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A Guide to Digital Advertising

Explore ways to improve audience targeting and use popular ad platforms.

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A businesswoman looks at a digital ad on her smartphone

Chapters

Chapter 1

Introduction

Chapter 2

What is B2B Advertising?

Chapter 3

B2B Advertising Strategies

Chapter 4

B2B Advertising Examples

Chapter 5

Optimizing Your Campaigns

Chapter 6

Popular Advertising Channels

Chapter 7

What is B2B Programmatic Advertising?

Chapter 8

Measuring Ad Performance

Chapter 9

Conclusion

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Introduction

B2B businesses spend billions each year on digital advertising, and are devoting increasing percentages of ad budgets to digital efforts. The reason is simple: It’s a great way to reach a targeted audience of potential buyers.

But simple doesn’t mean easy.

Ad networks, sites, and campaign options change all the time. Your audience changes, too. Interest grows and wanes within accounts, and key decision makers change jobs and move on to new companies.

When you’re spending a hefty part of your budget on ads, it’s critical to be dialed in with the right audience, the right message, and the right timing to reduce waste and generate strong ROI.

Effective digital advertising means your team is able to:

  • Identify your target audience and engage them with relevant campaigns
  • Get ads placed where your audience can’t miss them
  • Effectively measure your efforts to drive positive change

This guide can help you understand digital advertising for B2B sales and find ways to maximize ROI.

Chapter 2

What is B2B Advertising?

B2B advertising includes spending money on your website, digital ad platforms, trade shows, event sponsorships, events, and other initiatives.

B2B advertising is quite different from B2C advertising. Some of the major differences include:

  • Narrower audience targets. Most Americans will buy a pizza this month, so a B2C pizza chain can afford to advertise to a broad audience. The number of people who need to buy an enterprise software package or an industrial water pump is radically smaller. If you advertised those B2B solutions broadly, your ROI would be devastatingly bad. You must refine your targeting to make ad dollars count.
  • Longer sales cycles. A typical B2B sale involves months of research from the prospective customer and many conversations, demos, and negotiations.
  • Multiple decision-makers involved in purchases. When companies make a big-ticket purchase, multiple people sign off. For some industries, the average size of B2B buying teams is 14 to 23 people.

Long sales cycles and the presence of large buying teams makes for a much more complex buying journey.

But it can also represent an opportunity. As more people within an account research solutions, they give off buying signals. Collecting and analyzing those buying signals empowers you to narrow in on an incredibly valuable audience of likely buyers.

Chapter 3

B2B Advertising Strategies

Identify Your Audience

To have the greatest advertising impact, your campaigns must reach the right people.

Develop a Targeting Strategy

Before creating your intended advertising audience, start by defining your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Your ICP narrows down the type of company that would benefit from your product, based on industry, geography, size, and more. Make sure your ICP includes accounts that are not only relevant to your business and products, but also high-quality and more likely to convert.

Within those accounts, make sure to target members of the buying team who will have a say in whether to invest in your solution.

Get a Leg Up

With the right account intelligence tool, revenue teams can gather even deeper intent insights for reaching the highest priority buyers, like:

  • Technographics (state of their current tech stack)
  • Trends in the market (new competitors, economic shifts)
  • Intent signals (what companies are researching)

You can then use this information to determine your in-market ideal customer profile (IICP): a group of prospects that are likely to buy your solution — and buy now. With a defined IICP, you not only know what content to serve certain members of your audience, but you’re also empowered to focus efforts on the most timely opportunities.

Segment Your Audience to Create Personalized Experiences

Generic advertising leads to lackluster results. Eighty percent of buyers say they want personalized messages from marketers and sellers. You can meet that desire by segmenting your audience into those with common attributes and interests, and then delivering different user experiences that are tailored to the buyers.

It’s not just the ad that should be personalized; personalize the landing page, as well. Put yourself in your audience’s shoes: you wouldn’t want to be enticed with a highly personalized ad that then takes you to a generic page aimed at the masses. The content of the landing page should speak to the same persona as the ad, reiterating and furthering the ad’s promise. 

AI tools like ChatGPT can help you come up with ideas for content variations. Try giving it an example of your ad text and asking it to generate five variations.

