Tag: B2B Industry

Navigating the Evolving Digital Video Landscape: 2024 Trends and Strategies for Marketers

Posted on by Stephanie Dwyer

In the digital realm, we’ve witnessed firsthand the transformative power of converging technologies and evolving consumer preferences. The intensifying battle for user attention, the ubiquity of smartphones, the proliferation of streaming services, and the growing appetite for immersive, personalized experiences have propelled video to the forefront of content consumption, surpassing text-based alternatives.

2023 saw video marketing become the cornerstone of engagement, revolutionizing business connections. This surge showcases diverse content and devices catering to personalization, authenticity, and educational value, making video king in marketing strategies.

Video & The Consumer Consumption Landscape 

Imagine captivating a global audience of 3.5 billion by 2023. That’s the video revolution unfolding before us, and the screen time speaks for itself: Americans spend over 7.5 hours glued to screens daily, devouring video content with unmatched fervor. Marketers are chanting in unison: video reigns supreme in social media marketing. Over half (54%) have named video as the sovereign ruler, with its unmatched ability to enthrall audiences, educate them, and spur them to act.

 

Smartphones have become the go-to device for digital video consumption, embraced by 69% of U.S. adults. This shift away from traditional television is fueled by the widespread adoption of 5G connectivity, with nearly one in four smartphone owners streaming videos on the go.

 

While mobile video remains significant, connected TVs (CTVs) are poised to take the lead with video accounting for 90% of CTV content. This trend will reshape the digital video landscape by 2025, with CTV video, social video, and YouTube taking center stage. Subcategories like SVOD and TikTok will further solidify the dominance of CTV video and social video.

The Impact For Marketers: Digital Video Advertising Spend & Strategy

The global video advertising landscape is experiencing a seismic shift, propelled by user consumption patterns. With an expected video ad spend reaching a staggering $180 billion by year-end 2023, it’s clear that video is king. The United States leads the charge, with a significant portion of that budget allocated to search and social video ads. Both channels exhibit a strong mobile bias, while their presence on CTV remains limited.

 

But this is changing. CMOs are discovering the undeniable power of video, with a 24.74% increase in brand lift and recall, 21.71% improved user experience, and a whopping 40% boost in brand perception. This translates to a more engaged and informed audience, ultimately driving brand awareness and loyalty. While video’s direct sales impact sits at 15.65%, its ability to nurture leads and build trust makes it a vital tool for marketing teams. This is evident in the fact that 68% of marketers track engagement, and 51% now measure lead generation and conversion rates, recognizing video’s true value beyond just views and likes.

 

2023 witnessed a critical development in this evolution: a wave of CTV adoption across diverse industries, with retail, health & wellness, and CPG leading the charge. By 2027, retail media spending on CTV is projected to reach $8.64 billion. Yet, a crucial challenge remains: our lagging migration to CTV. Despite consumers spending a whopping 25% of their time on the platform, advertisers are underinvesting, allocating a mere 9.5% of digital ad budgets.. Concerns about limited inventory and premium pricing are holding us back.

 

It’s time to overcome these hurdles and unleash CTV’s potential. By collaborating and harnessing its power, we can reach target audiences where they are and achieve unparalleled success in this transformative era. The video advertising landscape is ripe for innovation and growth. By embracing the full potential of video across platforms, we can unlock unprecedented opportunities to engage with audiences and build lasting brand connections.

Trending: AI-Powered Digital Video Creation & Personalization

In the competitive landscape of 2024, AI-powered personalization and audience insights can elevate your video marketing campaigns to new heights of engagement and effectiveness:

Key Takeaways for Marketing Professionals

  • Embrace AI-driven personalization while prioritizing authenticity: Audiences are craving real connections, not manufactured perfection. Refine your content to resonate on a deeper level, but steer clear of anything inauthentic. Micro and nano-influencers who spark genuine conversations are your secret weapon. And remember, transparency is key – be upfront about AI’s role in crafting your message. This authenticity is your golden ticket to engagement, trust, and brand loyalty.
  • Utilize AI for efficiency, not replacement: Automate tasks and gain insights, but don’t let it replace human creativity. High-quality creative content remains essential for impactful marketing campaigns.
  • Craft personalized video journeys with AI-powered insights: Analyze customer data and deliver hyper-personalized video content, tailored to individual interests through dynamic elements, interactive experiences, and customized recommendations. It allows you to lean into using an inclusive approach by going beyond surface-level metrics while driving engagement and fostering loyalty.

