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EBOOK NEXT-GENERATION B2B DIGITAL ADVERTISING

EBOOK NEXT-GENERATION B2B DIGITAL ADVERTISING...EBOOK NEXT-GENERATION B2B DIGITAL ADVERTISING. DIGITAL ADVERTISING HAS ALWAYS HELD A GREAT DEAL OF PROMISE FOR B2B MARKETERS. Over the

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Page 1: EBOOK NEXT-GENERATION B2B DIGITAL ADVERTISING...EBOOK NEXT-GENERATION B2B DIGITAL ADVERTISING. DIGITAL ADVERTISING HAS ALWAYS HELD A GREAT DEAL OF PROMISE FOR B2B MARKETERS. Over the

EBOOKNEXT-GENERATION B2B DIGITAL ADVERTISING

Page 2: EBOOK NEXT-GENERATION B2B DIGITAL ADVERTISING...EBOOK NEXT-GENERATION B2B DIGITAL ADVERTISING. DIGITAL ADVERTISING HAS ALWAYS HELD A GREAT DEAL OF PROMISE FOR B2B MARKETERS. Over the

DIGITAL ADVERTISING HAS ALWAYS HELD A GREAT DEAL OF PROMISE FOR B2B MARKETERS.

Over the past decade as programmatic advertising has come to prominence, we’ve been told we could reach and influence the right people more precisely than ever before. We’ve been told we could launch campaigns with ease and test new tactics on the fly. We’ve been told we can get better visibility into the effectiveness of our budgets and our messages.

It all sounded so great in theory. But, in practice? B2B have advertisers have struggled to adapt to these shifts at every turn. Why? We’ve been led astray by advertising technology and approaches engineered to meet the needs of consumer marketers — which in turn has led us to wonder whether investing in advertising is actually a smart choice for B2B, especially when it comes to 1) whom we’re reaching and 2) whether we’re actually moving the needle.

In this ebook, we’ll show you how to go beyond traditional B2B advertising, adopt an evolved account-based advertising approach, and run successful campaigns.

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WHO ARE WE REACHING?

Meanwhile, when it comes to measurement, B2B marketers have to settle for KPIs created by and for consumer advertisers. And that leaves more questions than answers: as B2B marketers, our goal is to drive pipeline, so why are we stuck measuring clicks and leads? And given the fact that B2B purchasing decisions are profoundly different from those of consumers (with an average of 6.2 stakeholders within a company involved and months-long sales cycles), why do we orient all of our measurement around the short-term activities of individuals?

ARE WE MAKING AN IMPACT?

When it comes to audiences, traditional approaches present a stubborn tradeoff between scale and precision:

PRECISION SCALE

Audience segments that identify individuals by job title, department or seniority are notoriously inaccurate. They’re often derived from a small core of contact records bought and sold through a chain of third parties and then modeled out to include “lookalikes” who, more often than not, look nothing like your intended audience. Or worse, they are built entirely on the basis of inferences surrounding a user’s content consumption behaviors, resulting in an audience that only vaguely approximates your intended target if you squint hard enough.

LinkedIn offers arguably the most precise targeting for company and job function, but many advertisers find that it can’t drive enough reach and frequency on its own to make an impact with their buyers. Some advertisers attempt to get super-precise with their targeting by working with an onboarding vendor to turn contact records from their CRM into anonymous cookies so that they can reach them with ads. But match rates for CRM data in B2B are very low - you will typically end up with only 15-30% of your original audience.

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Targets on function, seniority, industry

Seeks clicks and leads from “decision makers”

Marketing-to-sales hand-off

Targets buyers within the best, most qualified companies

Seeks real influence with the full buying committee

Full-cycle marketing/sales partnership

TRADITIONAL B2B ADVERTISING

ACCOUNT-BASED ADVERTISING

EVOLVING THE APPROACH WITH ABM

There is a better path forward. Account-Based Marketing, or ABM, emphasizes bringing an account-based lens to marketing activities at every stage, from planning, to execution, to measurement. B2B marketers everywhere are adopting ABM so that they can better focus their resources, align with their sales teams, and improve outcomes throughout the funnel.

