COMPLETE GUIDE TO TARGETED

Engaging customers on their terms

GO-TO-MARKET The Complete Guide to Targeted B2B Advertising

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The Buyer’s Journey

Consider this typical scenario: Your team just returned from your biggest tradeshow of the year and met Mary, the CMO of a Fortune 500 healthcare company. Your solution is a perfect ft for Fortune 500 healthcare companies, and you sell directly to their teams. What do you do with the information you’ve collected on Mary? If you’re like most marketers, you’ll add her contact information to an email drip campaign, and pass it over to where they’ll bombard her with phone calls and their own emails.

The frst problem with this approach is that neither of these tactics are on Mary’s terms. She’s not waiting around at her desk for your phone calls and emails. She’s busy at work, and equally busy at home – doing things on her own terms. When she has downtime, she’s spending it checking the news on CNN.com, catching up on her feed, and maybe even browsing to TMZ to get the latest celebrity gossip.

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The second problem is that we’re only thinking of Mary as the CMO of the Fortune 500 healthcare company. In reality, there are 8 to

10 other decision makers typically part of a B2B software purchase. They could be Mary’s direct reports, Mary’s boss, Mary’s internal customers, and even folks from other departments like legal, or IT. Focusing just on Mary reduces our chances of winning a deal, or even getting something off of the ground, by 10x!

In reality, there are 8 to 10 other decision makers typically part of a B2B software purchase.

Imagine if you could engage Mary on her own terms – the websites she’s already visiting to do her job, or catch up on her social life. On the platforms and channels she’s already using, and with a message that’s contextually appropriate to her current understanding of your solution. And what if we could start to engage the other 8 to 10 decision makers at Mary’s company who infuence her buying decisions? That is the vision being made possible with today’s technology.

+ 3 The Complete Guide to Targeted B2B Advertising Table of Contents

Why Use Targeted Advertising? ...... 5

Segmenting Your Target Audience ...... 6

Segmenting Your Target Personas ...... 6

Developing Your Buyer’s Journey ...... 10

How Does It Work? ...... 12

Retargeting ...... 13

Proactive or Account-based Advertising ...... 13

Is Targeted Advertising Right For My Company? ...... 15

Getting Started: Popular Platforms/Suppliers ...... 16

How Targeted Advertising Can Engage Target Prospects at Every Stage of the Buyer’s Journey ...... 20

Creating Campaigns ...... 21

Retargeting Campaign ...... 23

Ad Creative Best Practices ...... 25

Landing Page Best Practices ...... 27

Metrics to Measure ...... 29

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Why Use Targeted Advertising?

If you consider yourself a modern marketer or professional at a B2B company today, you are likely already up and running with basic display advertising and retargeting campaigns. For most B2B organizations, these are two of the most tried-and-true tactics in the digital demand generation playbook. The most common problem with these two channels is that most marketers fail to consider them strategically by understanding where they ft into the grand scheme of demand generation, which is targeting only relevant personas with differing messages and calls to action appropriate to whatever stage that buyer is at in her journey.

It’s important to note that targeted advertising is only one way to make contact with your buyers. You ultimately need to determine the best mix of channels to deliver your content to your prospects.

Because we believe in taking a hyper-targeted approach to advertising in order to spend your paid acquisition dollars most effectively, this guide will focus on advertising methods that allow you to deliver ads only to the buyers you care about, like Mary and the other relevant personas at her company, and thus you won’t be wasting impressions on buyers who aren’t relevant to your solution.

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Segmenting Your Target Audience

To understand how to do this, you frst have to understand the concept of the right buyer and their journeys. To succeed in any form of marketing – particularly display advertising – you need to be laser focused on the segments, personas, and channels that matter to your overall go-to-market strategy. It is impossible to market effectively to everyone, so the best marketers always concentrate their efforts where they will have the most success. This means focusing on only one customer segment.

