B2B Top 10 Digital Campaign Checklist

For many businesses, the sales cycle and customer journey can feel like a double-marathon. After all, you're not selling a six-pack of ice cold beer on a hot summer day. More likely, you need to educate the market, align your solutions to the client's needs and address real obstacles that can stall or kill a deal at any stage in the sales process. For this reason, it makes sense to leverage technology and do everything possible to streamline your account-based marketing process.

In our last post, we described the three building blocks for a B2B digital marketing campaign. This checklist will help you get organized and make sure you have the ingredients and recipe for a winning B2B digital marketing campaign.

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1. Secure a quality B2B data source. Don't pay for what you don't need, but be sure to validate the accuracy of the information. Some databases contain less than 50 percent verified contact emails, so you'll definitely want a guarantee on the delivery of those records.

2. Leverage search retargeting for intent. Many corporate sites have their own search engines for business buyers looking for specific solutions. Data like this can now be aggregated for search retargeting campaigns. Other intent data of web site activity is also available to further refine online targeting of in-market audiences in a non-PII way.

3. Consider account-based marketing (ABM). If you want to target specific companies, then make sure your ABM strategy is activated on multiple channels. Create a list of companies and URLs to be onboarded for your display campaigns and mirror that same list for LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and other social platforms. ABM may not be your best option though, especially where an industry has hundreds or thousands of small to mid-sized businesses.

4. Capture your remarketing audience. Make sure you have a privacy policy and banner notification in place for that. Your site traffic can be one of your greatest assets, especially if you apply #5.

5. Identify the companies that visit your site. Make sure you know and validate which companies are spending time on your site. This is an important part of measurement, especially when reports from email service providers do not always tell you that corporate spam filters are the reason for you high click-through rate.

6. Build your prospect database and update it frequently. Every company site visit, email open, opt-out, lead conversion and engagement counts when your buyer is responsible for a six-figure sale. Focus on quality over quantity, and don't allow bad data to survive -- eliminate it right away.

7. Optimize programmatic bids for quality and relevance. Most DSPs have made this easy, so take advantage of the opportunity to pay a premium for where you want to be. An ad impression served on Forbes to the Chief Marketing Officer for a major brand is worth far more than that same impression served to a guy like me.

8. Personalize your email and deliver value. This is where your prospect database comes in. Clean up those contact and company names, add functional terms and personalize your templates so they don't look like promotional emails. We send both types here for our clients, but the results are clear. Open rates are 2 - 3 times higher when the effort is made to personalize the outreach.

9. Leverage video for solution sales. Video is a great way to promote problems and identify prospects who may be in need of your company's solutions. Start video with rhetorical questions that uncover problems, but don't jump to solutions. The objective is for viewers to identify your brand with potential solutions, eager to learn more. Don't steal your sales executive's thunder.

10. Go outbound with mobile. Forget the call centers, pick up the smartphone and talk to your top prospects. Build relationships, be quick to listen, slow to speak and don't assume you have the right solution... uncover as many problems or concerns as you can, take notes and then allow some time to think through how you can best respond to help them.

Would you believe all of this can be done with a single test program? That's the winning combination of man plus machine. Whether you work with us or not, please consider speaking to a senior member of our team before you invest.

3 B2B Building Blocks for Getting Started

B2B digital advertising doesn't need to be complicated. The three common building blocks for any campaign are audience, content and delivery.

1. Audience: defining who you want to reach. Custom business-to-business marketing audiences are most effective, because you can leverage the contact information for prospect follow-up and email marketing. We always recommend building a prospect database for our clients to leverage as part of thier integrated sales and marketing strategy. Great things happen when sales leaders and marketing experts work together.

2. Content: defining what you want to say. Content for business use needs to be objective and informative, but to ignore the emotional aspects of creative can lead to low engagement rates. Exceptional B2B content addresses problems with solutions with creativity and clarity. Make every effort to focus on business needs or education, and avoid product and company promotions if your goal is to engage prospects.

3. Delivery: the most frequently asked questions our team receives are related to delivery. "What are your thoughts about paid media on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter? Should we be using LinkedIn for account-based marketing?" These are legitimate questions, but should never lead the conversation. Who you want to reach and what you need to say are more important than the delivery channels you decide to use. For this reason, Programmatic B2B deploys the same messaging to the equivalent audience across multiple channels during the first 30 days to determine where the best engagement and responses are coming from.

On our next blog post, we will break down these three categories further and introduce strategic and tactical options for getting the best results.

B2B Client is Helping Auction Houses Move Online

Programmatic B2B client Barnebys is bringing SaaS to the auction table. Founded in 2011 by Christopher Barnekow and Pontus Silfverstolpe, Barnebys is now the leading global search engine for art, design, antiques and collectibles. Barnebys lists over 3,000 auction houses and dealers worldwide and features approximately 90 million items on its site.

Nevertheless, it is not a happy time for offline auctions as social distancing, health and safety concerns have brought these events to a halt. Fortunately, Barnebys had already been working on a timely project to bring the power of auction houses online. Their SKELETON platform is now available and we are helping them get the word out. If you are an auctioneer or saleroom manager in need of some counsel or encouragement, then please watch the following video to see what this animated therapist has to say about a recipe for online success.