Unleashing Innovation through Experimentation

  • Streamline your video production process & elevate your marketing videos with AI-powered platforms, empowering you to easily create engaging videos. These platforms can be used to create videos from text, add AI-powered voiceovers and avatars, and craft captivating social media videos.
  • Harness the power of AI-powered creative effectiveness platforms to revolutionize your campaign planning, video testing, and media planning. These platforms utilize advanced technologies like facial coding, eye tracking, and computer vision to provide unparalleled insights into your target audience’s behavior and preferences.
  • Foster inclusivity by leveraging AI-powered dubbing tools to unlock global audiences, enhance accessibility, and expand your video’s reach by removing language barriers through dubbing, subtitles, and captions.

Trending: Cross-screen, Cross-channel Advertising Solutions

As audiences divide their attention across various devices and engage in multitasking, marketers must reimagine their video advertising strategies to win them over:

Key Takeaways For Marketing Professionals

  • The rise of Netflix and Prime Video’s ad-supported tier: As CTV advertising gains traction and linear TV struggles to find its footing, Amazon’s Prime Video ad-supported tier is set to fuel a surge in ad spending. This presents marketers with a wealth of new diversification opportunities using multi-platform video ad campaigns to engage with a broader audience.
  • Distinguish your brand and engage viewers with premium-produced video ads: UGC’s authenticity and relatability can be highly effective, but its production quality often falls short of premium video content’s polished and refined aesthetic. As streaming TV continues dominating viewing habits, marketers should prioritize premium video content to capture attention and drive results.
  • Fragmented media consumption necessitates a multi-screen marketing approach: With 5G technology enabling seamless video delivery, marketers can now craft engaging ad experiences that adapt to individual viewing habits. By leveraging an omnichannel approach, you can ensure your message reaches the right audience at the right time, maximizing the impact of your campaigns.

Unleashing Innovation Through Experimentation

  • Streamline the shopping journey by incorporating shoppable CTV video ads: Seamlessly integrate product information and purchase options within your video ads, enhancing engagement and driving immediate conversions.
  • Tap into the massive audience consuming live sports online: As digital platforms compete for your ad dollars, unlock premium inventory with NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube. Reach paying subscribers, traditionally targeted by major brands, with the precision of digital advertising. YouTube’s “multi-view” expands this inventory, offering even more targeted ad placements.
  • Long-form video investments drive exponential returns: Let performance, not production value, guide your video investments. Embrace a data-driven, multi-platform approach, and repurpose the content that truly connects.

Trending: Embracing Interactivity, Live Streaming, and Format Diversity

Marketers should strategically embrace the versatility of vertical and horizontal videos, strike a balance between short-form and long-form video content, and engage audiences in an interactive and immersive modern world:

Key Takeaways For Marketing Professionals

Unleashing Innovation Through Experimentation

  • Incorporate AR elements & VR experiences: Overlay virtual objects and graphics onto real-world scenes to create an interactive and immersive storytelling experience. Transport viewers into a virtual world where they can interact with your brand’s story and products in a fully immersive environment.
  • The Synergy of Branching Narratives and Gamification: By allowing viewers to choose their own path and incorporating engaging gameplay elements, you are enhancing viewer engagement, collecting valuable data, personalizing product recommendations, and fostering deeper connections. 
  • The powerful trifecta: Live shopping experiences, combined with horizontal and vertical video formats, and creator content, can create a powerful video advertising strategy that resonates across platforms and drives meaningful engagement with their target audience.

Digital video has emerged as a formidable force in the modern online world, offering marketers an unparalleled opportunity to captivate audiences and foster meaningful engagement. Marketers who fail to incorporate video into their strategies are forfeiting a valuable opportunity to connect with their target audience.

By embracing the evolving trends and unleashing innovation through experimentation, marketers can effectively navigate the ever-changing digital video landscape, establish deeper connections with their target audience, and achieve their marketing goals in 2024 and beyond.