There are many techniques for segmenting your potential customers, but many are often overkill and their complexity kills progress. One simple approach is to look at all of your customers and then zero in on the best one. Collect all of the data you can on that one customer – suggestions for useful data points may include things like:

• Number of employees • B2B or B2C • Geographic location • Annual revenue • Average selling price • Growth rate • Number of offce locations • Industry or vertical

Segmenting Your Target Personas

After you’ve understood what a company within your ideal customer segment looks like, you must understand the context around how that company, and the personas within that company, purchase your software. This will help you understand which points throughout their buyer journey you need to infuence with advertising in order to drive conversions and move that buyer through the sales funnel.

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To create highly converting messaging and calls to action in your Record these traits in a document that outlines advertising efforts, you will need to understand the following about your ideal customer profle, because you will use them as variables to segment your advertising your target buyers: campaigns.

• Their motivations for buying your software • Their pain points in their current role • Their role in the overall buying process at their organization • Where along the buyer’s journey they are most likely to get stuck • How to resolve their concerns at the point in their journey where they are most likely to get stuck

As you begin to understand these points, you will have started to develop an understanding of your buyer persona. With these learnings as a start, continue to hone in on your buyer persona by gathering the following information:

• Title (e.g. CEO, VP of Marketing, Engineer, Offce Manager) • Role in buying process (Infuencer, Champion, Economic buyer, Decision maker) • Behavioral information (This is what you started to develop above) • Department (Marketing, Sales, Operations, etc.) • Potential size of budget • Primary responsibilities (generating marketing reports, managing a team of account executives, maintaining servers across four data centers, etc.)

The Buyer’s journey is the active process a potential buyer goes

through leading up to a purchase decision. (HubSpot)

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Completing this exercise for each of your target buyers will give you a much clearer understanding of how to tailor your advertisements to ensure they are effective in removing sticking points within your buyer’s journeys.

To gather this information, use both primary and secondary research methods:

• Interview individuals in your network who ft this persona • Gather data from your CRM • Read articles or posts published by individuals who ft this persona • Mine the LinkedIn profles of this persona • Use existing persona research from analyst frms like SiriusDecisions

A buyer persona is a semi-fctional representation of your ideal customer based on and real data about your existing customers. When creating your buyer persona(s), consider including customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. The more detailed you are, the better.

(HubSpot)

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It is important to note that in a complex B2B software sale, you often have multiple buyer personas involved and need to consider where each of them becomes most involved. For example, an executive persona at your ideal prospect might not be involved until the point at which vendors are reviewed against each other, but not in the initial solution research phase. In the future, you will need to complete a persona for each potential buyer. For now, let’s just start with one.

Once you have gathered as much information as you can about your target personas, compile the information into a short description like this:

Titles: Managing Partner, Executive Partner, Managing Principal Managing Partner Persona Reports to: Partnership Oversees: COO, CFO, Attorney Partners

Business Role: Use of the Software:

• The MP acts as the CEO of a law frm. In ProBill Legal’s under 50 • The MP is the only person in a law frm who uses both the Attorney attorney segment, this is usually a part-time job. They spend about half and Administrator portals of ProBill Legal their time as a practicing attorney and half on frm administration

• This involves diverse responsibilities, including client-facing Key Criteria: responsibilities, PR, vendor management, and fnancial administration. • Must be Web-accessible to allow attorneys to bill from the road or • This includes overseeing and approving the frm’s billable hours. from home

• Needs to integrate seamlessly with their fnancial system, which the Buying Role: MP also uses frequently

• If the frm has a COO and/or Head of Technology, these positions and • The MP does not have a technical background so the system needs to the MP make up the core buying committee and relatively equal power. have intuitive, out-of-the-box dashboards and analytics

• Otherwise decisions are made by a vote of the partners, in which the MP has the tie-breaking vote. This is true at most small law frms. Exisiting Solution: Most small frms use excel to keep track of • Since they have limited administrative staff, the MP is the key person in their hours the buying process. + 9 The Complete Guide to Targeted B2B Advertising

Developing Your Buyer’s Journey

In addition to developing a buyer persona, you need to analyze the corresponding buyer journey or process that your buyers go through when deciding whether or not to make a purchase. Doing so will allow you to turn those sticking points into leverage points for targeted advertising, and vary the messaging in your advertising so that you are addressing each sticking point.

