20 Tips for Creating Effective ABM Display Ads (Part 2 of 2)

This post tries to answer the question, “How do I create effective display ads for account-based marketing (or ABM)?”

It’s the second of a two-part series that aims to help you avoid mistakes others have made in setting up their ABM display campaigns. It identifies important steps others have missed along the way.  

The first article provided 10 tips to help you evaluate your capabilities before you set your strategy.   

This article offers 10 tips related to your your target audiences, your goals for your ads, and how you’ll measure success:

11. Clarify your purpose and goals.

12. Define your target audiences.

13. Check the number of targets available in each segment.

14. Consider which ad formats you’ll use.

15. Think what you want people to do when they see your ad.

16. Think how you will measure the success of your ads.

17. Check how much you can learn about who visits your web pages.

18. See if your ad platform can compare click-through performance across ads.

19. See if you can do split testing.

20. Strategize appealing offers.

The common point of both articles is simple: It pays to think ahead.

Your management and others will think you’re spending a good chunk of money on your ABM display program.

If you’re just starting a new program, you’ll be under especially close scrutiny. Give yourself a solid chance to succeed. Invest your budget wisely.  

Start with your audiences and goals

All effective communication strategy focuses on three essential elements: goals, audiences, and messages.

First you think about your audiences and goals. Then you tailor your message for both.

11. Clarify your purpose and goals

What are you trying to achieve with your ads?

If you’re coming to ABM display advertising from a lead gen or demand gen role, you’re likely to carry that mentality forward. Be careful.

You can accomplish much more with ABM display than you can with lead gen. So don’t define your goals too narrowly.   

The goals of lead gen and ABM display are different

With lead gen, you try to get names, email addresses, and other contact information from people who may be interested in your company’s products or services.

But not everyone who submits a name in return for a white paper or webinar is interested in buying your product. Many are interested only in your content.

So you qualify your contacts. You distill your list down to people who seem likely to be a good fit for your product or service.

When you identify a “marketing qualified lead” (or MQL), you pass it to your sales team.

As a lead-gen marketer, you probably don’t care whether a lead comes from a high-potential or a low-potential account.

Nor do you care if you’ve earned the interest of only one person in an account with 10 decision makers. And you don’t care if the lead you’ve delivered is not among the people your sales team want to speak with.

With lead gen, you score your points when you deliver an MQL. Period.   

Broaden your objectives, narrow your targeting

With ABM display, you define your objectives more broadly. You also focus your targets more narrowly. Your goal is to increase engagement in targeted accounts. Maybe you also target people in specified roles, business functions, or job titles.  

For any metrics-driven demand-gen marketer, “increasing engagement” may sound soft and squishy, like “raising awareness.”

It’s expensive to measure whether you’ve raised awareness. Many B2B companies don’t even try.

But increasing engagement is a legitimate, high-value objective – provided you increase it with the right people, in the right accounts.

And with ABM display technology, you can easily measure your success.    

Stop obsessing over contact names and email addresses

In the world of ABM display, you can achieve a nice win just by getting people to visit your website. It need not matter which pages they visit, as long as they’re the right people.  

You don’t have to badger them to provide a contact name or email address.

Here’s what matters:

  • Do they come from the right accounts?
  • Are they the right people from these accounts?
  • How did they engage with us, and how much?
  • How many of the right people are engaging with us from these accounts?    

12. Define your target audiences

Precision targeting is one of the main advantages of ABM display advertising.  

A prior article in this series addresses the details of targeting ABM display ads.

The article explains how you can target named accounts, and possibly specific geographic locations of named accounts. You do it by using internet protocol (or IP) addresses.

With cookie-based targeting, you can get much more detailed than with IP addresses alone.

You may be able to target individuals in specific business functions. You may also be able to target specific job titles at designated levels of seniority.

You may even be able to target people who have visited certain web pages, such as those of your competitors or business partners.  

12. Decide how you will segment your audiences

Relevance is one of the most important factors in the success any marketing communication.

Because you can target ABM display ads so accurately, you can also make your ads highly relevant to small groups. More relevant ads achieve better results.

That’s why the fine targeting capability of ABM display ads is a dream come true for many B2B marketers.

For best results, tailor the messages in your ads to the segments you’ve targeted.

Revisit your ABM targeting pyramid

For ideas about how to target your ad messages, let’s turn to the ABM pyramid from a presentation by Jon Miller at Engagio.  

The idea behind the pyramid is simple. Toward the apex, you have a relatively small number of your most important targeted accounts.

These are the accounts where you can afford to spend more time, effort, and money. That’s because they offer more prestige or revenue potential for your company.

As you move down the pyramid, you include a larger number of accounts in each tier. The size of the accounts and the revenue opportunity of each account tends to decrease as you move downward.  