Similarly, tools like Canva and Creatopy can make it easier to quickly create multiple banner ads for A/B testing.

How Much Personalization is Too Much Personalization?

Base your content on audience needs, concerns, and stages — and make personalized variations different enough that you can identify what works and what doesn’t.

It’s easy to get carried away with segmentation and personalization. Creating individualized campaigns for all accounts is cumbersome, time consuming, and a nightmare to keep updated. Save that effort for your absolute biggest logos. 

For everyone else, take advantage of dynamic segmentation, which is available within some AI-powered AMB platforms. Dynamic segmentation evaluates real-time intent data and assigns contacts to specific campaigns that match their account’s current research. 

For example, you might have campaigns created for accounts that are researching certain keywords, and who have reached specific buying stages. Dynamic segmentation can automatically shift your audience segments into campaigns that match their current research patterns. 

Chapter 4

B2B Advertising Examples

In addition to personalizing the content of your ads, determine the type of campaign that lends itself best to its audience and goals. The most popular platforms offer advertisers various options, like:

  • Search ads that target people based on their keyword searches 
  • Retargeting ads that target people who have already visited your website
  • Compete ads aimed at accounts researching your competitors, and that highlight your company and differentiators
  • Dynamic ads with elements (copy, CTAs, etc.) that change based on a specific account’s behavior
  • Lookalike audience ads that target people with similar characteristics as your existing followers or customers
  • Contextual targeting where your ads are displayed on sites that feature related content
  • Native ads which show your sponsored content alongside other articles in online publications 
  • Audience targeting that reaches users based on online behaviors and subsequent buying signals

Chapter 5

Optimizing Your Campaigns

So you’ve used data to segment your audience and assembled compelling ad content and campaigns. Now it’s time to make sure all that effort was worthwhile when putting the campaign into action. 

Choosing the Best Digital Ad Networks

The process begins with the network you use to publish your digital ads. There are many, and each offers its own formats and serves its own purpose. 

Your team has landed on campaign objectives, so ensure the network you choose aligns with those objectives and has the capabilities you need to achieve them. For instance, does it have the features you need to target your audience segments? What about the ad formats to support your creative? 

Most ad solutions offer access to a comparable inventory of hundreds of thousands of sites (or more) with similar formats. Once you’ve narrowed your options, consider inventory. Ask the following questions:

  • Can I access the ad inventory required to meet my goals?
  • Do I have control over the inventory I buy (or don’t buy)?
  • Can I see the inventory in which my ads are running?

The more visibility and flexibility you have within a network, the better. 

Chapter 6

Popular Advertising Channels

Three common digital advertising platforms are Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

The most popular platforms for B2B advertising are LinkedIn and Google Ads. Facebook‌ can also be a strong channel for top-of-funnel advertising.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn Ads offer a few placement options:

  • Sponsored Content
  • Sponsored Messaging
  • Conversation Ads
  • Text Ads
  • Dynamic Ads

You must have a LinkedIn business page in order to run a Sponsored Content, Messaging or Conversation Campaign. Similar to Google, you’ll select your objective, ad format, and daily budget. Then, you’ll develop an audience by specifying criteria including titles, companies, industries, and even interests.

B2B sellers love LinkedIn because it’s a great place to research potential buyers, and its LinkedIn Sales Navigator platform makes it easy to build lists of leads based on firmographic details, job titles, locations, and other characteristics.

The downside to LinkedIn is that its advertising costs are comparatively expensive. To get great ROI, your targeting needs to be tightly dialed in. Fortunately, a solution like 6sense integrates with LinkedIn and can supplement its audience targeting capabilities by layering in intent data — helping you advertise only to the subset of leads that are likely to buy. It’s a powerful combo.

Google Ads

Google Ads enable advertisers to promote products and services where people are searching for them. Set goals, create text and/or display ads, select relevant keyword themes, narrow your audience within a certain geography, and pay only for results.

Google is the king of search, so using its ad platform to advertise for your business’ most important keywords is a no-brainer. But like most other digital marketing platforms, Google Ads is built with B2C sales in mind. It’s not designed to capture the intricacies of B2B buyer research involving multiple team members.

Here are some tips for optimizing Google Ads performance by introducing ABM data.