To start developing your buyer’s journey, map out the key stages within the process and try to anticipate what will need to happen at each point to move the buyer to the next stage. It is also important to identify the points throughout the journey where your buyers are likely to get stuck, and to fgure out what messages you need to communicate to address their concerns and get them unstuck.

For most early stage companies, your most fruitful leverage points for targeted advertising are at the awareness and research stages. These are often the points that have the most volume and opportunity for targeted advertising to be effective as they target groups who may not be aware of your company or software and also those who are already doing research and are ready to make a purchase. Although the awareness and research stages may be the most fruitful for targeted advertising, advances in targeting technology from modern advertising platforms allow you to serve stage-specifc advertisements to your prospects at every stage. You’ll need to create different advertisements for each persona to address their concerns at each of these leverage points and move them through their buyer’s journey.

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Now You’re Ready

The early days of display advertising was a time when only the most well-funded B2B marketing teams could even consider display advertising campaigns. These channels were only effective for B2C marketers who could cast a wide net. But now, with the advanced hyper-targeting capabilities of most display advertising platforms, B2B marketers can use display as a cost effective way to hone in on the target buyers within their ideal customer segment without serving, and paying for, ads that are displayed to others who will never buy your software.

Now that we can target and deliver, and thus only pay for advertisements aimed at the right buyer, targeted advertising has become a much more effective tool for B2B.

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How Does It Work?

Targeted advertising is most effective when used as a strategic piece of a go-to-market strategy. Just like with any other marketing initiative, a targeted advertising campaign should support your overall business and marketing goals.

Let’s take a look at how targeted advertising works, both at the account level and for retargeting purposes.

DISPLAY, ETC. RETARGETING

Targeted advertising in the B2B context is the ability to Showing ads to buyers who have previously been to your hyper-target your prospects on various platforms at each website, or are part of a list of prospects who you want to stage of their buyer journeys. target explicitly.

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Retargeting

Retargeting takes advantage of tracking pixels and cookies to serve targeted ads to visitors of your website on other sites they visit. Considering that virtually 100% of your buyers will end up on your website at some point in their buyer journey, retargeting can be a highly effective tactic.

By placing an unnoticeable piece of code on your website, called a pixel, you’re able to “cookie” visitors and keep your in front of them even after they leave your website.

When a cookied prospect visits a site that has opted into displaying retargeting ads as a part of their advertising inventory, retargeting platforms will recognize the site visitor and deliver an advertisement to that buyer. This ensures that your ads are only served to people who have previously visited your website (where they were originally cookied), providing context around your marketing messaging.

Retargeting is largely reactive (for example, you see ads for an accounting software you were looking at on a website, but only after you leave the site). This can be helpful for keeping your brand top of mind over the course of a long sales cycle, and is a critical tool for moving buyers through their journey.

Proactive or Account-based Advertising

A study by and Carat Enterprise found that 33% of B2B decision-making units contain 6 to 10 people, and over 50% contain 1 to 5, precisely why companies are turning to account-based advertising. This form of advertising allows companies to place their marketing

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messages in front of all of the decision makers within an account, rather than just a single lead.

Here’s how it works: account-based advertising uses digital (IP or cookie-based) targeting to reach specifc accounts. You can integrate an account-based marketing platform with your CRM or marketing automation tool to run campaigns targeted toward the accounts already in your database. This gives you the ability to run multi-channel campaigns by choosing the ads you want to show your target audience across mobile, social, display, and video. Not only that, but you will fnally understand which message resonates with your target audience and have the data to back it up.

