How to Use Account-Based Advertising to Attract the Best Accounts

Advertising is a great way to get started with account-based marketing because it’s a channel already familiar to most, if not all, enterprises. In fact, many businesses will already have a budget committed to programmatic advertising — and it’s easier to shift some of that spend to account-based advertising than having to find and justify new budgets.

In this article, I’ll explain why you should consider B2B advertising and introduce the various methods available to B2B marketers.

28 percent — Companies invest 28 percent of their account-based program budget on advertising. - 2019 Account Based Benchmark Study, TOPO

The purpose of advertising

Paul Fedwick summarizes the purpose of advertising in his excellent article “How Does Advertising Work?”

He notes there are two purposes of advertising: salesmanship (direct response) and subconscious associations (brand building).

With direct response, your goal is to drive immediate action from the recipient — whether that’s an e-commerce purchase, signing up for a free trial or downloading an eBook.

For brand building, there are many ways advertising helps, ranging from simply staying top of mind to building emotional preference, establishing social proof, or entertaining the audience.

Branding matters and emotions affect B2B decision-making, so using advertising to build positive emotional associations with your brand can have a tangible impact on your business. As Fedwick points out, advertising works by creating patterns of associations that have emotional force and, therefore, influence purchasing behavior, often unconsciously. This means that a large part of the impact is unconscious, making it harder to explain and measure how and why it works.

Many companies are used to measuring their marketing in terms of hard metrics like clicks and leads generated, but the goal of brand building is not direct response — and so it requires different metrics and a longer-term strategic view.

Advantages of advertising

There are many reasons why companies use account-based advertising as a core part of their strategy.

Easy

Getting started with account-based advertising doesn’t require building deep marketing and sales alignment or dramatically revamping metrics or lead-based processes. It’s a channel most businesses are familiar with and already engaged in.

Automated and always on

Unlike other tactics that require your team to do manual work each time, your ads can run 24x7 without manual intervention. And when executed correctly, many optimizations can also be automated.

Reaches people not in your database

If you want to send an email or direct mail package, you need to have the person’s contact information in your database. But account-based advertising lets you reach the people you don’t yet know. This can be especially useful in B2B since buying committees are large and you may not have everyone in your database.

Targets by funnel stage

You can build different campaigns for different stages of the buyer journey. For example:

• Accounts that have never engaged with you should get a broad awareness campaign, focusing on emotion.
• Accounts that have visited key product pages on your website should see more rational, informational content, like a detailed case study.
• Accounts that have open opportunities can receive broad targeting to validate the decision and build consensus across the buying team.

Advertising and the account experience

But wait. Don’t buyers hate ads? Isn’t interrupting someone while they just want to read an article or watch a video a terrible account experience?

Well, as it turns out, buyers don't hate ads — they hate bad ads. They hate ads that ruin their experience: pop-ups, auto-play videos, gaudy design, ads that interrupt the content they want to read.

Good ads don’t disrupt the experience. They don’t attempt to trick the buyer. They use quality creative that engages emotions.

Good ads are also well-targeted, so they’re relevant. Buyers appreciate ads that introduce them to new ideas and new products that can help them be more successful. With strong analytics and programmatic strategies (see below), marketers can create campaigns that deliver relevance and personalization at scale — and as we know, a more relevant experience is a good experience.

Digital account-based advertising tactics

B2B companies can use many kinds of advertising, each with its strengths and weaknesses.

Banner (display) ads

Virtues: The basic banner continues to dominate the advertising medium because it is the most available and easily scaled ad format on most websites.

Considerations: Banner ads are effective for calling attention to your brand, but if you need to relay a deeper message, there are probably more effective channels for that. Which leads us to video...

Native & video

Virtues: Native and video formats continue to gain popularity as web-based advertising options. It’s a compelling storytelling medium that allows brands to take buyers on an emotional journey.

Considerations: Video requires more customized real estate on websites, including a video player and, in the case of native, specific images and text placements. Also, inventory remains low and expensive compared to display ads.

Search (pay-per-click)

Virtues: Search advertising made Google the company it is today. It’s valuable because it’s inherently intent-driven: People only search for things they’re interested in. You can design a PPC strategy that fits your budget, goals, and competition — and measure the results easily.

Considerations: There’s no native concept of an account within Google search, so there’s no real way to advertise to an account through search (although you can use an orchestration platform to push contacts from your target accounts to Google to influence bidding strategy). Also, keep in mind that by the time buyers are conducting a search, they’re often well into their buying process. If you aim to reach buyers that are at the top of the funnel — before they even know to do a search — you’ll want to use other ad formats as well.