For accounts at the apex of the pyramid, it may be worth the money and effort to create ads that are highly customized or individualized.

Your ad might mention a targeted account by name. Or it might refer to a corporate priority or a challenge the company faces.

At lower levels of the pyramid, you can’t afford to do so much customization.  

Consider geographies and language groups

At any level of the pyramid, your ads might target specific geographic locations.

If you’re targeting geographies in North America, Europe, and Asia, you’ll probably create variations of your ads in local languages.

Consider different messages for different business functions

For major accounts at the apex of the pyramid, it might also make sense to target the content of your ad to specific business functions: Finance, Supply Chain, Operations, Engineering, Human Resources, and so on.

Don’t overcomplicate

But be careful. Fine-scale targeting of ad messages can fast become a nightmare of complexity.

Here’s your dilemma: If you don’t make your ads highly relevant to your target audiences, you squander one of the key advantages of this unique marketing channel.

But as you target narrower groups, your complexity, cost, and effort will increase. You must create and run more ads. Your review and approval process will be more complex.  

At some point, you’ll see diminishing returns.

A finely segmented strategy may be very effective in stimulating engagement. But if it’s too hard to manage the complexity, your advantage will be unsustainable.  

This is a central dilemma for all ABM marketing, not just for display advertising.

Narrow your segmentation strategy to a few important factors

So how do experienced ABM advertisers segment their messages?

I asked Mani Iyer, CEO of Kwanzoo, what he sees among companies that use his ad platform.

“All of our clients keep it pretty simple,” he says. “They don’t have time, money, or bandwidth to manage too many levels of segmentation.”

“We’ve seen four main dimensions of ABM ad segmentation. The first is by industry. You serve a different ad to the healthcare industry than you do to the transportation industry,” he says.

“The second is by geography. You serve ads in English to English-speaking countries and in German to German-speaking countries.

“The third dimension is by relationship. Are you targeting customers or prospects? You serve one ad to customers and another to companies you want as customers.

“The fourth dimension is stage of awareness or interest. Are we trying to attract their interest for the first time, or are they already an identified sales opportunity in our CRM system?”

Mani says these four dimensions of segmentation are both useful and relatively simple to manage.

“Each segment will require different creative,” he says. “Copy, content, offer, and messages. So you have to really think through what is going to resonate with each audience you’re targeting.”

13. Check the number of targets available in each segment

Once you’ve established your trial segments, you can check the number of available targets in each segment.

Kwanzoo provides a preliminary report that tells you three things:

  • The number of targeted individuals in each trial segment
  • The inventory of available space in various sizes and formats
  • The frequency of ad exposures you can achieve for the individuals you’ve targeted, in various ad formats.

Have your ad platform run this analysis before you commit to your segmentation strategy.

Be sure to review that analysis before you commission any creative work for your ads. Otherwise you may waste money creating ads for a segment that’s too small to reach.

Note that the analysis an ad platform runs will probably not help segment your audiences by their level of interest or awareness.

What if the group you’ve targeted is too small?

You may find that the number of target individuals is too small to be practical in the segments you initially chose.

You may also find that the inventory of available ad space is too low for ad formats you’re considering and the number of impressions you want to make.

In either case, you’ll want to adjust your segmentation and targeting to achieve your goals for exposure and frequency.

14. Consider which ad formats you’ll use

In the North America and Europe, four ad formats dominate B2B display advertising.

They are known as Standard Ad Units:

  • The Leaderboard (728×90 pixels)
  • The Banner (468×60)
  • The Medium Rectangle (300×250)
  • The Skyscraper or Right Side Rail (160×600)     

The inventory of ad space in these formats is generally strong in North America and Europe.

As you consider other markets, other formats may be more important. For example, pre-roll video is one of the most readily available ad formats in China.

These are the video ads that appear before you can view content on YouTube, news sites, and other websites that welcome video ads.

So if you plan to advertise in China, consider creating pre-roll video ads.  

15. Think what you want people to do when they see your ad    

Direct-response ads prompt a viewer to take some action you can measure.

In contrast, “image” or “awareness” ads aim only to change a viewer’s perception of your company or your offering.

Clearly, the effect of direct-response ads is easier to measure. That’s why I suggest you limit your ABM display program to direct-response ads. Avoid image and awareness ads.   

In planning direct-response ads, you first choose which measurable action you want your ad to prompt.

Some actions require only a small commitment from your viewer:

  • Register for a webinar.
  • Visit your website to engage with your content.  
  • Download a document.
  • View a video.  
  • Participate in an online survey.

These actions are probably the most you can expect from people at low levels of interest and awareness. But they are also appropriate for people at higher levels.

Other actions require more commitment:

  • Participate in a diagnostic assessment.
  • Share your content with a colleague.
  • View a demo.
  • Talk to a salesperson.