Advertising is an important component of any ABM strategy, because it helps marketers stay top-of-mind with the buyers within their key target accounts throughout a sales cycle, driving awareness and credibility and ultimately contributing to an account’s nurture through to closed won opportunities.

At its most fundamental level, Account-Based Advertising means 1) Identifying the accounts that represent the best opportunity for you, 2) Constraining ad budgets to the likely buyers within those companies, and 3) Measuring campaign performance at the account level with metrics that relate real business impact.

In the remainder of this ebook, we’ll walk through a series of best practices for carrying out Account-Based Advertising the right way.

1. IDENTIFY THE ACCOUNTS THAT

MATTER MOST

2. ADVERTISE TO THOSE

ACCOUNTS

3. MEASURE AT THE ACCOUNT

LEVEL

ACCOUNT-BASED ADVERTISING IN THREE PHASES

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IDENTIFY THE ACCOUNTS THAT MATTER MOST

Selecting the right accounts is perhaps the most important aspect of your Account-Based Advertising efforts, because it has a profound impact on the success of your campaigns as well as every other tactic throughout the funnel.

There are several ways you can approach building your account list:

While there are several approaches to building an account-based advertising list, it’s important to note that these methods aren’t mutually exclusive. Depending on what you already have in place and where you are in your ABM adoption journey, a combination of these approaches

may very well be the right approach for your team.

GOOD

CRM data: Build reports in your CRM platform to identify the accounts with active opportunities, or accounts assigned to a particular segment or region. This approach represents a great starting point for building alignment with sales. However, it does have its blind spots. You’re at the mercy of your CRM’s data quality, which even the most disciplined B2B companies struggle with. In a fast-paced environment, sometimes records go out of date — opportunities that should be marked Closed Lost and long-abandoned account records attached to a rep who no longer works for you.

BETTER

Work with sales: By collaborating with sales to define a prioritized list of accounts based on both CRM data and the input of sales leadership and individual reps, you can generate a list that more closely resembles the best opportunities in front of you. But this approach has its faults, too. Most notably, you are still restricting your ABM efforts to your known universe of accounts, while in all likelihood there are companies out there with latent demand who just are not on your radar yet.

BEST

Data-driven solution: B2B marketers are increasingly adopting tools that draw in data from both the company (CRM records, site activity) and outside sources to determine a more optimal mix of accounts. The most sophisticated account selection solutions use a combination of lookalike modeling, predictive modeling and intent signals. These solutions can recommend accounts that both have the right firmographic fit and are demonstrating intent signals that suggest they might be actively in market in your category.

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So you have your prioritized accounts. How should you go about reaching them?

Usually, you will need to layer two types of targeting on top of one another: one for identifying the employees at your target accounts, and another for identifying the right individuals within.

Many solutions use IP address targeting to capture the account level. IP addresses are well suited for this purpose, because they are the closest thing to a company’s street address in the digital world. Advanced IP-to-company mapping technologies go beyond the registries that feed “Reverse IP” solutions, to uncover accounts within corporate hierarchies and behind ISP addresses. The best can achieve 90%+ coverage rates across enterprise and the middle market by using machine learning-driven modeling and validation processes.

From there, the task is to narrow delivery to the individuals within those corporate IP addresses who make up your buying committee. Contrary to traditional thinking on this question, the best predictor for whether an anonymous web surfer is likely to be part of your buying committee isn’t some vendor’s best guess at their job function or department, but rather, that individual’s observable behaviors.

Fortunately for advertisers, new technologies for intent monitoring can help you see these research activities happening in near-real time, as anonymous users from your target accounts go about their web surfing. And while no single content interaction can determine much of anything, by using artificial intelligence and natural-language processing, you can begin to uncover intent signals in patterns and trends over time. By pinpointing the users exhibiting these patterns, you can form a buying committee to target in your campaigns.