Avoiding the BS in ABM

Posted on by Savannah Westbrock

Account-based marketing, or ABM (because what’s a marketing term without a corresponding acronym), is a B2B strategy that targets specific, high-value accounts to convert them to a sale. The key differentiator between a traditional B2B approach and ABM is that the strategic focus for ABM is building relationships with specific accounts’ key decision makers that require a personalized experience to generate qualified leads and incremental revenue. 

When initially evaluating how to implement an ABM strategy, you’ll likely be led to believe that you need to onboard specific ABM marketing platforms and measurement solutions in order to be effective. However, there’s a good chance that you already have the necessary tools to be successful – they just need to be reimagined with an ABM lens. Before opting to onboard new partners, read through our steps on how to implement an ABM strategy within your existing tech stack. 

Reaching the Right Audience

The foundation of any ABM initiative is an audience targeting strategy that enables media to accurately reach in-market accounts. The traditional approach to B2B audience targeting through digital channels is centered on driving users to the site to fill out leads forms, which are then the accounts that are manually qualified and followed up on by the sales team. The opposite happens with an ABM strategy, which starts with identifying the core accounts to engage with and nurture to simplify the process of fostering a relationship with the sales team. 

Developing an ABM strategy can feel overwhelming at first since it’s like trying to locate a needle in a haystack in order to reach key decision makers. However, it can be accomplished with strategic data partners that seamlessly plug-and-play within your key media buying platforms to maintain an integrated ecosystem. B2B data partners with ABM targeting solutions, such as Bombora and Dun & Bradstreet, can provide firmographic segments which use data to categorize organizations based on industry, location, technologies used, and more to identify and reach critical accounts. When evaluating data partners, it’s important to understand the methodology used to define audience segments to ensure the audiences are built to reach the intended users. Additionally, if your brand has existing CRM lists, ABM data partners can enrich the data to improve accuracy and scale. 

Scaling with Contextual Targeting

Given the nature of ABM audience targeting being more of a one-to-one approach to reach accounts and their respective key decision makers, campaigns may be susceptible to scaling issues. To mitigate low reach and high expenses, leverage contextual targeting as a complement to the data-driven audience targeting strategy to add scalability to the overall marketing initiative. Using contextual targeting, media is able to reach accounts while they are actively researching content that indicates interest or intent in a relevant product or service offering. Engaging users with relevant messaging while in the proper mindset can capture attention and drive key onsite actions. 

It’s important to note that contextual targeting has become far more intelligent than it was at its onset due to advancements in natural language processing and large language models. Contextual targeting is no longer a mass reach play, but rather an effective targeting strategy when executed with understanding of behavioral intent signals and corresponding keyword and top publishers research. 

Nurturing Leads with Sequential Messaging

Since a key differentiator between an overarching B2B strategy and ABM is a focus on the individual account, delivering a personalized experience from the initial touch point to the sale is critical. Sequential messaging can be leveraged as a lead nurturing strategy that provides the key decision maker with the information they need based on their intent signals and current stage in their buying journey. Utilizing previous ad engagement and onsite actions as data touchpoints, sequential messaging can provide a series of ads to potential customers that tell a continual, highly tailored story to drive users toward conversion. For example, if a user downloads a whitepaper, signaling interest in a product or service but have not yet converted into a qualified lead, targeting them with tailored messaging to drive them back to the site with a specific offer could result in the acquiring of a new account. 

Many programmatic buying platforms that are likely already part of your tech stack have sequential targeting logic incorporated into the audience builder, enabling re-engagement based on exposure to or interaction with a creative message or key actions taken on the brand’s site.

Determining Effectiveness with a Measurement Strategy

The first step to developing a measurement framework is implementing a pixel strategy that captures key onsite actions to both inform campaign performance and enable custom audience creation. It’s important that the pixel strategy complements the media strategy to ensure all intent signals are captured to monitor stages in the consumer journey. Intent signals should be used to better understand your audience and its current needs instead of pushing for leads straight away before they are properly primed. 

