Paid media presents one of the most effective avenues for promoting your business, reaching new audiences, and generating leads. According to Worldlead, the average paid search campaign, for example, brings a 200% ROI. But high returns aren’t automatic, and getting the most out of your ad spend can be a challenge given the sheer number of channels, platforms, and tools available today.
To make the most of paid media marketing, your business needs an integrated strategy that unifies your message across multiple channels. You also need to efficiently deploy your marketing budget to lead your target audience from awareness to action. In this guide, we will provide you with tips and best practices to devise that strategy and maximise your B2B paid media ROI in the process.
Are you getting the most out of your paid media investment?
In large part, companies who struggle with paid media marketing do so because of a lack of intentionality, a fragmented approach, and/or an over-reliance on outside expertise.
A common mistake made by paid media advertisers is an over-emphasis on quantity over quality. Marketers spend their advertising budget on attracting untargetted traffic to generic content—thinking that any visitor is a good visitor. This results in high bounce rates, low returns, and rooms full of frustrated executives who want to understand why so much of the company’s marketing spend has been wasted on clicks that don't convert.
To achieve success in paid media, B2B marketers especially need to focus on the prospect—who they are, which problems they’re trying to solve, and what their hopes are for the future. This user-centric approach enables advertisers to tailor ads that hit their target precisely where they are in the sales funnel and provide valuable answers to the questions they’re already asking.
For example, ads that target specific needs (“how to eliminate spam calls on our office phone system”) will attract higher propensity customers than more generic copy (“take a look at our VoIP products”). When these targeted ads link to specialised content rather than a generic landing page, they engage motivated prospects and move them closer to conversion.
Paid media fails to deliver optimal results when it’s carried out in isolation. Every aspect of a company’s marketing machine—from paid ads to email marketing to social media engagement to print advertising—ought to be working together to communicate one unified message adapted to fit a diversity of contexts and applications (see above on targeting/tailoring high-value content).
As your marketing operates across multiple channels, it’s important to observe each one’s unique character. LinkedIn is great for paid media B2B lead generation. But, if your goal is to enhance your visual branding, then Instagram would be a better choice.
To succeed in paid media marketing, companies must coordinate efforts across channels so that marketers can communicate one unified message in diverse ways that fit well in the chosen channel, hit the right people with the right advertising, and move targets on toward conversion.
When companies bring in external partners to manage their paid media, they benefit from the agency’s expertise, but the campaign itself suffers from a lack of insider understanding. Agencies operate best as partners who help companies understand their own goals and target audience. They then work with them to develop and execute campaigns that align with the company’s needs.
With our own clients, PwC recognizes that our primary role is not to do all a company’s paid media work for it. Rather, we help clients harness technology and internal human expertise to drive overall marketing impact. Our unique methodology brings together the fragmented business, customer experience and technology viewpoints that exist within a company to help it increase revenue, reduce costs, and win customers who then become strong advocates.
Seven questions: A framework for integrated campaign management
When companies align and integrate, they put themselves in a position to hit their target with high-value content that will boost conversion rates and maximise returns. The integrated campaign approach that PwC Switzerland uses with its clients is designed to facilitate this kind of aligned, integrated, and targeted paid media advertising across multiple marketing channels.
The heart of our approach focuses on seven golden questions. As we challenge clients to ask and answer these questions, we glean the precious information we need to tailor a paid media campaign that makes the most of its budget resources and opportunity for marketing impact.
Here are those seven questions in simplified form:
- What are our goals?
- Where are our clients/customers (online)?
- What do they think of us today, and what should they think of us tomorrow?
- How do we differentiate ourselves from competitors?
- What compelling stories do we bring to the market?
- Which of those stories are suited for which channels?
- What does the organisational set-up look like?
You need to know these four paid media trends
Paid media for B2B is constantly evolving. To help you stay ahead and make the most of your marketing budget, here are four trends in paid media advertising that you need to know about:
- Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
As the name ABM is a strategy that focuses on specific accounts within a market. This approach allows the B2B marketer to choose their highest value targets and personalise an ad experience that speaks directly to them. ABM streamlines the marketing and sales process and significantly boosts conversion—especially when integrated across display, social, and search advertising. - Profiling for personalisation
When it comes to optimising paid media ROI, personalisation is key. To help build rich buyer personae, marketers are now turning to Customer Data Platforms (CDP) for comprehensive information on customers. A good CDP will analyse the mass of available data, connect the dots, and provide a 360-degree profile that can be used to perfectly target paid media campaigns. - Artificial intelligence and machine learning
AI is everywhere—including paid media. Marketers are leveraging machine learning to analyse large amounts of data, identify patterns, and make predictions automatically and in real-time. For example, Google Ads now uses AI to optimise CPC bidding so that marketers can stop guessing and start making the most of their budgets. AI also enhances personalisation, provides insight on the effectiveness of ads, and improves advertising performance across the board. - Increasing investments in social and search advertising
According to Gartner, marketers allocated more of their 2022 budget to social and search marketing than anything else. Consumer goods and retail brands are especially reaping the rewards of campaigns that target customers based on previous search and purchase activity. This method is allowing brands to scale up their engagement, but it requires nuance and patience to track the data and learn which channels are best suited to their products and message.
Conclusion
For B2B, paid media ads are an excellent way to reach new audiences and grow your business. If you’re going to succeed with paid media, however, you can’t just “set it and forget it.” Success follows intention, and a high ROI in this space requires careful targeting, thoughtful integration, and the wisdom to bring in outside help without eclipsing inside knowledge.
Four quick tips to dial in your paid media strategy
- Investigate your target persona:
Map your customer’s journey and envision who they are, where they are, and what they’re looking for when they first see your ad. Develop a buyer persona and tailor your ads to reach that person with the right message at the right time.
- Identify data-driven campaign goals:
Don’t set a vague goal (“get more customers”). Instead, look at metrics like web traffic, new leads, bounce rates, conversion rates, etc. and set goals that are focused specifically on improving those metrics.
- Integrate with other marketing channels:
Amplify your paid advertising with social campaigns that increase awareness. Nurture paid leads with email and content marketing. Allocate your budget across these multiple channels so that your paid media is adequately supported.
- Implement tracking/monitoring:
You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Analyse data regularly and holistically across multiple channels. Watch your key metrics. Implement A/B testing to see what works and what doesn’t. Iterate, adjust, and optimise.
How PwC helps clients optimise paid media
Marketers (and the executives they report to) are looking for increased transparency and insight into where their advertising spendings are going and what effect (if any) they’re having. At PwC, our robust media intelligence services provide the clarity they need to act fast and maximise their investment. Our integrated approach looks holistically at every channel, analysing budget allocation and performance to deliver actionable insights at the business unit, campaign, and creative levels. By combining our in-house expertise with performance data, we provide insight that helps companies make the right decisions to maximise their paid media ROI.
Would you like to discuss your paid media strategy in more detail?
One of our experts would be happy to provide a free session to help you optimise one or more of your B2B’s paid media campaigns.
For more information on our services, please visit our Marketing Consulting website.
https://pages.pwc.ch/core-contact-page?form_id=7014L000000DZ5LQAW&embed=true&lang=en
Contact us