Facebook

Facebook ads work similarly to LinkedIn, where you can opt for your ad to be featured within the Facebook feed, videos, search results, one-to-one messages, or on third-party apps and sites. Set an objective, select your audience, choose your placements, and enter a daily or lifetime budget.

Many B2B sellers avoid Facebook. The site has billions of users and commands an impressive amount of user attention — but almost nobody uses Facebook with the intention of making B2B purchasing decisions.

But the sheer size of Facebook’s audience makes it a valuable place to generate brand awareness among your target buyers. 6sense integrates with Facebook Ad Manager, which allows you to create highly targeted in-market audiences in 6sense, then push those audiences to Facebook. This allows you to bypass Facebook’s B2B targeting limitations.

Chapter 7

What is B2B Programmatic Advertising?

B2B programmatic advertising is used to target specific businesses or job titles with relevant ads, rather than using broad demographics. This makes B2B programmatic advertising a more targeted and efficient way to reach your desired audience.

By using buyer intent data and real-time bidding, you can ensure your ads are served to the right people at the right time, resulting in a higher ROI for your campaigns.

Programmatic Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) allow you to advertise on a variety of platforms from a single interface, which makes it easier to reach your audience without having to individually juggle multiple ad platforms. The ads can be displayed in various formats, such as display banners, native ads, videos, and more.

(6sense’s programmatic advertising and DSP are built specifically for B2B.)

Chapter 8

Measuring Ad Performance

Your work isn’t over once your campaigns are running. It’s vital you analyze performance over time to see how you’re trending toward objectives. 

Determining Campaign Success

Revenue teams often focus on views and clicks — but what do those tell you about overall business impact? Move from individual contact metrics to those that reveal whether ad engagements contributed to account progression and revenue generation. 

These are a good place to start:

  • Influenced pipeline: How well your ads are influencing accounts to become opportunities, or opportunities to become customers
  • Target account coverage: How many in-market accounts you’re engaging at a time
  • Average length of sales cycle: How long it takes to convert an account to a customer
  • Pipeline velocity: How quickly accounts are converted into revenue
  • Return on investment: Profit generated through digital ad campaigns

Don’t Neglect Traditional Engagement Metrics

Influence-based metrics are necessary to drive change, but engagement metrics are still relevant in helping to determine whether your ad budget is being optimized. Here are several to know and track:

  • Reach: How many people saw your ads
  • Click-through rate (CTR): How many people clicked on your ad
  • Conversion rate: How many people clicked on your ad and performed a desired action
  • Cost per acquisition: Average acquisition cost through digital ad campaigns
  • Web traffic: How many people came to your website through a digital ad
  • Time on site: Average amount of time a visitor spends on your site after viewing an ad
  • Social media engagement: Likes, shares, comments, etc.

Continuously tracking these can clue you in to both the visibility and interest of your audience — particularly if multiple people from the same company are engaging with you (but this requires account-level data). 

Analyze and compare engagement metrics for different ads and campaigns to learn what type of copy, imagery, CTAs, and other elements attract your audience.

Chapter 9

Conclusion

Successfully engaging your target customers with digital ads requires strategic thinking — and an understanding of not just your prospects, but how your offering solves their problems.

With the practices mentioned in this guide, you can:

  • Identify and segment accounts into smaller audiences with similar attributes
  • Deliver compelling and personal ads to every member of every buying team in your pipeline
  • Diversify ad campaigns to obtain the most revealing performance data
  • Get ads placed on the most relevant and reputable sites — without breaking your budget
  • Gather insights on what ads are driving the most engagement, and why
  • Understand advertising’s long-term impact on business outcomes

6sense has its own DSP that advertisers can use to easily target publisher inventory that is pre-screened for quality and brand safety. The DSP partners with dozens of ad exchanges to target your audience across a breadth of sites.

You have control over where your ads run, but can get a quick start by choosing to run across:

  • 6sense’s entire network of pre-screened sites, or
  • A highly targeted list of premium sites

6sense also integrates with LinkedIn, Google, Facebook, and Instagram. This makes it simple to create an audience of high-intent B2B buyers in 6sense, then push those audiences to the other platforms to target their users.

Ready to see 6sense in action?

The 6sense Team

The 6sense Team