That being said, paid marketing alone is rarely enough to fully nurture a lead into an account. But with an effective ABM approach, you can avoid clogging up your Salesforce with people who just wanted a whitepaper. Below are the key stages of the ABM journey and the corresponding key metrics to measure along the way:

  • Educate: It’s important to establish the brand as a thought leader in the industry and showcase the product or service’s value to decision makers in order to break into their consideration set. The initial touchpoint with key accounts should be centered on the education of the unique business application of the brand’s offering, fueled by a carefully curated content strategy. In this stage, measuring metrics such as time on site and scroll depth will indicate that media is reaching a qualified audience and capturing attention with content that satisfies a current interest or business need. Also, measuring cost per unique reach will inform if media is efficiently scaling and introducing the brand to a breadth of key decision makers.
  • Engage: The proper cadence of engagement with accounts is critical to a successful ABM strategy. Utilize intent signals and firmographics to understand the right time to engage with key decision makers, understanding what relevant information they’ll be looking for as well as typical buying cycles. It’s important to remember that each engagement with an account should bring value to aid in the decision making process. In this stage, measuring engagement metrics, such as cost per whitepaper download and cost per completed video view, will indicate if the message is resonating with the core target accounts to drive meaningful user activity.
  • Qualify: The final stage of the ABM journey is focused on acquiring qualified leads that eventually lead to a high revenue sale. It’s important to identify the true value of a qualified lead prior to the marketing campaign launch to establish cost per lead goals that better inform the platform algorithms on the value of lead to prioritize media spend toward. This will ensure media is capturing qualified leads from key decision makers that are indicating intent to convert. In this stage, it’s also important to measure return on investment (ROI) since leads aren’t guaranteed revenue. 
  • Evaluate: While marketing is primarily responsible for marketing qualified leads rather than sales qualified leads, it can still be valuable to measure sales cycle efficiency. This metric determines the effectiveness of media touchpoints at driving key decision makers from the awareness of the brand to the point of sale. This can help inform if the messaging and audience targeting strategies are reaching the right users with the right message at the right time.

Planning and activating an account-based marketing initiative can feel overwhelming since it is presented under the guise of complexity and needing specialized tools in order to succeed. But if you peel back the layers of ABM, you’ll discover that its core components are not entirely different compared to a traditional B2B strategy. Before reinventing the wheel, consider your approach to digital media and how the existing tools within your tech stack can be repurposed to apply to an ABM approach before investing time and money in yet another platform.   

 

The B2B Digital Marketing Handbook

Posted on by Coegi

The digital marketing revolution is sweeping the world – and B2B advertising is no exception. Buyers and sellers are shifting to digital channels for conducting networking, brand building, product demos and training, and even transactions. 

Using this handbook, you can adapt your brand to the evolving marketplace by using the most effective channels, targeting methods and measurement strategies for reaching modern B2B buyers. In this guide you’ll learn the answers to key marketing questions, such as: 

How can you efficiently target B2B audiences?

B2B’s emphasis on precisely targeting niche audience groups will be affected by third-party cookie deprecation in 2023. Find a balance between leveraging non-cookie based second and third-party prospecting audiences and creating digital touch points with your CRM contacts to reach the buyers that matter most for your brand. 

What are the best channels for B2B brands to advertise on?

Some of the most effective and fastest growing digital channels we recommend for B2B marketers include social, display, search, connected TV and audio. Read the full guide or continue scrolling to learn how to activate each channel most effectively and achieve business results. 

How to measure the results of B2B digital marketing? 

Track the cross-channel customer journey via both sales and marketing touchpoints. Accurate measurement provides learnings to optimize the process, making the sales funnel shorter and ad spend more effective. A common misstep marketers make is focusing solely on attribution and sourcing metrics. This is an oversimplification that blinds true insights and efficiency. To more accurately track a complex buying cycle, we outline a five step measurement process to define omni-channel success.

Future-Proof Your B2B Digital Marketing Strategy

Digital-first marketing is the way forward for B2B brands. This handbook provides a deeper understanding of the high level trends you need to know to stay ahead of the competitive curve and capitalize on untapped marketing space.

Download the B2B Digital Marketing Handbook now to level up your strategy. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us to set up a discovery call.

Adapting to the Digital-First B2B Marketplace 

B2B digital ad spending is growing rapidly, and traditional spend is not expected to recover to pre-pandemic levels. Digital advertising will be pivotal for B2B brands moving forward as buyers become more accustomed to a digital-first marketplace. 

