Programmatic Advertising Adds Value to B2B Marketing

The goal of business-to-business (B2B) advertisers is to run targeted marketing campaigns that help them reach decision makers at a minimum cost to convert. Programmatic advertising is an automated way of buying and selling digital ads by defining parameters such as price and network reach through real-time bidding (RTB). These parameters can be combined with behavioral or audience data on the same platform. Marketers buy media in response to real-time customer actions through algorithms, usually at lower costs than with traditional ad-buying methods. As a result, these algorithms allow advertisers to spend more time being creative and less time reading spreadsheets.

Programmatic advertising is increasing due to its inherent efficiencies in workflow and performance and it allows marketers to:

• Show a specific ad
• To one anonymous consumer
• In one context
• On one device

Compared with traditional programmatic trading, where agencies would buy blocks of inventory at fixed CPM rates, RTB now powers the buying, selling, and measuring of inventory on an impression by impression basis, in real-time, as each browser or agent loads the page.

eMarketer estimates U.S. advertisers will spend more than $3.36 billion on real-time bidding this year, up from just under $2 billion in 2012 and less than $1 billion in 2011.

 

 

Programmatic advertising enables businesses market effectively on different channels. Customer interactions are integrated into a single dashboard to develop the best engagement strategy. This increases advertising effectiveness by assigning a value to every impression and showing ads only to interested prospects with a high likelihood of conversion.

Because it is automated, programmatic buying helps marketers to:

Advertize in a cost-effective manner with lower budgets:

A report from BtoB Magazine highlighted several of the obstacles that B2B advertisers currently face, such as the lack of budget (59 percent) and the inability to reach the right target at the right time (39 percent). Most agree that moving beyond a “batch and blast” use of marketing automation in order to arrive at a more relevant, effective lead nurturing program requires one thing: data. In particular, it requires behavioral data. Fortunately, there is a solution—automated real-time bidding (RTB). RTB platforms improve cost efficiency by minimizing spend on poorly targeted impressions. RTB is also highly-relevant. Before purchasing impressions, advertisers pick and choose which customers they want to engage. Using these parameters means B2B advertisers' messages are delivered only to those people who are most likely to be interested in products or services; greatly reducing waste in budgets and improving the quality of leads.

Tailor messaging to suit needs, time and context:

Whether B2B or B2C, brands cannot compete in today’ environment with rigid messaging strategies. As Forrester predicts, “The core of the display market, performance-based impressions, will shift toward programmatic exchange-based trading at a rate of 43% annually between 2012 and 2017, comprising 30% of total display spending by 2017.” Businesses need to provide diverse deliverables to meet the varying expectations of audiences. Cues can be taken from various factors like the referral sources of website visitors to decide the types of content to serve. For example, if a prospect arrives at a creative agency’s site from an article on iPad website design, the content displayed should have information about producing an iPad website. Similarly, if someone arrives via a tweet about “back-to-school marketing strategies,” the website should tailor the content accordingly. The same principles hold for businesses that have presences on multiple platforms. By analyzing the information prospects consume on one platform, smart marketers should customize the content served in their next interaction on different channels to take dialogues further. In other words, if prospects have searched websites with career-related terms, they will be excluded from the display campaigns, whereas the frequency of ads will increase to target people who looked up related solutions.

Nurture leads with intuitive email campaigns:

Data plays a vital role in lead nurturing by allowing marketers to segment prospects according to where they are in the sales cycle and their unique needs, providing the ability to follow up with targeted messaging. Marketing automation platforms help B2B marketers understand the interests of their audiences based on their on-site behaviors and the information they provide in forms. This insight is used to develop emails with the appropriate calls to action, whether that means stressing price, quality or project management—depending on the top concerns of the potential customers.

The biggest challenge for marketers is in connecting the dots with big data. Information has always been gathered with transactions and other types of interactions but the key is in capturing the right elements from big data and developing algorithms for programmatic platforms that provide the best returns.

Before taking a plunge into the automated model of advertising, it is important to understand what elements of your advertising and marketing campaigns are suited to programmatic models. Having a clear grasp of your business objectives, the kind of audience you want to attract and at what scale, as well as the level of performance required—all of this will help you set attainable objectives and an effective marketing plan.

How do you plan to use programmatic advertising for your business-to-business marketing goals?

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