If you’re a B2B marketer looking to improve your B2B ad performance there are 4 basic types of B2B ads that are must-haves in your arsenal.
While running an ad search via Moat will show you thousands of ad variations, at the end of the day all B2B ads can be categorized into these 4 basic ad categories. Here are B2B advertising examples you should definitely be running and the key reasons why:
Air Cover B2B ads
Sometimes referred to as brand awareness ads, these types of ads are really an introduction to your company. It has been shown that on average it takes 5 interactions with your brand to make get a B2B meeting.
Buyers have a tendency to buy brands that they have already seen. One B2B advertising strategy you can use to help speed up the process of getting buyers familiar with your brand is to run some basic B2B ads where the focus of the ad is your company name or product.
The goal of these ads is to set someone up to say, “Oh yeah, I’ve heard about you,” once your sales team reaches out to them.
You can see a great example of how Outreach used this B2B ad strategy to help their sales team fill their conference here.
Retargeting B2B ads
The most basic B2B ads that are recommended across all industries are retargeting ads. The retargeting ad works because like we mentioned above, on average it takes 5 interactions to get a sale.
There are a variety of retargeting ads that you can run so we’ve assembled 6 types of retargeting ad examples here.
The most important thing to keep in mind about retargeting ads is that they can get stale if they’re not refreshed frequently. The most common reason that people are “annoyed” by retargeting ads is simply because the marketer has set their frequency too high and doesn’t bother to update them with fresh ads.
If you run retargeting ads, and you definitely should, we recommend using a full-funnel approach so that your ads are helpful rather than just more noise on the internet.
Content-specific ads
Another basic component of a B2B advertising strategy that’s a must-have is a set of content ads. These ads link to a piece of content that’s relevant to your buyer and helpful to them. These are some of the most common B2B ad examples out there, but a lot of marketers still get a vital piece of these ads wrong: They don’t target them precisely.
The most important quality of a content ad is its relevance to the person you’re serving it to. While it might be intuitive to send lots of content to your buyer, sending an irrelevant piece of content can do more harm than good.
Imagine that the prospect clicks on your B2B ad and goes to a piece of content that’s completely irrelevant to them. Will they be more or less likely to click on your next ad?
Improving the precision of your ad targeting is an easy mistake to fix if you have the right intent data and cookie data in your system.
Testimonial & Proof Point ads
The last component of your B2B Account Based advertising strategy are testimonial and proof point ads. These ads usually feature a statistic or a quote from one of your customers. This type of B2B ad is best used once someone already knows about your company and product.
Once a prospect is actively looking for your product they usually want to know what kind of performance they can expect from it. If your ad platform of choice uses intent data, they can trigger your testimonial and proofpoint ads to run once someone shows a strong amount of intent.
Intent is usually demonstrated by the amount of engagement someone exhibits. We’ve written about the difference between IP-based vs Cookie-based ABM providers, but essentially if your platform of choice is cookie-based, they can track the engagement of a given prospect and serve the right ad to the right person at the right time.
Next Steps
If you’d like to go beyond these B2B ad basics, check out our recent report "What's Working in B2B Advertising" where experts in the industry sound off about how to effectively advertise in a competitive B2B marketing landscape. Click below to check it out.
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