Here’s three simple shifts that can have a major impact:

Follow B2C’s Example

Leading consumer brands diversify and digitize their marketing mix to create robust omni-channel strategies. This is highly successful for meeting customers wherever they are online. Personalizing content is now an expectation for B2B digital marketing.

Lead with Data

Use CRM data to identify customers with the greatest lifetime value based on potential or historical spend to optimize your marketing expenditure. Then, create AI-based lookalike models to find new consumers who behave like your best customers.

Lean into Video 

B2B buyers engage heavily with video content across the consumer journey, perhaps to the surprise of the more traditional B2B marketers. Product demos, tutorials, webinars, and culture-based content all have an impact on engaging and informing buyers. 

Digital Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

Companies are placing the highest investment for their account based marketing (ABM)  strategies into digital. The majority of spend occurs on social media, paid search, and e-newsletters. However, other channels such as display, CTV and audio are gaining more share of wallet each year. 

A barrier to successful ABM is the ability to efficiently and effectively personalize marketing at scale. This is addressable by using AI technology to segment and serve account-based ads on a programmatic level. There are also various methods for account-based targeting on platforms such as LinkedIn. 

Targeting B2B Audiences with Digital Marketing 

Impact of the Cookieless Future

It is important to maintain a forward looking mentality for lead generation. The cookieless future will affect targeting niche audience groups, an emphasis of B2B marketers. Brands should explore emerging identity-solution technologies while also prioritizing first-party data collection. Finding a balance between leveraging third-party prospecting audiences and your CRM contacts can define your success. 

Know Your B2B Audience

Use consumer intelligence tools to create highly specific audience personas. Understand where their media consumption lies so you can reach them in both endemic and non-endemic environments. Focusing on intentionally targeting high quality leads will achieve a much higher return on investment than a mass market approach. 

Job Title Targeting

Reach industry professionals based on the NAICS listed industries in which they work. Target using ABM, job title, job function and seniority targeting, firmographic, and intent signals. Further refine targeting through Boolean logic to reach specific B2B audiences.

IP Targeting

IP targeting enables brands to identify qualified households and businesses based on IP address. You can also create look-alike models using audience lists to expand reach. This allows you to target specific business locations and reach employees while they are at work. 

Geo-Targeting

Geo-fencing powers hyper-local mobile targeting in specific locations of your target accounts. Geo-targeting industry conferences can be effective to reach a high concentration of relevant professionals with greater efficiency. 

Retargeting

Website retargeting allows you to reach warm leads who have recently visited your site with sequential messaging. Conversion pixels can be particularly useful for B2B brands to place on key actions, like PDF downloads or form submissions. However, the deprecation of third-party cookies will inevitably impact this – so avoid overreliance on this tactic.

Key Channels for B2B Digital Marketing 

Brands need to enable digital transaction and communication across all stages of the lead funnel. Here are some of the most effective and fastest growing digital channels we recommend for B2B marketers:

Social Media

While social media is extremely useful in personifying the brand, it also goes a long way in driving new prospects and increasing customer lifetime value. Advertising and engaging content initiates that process. The most commonly used and highly effective social media for B2B brands is LinkedIn. 

LinkedIn has millions of active professionals with detailed targeting capabilities for reaching a business-focused target audience. On LinkedIn, individuals are more likely to be engaged in business-related activities, which is a great fit for B2B initiatives. 

Connected TV

Brands are realizing the value of video in driving awareness through storytelling, which is just as important to B2B as it is to B2C. CTV ads provide maximum impact, reaching users on the largest screen in their home against premium content. With advanced audience targeting across CTV devices brands can re-engage existing customers and reach new audiences. 

Programmatic Audio 

Programmatic audio is a growing sector for B2B. Placements in relevant podcasts or streaming platforms can reach very specific audiences. B2B spend in this category is currently lagging, but we expect growth in the next several years. By capitalizing on this tactic now, your brand has the potential to capture attention ahead of more widespread adoption 

Digital-Out-of-Home

Digital Out of Home (DOOH) refers to the purchasing of digital screens in public. With DOOH, you can purchase inventory nearly in real-time versus traditional methods that take multiple weeks and contracts. Digital screens place ads in locations where you know key decision makers are likely to be.

