A Guide to B2B People-Based Advertising Strategy
Gabriel Gervelis
8
min read
Innovation in B2B advertising technology has opened the door to a new online audience targeting capability called people-based advertising.
Leading B2B brands use this technique to raise brand awareness in highly targeted audiences composed solely of decision makers and buying committees within accounts that they’d like to do business with.
Advertising to this type of audience is proven to maximize the efficiency of ad spend, increase inbound sales inquiries, increase deal win rates, increase deal velocity, promote cross-sell opportunities to customers, and expand into new buying teams within customer accounts.
However many companies have been slow to adopt digital transformation initiatives in their sales and marketing departments. Several factors contribute to this lack of adoption, including: The cost of technology, lack of inhouse expertise, unreliable CRM data, siloed data, and low advertising budgets.
In this article, I’ll break down how companies can overcome these challenges to adopt people-based advertising campaigns to gain a competitive advantage, win more business, and measure their investment.
What Is B2B People-Based Advertising and How Does It Work?
Using a business contacts first name, last name, email address, and company name a b2b marketer can create an audience to activate digital ads against. This technique enables a 1:1 targeting between the business contact and the ad.
These audiences can be activated on channels such as Meta (Facebook / Instagram), Google, LinkedIn, and various native (Outbrain, Taboola) and display (OpenX, Yahoo, Verizon) networks.
This enables a marketer to engage with the target audience across many different digital channels. Also, the marketer is able to execute several campaigns with messaging that's unique to the stage of the sales funnel that the audience is in.
How much does people-based advertising technology cost?
People-based advertising capabilities are coupled within account-based marketing platforms. These enterprise ready platforms can have annual fees starting around $35,000 - $75,000 with several areas that will increase the price. These cost drivers may include the number of audiences created, the number of people targeted, number of accounts targeted, or the number of channels the audience is activated on.
In this Total Economic Impact report published by Forrester, on behalf of DemandBase, it is stated that over the course of 3-years customers paid $528,000 in technology fees for the account-based marketing platform. These customers realized a value of $2.47 million from their investment, an ROI of 367%.
In this blog post Forrester states that the average ad and technology budget for these types of campaigns, excluding headcount, is around $350,000. Pilot programs average $200,000.
These costs, and in-house expertise needed to execute the programs, have placed sophisticated people-based advertising programs out of reach for many businesses, mainly in the professional services industry.
Get Started With People-Based Advertising With An Ad Budgets Starting At $15,000.00
What media budget do you need for people-based advertising?
To execute people-based advertising you’ll first need access to a platform that has this type of targeting capability. After this is secured the cost for media will vary between on two important factors.
The first factor is the b2b audience match rate. If you attempt to create a b2b audience using 1,000 business contacts, the rate that the contacts match to the ad channel to become an audience will vary depending on the quality of your contact data.
The higher the match rate, the more media budget you’ll need to reach the audience.Tipcally you can expect a 50% match rate for most data sets. Match rates can reach 75% - 80% with high quality data and a premium people-based advertising service.
The second factor is the media cost on the platform. Digital advertising is bought and sold in units called a CPM. CPM stands for Cost-Per 1,000 ad impressions. You pay $X each time your ad is exposed 1,000 times. The CPM cost is different across channels. For example, a CPM on a display network (banner ads) will be different from a CPM on YouTube’s pre-roll video network.
When budgeting for a people-based advertising campaign a good rule of thumb is to use a ballpark measure of $1- $2 per person, per month, per channel. Then measure the ad frequency and reach into the audience to optimize your spend each month.
How long do I need to keep my campaign live to a b2b people-based audience?
This depends on the campaign objective that you're activating. For example,the campaign objective is to generate your first sale at 100 high priority accounts, then your campaign flight time should be longer than if your campaign objective is to increase brand awareness to people who are in your live pipeline.
It’s important not to think in terms of one set of ad creative and message to a single campaign. Rather, think about a campaign as a conquest to promote your brand to a high value audience over a long period of time. To do this, rotate ads and messages within the campaign once they have researched the desired click-through-rate and ad frequency.
With B2B advertising its proven that consistent brand exposure to an audience of decision makers and buying committees will drive higher returns. Setting a quarterly, or annual, budget based on the campaign objective and the audience will be a contributing factor for b2b people-based advertising success.
B2B People-Based Advertising Playbook
The following plays are proven techniques to use people-based ads to accelerate revenue at every stage of the b2b sales funnel.
Air Cover for B2B Sales Teams
Objective: Raise brand awareness to people that your sales team is prospecting and outbounding to.