There are several key advantages to this approach:

• Better penetration: Reach the entire buying committee, without resorting to the game-of-telephone identification that comes with third-party data segments or the drop-off rates that come with CRM onboarding.

• No more cookie-cutter personas: Target buyers who are actually relevant to your business. This is especially important when targeting enterprise-sized companies, whose broad product lines and numerous divisions can mean there are a dozen Vice Presidents of Finance, but only one who is in-market for a solution like yours.

• Brand safety: By eschewing stale and ever-shrinking job-function audiences, you won’t have to bid for impressions in the darkest corners of the web to make an impact.

FROM ACCOUNT LISTS TO TARGETABLE AUDIENCES

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At this point, most marketers are bought into the importance of personalization. However, when it comes to actually delivering personalized experiences, many limit themselves to email, and as a result, end up missing out on a key way to engage their audiences across other important channels, such as the website and advertising.

Personalization is key to driving engagement with your advertising campaigns. You can customize messages to specific companies or segments defined by company name, industry, stage in the buying cycle, prospect vs. customer or other account attributes. Below are some examples of personalized ads from Demandbase clients.

PERSONALIZE THE CREATIVE

Company name personalization

Industry personalization

Company name personalization

EXAMPLES

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While brand safety is important on the consumer side, in B2B, the stakes around any given impression are much higher. Keeping your message out of environments where your buyer might make the wrong associations is crucial.

One way to avoid unintentionally buying impressions on less-than-ideal websites is to create a “blacklist” of domains that your platform is not to bid on. But while blacklists can avoid the known bad sites, they fall short of actually protecting your image and your budgets.

You have to know about a site to block it. And in the vast, complex and ever-changing world of exchange media, that doesn’t cut it. Managing a list of all known “bad sites” is an exercise in futility – there are millions of sites auctioning impressions on the ad exchanges, with new domains popping up every day. Even an obsessively managed blacklist still exposes advertisers to the risk of their carefully crafted message showing up on sites featuring extreme political content, piracy, and even porn.

There is a far more effective approach: whitelisting. As its name suggests, a whitelist is the opposite of a blacklist. Whereas blacklists seek to block known “bad” sites, whitelists define a discrete list of acceptable domains and tell an ad platform to restrict bidding to only those sites.

Many advertisers find that their ad-tech partners are reluctant to use a whitelist. They’ll wave their hands and tell you how it will hurt delivery, how it will kill performance. They’ll tell you about their extra-special inventory strategy or proprietary technology that obviates the need for a whitelist.

Don’t buy it.

Demand better for your brand. If your vendor won’t run on a whitelist, won’t share their whitelist, won’t provide transparent reporting on site-level campaign delivery, or can’t deliver in full and drive strong performance on quality sites -- find another vendor.

You don’t have to take their word for it, either. Several companies offer independent measurement and verification for brand safety, viewability and ad fraud.

PROTECT YOUR BRAND

Don’t settle for smoke, mirrors and excuses from your ad-tech partners

when it comes to quality site inventory. Make a point of asking to see

whitelists, and insist on domain-level impression reporting.

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B2B MEASUREMENT THAT MEANS SOMETHING

Account-Based Advertising Metrics

Accounts reachedTarget accounts reached by ads in the campaign

Accounts visitedTarget accounts who came on-site during the campaign

Accounts clickedRather than clickthrough rate, track percentage of accounts who click on your message

Accounts engaged

Define on-site engagement in terms of number of sessions within a timeframe or activity on high-value pages

Accounts with opportunities

Opportunities generated in CRM for included accounts

Accounts with closed-won opportunities

Accounts with successful deals

Across all aspects of B2B advertising, measurement may be the most debated. Depending on your favorite metrics and KPIs, a campaign might appear to be killing it — or to be a total waste of budget. But campaign reporting doesn’t have to be a Rorschach test, so long as you follow these guidelines:

