B2B brands face unique obstacles— particularly hurdling the lead generation challenge. Building brand awareness is an effective way to bolster your lead-generation efforts. However, with limited time and resources, marketers need a sleek and cost-effective strategy to conduct a brand awareness campaign and bring in the qualified leads they need to optimize their outreach.
Despite common misconceptions surrounding programmatic advertising, it actually has a huge amount of untapped potential in building brand awareness and influencing B2B buying decisions. Programmatic advertising can be targeted to bring in a steady stream of viable prospects for a business’ outreach efforts. Furthermore, the insights you gain from your programmatic efforts can ultimately teach you more about who your ideal customers are— not just as business leaders, but as human beings.
The Benefit of Brand Awareness
With limited time and often limited budgets, it’s no surprise that many B2B marketers are laser-focused on lead generation. However, the benefits of brand building can often go overlooked in the scramble for more sales. Particularly in the B2B space, research is everything— and sales cycles are notoriously long. Ensuring that you are running an active brand campaign is an easy way to keep your solution top-of-mind for prospects throughout their research phase.
Branding is vital— but B2B marketers can exert an abundance of caution in choosing where to safely promote themselves. Media-allow lists are safe, but they will ultimately limit your prospects and the reach of your brand awareness. Your brand could easily miss out on valuable opportunities from websites that have not been assessed and verified by a single solution. Because of programmatic advertising’s increased ability to target the right consumers, it is able to mitigate concerns about advertising in a safe environment.
Programmatic advertising can be a game-changer for your business when correctly quantified. Some of the misconceptions surrounding programmatic advertising come from those who are primarily using the channel to measure conversions. However, programmatic also has the opportunity to shine as a tool for brand awareness and brand-building efforts.
For B2B brands looking to start using programmatic, a brand awareness campaign is the perfect entry point. Much of the programmatic advertising ecosystem is autonomous, once you have provided your chosen media-buying software and precisely defined your target audience. For busy marketers, programmatic can serve as a valuable tool to ensure that you are consistently getting your business’ name in front of your ideal consumers in a cost-efficient way.
The Play for Programmatic
Programmatic advertising is an efficient way to fill the top of the funnel with new prospects for a B2B business. Qualified leads are required in order for account-based marketing (ABM) and intender tactics to work efficiently. Rather than wasting ad spend and time trying to find the right prospects, audience targeting and programmatic media buying empower marketers to easily find and reach the right targets.
There are also a number of targeting tactics to further refine your audience. Job title targeting is a promising tactic being utilized by B2B marketers. With these capabilities, marketers can serve relevant ads to prospects based on their professional profiles. You can also condense unique employee titles into normalized sub-categories, making it easier than ever to find and reach out to the most qualified prospects at specific organizations.
However, professional profiles aren’t everything — and marketers need to also consider their prospects as people, rather than just names on a list. Consider what streaming service they turn to at the end of a long day, or where they spend the most time each week. Then, tactics such as targeted CTV advertising to reach decision-makers outside of the office, and geofencing locations for prospective businesses can continue to ensure that your brand stays top-of-mind for prospects, wherever they are.
Sharpening your targeting abilities naturally leads to better connections and higher-quality leads. Moreover, with programmatic advertising as part of your branding strategy, you can ensure to have a steady stream of qualified leads for your ongoing outreach.
Programmatic Efforts Amplify Ideal Prospects
Using programmatic advertising in your B2B branding campaign is a great way to support and enhance your lead generation efforts. By running an effective campaign across the proper audiences, you can boost conversions by keeping B2B prospects aware of your brand during lengthy sales cycles. With programmatic at the helm of your marketing efforts, B2B marketers can then hone in on these ideal prospects by considering their behaviors as people and adjusting their marketing strategy to reach them, wherever they are. By beginning with a programmatic branding campaign B2B markers can gain an ongoing advantage in their outreach efforts.
About the Author: Michael Skaldony, GM of Consumer Services, Semcasting
Michael Skladony serves as the general manager of the consumer services team at Semcasting. He oversees all travel, entertainment, tourism, higher education and nonprofit clients. Michael’s team of audience developers, account managers and campaign managers work with clients hand in hand to develop audience solutions and winning digital campaign strategies. Michael started his career with Semcasting in 2012, straight out of college and right into a role as Semcasting’s first digital account executive.
