Paid Advertising & Demand Gen

Paid Advertising and Demand Generation for B2B Companies

What is Paid Advertising?

Paid advertising is a tool that enables you to pay for improved placement for marketing content in search engine results, social media, and advertising-enabled websites. It can also be used to precisely target relevant niche audiences based on demographics, use patterns, and other parameters.

Paid advertising is a proven method for generating new leads for your business. It can also be used to nurture leads throughout the sales funnel, optimize your conversion rates, raise brand awareness and increase engagement with prospects.

There are multiple types of paid advertising.

Paid Search Engine Advertising

This type of paid advertising focuses on inbound marketing, targeting users who are actively searching for something on search engines such as Google or Bing, by placing your content in a higher-ranked position in the search engine’s results. Most people don’t look beyond the first page of search results, and businesses rarely achieve a first-page position organically, especially those operating in highly competitive fields. Paid advertising lets you sidestep such roadblocks, ensuring your content appears among the first results returned in web searches.

The key advantage of Paid Search Engine Advertising is that search engine advertising funnels audiences who are already interested in what you have to offer directly to your homepage. B2B technology companies whose natural customers are internet natives cannot afford to miss this valuable sourcing channel. For example, if you offer transportation management software, you can target decision-makers in the transportation industry, rather than wasting money advertising to the general public.

Google Display Network & Google Remarketing

Google Display

Not all of your potential users are actively searching for your product, so Google gives you another opportunity to reach additional users using outbound marketing—the Google Display Network. Through a program called Adsense, website owners have the option to “rent” space on their website to the Google Display Network for advertising.

The Google Display Network uses several advanced methods to show the right ads to the right people. These include matching your keywords to sites with relevant content, matching them to a user’s search history (what they’ve looked for in the past–see “Google Remarketing” below), and using demographic information such as age, gender, and location to target specific audiences.

Google Remarketing

Most people don’t commit to a product or service the first time they see it. Google remarketing, also known as retargeting, is one of the most effective paid advertising tools because it allows you to target a person repeatedly. Your ads actually follow potential customers all over the internet, encouraging them along the conversion funnel with personalized messaging.

When a person visits your website, a small snippet of code (cookie) adds them to your remarketing list. When they visit another website that uses the Google Ad network, they see your ad, usually multiple times. There are lots of options for customization including personalizing the ad to the person’s browsing history on your site, for example, according to the specific page he/she visited or to products and services viewed.

Social Media Advertising

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With 3.8 billion users, social media is one of the best places to expose people to your brand and a key element of outbound marketing strategy. While people used to depend solely on search engines to find the products and services they need, more and more people today are finding them in their social media feeds.

As our personal and professional lives become more intertwined, all social media platforms are relevant for B2B advertisers targeting people in a business capacity. For example, Twitter can be a great tool for micro-targeting, Instagram for showcasing products with strong visuals, and Linkedin for connecting with people in specific roles or industries.

Owned social media channels, like your company LinkedIn page or Instagram account, are limited in scope because they can only reach a small portion of the users who have followed your page, and aren’t usually an effective way to generate new leads. With paid social media advertising, you can significantly expand your reach and display your ads to the right users, in the right place, and at the right time. It also allows you to accurately target people who are most relevant to your business, utilize different ad formats, use smart tracking to maximize your investment, and create a built-in Call to Action (CTA).

Email Database Marketing

Another effective tool in the B2B paid marketing toolbox is email database marketing. You can upload lists of emails, either purchased or acquired, into marketing platforms like the Google Display Network and social media platforms, and then display your ads to the people associated with those emails. This can be a great way to re-engage with cold leads or expose them to a new product or offering, as long as you’re careful to remain compliant with GDPR and other privacy regulations.

Account-Based Marketing

Account-based marketing (ABM) lets you target predetermined potential buyers or influencers in any given organization or company. You start by identifying the target companies most relevant to your service or product, and then carefully craft messaging that addresses their pain points and how your offering can be beneficial to them. ABM can be a great way to engage with B2B prospects and nurture lasting connections with potential customers. It’s also a great way to build up your LinkedIn network by connecting with relevant prospects and like-minded colleagues in your field.

Additional Paid Marketing Channels

In addition to the paid marketing channels and methods mentioned above, there are lots of others including Google Sponsored Promotion (Google emails targeted to people through remarketing, specific interests, etc.), YouTube advertising, Taboola, Quora, Reddit, and third-party referral sites (Capterra, etc.). This field is constantly evolving, which is why we make sure we’re always on top of new trends and platforms.

Why is Paid Advertising so Important for Your Business?

Paid advertising is the quickest and most effective way for a B2B company to get its message to its target audience and to generate marketing-qualified leads (MQLs). It’s sort of like a fast pass at an amusement park—it gets you where you’re going faster and more efficiently.

