Programmatic Opens the Door to Paid Media for B2B Marketers

This post is part of a series dedicated to exploring how B2B marketers can use programmatic technology to effectively reach their target buyer personas, and move them down the path to purchase. Click on the “B2B Series” tag below this blog post to see all other posts in the series.

B2B marketers are, out of necessity, ROI-driven; every success must be proven and tied back to revenue generation. As a result, B2B marketers are, by and large, creatures of habit – they rely on tried-and-true B2B marketing assets like email, events, and content marketing. And what do these media channels have in common? They are all predominantly earned or owned. B2B marketers have been generating leads with white papers and nurturing them with webinars since the day the PDF was invented. They are masters of direct mail and email samurais.

Programmatic advertising represents a world-changing opportunity for B2B marketers. Most B2B marketers traditionally might not have considered online advertising for a single reason: The perception that their desired audiences are too niche to be reached effectively via programmatic means. This type of thinking is flawed.

The fact is, because of the tremendous number of available impressions in programmatic today, the opportunity exists now to target niche audiences at scale. Additionally, the fact that more first-party data is now addressable across those impressions means that B2B marketers can effectively reach key decision makers at relevant points in their lengthy customer journey. eMarketer reports that first-party data “was the easiest to justify using, drove the highest increase in customer value, and [had] the highest campaign lift” amongst the marketers they surveyed; through the activation of first-party data, B2B marketers are able to target prospects or customers and reach them with content that can nudge them further along the path to purchase.

Programmatic is also both dynamic and accountable. Campaigns that aren’t delivering the desired results can be optimized and adjusted in real-time, without wasting budget. Ad creative can dynamically personalized to the viewer and their current stage in the buying process. Campaign performance can be measured on, and optimized against real user action like registrations and content downloads, as opposed to “awareness” level branding metrics such as CPMs and impressions.

By virtue of its scale, targeting and accountability, programmatic offers a fantastic compliment to the owned and earned channels previously favored by B2B marketers. Marketers publishing a white paper on innovations in payroll technology can extend their reach beyond their house list, beyond their LinkedIn blog and deep into the world of HR professionals and accounting departments. Prospects who watched archived webinars or engaged with other owned content can be reached with ads that invite them to download the new publication. A message offering the free download can be surfaced to leads met at the most recent trade show.

It’s a whole new world for B2B marketers and one worth testing. There’s an entire universe of prospects out there who don’t read the trades you think they read, who aren’t on your email list and who don’t even know how to find your blog. Programmatic offers B2B marketers the opportunity to find these prospects and engage them, and the ROI to prove it. Why not dip in a toe and see what the wide world of paid media has to offer?