33% of B2B decision-making units contain 6 to 10 people, and over 50% contain 1 to 5, precisely why companies are turning to account-based advertising.

Account-based technologies have seen great success for two primary reasons: 1. ABM can help you engage your customers on their terms, i.e. using digital channels rather than email and phone calls. 2. ABM makes it possible to engage not only the lead but the entire account, which means you can now do account-based marketing at scale. Not only can you expand your reach by being everywhere that your buyers are, you can also automate and track your advertising campaigns to optimize their performance. This allows you to scale their effectiveness without having to scale the headcount that’s often needed to run highly-targeted, high-reach campaigns.

Today’s account-based marketing technologies allow you to market across personas, sales stages, campaigns, or statuses in your CRM, and go from one-channel marketing to multi-channel nurturing, instantly. As the one-size-fts-all approach to marketing continues to go out of style, targeted advertising has become a reliable, must-try strategy to personalize the buying experience with highly-targeted messaging.

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Is Targeted Advertising Right For My Company?

Successful targeted advertising and retargeting are underutilized channels for B2B marketers, but are becoming increasingly popular due to their ability to serve extremely focused ads to a very specifc segment of prospects.

Despite the growing popularity of these channels, many marketers’ campaigns fail because they haven’t considered the strategic elements of success. Before you get started with account based advertising or retargeting, gauge whether or not you have the following:

• Understand who your prospective customers and buyers are • Understand their buyer journey as well as the points within that process where they tend to get stuck and where you can use targeted advertising as a contact point • Infrastructure to track prospects you’ve acquired as a result of these tactics (marketing automation) • Content to serve in your advertisements that relates to the needs of your buyers • Accompanying landing pages to point potential prospects to • Budget • Traffc to your site (retargeting)

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Getting Started: Common Platforms & Suppliers

When it comes to choosing the right advertising solution to meet your needs, it’s most important to evaluate your goals and what you’re trying to accomplish. Are you hoping to re-engage website visitors and help move them through the sales funnel? Or is your main goal to increase and support sales by helping to penetrate key accounts?

If your goal is to target website visitors and engage with them throughout the sales process, then retargeting is likely the solution for you. However, keep in mind that retargeting is a more reactive approach, and therefore does not expose your brand to new audiences as effectively as account-based advertising. Similarly, while account-based advertising solutions are great for increasing brand awareness within key accounts and proactively engaging with your target audience, there may not be a level of brand awareness already present to build of off.

Each of these pros and cons are important to evaluate as you narrow down your options for an appropriate advertising solution. Let’s take a look at a few advertising vendors that should top your list:

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Targeted Advertising Platforms

Bizo, acquired in 2014 by LinkedIn, offers targeting and analytics for display and direct response ads. As a part of the acquisition, Bizo’s offerings have been integrated into LinkedIn’s products to create a more powerful tool for that want to build stronger relationships with professionals.

LinkedIn leverages its vast professional network to provide precision B2B targeting based on job title and function, industry and company size, and seniority. Just set up a LinkedIn account, decide on a budget, and choose from text ad, image ad, and video ad options.

Similar to LinkedIn, Facebook is able to leverage a huge network of highly-engaged users to provide target advertising for businesses. Using their ad create tool, you can target by location, deliver relevant messaging to specifc users, and refne your target audience based on demographics, interests, and behaviors. The Facebook advanced targeting tool allows you to upload lists of contacts and create lookalike audiences for targeting purposes.

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Terminus specializes in the account-based marketing space and helps marketers target infuencers within the accounts they would like to reach. With Terminus, you can simplify your account-based efforts by marketing and optimizing on the fy across all stages of the buyer’s journey, while also leveraging data collected by a CRM or marketing automation tool to develop deeply engaging campaigns.

Demandbase is an account-based marketing and web tool that makes it possible for businesses to deliver personalized ads across the web. By connecting to existing technologies including CRM, CMS, and marketing automation, analytics, chat and more, Demandbase gives you a comprehensive look at campaign performance across the sales cycle.

