can do it.
Get creative
You can even target people who have visited other websites – including those of your competitors or partners.
Why would you do that? Consider two examples.
Suppose you want to target people who appear to be shopping for cloud IT infrastructure. With a little creativity, you might decide it makes sense to show your ad to people who have visited specific web pages. Or maybe they’ve downloaded specific content from web pages.
Someone might be good candidates for your message if he’s a senior IT executive who recently visited web pages for Microsoft Azure, HPE cloud services, and Amazon AWS.
Do you want to reach C-suite executives who are shopping for strategic consulting services? You can target the browsers of C-suite executives across multiple business functions.
Your ad will appear if such a browser contains cookies for information recently downloaded from McKinsey, Deloitte, and Accenture web pages.
Refine your targeting
Once you’ve specified your targets, Kwanzoo works with a data aggregator to see how many suitable cookies are available in the pool of web browsers the aggregator tracks. Kwanzoo provides you with a “coverage report” that summarizes their findings.
After reviewing the coverage report, you may find that the number of cookies in the cookie pool is too small for the groups you’ve targeted. You may not be able to reach enough people at the frequency you want.
If that happens, you may adjust your targeting to reach a pool of individuals that’s big enough to achieve the results you expect. You can do this while you’re still in the planning stage, before you’ve spent any money.
Step 2: Decide how often you want your ads to appear
Next you consider how often you want to advertise to each person in the cookie pool.
People rarely react to their first exposure to an ad. It may take several exposures before they notice it. It may take a dozen or more before they react to it.
You can make your ads appear at almost any frequency you want, depending on the size of the cookie pool the data aggregator can offer for the Internet Protocol (or IP) addresses and cookies you’re targeting.
The frequency you choose will depend on how much you’re willing to spend.
You need enough exposure to get plenty of people to respond. But you don’t want so much that they’ll feel you’re stalking them.
It’s a reasonable to put your ad in front of the people you’ve targeted once a day for 30 days.
Step 3: Get your ads written and designed
Now you decide what you want your ads to say to each person you’ve targeted.
If you’ve targeted several profiles of people in several accounts, you customize your ad message to appear differently to each.
Your ad to IBM executives in finance may mention IBM directly. It will probably use the wording that financial executives use. It will address a topic you have learned is probably a high priority for IBM financial executives at these locations.
Then you create your ad campaign. You get the copy written, the graphics completed, and the landing pages created.
You can have these services done internally. If your company doesn’t have in-house ad creative and production capabilities, you can use an outside firm. Or if you prefer, you can have the work done through Kwanzoo.
Step 4: Delegate the delivery process
That’s about all the active involvement for your company until results start coming in.
You need not be directly involved with web publishers or ad auctions – or with any of the other parties that work together to generate and publish online display ads.
Your online ad platform is responsible for managing that orchestration. The platform simplifies your involvement.
Recent news raises concerns about ‘brand safety’ of online ads
You may have read news stories that raise concerns about the risk of placing ads on inappropriate websites.
The concerns are important and legitimate. Without proper safeguards, automated ad-placement processes may put your ad on a web page where you don’t want it.
“Unsafe” websites may contain content that’s fraudulent, extremist, bigoted, discriminatory, sexually explicit, and so on. Unsafe sites may also advertise firearms, tobacco, alcohol, or other products that may provoke strong negative reactions.
Fake news presents special challenges
Increasingly, advertisers may be criticized or even boycotted for placing ads on sites that publish “fake news.”
Such sites publish intentionally misleading information to generate traffic. Their goal is to receive payment for ads that automated systems place on their pages. More traffic brings higher rates.
Fake news became a big issue during recent U.S. presidential elections, when fake news sites sought to cash in on strong public interest.
Sites that publish fake news are hard to monitor. That’s because algorithms and bots are not yet sophisticated enough to distinguish between real and fake news. Also, fake news sites tend to come and go so fast that they’re hard to blacklist.
Ad networks and verification services help protect your brand
Your first line of defense against unsafe websites is a group of organizations called ad networks. These services manage relationships with companies that publish websites.
Ad networks manage the inventory of advertising space for web publishers they work with. They also help monitor which websites are safe venues for your ads.
A group known as ad verification services also monitors the brand safety of individual websites. In addition, they perform two other valuable services:
- They reduce the likelihood that your ad will be served at an inappropriate time or in a negative context. For example, they can help ensure that an ad for travel to Paris doesn’t appear on a website containing news about terrorist attacks in Paris.
- They reduce fraud by verifying that that ads have actually been served to an advertiser’s target audiences.
Watch for related posts in the coming weeks.
You may still have questions about getting started with B2B online display advertising. If so, watch for future blog posts that will address topics such as:
- The role of creative service providers
- The creative elements of successful online display ads: copywriting, design, and ad production
- How to measure progress and success with online display advertising
- The economics of online display advertising: What you need to get started and how much it’s likely to cost
- Common concerns about online display advertising
- How online display ads are different from online search ads
- Testing, and tuning your effectiveness
- Setting reasonable expectations for return on investment
To be sure you don’t miss any articles in this series, share your name and email address. We’ll notify you as future articles appear.
To view prior articles in this series, go here:
Online Display Advertising for Account-Based Marketing: What’s in It for B2B Sales Teams
B2B Display Advertising: Targeting the Exact Groups You Want to Reach
About Dave Vranicar
Dave is founder of Redwell B2B, a company that provides consulting, coaching, and content-creation services at the intersection of Sales and Marketing. Redwell’s goal is to help business-to-business companies accelerate revenue growth by helping Sales and Marketing work together as members of the same agile revenue team. Most of Redwell’s clients are tech firms that engage in complex sales involving multiple decision influencers. Content created by Redwell supports both inbound and outbound prospecting, including social selling and account-based marketing and sales development.