B2B Buying Process–Where is it at today?

Wow, where do you start?  The world of digital marketing in the B2B world is constantly changing and evolving.  There is marketing automation to social media strategies to paid media strategies to content marketing.  But what is the best way to reach your prospects?  B2B prospects are getting more and more savy about how the look for solutions and/or services for their business.  They use a variety of digital means, peer to peer networks, reviews to do their research.  In fact, according to Forrester Research, they are 90% through with the buying process before they even talk to a sales person.  Not only that, but buying processes are longer, more than one person is involved in the process and marketers are missing the mark at filling the pipeline.

 The “new” World of Display Advertising

Ultimately, there are multiple goals that a digital marketer is attempting to accomplish.  From brand awareness to lead generation to lead nurturing, different strategies can be implemented to accomplish this different goals.

Well, welcome to the world of display advertising.  Previously, this only truly utilized by the “big” boys. That has changed.  Programmatic ad buying can work extremely well in the SMB world.  In fact, it can accomplish all of the goals stated previously.  Email, search and content marketing are important strategies and have their places.  But, they can have limitations.  Do you have email contact info?  Search and content marketing work if someone is “searching” for that type of info.  Out of 20 hours that someone spends on the internet per week, only 4% of that time is in search mode.  The rest is in consume mode.

With display advertising, you can use extremely effective targeting methods to reach your audience.  They may be in the problem unaware phase.  In this case, use creatives that inspire the switch to problem aware.  Other creatives can be used to reach those in the nurturing phase as well and the conversion phase.
So as I said earlier, display advertising can accomplish multiple goals for a marketing and ultimately their company.  In the next series of blog entries, I will break down the “sales funnel” and take a closer look at how to utilize display advertising more effectively, depending on where the customer might be in the buying process, aka sales funnel.

By the end of this series of blogs on display advertising, you are going to start to notice all those banner ads you may have missed before….see if you notice some pretty good targeting.

 

If want to learn more about display advertising in not only the B2B world, but also the B2C world, and how we are helping our clients, give me a call or shoot me a note

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