Retargeting Platforms

In addition to the targeting capabilities described above, Facebook also provides retargeting services that allow you to remarket to users on Facebook who have already visited your website.

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Google allows you to remarket to your previous website visitors by showing ads as they browse Display Network websites and use Display Network apps. Google offers additional services like dynamic remarketing, mobile remarketing, video remarketing, and remarketing for search ads as your website visitors conduct follow-up searches after visiting your website.

AdRoll is a global leader in retargeting with over 20,000 active advertisers worldwide. Their marketing platform enables businesses of all sizes to create personalized ad campaigns based on their own website data, helping to drive maximum return on spend. AdRoll provides a high degree of transparency and reach across the largest display inventory sources, including Google AdX and Facebook Exchange.

ReTargeter is a full-service display advertising platform specializing in audience targeting and retargeting, allowing you to reach your audience across the web. Retargeter helps keep your brand top of mind and brings website visitors back to your website after their initial visit.

Perfect Audience uses a simple self-service dashboard to make Facebook, , and web retargeting (on sites) easy for brands of all sizes. Set up campaigns in minutes and run them from one central dashboard, run campaigns based on how recently users viewed your site, and track conversions and revenue in one place.

While there are many advertising options at your fngertips, there is likely one that fts your needs and use case better than the rest. Take a look at the next chapter to learn more about how you can use solutions like these to engage buyers throughout the sales cycle and beyond.

+ 19 The Complete Guide to Targeted B2B Advertising How Targeted Advertising Can Engage Target Prospects at Every Stage of the Buyer’s Journey

Since targeted advertising can be both reactive (retargeting) and proactive (account-based advertising), it’s possible to reach your target audience on a larger scale throughout the course of the customer lifecycle. Not only can you serve up ads to your website visitors as they browse other channels, you can also reach additional stakeholders within key accounts — whether they have engaged with your website or not — and help move them forward toward a purchasing decision.

The capabilities of targeted advertising don’t end there. An often overlooked beneft of advertising is that it can be used for as well. Let’s take a look at some of the ways that display ads and account-based campaigns can be used to target prospects at every stage of the buyer journey, from identifying potential new customers to securing customers for life.

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Creating Campaigns

Once you understand who your targets are, what they care about, and the steps along their buyer journey, you need to decide what actions you want them to take through targeted advertising. Ultimately you want to convert your target buyers into paying customers, and the way to make that happen is by getting them to take a series of much smaller actions that will collectively help propel them through the buyer journey. Each of those actions is a conversion, and you should set a series of conversion goals for your target buyers based on the content you have delivered to them, the advertisements you want them to click on, the phone calls you make to them and so forth.

Although clicking on an advertisement, flling out a form on the corresponding , or reading a piece of your content will not necessarily result directly in a sale, they are contact points with your targets that will collectively help move them through the sales funnel over time.

You will begin to collect these contact points into a campaign that aligns your contextual understanding of your buyers and their journey with your advertisements’ conversion goals.

To begin planning these campaigns, you must use learnings from your persona research completed earlier, and understand that your prospect’s needs and motivations change over the course of their buyer journey.

The earlier in your prospect’s journey — at the critical unaware to aware sticking point — the prospect is less likely to pay attention to your advertisement. You haven’t earned their attention yet. As the prospect progresses in their journey, the more time you have and the more promotional you can be.

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Adapt your ads accordingly and use this framework to begin to create a different campaign for each stage in a persona’s journey. An often overlooked beneft of targeted advertising is that it can be used for customer advocacy after the initial purchase process as well.

The importance of turning customers into evangelists is often underemphasized in today’s marketing landscape, but marketers have just as much power to affect customer advocacy as other more client-facing teams. This is especially important given the fact that it is much cheaper to retain your existing clients than to bring in new ones. With targeted advertising, marketers can just as easily target current customers as they can prospects, making it possible to serve up ads promoting helpful new assets or even upsell or cross-sell offers.

