Last blog, we talked about working to get your potential customers into the top of the funnel.  Once they are in, now is the time to move them to the middle of the funnel.  Remember, the power of the buyer has never been stronger.  They don’t want to talk to you until they are ready….so you have to work with them, and provide them with what they need during their research phase.

This is where display advertising helps in the middle of the funnel: educate, and influence them after they get exposed to your brand.  They still don’t want to talk to you.  Who wants to be influenced by a sales rep at this point??  They still have research to do!  Now is the time to get smart with your with demographic targeting in display, as well as, social advertising.  Target them so they engage with your brand and more importantly your content.

Targeting Tactics

1.  Business Demographic Targeting:  get your display ads in front of those specific people that make sense for your brand/product/service.  Determine the title, or seniority of those you want to influence. Don’t be afraid to look at those types of titles that might be an influencer of the decision making process. Most B2B buying decisions are made by more than 2 people. There are 3rd party suppliers of data out there that can tell you where they travel around the web.

2.  Utilize LinkedIn:  This should be an obvious one.  It is a business oriented platform.  Duh.  You can look at specific industries, title, job function, and even certain groups that they belong to.

3.  Facebook:  Yes, you may look at it as a place to post pictures of your family, but professional people spend a ton of time in Facebook.  They utilize a real time bidding system where marketers that know what they are doing can reach a very targeted audience.  And, even better, re-targeting strategies.

Middle of the Funnel Ad Metrics

1.  Number of new visitors:  From your baseline, measure the number of new visitors to your site based on a specific campaign.

2.  Cost per new visitor:  This one will help you understand what the cost is for acquiring a new prospect.  Although it may not seem right to consider a visitor to your website a prospect, but a certain % of those visitors are prospects.  Divide your total campaign cost by the number of new visitors gained by the ad campaign.

3.  Form submissions:  The middle of the funnel is where a big part of the education process happens for your prospects.  If you have quality content in the form of whitepapers, case studies, etc. that is downloadable, you can tie that back to a specific campaign.

4.  Increase in page view:  If your campaign is driving the potential customer to a particular page, measure the increase in the page view quantity against baseline.

5.  Overall leads:  This is the obvious big one.  Whatever campaign you run, tag those campaigns so you can measure the overall effectiveness.  This will tie in directly with the form submissions metric described above.

Use middle of the funnel display advertising to continue to move potential customers though the middle. Direct them to the right kind of content that educates them on how your product/service will “make their life better”.  You will gain a secondary bump in brand recognition, but it is really all about nurturing.

If you have any questions, or would like to learn how to use display advertising to your benefit, feel free to contact us at LTR Digital Group.

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