Display

4 out of 10 US B2B marketers said they plan to increase their display budget in 2022. Use display to drive consideration and lead generation through specific CTAs. Segment audiences based on attributes and behaviors. Then, connect with them on relevant sites and apps using a combined approach of contextual and audience targeting. 

Native

Native ads match readers’ interests with curated content and generate higher brand engagement. This is especially useful for targeting B2B buyers when they are consuming contextually relevant content. Plus, it can position your content as an additional resource to the topic they are reading about without being intrusive.

Paid Search (PPC)

To show up in highly competitive search rankings, combine organic and paid search strategies for maximum impact and profitability. When B2B buyers begin searching for information, they will likely land on a top ranking site on Google. So, it is critical to bid against the most effective keywords to place your brand at the forefront of the consumer journey. 

Measuring B2B Digital Marketing Results 

Tracking the cross-channel journey across sales and digital marketing touchpoints is essential. Accurate measurement provides learnings to optimize the process, making the sales funnel shorter and ad spend more effective. 

Focusing on sourcing metrics is an oversimplification that blinds true insights and efficiency. To more accurately track a complex buying cycle, we recommend creating a custom measurement framework. 

Use this 5-step process to define omni-channel success for your B2B marketing: 

1) Align Sales and Marketing Teams

First, sales and marketing must have alignment. The following steps of identifying business OKRs should be collaborative to meet shared goals and understand the impact of one another’s efforts.

2) Identify Desired Business Outcomes

Secondly, establish and understand your core business goals. This creates a roadmap that empowers marketing and sales teams to make informed decisions. From there, you can begin to build a strategic marketing plan to move the needle for the brand

3) Determine KPIs to Indicate Success

Begin to identify the signals that trigger audience actions and bring you closer to your goals. Next, determine how each touchpoint leads the customer to the point of purchase and how you can track directional success. Move beyond typical metrics that simply measure media efficiency and see what is truly impacting your business results.

4) Evaluate Incrementality

As you nurture leads and drive new business, evaluate the incremental effects of your marketing strategy. To test different tactics or channels, establish a performance baseline and then adjust one variable at time to see the impact. This will give you more accurate insight than attribution or last-click models. 

5) Create a Cycle of Test and Learn

Now it is important to identify the key questions we can answer to improve upon results in the next campaign. Create a learning agenda to determine which components are driving the best outcomes so you can adjust and optimize in the future. 

Apply these core principles and watch your business transform. Using this approach will allow you to track and communicate meaningful data about your buyers, no matter how complex your channel strategy may be. 

Key Takeaways for B2B Marketers

Agility will be key in 2022 and B2B brands have an exciting opportunity to leverage the digital marketplace to their advantage. Using this guide, you should be able to better understand how to adapt your brand’s strategies for long-term success.

With a digital-first approach, audience personalization, and strategic targeting, you can reach your highest potential buyers with maximum efficiency. 


As you continue to navigate these challenges, Coegi is here to be your guide!

Reach out to us at info@coegipartners.com for a strategy consultation to enhance your customers’ digital journey.

Increase B2B Conversions Using Account Based Marketing

Posted on by Coegi

Account based marketing (ABM) is a focused strategy that blends sales and marketing efforts to reach high potential B2B customers. However, many brands struggle with achieving the level of personalization and automation needed for effective ABM at scale. Thankfully, there is a solution: programmatic ABM. Using automated buying tactics, brands can serve targeted ads to thousands of highly segmented B2B consumers within target organizations using technology and data for personalization. 

Why Account Based Marketing?

B2B marketing has historically emphasized quantity of leads generated first (Marketing Qualified Leads), with quality to follow (Sales Qualified Leads). Unfortunately, this method has led to 79% of leads never becoming customers, not to mention wasted media dollars. The account-based approach instead focuses on decision makers in target companies rather than mass outreach. By doing this prequalification, the sales funnel becomes shorter and every customer touchpoint is more intentional and personalized. This is why 77% of marketers believe ABM is their top driver of sales and marketing success. 