Paid advertising is becoming more important than ever for B2B companies as personal and work lives merge, and more companies adopt a BYOD (bring your own device) policy. With strategic paid advertising campaigns, B2B companies can target decision-makers in niche markets, raise brand awareness, generate leads and drive traffic to their websites and other content assets.

Companies often make the mistake of thinking that spending more will guarantee better results, but in B2B advertising, precision trumps quantity. The key to paid advertising isn’t increasing your budget, but rather optimizing the budget you have. No matter what the size of your budget, you can achieve impressive results with the right strategy, research, copy, and optimization.

Tailored Paid Marketing Strategies for B2B Companies

At Inspired Marketing, we specialize in marketing for B2B technology companies and we bring that expertise to your paid advertising strategies and campaigns. We offer end-to-end campaign management including strategy, research, copy, testing, and updates, and can help you identify and promote your offering to the right niche audiences using sophisticated targeting techniques. And, throughout the process, we closely track and optimize all campaigns, share real-time reporting, and keep you updated in weekly calls.

One of our main advantages is that we work with multiple audiences, industries, and verticals such as medtech, agritech, telco, cyber, technology, consulting, and B2B SaaS platforms. This enables us to learn the ins-and-outs of diverse industries, including their keywords and terminology.

We apply our in-depth marketing knowledge to clearly and precisely define your customer personas and the stages they go through before purchasing your offering. This helps make the most out of your paid advertising budget, generating the maximum number of leads and creating workflows that will nurture your leads to conversion. We can work with big and small budgets to deliver results.

This is How we Make it Happen

Step 1: Define the goals and parameters.

We start the process with a kick-off meeting that helps us understand your business, competitors, major USPs, target audiences, demographics, brand and voice, sales process, main offerings, and pain points. Based on this initial review, we define the goals and KPIs for your paid advertising strategy.

Step 2: Conduct in-depth research.

The next step is research (and lots of it), focusing on two key parameters:

Audience research: Effective targeting is the key to making an impact in paid advertising. The more accurate you are, the better your campaign will be. We dig in and do detailed customer research and create customer personas that give you insight into your audience, including their concerns and motivations, so you can deliver the most effective ads to each person.

Keyword research: Keyword optimization is an art—it’s all about finding the keywords that will connect you with the most relevant audience for the least investment. That’s why we drill down into the data and create a precise keyword list and strategy for your business.

Step 3: Design a funnel and create a strategy.

Potential customers aren’t likely to buy your product or even start a free trial the first time they hear about you or your product offering. That’s why a great paid campaign serves the prospect (potential customer) the most compelling and relevant content at each part of his/her journey.

Years of work in B2B marketing have helped us become masters in funnel design and segmenting. We’ll start off at the top of the funnel with lead generation, which is always at the forefront of all digital marketing campaigns. We’ll work with you to nurture prospects in the middle of the funnel, through creative remarketing campaigns that aren’t boring or annoying, but instead, remind the potential buyer of the value they can get from your product. At the bottom of the funnel, we’ll craft messaging to convince your users to take the plunge and try or buy your product.

Step 4: Create messaging and write content.

Like in all advertising, the objective of a paid campaign is to convince your prospects that you have something valuable to offer them, but in paid advertising, there’s a very limited amount of space to get your message across. For this reason, we write copy that makes every word count so that you can generate the maximum number of leads, drive conversions, and increase your ROI. We also craft optimized landing pages that encourage visitors to leave their details and generate new leads.

We’ll also keep your content fresh and engaging. If a user has been seeing the same ad for six months, it’s not going to be effective.

Step 5: Test, test and test again.

One of the main advantages of digital advertising tools is that you’re not shooting in the dark. Sophisticated monitoring tools enable you to track the performance of your campaigns so you know exactly what’s working and what isn’t.

That’s what we love about paid advertising—there are so many parameters to optimize, including keywords, landing pages, campaigns, and audience targeting so that the campaign is constantly improved. We use advanced tools to measure metrics like engagement, reach, impressions, views, and more. This data helps us understand what the audience responds to and what needs to be improved.

A/B testing, one of our specialties, is a key to all optimization strategies. We help you craft multiple versions of an ad, each emphasizing a different benefit of your product and test which performs best with which audience segment, helping you hone your message and reach the perfect, “golden” campaign that drives leads and improves conversion rates.

Staying Ahead of the Trends and Continuously Optimizing Our Methods

As an agency, we have the advantage of managing multiple accounts across different industries. This means that we can learn each platform in-depth, recognize trends across the board, understand which tools to invest in, and constantly test and optimize our methods to keep up with these changes. We monitor everything using KPIs and optimize between and within channels/platforms to reduce costs and optimize visitor quality, giving you the highest return on your investment.

So if you’re looking for an international team of experts who really understand paid advertising and lead generation, and can help you get the attention of customers you’ve always dreamed of – fast – then you’ve come to the right place!