The Complete Guide to Targeted B2B Advertising [Free Download]
Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from the eBook ‘The Complete Guide to Targeted B2B Advertising.’ You can download the full eBook at the bottom of this post.
Consider this typical scenario: Your team just returned from your biggest trade show of the year and met Mary, the CMO of a Fortune 500 healthcare company. Your solution is a perfect fit for Fortune 500 healthcare companies, and you sell directly to their marketing teams. What do you do with the information you’ve collected on Mary? If you’re like most marketers, you’ll add her contact information to an email drip campaign, and pass it over to sales where they’ll bombard her with phone calls and their own emails.
The first problem with this approach is that neither of these tactics are on Mary’s terms. She’s not waiting around at her desk for your phone calls and emails. She’s busy at work, and equally busy at home – doing things on her own terms. When she has downtime, she’s spending it checking the news on CNN.com, catching up on her Facebook feed, and maybe even browsing to TMZ to get the latest celebrity gossip
The second problem is that we’re only thinking of Mary as the CMO of the Fortune 500 healthcare company. In reality, there are 8 to 10 other decision makers typically part of a B2B software purchase. They could be Mary’s direct reports, Mary’s boss, Mary’s internal customers, and even folks from other departments like legal, or IT. Focusing just on Mary reduces our chances of winning a deal, or even getting something off of the ground, by 10x!
Imagine if you could engage Mary on her own terms – the websites she’s already visiting to do her job, or catch up on her social life. On the platforms and channels she’s already using, and with a message that’s contextually appropriate to her current understanding of your solution. And what if we could start to engage the other 8 to 10 decision makers at Mary’s company who influence her buying decisions?
That is the vision being made possible with today’s targeted advertising technology.
The B2B marketing playbook has changed. But what are the new rules? Engagio and Marketo founder Jon Miller explains here.