B2B marketing has been suffering from a mixture of:
- traditional, expensive advertising methods
- confusion in digital solutions
- labor-intensive growth-hacking methods…
- and traditional channels with tracking difficulties.
No wonder B2B marketers face such challenges! And let’s face it: targeted businesspeople don’t have the time to peruse content. If not efficiently outlined, with sufficient technical insights, failure is almost certain. And by the way: you still need to provide an emotionally inspiring, nice experience. So yes, you do need high-quality content.
But quality outreach is also essential.
Many marketers right now are still relying on on traditional recipes that, don’t get us wrong, often still work, such as direct marketing or PR.
Even in the purely B2B digital side, it’s a confusing environment of solutions and techniques (perhaps adding to the allure of the good-old-fashioned).
First, the specialized B2B social platforms, that often act as walled gardens, offer quality, but very expensive CPMs. Growth marketing has also become increasingly essential far beyond its original start-up environment. But it does present data-management, compliance, and scaling challenges.
That’s where programmatic B2B comes in. It allows to address professionals in their preferred media environments, to benefit from the best deals and CPMs thanks to open bidding for the best publishers’ inventory. It also allows to diversify data sources and benefit from high-quality data pools with industrial categorization, outreach, affinity, seniority, and job position diversity. Programmatic B2B can even serve find contextual keyword targeting and and support search engine strategy optimization. Over the years, we’ve been working on fun, fantastic, and high performance campaigns in B2B programmatic.
What’s more, programmatic solutions can be combined with some of the other channels mentioned elsewhere in this article. For instance, by adding programmatic to LinkedIn or Xing, we can not only lower CPM’s and get better deals with better results, and more diversity in terms of data sourcing, but we can also efficiently combine these campaigns with CRM data, providing for better articulation with existing clients, and existing persona. And enhance targeting, not just in look-alike methods. This applies to any industry.
Professionals are (sometimes literally) in the field. They’re with clients, patients, staff, suppliers, partners, you name it. It’s important to reach out to them where they are, with quality interaction.
That’s also why having a non-dogmatic approach to B2B marketing, and remembering that B2B marketing is about people first and foremost is so important.
And if we had one last message, it is the following: B2B marketing is about people.