Now, let’s examine how to set up and create each type of targeted advertising campaign.

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Retargeting Campaigns

Retargeting is a perfect tool for moving your prospects who have already visited your website or other web property on which you can place a retargeting cookie (see that chapter), from one stage in their journey to the next. According to Digiday, retargeting ads have a 10x higher click through rate than standard display ads.

The standard starting point for most companies’ retargeting programs is to serve the same retargeting ads to all of their visitors, regardless of which pages they have visited, device they are using, or referral path. While this is a starting point, it’s not ideal. To create effective retargeting campaigns, you need to start by segmenting the pages on your site by persona and journey stage visitors to that page associate with.

Some examples of this might be: • Visitors to your blog – Generally aware stage. Retarget these users with an enticing content offer like a guide, ebook, or webinar hosted behind a landing page that will capture their lead information and help move them to the interested stage. • Visitors to your product information or features page – Generally interested stage. Retarget with materials like case studies, success stories, and white papers. • Visitors to your page – Generally vendor selection stage. Retarget these users with an offer for a demo, or free consultation with one of your sales representatives.

You can get more advanced by creating segmentation groups by device type. For example, users who visit from an iPhone would receive a different ad set than users who consistently visit from desktops. It’s likely that a persona visiting from a smartphone would respond better to an ad call to action that’s appropriate to the context of their device: download a mobile app versus complete a form. The same segmentation methodology could be applied to other segmentation points that are effective for your business: keywords, referral paths, personas and so on.

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With your pages segmented by persona and journey stage, you can craft messaging and calls to action into an advertisement and

conversion goal that addresses the sticking points that could be preventing your target buyer at that stage from moving on to the next stage, or give her an incentive to move to the next stage.

The retargeting platform that you use to serve these ads will allow you to serve different ad sets to visitors of the different page groupings you’ve created.

Things like message copy, images, size of advertisements, and URLs can all affect conversion rates and success metrics. Make sure you’re testing multiple versions of ads within your retargeting platform and continue to test and optimize to achieve the best results.

Within your retargeting platform, create exclusions or separate groups for folks who are outside of your buyer journey, but who might be visiting your website for other reasons. By excluding these website visitors, you’ll save money by not delivering them ads.

Examples of these exclusions might include: • Current users of your product – create a separate onboarding campaign • Current employees of your company • Job seekers routinely visiting your careers or jobs page

+ 24 The Complete Guide to Targeted B2B Advertising CASE STUDY:

Learn how Datadog, an OpenView portfolio company, leveraged the OpenView Growth Team to identify, test, Ad Design / Creative and implement new targeted advertising programs — so Best Practices they can experiment without stepping off the gas VIEW THE CASE STUDY One of the most important parts of any online advertising campaign is the ad itself. Without engaging and attention-grabbing ads, it will be diffcult for your message to make an impact. To avoid wasting time and money on advertising campaigns that fy completely under the radar, stick to the best practices listed below.

REMEMBER YOUR AUDIENCE’S INTEREST

If you’re designing creative for a retargeting campaign, you already know one thing is true across the board: your audience has already been to your website, and has some level of awareness of your brand. Your advertising needs to remind them of their interest and provide additional incentive to convert, such as a beneft of your product or a particular feature that may be of interest.

Regardless of the type of online advertising you’re using, the most important thing to keep in mind is that your messaging should always be focused on the buyer, not on you. Make sure your value proposition is clear within the frst few seconds of looking at your ad.

CREATE ENGAGING VISUALS

With many advertising solutions, you can test and optimize your ads to maximize their effectiveness (often in real time) but, there are some best practices that you should stick to right from the start.

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1. Make it Easy to Read - Be sure that any text used on your ad is easy to read and makes sense in the context of your visuals. You want your ads to pop, but you also want them to be tasteful and uncluttered. Use bold colors, but don’t sacrifce readability. Ads should look like the site the visitor will land on after clicking the ad. Consider using similar colors, typefaces, and tone of voice to ensure a smooth user experience between ad click and landing page visit.