• Measure real business outcomes. Our longtime obsession with clicks and conversions is a direct result of the fact that most digital advertising platforms were built first and foremost for consumer advertising. While these metrics can be useful as short-term, directional indicators for your campaign’s success in engaging your buyers, it’s important to keep in mind why we’re expending all this budget and effort in the first place: to drive business. Today’s forward-thinking B2B marketers are working with their technology partners to measure the performance of their advertising campaigns on more robust account-level metrics, including pipeline, closed revenue, funnel velocity and close rates.

• De-emphasize Leads. Leads are a business outcome, right? Well, no. They precede a business outcome, at least in theory. Most B2B advertisers already recognize that advertising is not a particularly efficient channel for lead generation. But Lead-focused campaigns also miss the point of Account-Based Marketing. Campaigns optimized for leads seek hand-raisers wherever they might be found, irrespective of the account’s qualifications, while account-based advertising campaigns qualify the accounts first and then seek to drive engagement with the whole buying committee.

• Measure at the account level. This sounds like a no-brainer, but some platforms that have the capability to target by account can’t handle reporting on impressions, spend and engagement (let alone CRM outcomes) by account.

• Measure incrementally. It’s one thing to report on engagement, opportunities and deals generated by an account in a vacuum. But without a control group, you’re in the dark as to whether advertising had anything to do with those outcomes. By holding out a subset of your target accounts from an advertising program, you can compare results to the accounts exposed to your message to get a better handle on advertising’s impact. Some vendors will also help you avoid holding out important accounts by building a “synthetic control group” that’s firmographically representative of your account list.

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Effective as advertising is as a channel for driving target account engagement, it’s part of a broader customer journey.

If buyers within an important account are driven to your site but then bounce after mere seconds because they don’t see anything relevant or interesting to them, you have to ask whether it was even worth driving them there in the first place. Same goes for an account that comes on site and is so drawn in by your content that they fill out a form but your seller is left flat-footed in their outreach.

Success in Account-Based Advertising requires more than just adhering to the best practices outlined in this ebook. It means that your advertising is a part of a focused ABM strategy. To learn more about ABM technology and how Demandbase can help you achieve your Account-Based Advertising goals, visit demandbase.com

ADVERTISING IS JUST THE BEGINNING

ABM PLATFORMAudience Management

ABM Analytics

Account SelectionGlobal B2B

Data at Scale

Patented IP Identification

Proprietary B2B Ad Tech/DSP

Artificial Intelligence &

Machine Learning

Account-Based Retargeting

Account-Based Advertising

Keyword Discovery

Site Personalization

MAS Integration

AI Based Recs.Sales Insights

Email, SFDC, Slack

Real-time Alerts

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BECOME AN ABM EXPERTAT YOUR COMPANY

Demandbase o�ers two ABM Certification courses online that you and your team can take in the convenience of your home or o�ce. An Expert-level

course is also o�ered in select cities throughout the year.

FOUNDATIONS ABM CERTIFICATIONLearn the importance of Account-BasedMarketing and gain how-to tips that’ll get

you started on the path to success.

ADVANCED ABM CERTIFICATIONGet best practices on topics including sales& marketing alignment, target account list

development, metrics and budgeting.

Register now: www.demandbase.com/cert

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Demandbase is a leader in Account-Based Marketing (ABM). The company offers the only Artificial Intelligence-enabled, comprehensive ABM platform that spans Advertising, Marketing, Sales and Analytics. Enterprise leaders and high-growth companies such as Accenture, Adobe, DocuSign, GE, Salesforce and others use Demandbase to drive their ABM strategy and maximize their marketing performance. The company was named a Gartner Cool Vendor for Tech Go-To Market in 2016. For more information, please visit www.demandbase.com or follow the company on Twitter @Demandbase.