Whether or not you opt in for a B2B SaaS PPC agency to leverage web targeting for your B2B brand, it is important to do your research so as to understand exactly what it is and how to implement it within your strategy.
Those who have worked within the advertising industry for a while will understand the importance of buying/selling physical ad space for brands to showcase their products or services. But as the world becomes more and more digital-based, so do our marketing methods.
Advertising space is still an important aspect of marketing – however, we’re looking at online (programmatic) ad space for B2B brands to bid on and implement within their strategy.
Here’s everything you need to know.
Why Programmatic Targeting Works
Programmatic targeting isn’t just a temporary digital fad; there’s a reason why it’s taking the digital marketing world by storm.
The core reason is because it eliminates the need for face-to-face negotiations, thus saving time and resources. A few of the other benefits include:
- It provides data in real-time. You can monitor the performance of a campaign there and then (and any time you want) without needing to wait until the campaign has run its course before collating the data. This allows you to tweak and optimise your campaign while it’s live in order to elevate its success.
- Building a larger audience. This can be achieved by purchasing digital marketing space from reputable publishers on various networks.
- Pin-pointed targeting. You can be as specific as you need when targeting your audience, meaning a budget that is well-spent and that garners a sizable ROI.
Types of Programmatic Advertising
There are several different types of programmatic advertising (based on targeting), and it is important to be aware of which approach is best-suited for your campaign.
Contextual Targeting
This approach focuses on providing content-specific ads at users browsing a particular website in real-time. By harnessing this, the advertiser would need to bid for certain topics and keywords, which will then be used in ads that you will display on similar, industry-relevant sites to that of which the audience is browsing.
Behavioural Targeting
This approach focuses on what your audience members do while surfing the web. It does so via cookies, which track the audience’s interests via what sites they visit and how they engage them.
An example of a good usage for behavioural targeting would be for a retargeting campaign, as it hones in on the users who have recently visited or engaged with your website and have shown interest in a particular product or service.
Because of their prior interest, they make for a “hot” audience who are very likely to convert. As it focuses on buyers who are at a particular stage of their buying journey (AKA, near the end), this type of targeting is designed to speed up the journey.
Geographic Targeting
Any device that has access to the internet will display the user’s location by default (unless the user has disabled this from the device) whenever they are browsing websites, therefore, naturally this type of targeting is focused on location (this can be postal/zip code, city, state/county, etc.), and is particularly useful in letting advertisers know of a change in shopping habits (such as if the user opts to purchase something from a different store than usual), and allows you to target based on the nearest stores to their location.
Device Targeting
Because we live in a modern, tech-focused society, many consumers have more than one device in which they browse and purchase items from the web, which means it is important that your campaigns are compatible with multiple devices (and not just from desktops, for example).
In short, device targeting allows an advertiser to gain access to their target audience across a plethora of devices (desktop, smartphone, tablet/iPad, etc.).
Retargeting
Have you ever noticed sometimes when browsing the web that ads will pop up for various items you’d previously been searching for (such as a specific laptop, or a killer pair of Timberlands, etc)? This is retargeting marketing in all its glory.
How it works is cookies that have already fostered your data from your previous searches feed back to the advertiser, who then creates a campaign to remind you that their brand exists and you should definitely check them out again and purchase something.
More often than not, the user has purchased something before, and therefore, the advertiser knows they are likely to do so again if a line of trust has been established.
Conclusion
So there you have it. Programmatic targeting for B2B companies explained and simplified. The trick is to leverage the correct format for your campaign to really affirm your audience type in order to successfully target them via online ad space.
If you’d like to learn more about how we help B2B SaaS and Tech companies grow their MRR through online paid advertising, contact us online or send us an email today at info@getuplead.com to speak with someone on our team.