These four are more appropriate for people at middle and higher levels of interest and awareness. Such people are probably more willing to commit their time and energy.

16. Think how you will measure the success of your ads

In measuring the effectiveness of your ABM display ads, you’ll want to answer two big questions:

  • Do my ads achieve results that justify the cost of my program?
  • How can I improve the effectiveness of individual ads?

For ideas to help you answer the first question, go here and here.

For now, I’ll focus the second question only.

You measure the effectiveness of a direct-response display ad by tracking the extent to which it prompts an action you want a viewer to take.

Each of the nine actions listed in the preceding section are relatively easy to measure.

Your bigger challenge will be to link a specific specific ad to a specific action.

Don’t obsess over form-fills

In lead-gen marketing, the common practice is to drive traffic to a landing page. The landing page presents an offer and provides a form for the visitor to fill out.

To receive the offer, the visitor must provide personal information such as name, email address, name of employer, and so on.

With this strategy, it’s easy to track which links (and so which ads) drive traffic to the landing page.  

But your ABM ads may nudge people to take actions other than the ones you’ve suggested.  

What if someone sees your ad but doesn’t click on it? Instead she goes to your homepage or your “About us” page. Maybe she goes to both.

Or maybe she shares your URL with a colleague. And then her colleague visits your homepage.

Alternatively, the person who saw your ad may click on it and be taken to a linked landing page. But when she gets to your landing page, she sees that your content is gated. She chooses not to download your content and leaves empty handed.

How can you measure these alternative actions?

You’ll want to capture all available evidence that your ad has influenced the behavior of people who see it.

17. Check how much you can learn about who visits your web pages

With solid website analytics in place, you can see how much new traffic arrives on your web pages.

By tracking the internet protocol addresses of visitors, you may also be able to see the names of the accounts from which the traffic has come.

Kwanzoo’s research suggests that even with IP address tracking, as much as 80% of traffic to a web page is unidentifiable.  

That finding has an important implication. If you can identify only 20% of people who visit your web pages, it’s hard to measure the effectiveness of your ABM ads.

How cookie data can help

Kwanzoo recently introduced a cookie-tracking capability that provides much more insight.

With it, you can identify a much higher percentage of the visitors your site. You can also identify them by more than just the name and geographic location of their account.

How does it help you to know more about who visits a web page?

Let’s look at an example.

Suppose you run an ABM display ad that targets the headquarters location of John Deere in Moline, Illinois. You want to reach senior executives in Deere’s Finance, Legal, Compliance, and Human Resources functions.

You receive a performance report from your ad platform. It says your ad got 43 clicks from 1,000 impressions. That’s a click-through rate of 4.3%.

Is your ad successful? Should you try to improve its performance? Or should you stop running it?

Hard to say.

Now, what if your ad platform could provide more complete information about the people who clicked?

And what if it could also tell you something about the people from John Deere who visited your website without clicking on your ad?

How you can use insights from cookie data

Suppose you could see that 35 of the 43 clicks came from the John Deere Finance organization and four from Legal. The remaining four are unidentifiable.

Suppose you could also see that 15 of the clicks from Finance are from executives with the title of director or higher?  

That information identifies a likely “hot spot” of interest in Finance. The four clicks also shows some interest from Legal.

And beyond the clicks your ad generated, you can also see that website received 50 new visitors. Twenty were from John Deere Finance, 15 from Legal, 10 from Compliance and 10 from HR. They are all different from than the people who clicked on your ad. And most have a title of director or higher.

Such insights would be extremely valuable to your sales team. Although you can’t provide contact names, email addresses, or phone numbers, your sales team now knows where to focus their outbound prospecting efforts.

Without the information your reports provide, your sales team could flail around in the dark. They could spend hundreds of hours pursuing other accounts that have shown much less interest.

By spotlighting a potential opportunity at John Deere, you will have helped increase sales productivity. That’s worth real money.

Your ABM ad program should get credit for it.

You may still not be able to see which ads sent which visitors to your site

Even if you can partially identify individual people who click on your ads and visitor your site, you may not always be able to see which ads sent which visitors to your site.

This is an important consideration. If you can’t attribute specific actions to specific ads, you can’t know which ads are more effective and which are less so.

Lacking that insight, you won’t know which ads to improve and which to abandon.

You risk wasting time and money on ads that aren’t effective. You also miss the opportunity to improve ads you could have made more effective.  

This has an important implication for your ad strategy.

Rather than directing traffic from multiple ads to the same landing page, you might create a separate landing page for each ad.

That way, you can at least be sure the traffic that arrives on a landing page has come from a specific ad.

18. See if your ad platform can compare the click-through performance of your ad to others like it

Kwanzoo can generate a report that tells you how many clicks each of your ads has generated.

