B2B display advertising for lead generation?

I put a question mark in the title because there is a strong opinion that media advertising (and even more so in B2B) does not work for lead generation, but only to increase reputation, recognition and image. And it’s difficult to measure the effect based on leads (except for direct clicks on banners, of course, but such clicks are usually minuscule).

And it is true. But only partly. If we just take and launch a media project, and the main goal is to increase awareness, it will work, it will spin out and everything will be fine. Goals will be achieved, awareness will increase (possibly), and coverage metrics will show the fulfillment of KPIs.

This is scenario #1, not cool. Now let's talk about scenario No. 2, cool one:

How can it be

We create a media campaign as part of a marketing and/or communications strategy that outlines multiple options and communication/lead generation channels. In this case, it is important for us that the media works not only to increase recognition and reputation, but also to increase specific metrics that can be calculated and used in the leadgen.

We develop advertising creatives in such a way that our company (for example: “Stiralshchikoff”) is identified with the product that we sell (for example: “Laundry equipment”). An example of what a banner might look like:

What is important here is not the aesthetic part, but the conveyed meaning: “The company Stiralshchikoff engaged in sales laundry equipment“

We run such advertising in the required city/region. We customize audience targeting as needed (socio-demographic characteristics, interests, age, etc.). As a result, we get coverage, recognition, reputation and… Ta-daaam!

Super-logical and understandable metric: post-view increase in brand and vital queries.

Branded queries contain the company name + query (for example: “Stiralshchikoff Laundry” or “Stilalshchikoff Laundry Equipment”), and Vital queries contain only the company name (for example: “Stiralshchikoff” or “Stiralshchikoff LLC”).

We ask Yandex analysts (or wherever we launch media) to make a post-view report of the campaign. We get approximately the following values:

I made up the numbers as an example, these are not real values.

We are seeing an increase in search queries in this city. Cool? Cool! But competitors can get all the traffic… And it turns out that we helped competitors… Yes, if you just do media in isolation from the marketing or communication strategy. But we are smart and sexy, so we launched a media campaign as part of a big strategy and thought of everything!

We increased bids in advance for branded and vital queries (expecting their increase), did the necessary SEO optimization on the site (this is not so difficult for branded and vital queries), added the company name to the ad texts for A/B tests, landing pages for these requests were issued taking into account the brand and banners from the media (to make it easier for the user to compare the banner he saw earlier with the site he came to later).

And we collected the “hottest” and most loyal leads, increasing recognition and loyalty among them in advance.

In the example above, the difference in the values ​​“Before advertising – after” is not so large, which may not seem particularly effective. But in the example, the possible effect is only in one city, and we have a lot of regions! And the quality of such leads will be much higher, that is, the conversion into a deal. We get additional effect from a campaign that our competitors are not even designed for.

Conclusion

It turns out that if you use display advertising even in B2B as part of a clear marketing and/or communication strategy, you can not only increase awareness, but also influence the direct generation of leads, which will also be warmed up in advance.

If you don’t “play entrepreneurship”, but build a systematic project with ambitions, then you need to develop comprehensive marketing and/or communication strategies that will help you get a lot of advantages even in banal advertising activities.

PS This article is not an element of my communication strategy, so there will be no hidden offer here)))