By Stacy Williams, CEO, Big Drum
{3:36 minutes to read} Successful B2B marketers are increasingly relying on content marketing to generate leads and pull prospects through the sales funnel. Reams of content are being generated, addressing potential customers’ pain points at different stages of their buy cycles. Fantastic!
But…how are marketers getting their content into the right hands at the right time? Sure, they post it on their website, their blog, their social media profiles. This is certainly a best practice to get the content in front of prospects who already know who they are and are actively visiting their online properties. This can be done on sites such as RangeMe, where marketers of businesses expose their brand to buyers and top retailers, and as suppliers make their products easy to be discovered.
Marketers can also email the content to their prospective customers. Again, this should be done, but email reaches a limited pool of people – those who already know about the company and have opted in to receive emails.
When a marketer has invested resources and time to create quality content, they generally want it to be consumed far and wide. Savvy marketers are increasingly turning to display advertising as a content distribution network.
There are a myriad of ways to target different groups of people through display advertising. Using the search engines’ display network, ads are placed on non-search engine sites. Specific sites can be chosen, or ads can be placed based on specific topics or interests.
Social media display advertising is also very effective. Whether on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or other social media, marketers can typically target their audience by demographics, “likes,” industries, titles, etc.
There are also business display networks, such as DemandBase and Bizo (recently purchased by LinkedIn), which will place display ads in front of people in specific industries, job functions or even selected companies.
Many display ads that someone sees while browsing the web jump right to the marriage proposal without first asking the viewer on a date. This may be appropriate for consumer-oriented ecommerce sites that are selling inexpensive items that may be impulse buys.
But for B2B buyers making considered purchases, it’s more effective to ask the prospect to take a mini-conversion step first. Advertise your content – content that positions you as an authority and a thought leader – rather than your product or service. This will help ensure that you’re in the prospect’s consideration set early.
Then, be even more clever. Cookie visitors that have consumed your “top of the funnel” content, and use retargeting to stay in front of them with yet more display ads. These ads should promote content designed to pull them deeper into your sales funnel, to encourage them to take the next step in engaging with you further.
So…stop promoting your content only to prospects that already know you, and cast a wider net by using display advertising to distribute your content to new and appropriate audiences.
Wendy Alpine
wendy@alpinepr.com
www.alpinepr.com
Phone: 404-641-6170
Fax: 404-806-5316