Kwanzoo can then compare the number of clicks for your ads with the number of clicks other ads have earned.

By comparing the performance of your ad to that of similar ads, Kwanzoo can tell you whether your ad is a high achiever or an underperformer. It’s like rating test scores on a curve.

For low-achieving ads, you can pause your campaign to make adjustments that improve their effectiveness.

If you can’t attribute traffic to individual ads and you can’t measure the relative performance of individual ads, you may be challenged to answer the question, “Is this ad working?”

Lacking that insight, you won’t know whether to pull it or try to improve it.  

19. See if you can do split testing

A/B split testing offers another way to test the effectiveness of individual ads.

The technique is familiar to marketers who do conversion optimization on web pages.

You create two or more treatments of the your web page (or in this case, your ad).

You then serve your visitors randomly alternating treatments of your content. And you measure which treatment performs best.

A/B split testing can be great for improving the effectiveness of ads. But it has these limitations:

  • Not all ABM ad platforms enable you to do split testing. (Kwanzoo’s does.)
  • You need about a thousand clicks to generate a statistically valid A/B test. For some target audiences, your campaign may not be able to produce enough impressions to produce a thousand clicks. Only a small percentage of the people who see an ad will click on it. So to get a thousand clicks, you will probably have to serve thousands of impressions. If your targeted segments are small, your ABM display ads may never achieve enough impressions or clicks to provide statistically valid results.
  • As we’ve discussed, an ABM display ad may produce worthwhile activity other than a click. For ads that don’t generate a click but instead drive traffic to a homepage, it may be hard to know which ad produced which activity.    

Why measurement is so important to your ad strategy

Why does this article, which purports to be about creating display ads, focus so much attention on measurement?

Two reasons:

  • As you set your strategy and create the content for ads and landing pages, it helps to think about what results you can and cannot measure. Your measurement capabilities will influence both your strategy and your creative work.  
  • If you can do split testing, you may want your creative team to produce alternate treatments of the same ad. Then you can run one ad against the other at the same time.   

I’ll talk more about these points in my next article.

The key point of all this talk about measurement is simple: If you can’t measure the effectiveness of your ads, you’ll have a hard time justifying the cost of your ABM display program.

So focus your ad strategy to produce ads whose performance you can measure.

20. Strategize ways to improve the appeal of your offers

To prompt your target audiences to take the actions you want, you present a series of offers.

An offer tells someone what he’ll receive in return for taking a specific action. It’s a quid pro quo: “If you do this, you’ll get this.”

Your offer is one of the most important elements of any direct-response ad. If your offer is weak, irrelevant, or unappealing, it doesn’t matter how good your creative is. You won’t get the action you want.

So it pays to think hard about making your offers both relevant and appealing to your target audience.

Focus on what’s in it for them

After you’ve stated the action you want viewers to take, you must communicate what’s in it for them. The value they see in taking the action must be much greater than the effort or risk they may see in doing it.  

In my experience, B2B marketers could benefit by paying closer attention to the quality and variety of their offers.  

Every offer, even for free content or services, meets some level of resistance. Each person who sees your display ad will be distracted. They are always doing something else.

They may not know your company or the solutions you offer. They may have little time or inclination to fill out your forms. They may not want to share their contact information to receive your free information.

Most of them probably don’t want to call for a free consultation or talk to your salesperson.

Your offer and your ad copy must be strong enough to overcome all these sources of resistance. You must “sell” your free content as persuasively as you sell your product or service.

 

This article has shared 10 tips that will prepare you to define a successful strategy for ABM display advertising. Together, it and the preceding article have shared 20 tips to help you think ahead before you plan your ad strategy.

Kwanzoo’s experience suggests that these tips are not obvious. Companies routinely overlook many of them.

To achieve greater success with your ABM display program, go through the list methodically before you start producing your creative.   

My next article will focus on the creative elements of successful display programs: copy, design and the visual elements of ads and landing pages.

Look for other future articles to address these topics:

  • Common concerns about display advertising
  • Retargeting

If you share your name and email address, we’ll notify you when future articles appear.

If you have other questions about getting started with B2B online display advertising, look for other articles in this series. Here are the links:

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

ABM Display Ads: How to Reach Your Ideal Customers Before Your Competitors Do

Inside Display Ads for Account-Based Marketing: From Specs to Creative to Production

Online Display Advertising for Account-Based Marketing: How Much Does It Cost?

CEO’s Dilemma: When to Invest in Display Advertising for ABM (Part 1 of 2)

Marketing Leader’s Dilemma: When to Invest in Display Advertising for ABM (Part 2 of 2)

20 Tips for Creating Effective ABM Display Ads (Part 1 of 2)

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.  

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