Attracting the Right Audience: Paid Marketing for a B2B Product

For most of us, paid marketing seems like one of the quickest ways to ensure that a company’s message goes out to the best audience for them. When it comes to the B2B industry, paid marketing can often be a different ball game than general B2C product companies, and a completely different procedure needs to be followed to ensure the best success.

In this article, let us explore the differences between paid marketing for B2B companies and B2C companies, and discuss in detail the method we have followed at Hevo for our paid marketing campaigns.

B2B marketing versus B2C marketing

1. When it comes to B2B products, a brand along with the benefits of the product need to be displayed to the audience. The business investing in a particular product needs to know that the company that they are entering into an alliance with is trustworthy and has values that align with the needs of the business. They must know whether the product is going to solve the problem in an efficient way. It is a business relationship-driven decision making. However, in the case of B2C products, buying is mostly an emotional decision based on personal choices related to the category. Product packaging and advertising play a huge role in the choice as well.
2. B2C marketing typically involves much fewer touchpoints than B2B marketing. More often than not, B2C products are mass-market products that often do not require much deliberation before purchase, and there is often a single decision-maker involved in the process. However, B2B products are often niche products solving specific business problems. These can have large repercussions for many teams within a company, so having multiple touchpoints during the longer decision-making process is essential.
3. The messaging that works best for a mass consumer product is very different from that of a niche B2B product. While consumer products may have a discount or offer-based messaging, and highlight the packaging of the product or the marketing, B2B messaging needs to be very direct and Solution/benefit focused to convey utility, reliability, and transparency.
4. B2B businesses usually work in a niche market, and it is imperative to understand the ICP Persona to effectively attract them, compile and analyze accurate data. There is a requirement to narrow down and target the paid advertising to the Ideal Customer Profile only. Unlike B2B businesses, B2C businesses work in a larger-scale market, and the target is much more spread out. Here, the marketing team can think about pushing advertisements that are skewed toward emotional and product-driven purchases.

Due to these differences, a completely different approach needs to be taken when it comes to paid marketing for a B2B company. Using a similar approach as a mass consumer product would only lead to a poor outcome and not enough relevant people receiving the message.

Let us take a look at the general procedure that can be used in this case.

First things first- Understanding the ICP

Without understanding the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) for the B2B product, a marketing campaign can never be successful. The ideal customer profile needs to be understood on the basis of different parameters, like age group, job designation, experience, job responsibility, skills, etc.

The understanding of ICP is just the starting point. It is also important to know the way to use this understanding on different ad platforms to define the target audience. This can be done through experimental campaigns on platforms such as Linkedin which allow users to filter their campaign audience on basis of job, skills, experience, etc.

Next, one also needs to understand how our target audience would be searching for the product/solution. We gain a deeper understanding by finding answers to the following questions:

1. What kind of search terms are used by our target audience?
2. What kind of ads are our competitors using?
3. What messaging is working for which audience? Messaging can be dependent on multiple factors like geography. Something working for one region may not work for other.

There are many ways that such research can be done.

1. Research using different tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, Similarweb, etc.
2. Social media activity of competitors
3. Running a ‘dynamic search ad’ campaign to understand the keywords which can be targeted.

Once this understanding is gained, then it is time to move on to the next step of setting up the performance marketing process.

Phase 2: Hygiene Activities

Hygiene activities are those which must be undertaken as a bare minimum, to be visible to those people who are searching for us. Before any other paid marketing activity, these must be addressed.

These can include-

1. SEM Advertising- being visible on search engines for the relevant search terms. Those search terms can be of the following types.

• Brand Keyword-based — for Hevo, the search terms could be ‘Hevo’, ‘Hevodata’, ‘Hevo data’ etc.
• Product Keyword-based — For Hevo, here the search terms could be ‘ETL tool’, ‘ETL Pipeline’ etc.
• Industry Keyword-based — the search term, in this case, needs to be related to the problem which the product can solve.

2. Remarketing- making sure that those who have interacted with the website’s signup process or request a demo retain the product on top of their minds till they complete the signup process so that no high intent prospects are lost.

Phase 3: Brand Awareness

Henceforth begins the more aggressive campaigns which can be used to increase the number of people who are aware of the brand. The main task here is to engage with the ICP users who are till now not aware of the brand’s existence.

The problem to solve here is- how can these target users be reached out to? Here, the understanding of the ICP comes to the rescue. If the understanding of the ICP is clear, then their Interest topics, Skill areas, technologies used, etc. can be used to define the audience for the awareness campaign.

These ad campaigns will include both video and display campaigns. Here, what can work wonders is a lead-gen campaign where the company gives away a really useful resource for free in lieu of the contact details. This way, the interest of the right audience can be captured. This builds a context for the brand and encourages a link between the brand and the problem being solved for the user base.

Phase 4: Expanding the Audience

AI and ML, which are often overused buzzwords in the world of tech, can in fact be very useful for paid marketing. Multiple platforms like Facebook and Google use AI models to train data and increase the effectiveness of such campaigns.

Firstly, a proper event tracking system needs to be set up with these ad platforms, so that these systems get to know the response of traffic sent by these ad platforms.

Then, the learnings of these platforms can be used to expand the audience for the ad campaigns. Just create a lookalike/similar audience of the users who have completed the desired event of the funnel. An example of this can be a lookalike audience of Signup users.

Then the platform would be able to target the advertising campaigns to this relevant audience. Keep a close eye on the performance of these lookalike campaigns and optimize if the performance is not as desired. We can further optimize using other understanding about our ICP.

Intent data is also a good way to expand the audience. Intent data can be used to target in-market audiences (who are problem-aware, but not aware of the brand.)

This process needs to be a very iterative one. AI needs to be trained not just in the users to be targeted, but also the ones not to be targeted- and the more data that it is able to receive, the better. Hence, previous campaigns can be used to enhance the next one.

All activities also need to be very experimental in nature, to understand which approach works best. Testing out different messaging, forms of content, etc are all crucial so that we can narrow down on the best way to approach each audience segment that we are trying to reach.

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By following this basic outline, any B2B product company can approach their paid marketing in a very strategic manner. This is an ongoing process, and there are always ways to increase the numbers and attract the audience in a better way. The trick is to keep experimenting and exploring until you are able to hit the sweet spot.