Digital Ads: Rev Up Your Sales Engine
Advertising is the first step in building B2B brand awareness, and marketing pros know all about it. Insider Intelligence reported that the U.S. B2B digital ad spending grew by 16.8% in 2022 to $12.65 billion, and it’s forecasted to add another 15.1% in 2023 to reach the $14.57 billion figure.
Digital ads are essential in the current state of the B2B buyer's journey. According to Gartner, 33% of B2B decision-makers desire a seller-free sales experience, and the number climbs to 44% for millennial buyers.
B2B prospects want to perform their online research as independently as possible. While the aim is to understand their needs and how to solve them, the mission of B2B advertisers is to guide them to the websites, content pieces, and landing pages that might fill them with all the information they require to make their purchase decisions.
With so many ad formats, sizes, objectives, and displays available, it’s not always easy to structure an advertising management plan that matches perfectly with a certain target audience. For this reason, we decided to analyze the most successful methodologies to accelerate conversions by stepping on the digital ads gas.
Leverage Digital Ads to Get Qualified Leads
One of the primary purposes of digital advertising is to introduce business solutions to the market, boost brand awareness, and demonstrate your value proposition over your competitors. It is imperative to identify how well your ideal customer profiles and buyer personas react to ads to accomplish this.
As Jessica Rasheed, global outbound sales leader at Preply, mentioned in our Enterprise Sales Development Podcast, “We took a step back as a team and started to try and understand our persona. What is their day-to-day? What are the challenges among the tools that they are interacting with on a daily basis?”
Nowadays, digital ads are performed through programmatic advertising, which refers to the automated buying and selling of digital ad space in real time through artificial intelligence.
This automated ad-buying process can target audiences based on demographics, psychographics, purchase intent, and other digital behaviors across desktop, mobile, and video ad displays.
A great way to enter high-quality B2B leads into your sales pipelines is by leveraging their intent data. This can give your team a clear picture of what type of ad would be more effective at each stage of the buyer’s cycle, revealing how close a prospect is to the make a buying decision and ensuring that your brand or product is being considered.
Read More: What Is Intent Data and How Has It Transformed B2B Sales?
5 Types of Digital Ads That Boost Sales
B2B digital advertising heavily relies on data segmentation tactics, which dissect account-related data through different criteria and organize it into distinct categories to make it more actionable for marketing and sales strategies.
Nevertheless, defining what type of ad is more suitable for specific prospects, through what channel, and at what moment still requires sharp advertising management skills.
Be sure to try out the following ad types to discover which ones perform better with your target audience:
1. Display advertising
Display ads are placed as banners on websites that support such ad spaces. These can include text, pictures, audio, or video elements to lure users into clicking the call to action that will lead them to the destination website. They are automatically distributed to websites that hold particular relevance to a designated target audience.
2. Paid search advertising
These ads appear at the top of search result pages. They are text-based, consisting of a headline, description, and a link to the advertising landing page. Search queries trigger paid search ads, so they tend to be relevant to the user's intentions.
3. Retargeting advertising
Retargeting ads employ cookies to track users who have previously visited your website. They present these former visitors with different branded messages to persuade them to come back and complete a transaction.
4. Mobile advertising
These focus on ad spaces that can only be found through smartphone usage. Mobile ads include SMS messaging, mobile banners, and in-app displays. Depending on their intent, they can lead to the advertisers' websites or apps.
5. Social media advertising
The main advantage of social media ads is that users may like, share, and comment on different displays, raising brand awareness and boosting sales. Distinct social media platforms provide various opportunities for marketers to leverage.
Which of these ads are you currently deploying? Which one has shown the best results? Let us know in the comments below.
Before You Go
Check out our favorite content this week to get your sales and marketing juices flowing.
Blog of the Week
Advertising Management: A Comprehensive Guide
Advertising management is the process to plan, oversee, and control various advertising activities meant to influence the target audiences’ buying decisions. Learn more about this role in our guide.
Podcast of the Week
Enterprise Sales Development with Alex Greer
In this episode of Enterprise Sales Development Podcast, we speak with Alex Greer, senior director of sales operations and sales development at SetSail. Alex talks about his journey in the SDR space, what he’s learned throughout the years, and how the industry has evolved as a whole.
Get B2B Solutions with CIENCE
Have any thoughts or ideas you want to share? Reach out to us at [email protected].
Welcome aboard! Become a full CIENTIST and follow us on
YouTube | Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn
Are you passionate about B2B solutions like us? Then subscribe to this newsletter so we can keep on chatting about these always astonishing, larger-than-life topics.