Social media

Virtues: Social media platforms let you target your advertising (sponsored posts) to specific individuals, companies, and personas (e.g., Custom Audiences on Facebook and Tailored Audiences on Twitter). LinkedIn goes even further, letting you target by company and professional demographics directly, which is why LinkedIn plays a role in so many account- based campaigns.

Social platforms enable super-targeted advertising opportunities — just make sure the creative you use is appropriate for the specific platform.

Considerations: You can’t use the same programmatic buying platforms (see below) that you’d use for display to bid into the “walled gardens” of the tech giants. Also, for B2B you need some way to identify the right employees at the accounts you want to target. That’s usually not so hard for LinkedIn since people use their work identities, though it can be very manual to keep lists updated (see Fuze case study). But with other platforms, you need some way to match the individuals you want to their social identities, such as LiveRamp’s social graph.

“You can take an email and cut and paste it into a Linkedin message, and the Linkedin message will outperform the email with 7x response. Even further, if you send the message by InMail, you’ll get a 33x increase in response.” — Master Tactics for Exponential Growth by InsideSales/Hubspot

Should B2B use Facebook?

Many B2B marketers question whether Facebook is effective for their audiences. To me, if your targets are on Facebook, it can be an effective channel. The key is to make the offers Facebooky — leading with content instead of brand promotion — so the experience isn’t jarring. This is a classic example of finding your audience where they are consuming content and availing of the hyper-targeting capabilities Facebook offers (as well as with other social platforms where users are logged in).

Programmatic advertising

Digital advertising can be bought and sold according to two models: traditional direct and programmatic.

Direct advertising: Humans negotiate the ad purchases directly with publishers (similar to how you sign a contract to sponsor a trade show). The publisher’s sales team works directly with advertisers and agencies to come to a purchase agreement, often with manual RFPs and insertion orders.

Programmatic advertising: Programmatic refers to any technology that automates digital media buying, replacing human negotiations with machine learning and AI to make the transaction much more efficient.

Programmatic is much more common. eMarketer reports that 86.3 percent of US digital display ad spend was executed programmatically in 2020.

RTB and DSP and DMP, oh my

Roughly 90 percent of programmatic uses a process known as Real-Time Bidding (RTB).

RTB uses real-time auctions to buy and sell ads in the time it takes to load a webpage. When a visitor hits a website, a request goes to an ad exchange with information about the specific page (e.g., content) and the visitor (e.g., cookies and IP address). That gets matched against the rules advertisers have shared about what kinds of impressions they want, and what price they’re willing to pay. A real-time auction takes place, and the winner gets to display their ad to that browser.

The ad exchange is the digital marketplace that connects advertisers and publishers. Advertisers and agencies use Demand-Side Platforms (DSPs) to let the exchange know what they want to bid on. Some common DSPs include Adobe, Criteo, Display & Video 360 (Google), MediaMath, The Trade Desk, and Xandr (AppNexus). The suppliers (publishers) use Supply-Side Platforms (SSPs) to offer their inventory across one or more ad exchanges.

Just in case that’s not enough acronyms for you, the DSPs connect to Data Management Platforms (DMPs), which provide the data used to fuel ad-buying decisions, including customer information, demographics, and cookie IDs or mobile identifiers. This allows advertisers to identify audience segments and target specific buyers and contexts in their campaigns.,

Targeting

There are several ways advertisers can target ads with programmatic advertising.

Contextual and Keyword Targeting

Uses the context of the website. For example, if you sell security software, you might target ads on websites about cybersecurity.

Location-Based Targeting

Uses the visitor’s location to target the ad. For example, if you’re a retailer in New York, you would only target people based in New York. Similarly, if you’re advertising internationally, you could target language-specific ads based on location.

Data / Audience Targeting

Uses information about the visitor (using cookies) to target the ad. For example, if you sell cars, you might target visitors who have shown signs of being a potential car purchaser (data that comes from the DMP). Or, as we’ll see, if you are practicing account-based advertising, you might bid on visitors who work at your target accounts.

Retargeting

Uses cookies to target visitors who have previously visited your website. This is a highly efficient way to re-engage people who already have some relationship with you.

Coming Up Next

In my next article, I’ll dive into how you can use programmatic advertising in ABM and explain why you need a B2B DSP.  I’ll also talk about practical considerations, like brand safety and other best practices.

Get your copy of my book, The Definitive Guide to Smarter GTM™ with Account Intelligence and ABM/ABX. You can download it here.