Zeroing In On the Target

Emarketer data shows that one key barrier to successful ABM is the inability to efficiently and effectively personalize marketing at scale.  We know this is a critical issue to solve as, “40% of company executives in e-commerce report that personalization directly affects their sales and company revenues.” Once you have your ideal customer profile nailed down, how can you make sure you are reaching these individuals?  Can you reach them at scale, with personalization and within your given budget? Here’s where programmatic activation comes in.

Programmatic Account Based Marketing: Powered By Technology

Programmatic advertising automates the ad buying process. Just because you are targeting individual business accounts, you don’t have to have massive teams calling or emailing accounts one by one to succeed. With proper campaign segmentation, you can tailor ads to feel highly specific and relevant to individuals within these companies.

AI-powered creative learning takes this one step further by determining which combination of imagery and copy will be most effective for different audience segments and adjusting in real time. Programmatic and AI also allow agility and flexibility across channels. You can take a social ad and run it on digital or test a top performing display video on CTV – all while being confident your media spend is serving ads to real, qualified decision makers. 

 

ABM Investment Across Digital Media Channels

Activation: First-Party First

When available, start by leveraging existing CRM data. Activate against this high value pool of leads who have already shared their information with you via content downloads, newsletter sign-ups, or other acquisition activities. Carefully segment these individuals so you can serve highly relevant and personalized ads based on their industry, level of seniority, interests, geography, etc.

  • Work with a programmatic agency to activate 1PD segments across various digital channels and media publishers.
  • Track user behavior and data trends
  • Use AI tools to create lookalike audiences to expand the targeting pool

Expand and Refine Your Ideal ABM Customer

To expand further, strategically incorporate third party data. Various data partners can be tapped to reach decision makers across digital channels. Keep in mind that with third party data in particular, it is important to have a smart targeting strategy. 

Start by refining your audience. Yes, you want to achieve scale and pack the lead funnel for your sales force, but the way to do that effectively and efficiently is by ensuring you understand what the ideal customer looks like. Your cost per lead may be higher when you narrow the targeting parameters, but you can expect a greater return by reaching audiences with the highest potential lifetime value and reducing wasted hours sifting through unqualified leads.

Layer your targeting with firmographic, job title, and seniority parameters that indicate a high potential account. Look at your best customers  – what do they have in common? Segment your target personas into specific buckets so you can tailor your creative and messaging accordingly – adding the personalization now expected by B2B buyers.

Some targeting tactics for B2B accounts to consider are: 

  • Intent targeting to identify individuals and organizations who are actively searching for a particular topic or solution
  • NAICS job title targeting to reach specific job titles or organizations 
  • IP/Geo-Targeting to target specific business locations or industry events
  • Social targeting by skill/title/industry/location across platforms

Using programmatic activation with a digital partner allows brands to reach these highly sought after audiences with efficiency of both budget and time. 

B2B Channel Strategy: Time To Diversify?

Companies are placing the highest investment for their ABM strategies into digital, with the majority of spend occurring on social media, paid search and e-newsletters. These are all key ways to reach buyers, however, other channels such as programmatic display, CTV and audio are gaining more share of wallet year over year. Consider some of these more untapped spaces to allow your brand voice to be heard without competing with the noise. 

When choosing your channel strategy, don’t put all your efforts into one high-performing channel, such as LinkedIn. Instead, activate ads across a variety of channels based on the media consumption habits of your target audience and other behavioral insights. Use data-informed programmatic placements to meet the audience wherever they are active online.

To determine the best channel mix, it’s critical to build a cycle of testing and learning into your measurement strategy. This enables ongoing learning and optimization to improve the lead nurturing process by identifying what is working and what isn’t. Ask questions and test various tactics to find answers so your brand avoids stagnancy and reduced efficiency in the sales cycle.

Key Takeaways

  • Account based marketing doesn’t have to be tedious. Taking a programmatic approach enables efficiency and scale for brands with large target account pools.
  • Refine targeting criteria and segment key audience groups to personalize creative accordingly. 
  • Capitalize on your first party data, then expand reach with high quality third party data to reach verified decision makers.
  • B2B brands can benefit from an omni-channel media approach and considering non-traditional B2B media placements

Start reaching hundreds to thousands of B2B leads today by working with Coegi to build a programmatic ABM strategy. Download our guide to B2B Marketing to learn more. 

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