2. Use Your Logo - While it may seem like common sense, a company logo is often an afterthought when it comes to advertising creative, but it shouldn’t be! Make sure it’s clear who the ad is coming from, and include a strong call to action to encourage viewers to click through.

3. Get Creative with CTAs - Think outside the box and don’t feel obligated to use a generic “download now” — it’s often more effective to use language that tells the viewer what they’re going to get, rather than what they need to do (for example, “Get the free report” is less demanding than “Download now”).

BUILD AN AD LIBRARY

To make testing and optimization a much smoother process, create a suite of various ads up front. Try different combinations of vibrant imagery, messaging, and calls to action so that you can test a variety of options on your audience. When designing your ads, include all of the most popular sizes (300x250, 160x600, 728x90, and 254×133 (for Facebook)) to cover all of your bases. This will make it much easier to swap out underperforming ads in the middle of your online campaign.

The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) also suggests keeping the following best practices in mind when designing your advertising creative:

• Make sure that ad creative is distinguishable from normal webpage content and has clearly defned borders. • Don’t create ads that mimic computer actions, such as a fake notifcation. • Keep animation loop length under ffteen seconds.

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Landing Page Best Practices

Once you feel confdent about your advertising creative, it’s time to put some thought into the landing pages to which your ads will be driving. An effective landing page will take all of the work that you put into your targeting and creative efforts and turn that into a food of conversions; conversely, an ineffective landing page will bring your advertising efforts to a screeching halt.

How can you make sure your landing page is optimized for conversions? Take a look at some of the best practices below:

CREATE A SEAMLESS USER EXPERIENCE

The frst step to an effective landing page is to make sure that the offer matches what is being advertised in your creative. If a user clicks on your ad and expects to see a download offer for an industry report, but is instead presented with a form for a product demo, they’ll likely bounce from your site in frustration. A disconnect between the messaging in your ad and the messaging on your landing page can create a bad user experience, so it’s important to make this transition as seamless as possible.

STATE YOUR VALUE PROPOSITION

Just like with your advertising creative, the value of your offer should be immediately apparent to your viewer. Their attention span is limited, meaning that you have a short amount of time to pique their interest. Keep your language benefts-focused and targeted to their needs and pain points, rather than on your product feature set.

ORGANIZE YOUR TEXT

Research suggests that website viewers read text in an F-shaped pattern, with the majority of their attention being focused on the top and

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left-hand sides of the page. Place your most important information in these areas, and break up text so that it is easy to scan in just a few seconds. The easier your landing page is to read, the more effective it will be.

USE APPROPRIATE VISUALS

Add some visual intrigue to your landing pages with images, but skip the stock photography. Instead, include an image that gives your viewers some insight into the offer they’ll be receiving after they convert. For example, place a picture of the cover or a few inside pages of your research report instead of a woman speaking into a headset. This gives viewers something more tangible to look forward to upon conversion.

ADD COMPANY LOGOS AND TESTIMONIALS

Increase your credibility by including client logos or customer quotes on your landing page (with client permission, of course). This will add some third-party validity to your offer, making it more persuasive to viewers who are reluctant to give up their personal information.

KEEP YOUR FORMS SHORT

One of the most important aspects of a landing page is the form. How often do you click through an advertisement and land on a visually- appealing landing page only to be presented with a twenty-feld form? The frst thing a user will do in this situation is click the “back” button. Keep in mind that conversion rates are inversely related to the number of form felds on your page. As a best practice, limit form felds to the information that you need the most (if possible, 4 to 5 felds at most).

Implementing ad creative and landing page best practices will ensure your campaign is successful from the start, so that instead of backtracking to recreate campaign assets, you’re already ready to start measuring and optimizing for success.

