For years, B2B has been seen as the less creative and less exciting side of marketing. B2C has always been associated with more innovative ideas and imaginative artwork. But the notion that business to business marketing has to be less emotional and more rigid is fading away, and B2B brands are seeing great successes from trying different ways of engaging with their clients. And we can prove it.

The LinkedIn B2B Institute estimates that 40% of all businesses are now B2B. Selling to businesses now makes up a very sizeable proportion of our economy. Yet many marketers still seem to believe that the excitement can only be found in the consumer marketing world, with many steering clear of the B2B end, which is often referred to as niche.

However, this couldn’t be further from the truth. And those B2B marketers who fully embrace a more innovative range of marketing activities could soar ahead of the competition.

 

Can digital advertising really work for B2B?

Yes. It can work really well. Let’s not beat around the bush.

People seem to believe that digital advertising is better for B2C, but we think there’s an argument that it could be even more valuable for a B2B market.

Let’s strip back to what digital advertising really is: it’s just advertising. It’s a method of marketing that has been used for decades. It just happens to now be online. And it just happens that you can now be more targeted and get more visible measurements. There is no reason that it can’t be just as effective, or even more effective than B2C.

 

Pack the top of your B2B sales funnel

How much emphasis do you place on your top of the funnel marketing? The one thing that’s probably true of every B2B brand is that they aren’t selling something that anyone would buy on a whim. It’s the other end to the FMCG market. There are probably higher costs, less frequent buying patterns, more people involved in the decision making process, and a potentially changing audience as people move from role to role.

That’s where the power of brand could not be more vital. You need to build a solid brand and get it out there as much as possible to ensure that when your customers are in the position to buy, you’re the first company they think about.

To put it another way, how much budget have you allocated to onboarding new tech and clever CRM automation? That’s great and really important. But without the power of brand advertising to drive reach, what’s going to feed into your pipeline?

B2B or B2C, we’re all selling to people. We need that emotional message and captivating artwork to grab attention and pack the top of the funnel full. Then you’ll be in a position to maximise your automation as you’ll be attracting more new clients and reinforcing your message with existing clients.

So we know branding is vital. And what is one of the best tools for getting your brand out there? Advertising.

 

Time to prove it really works…

Seeing is believing, so we thought it would be useful to share a case study with you and prove just how effective digital advertising could be. We have been working with a B2B company very successfully for about 18 months. And they’ve been successful because they understand just how advertising needs to fit into their marketing mix.

This company approached us because they were particularly interested in geofencing. They wanted to get in front of potential trade customers in order to build brand awareness and product identification.

Straight away we agreed that meant the KPIs had to be about visibility measured through impressions, and brand interaction measured through clicks. It had to be all about the brand.

By the end of 2021, we had secured good impression rates of 430k a month. But we knew that there was a greater opportunity to further grow the clicks being generated by offering access to more active users.

 

With data now behind us and analysis we could utilise, we were able to be far more innovative with how we used different tactics - a way of working that has been traditionally more associated with consumer marketing.

We introduced two new audiences based on keywords and website visits. These changes meant that the campaign continued to grow in terms of impressions due to having better access to better priced audiences, but more importantly it also meant that we could substantially scale the CTR and, consequently, the clicks.

The success of this meant we could optimise it even further, bringing in even more creative thinking. In June 2022 we were able to pause initial campaigns and focus instead on the audience and geofencing insertions.

This led to an increase in CTR of over 1700% between December 2021 and December 2022, going from around 1,500 clicks a month to 24,000. These clicks were all generated from the target audience and helped to grow the traffic on the company’s website. This benefited the business in more ways than just leads.

In addition to this, the impression volume went from an average of 640k per month in H2 of 2021 to over 2 million a month in H2 of 2022 - an increase of 306%.[L5] 

You might read a case study like this without knowing the company or any detail and immediately assume that it’s B2C. But gone are the days when B2C dominates innovative marketing.

 

If you work on a B2B brand, maybe it’s time to think more creatively. How can you build your brand and target your audience in ways that you always thought were kept aside for B2C? If you haven’t explored the power of digital advertising yet, book a free consultation with the location based marketing experts today.