Methodology: People are more likely to respond to cold outreach attempts from brands that they know. Also, brand awareness ads coupled with cold outreach activities generate positive noise in the marketplace and increase the amount of research a buying team will conduct on your brand.
Strategy: Sync data from your CRM (Salesforce, HubSpot) or sales automation tool (Outreach, Apollo) to your people-based advertising campaign. Or, import a list of prospects that your team is selling to.
Campaign flight: This sales and marketing play should be activate as long as the prospects are being targeted by sales.
Measurement: Revenue, pipeline, number of opportunities, and amount of booked meetings from the cohort of accounts that these ads target are the metrics to measure. Its important to measure these metrics from the total number of accounts and not metrics from the post-click action, like page views. Note that increases in sales team efficiency, increases in sales ready leads from the website, and increase in organic search traffic will experience a lift from these campaigns.
Case studies and additional content:
- B2B Growth Expert: $1.5M in new logo pipeline was generated by providing air cover for B2B sales teams
- MetaData.io - Air cover campaign generates 30,000,000 ad impressions
Account Based Marketing To High Value Accounts
Objective: Generate demand from a cohort of high value accounts.
Methodology: Continued brand awareness with target personas within a cohort of high value accounts will generate revenue by driving inbound sales inquiries.
Strategy: Dedicate 6-months advertising to a cohort of high value accounts that will yield high revenue returns. After the audience is created and activated within the channels do not waver from this campaign and fully commit to the time frame of ad activation. When one account converts from this campaign the lifetime value of the account should far exceed the investment in ad budget.
Measurement:
- Revenue, pipeline, number of opportunities, and amount of booked meetings from the cohort of accounts that these ads target are the metrics to measure
Case studies and additional content:
- DemandGen Report - 76% of marketers experience higher ROI with account-based marketing than other campaigns
- RollWorks - Sales teams reported an 80% increase in win rates when accounts were targeted using ABM.
- Demand Metric - Companies that have used ABM for at least one year have seen a 10% increase in revenue while 19% reported more than 30% revenue growth.
Increase referrals from channel partners
Objective: Increase the number of referrals, and people sending referrals from key channel partners.
Methodology: Increasing brand awareness with the sales and account management teams at key channel partners will increase the number of referrals.
Strategy: Create brand advocates in people who send referrals, and their co-workers, with ads that promote case studies, features, services, offerings, and general corporate information such as a commitment to volunteer work. Also, use people-based ads to collaboratively execute account based marketing and selling strategies to key accounts.
Measurement: Create a benchmark of the number of referrals and the number of people sending referrals from a partner. Then measure the increase post campaign launch on a monthly basis. Revenue from these referrals are the main KPI.
Nurture leads from events
Objective: Maximize investments in events and tradeshows by advertising to people your team meets at events.
Methodology: Advertising to people who stop by your booth at events will increase post event meeting booking success and using a 9 or 12-month lookback window will provide higher revenue generated from events.
Strategy: In order to stay top of mind with people who you meet at events, create an audience of event attendees who stopped by your booth, or of people that your event team had quality conversations with. Then, serve ads that promote your content to this audience consistently over the course of a year.
Measurement: Revenue, pipeline, number of opportunities, and the number of booked meetings from people you meet at events. This investment should be a small percentage of your overall event budget, and the ROI from the ad spend should be measured as influencing the revenue (or pipeline) that the event program generates.
Accelerate deal cycles
Objective: Engaging buying teams that have open opportunities with ads will decrease velocity and increase win rates.
Methodology: This is your opportunity to control the narrative during low-touch / no-touch parts of the sales cycle. Keeping your brand top of mind with buyers and buying committees will reduce the length of the sales cycle. Also, by promoting your unique value proposition, company culture, and case studies via ads to the buying committee will increase win rates.
Strategy: For large accounts in your pipeline, craft a campaign schedule with content assets that tell a story that’s unique to the account. For small and medium accounts, craft a one size fits all schedule and story that reaches people as they move through the opportunity stages in your CRM.
Measurement: Track the win rates and deal time for a cohort of opportunities before you execute this people-based advertising technique. Use this as a benchmark. Then compare the metrics of your first cohort of opportunities to the benchmark to establish impact.
Conclusion
B2B People-based advertising is a new technique that allows brands to increase awareness with decision makers within key account. With a number of plays available brands can have a positive impact on revenue generation at every stage of the funnel. However, the high cost of technology and the need for inhouse expertise have placed these sophisticated strategies out of reach for many businesses.
At B2B Growth Expert, we have removed these barriers to give B2B companies the ability to get started with people-based advertising and account-based advertising.