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Metrics to Measure

One of the most important parts of any marketing initiative is measurement. Particularly when you’re operating at such a large scale — as you are with targeted advertising and retargeting — measuring and optimizing your efforts is critical to maximizing your reach and bringing in new customers.

Optimizing on the Fly

While many traditional marketing strategies don’t allow you to optimize until after a campaign has run its course, targeted advertising at the account level gives you the ability to optimize your campaigns on the fy using A/B testing. With ABM, you can see which advertising creative and marketing messages are falling fat with your target audience as the campaign runs, giving you the option to automatically swap out copy or ads that aren’t performing in real time. This works particularly well if you have alternate messaging and creative ready to go ahead of time.

Another important part of the optimization process — for both targeted advertising and retargeting — is gathering feedback from your sales team, which should happen continuously as you run your advertising campaigns. Ask your sales team if they have had better success penetrating key accounts, and see if there’s anything you could be doing to better support their goals.

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Measuring Success

Your advertising and retargeting metrics will depend on your business goals and the type of campaign you’re running, but the list below provides a number of measures to start with:

1. INTERACTIONS WITH ADS

Is your target audience clicking on your ads? Keep an eye on your engagement stats to see how well your advertising is resonating across devices, personas, sales stages, and the different campaigns you may be running. With ABM, keep in mind that the goal is to see how your ads are performing within your target audience.

2. CONVERSION METRICS

Is your target audience taking the desired action, i.e clicking on your ad and flling out a form, requesting a product demo, or visiting your website? Your conversion metrics can help pinpoint important areas for optimization. For instance, if your conversion rates are low, your messaging may not accurately refect the offer presented on your landing page or on your website.

Note that the value of these metrics may change depending on the type of campaign you’re running. While website engagement may be a signifcant measurement for an ABM campaign aimed at engaging leads after an event, a campaign that aims to “reawaken the dead” will be looking more at the number of leads who take an action, period — even if that just means clicking on an ad.

3. OVERALL ENGAGEMENT

The goal of a targeted advertising campaign is to increase engagement with your brand (and ultimately, with your sales team) within target

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accounts. Measuring prospect activity levels and engagement with your website can help determine whether or not your campaigns are really reaching their mark.

4. REACH

Account-based advertising and retargeting can be important awareness-generating tools within your key accounts. Better understand your success by tracking new contacts reached and generated from your ABM campaigns.

5. RETURN ON INVESTMENT

Like with any marketing campaign, you want to see a positive impact on your bottom line. Are you getting more out of your ABM campaigns that what you’re putting in? Be sure to constantly optimize your campaigns in order to ensure the highest return on investment possible.

6. SALES CYCLE LENGTH

By exposing your target audience to personalized messages that are targeted by account, you can shorten the awareness and research phase of the buyer journey, thereby reducing the length of the sales cycle. Keep an eye on your sales cycle length to gauge the impact of your targeted marketing campaigns.

7. CUSTOMER RETENTION

Targeted advertising isn’t only for generating new business. It can also be an important tool for upsells, cross-sells, and customer retention. Monitor retention rates among the accounts that are being targeted with personalized messaging to see if there are any signifcant changes in customer churn.

Using any combination of the above metrics — and optimizing based on your results — will help you build the most impactful, targeted advertising campaigns possible.

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About OpenView Labs About Terminus

OpenView Labs is the strategic and operational consulting arm of Terminus enables B2B marketers to scale account-based marketing OpenView Venture Partners, a global Venture Capital fund that invests in to reach and engage targeted accounts across all stages of the buyer’s expansion-stage technology companies. journey, creating better alignment between sales, marketing, and customer success teams.

More Information More Information Visit the OpenView Labs website for more ideas and inspiration for senior managers of technology companies. Terminus is the leading B2B advertising automation software helping marketers drive more revenue from their pipeline. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- Learn about automation. NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit www.terminus.com http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or send a letter www.twitter.com/terminus to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300,San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. To learn more about Terminus, contact us directly at 1-888-689-6670 or contact us now.

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