How Online Advertising Supports Every Stage of the Customer Journey

There is a common misconception that online ads are solely designed to drive direct sales. However, the reality is that numerous B2B marketing objectives can be supported by the strategic use of online advertising. Online advertising can be used to

• Inform customers about your products and services when they are at the very beginning of their customer journey, finding out what’s available and refining their requirements

• Persuade customers of the value and relevance of your offer by highlighting distinctive features that put you in their final selection or consideration set prior to purchase

• Remind customers about your offer through remarketing and retargeting. This can be used to keep your top-of-mind as customers finally lead up to making a purchase, or it can be used post-purchase to positively reinforce their decision and to avoid customers developing a sense of buyer’s remorse.

Of course your ultimate goal will be to grow your business and make sales. Growing your brand and reputation with different approaches to advertising will help in the long term.

A purely transactional, sales-driven approach in which you try to swoopnin at the end of the buyer journey will often mean you're arriving too late. It's certainly not suitable for complex advisory B2B professional services.

For the inform and persuade types of advertising it's often a better idea to promote marketing content such as articles, white papers, and 'how to' videos rather than directly advertising your services.

We understand that for a lot of marketing managers, online advertising may not be your area of specialisation. In many cases, you have a dedicated member of the team for ads or, most likely, outsource the work to an agency like 1872 Marketing.

However, lacking knowledge of the nuances of your advertising strategy can make it hard to effectively integrate it into your overall marketing strategy. So, this article aims to help you think more broadly about your strategic options in using online advertising as part of a campaign.

If you are looking for an in-depth guide to the importance of online advertising, we recommend checking out our Ultimate Guide to Online Advertising. In this post, we want to focus specifically on how online advertising can help you achieve different marketing objectives at different stages of the customer journey.

Why Are You Advertising Online?

Informative Advertising

The goal of informative ad campaigns is to build brand recognition. It is through brand, product, or service awareness that you can start to create trust and generate demand.

For sighted people, visual aesthetics play a huge role in attracting attention and creating a specific emotional effect. The careful use of visual elements (logos, colours, font, images) can help you drip feed your brand and its messaging into people’s consciousness.

You can use informative ads at the start of the customer journey to introduce people to the idea of your brand. In such ads, you showcase the qualities that make your brand desirable—that your company is reliable, innovative, secure, professional, or playful, for example.

Informative advertising can also be used to announce a new product or service to generate industry/consumer buzz. In addition to grabbing attention, they highlight product or service attributes and benefits to create consumer demand. For example, think how Apple can generate a veritable frenzy of buyer anticipation for their latest iPhone release.

Persuasive Advertising

As you might guess from the name, the goal of persuasive advertising is to get people to take action. You want to convince prospects of the superiority of your product/service and alter perceptions about your company. For instance, to buy into your brand, switch from a competitor, try a new product, or remain loyal.

Unlike informative ads which seek to grab attention at the start of the buyer’s journey, persuasive advertising generally targets people in the middle stage. Prospective buyers are comparing various options and need an extra nudge to give your brand a try. As such, persuasive ad content focuses on communicating the USP (unique selling proposition) for how your product/service can satisfy customer demand. The goal is to show you understand their needs and desires and how you can solve their problem.

Reminder Advertising

The purpose of a reminder advertising campaign is to keep your brand at the forefront of existing contacts’ minds.

At this point of the buyer’s journey, the person has (hopefully) subscribed to your emails, and follows you on social to get regular updates. They might have already made a purchase. As such, you want to take a more subtle advertising approach that doesn’t abuse this trust.

Reminder advertising works best when it is treated as an extension of good customer service.For instance, you can periodically target customers with ads for a related service they might find useful. Or use advertising to serve as a reminder when it comes time to reorder a product.

These days, online advertising platforms offer a variety of informative, persuasive and reminder campaign types. For example, Twitter Ads has campaigns optimised towards various objectives like ‘increasing reach’, ‘app installs’, ‘website traffic’, and ‘re-engagement’. As a marketing manager, it is worth exploring different ad platforms to see what options are available that support your specific objectives.

Advertising Elements for Reaching Your Objectives

We’ve previously discussed six key elements you need to build effective advertising campaigns, but we want to revisit two of the most critical ones: context and content.

Context

Context is where advertising sits in relation to the rest of your digital marketing strategy. It is made up of the platforms, supporting materials, timing, target audience, and other factors that keep your message aligned. Contextual factors can drastically alter how your post is understood by an individual viewer.

Before you start creating ads, you need to consider the who, what, where, when, why, and how of your campaign. For example, how does your ad relate to the customer’s experience when they land on your website, or the email marketing they receive.

When digital advertisers underestimate the importance of context, it can be a huge brand safety issue. Mis-contextualised ads campaigns can result in a temporary loss of brand trust, bad publicity, or escalate to a public backlash.

You must consider how your audience might experience your ad and the fact that said experience will be dynamic. For example, you can target a social media ad to appear before people who meet specific demographic and interest requirements. However, knowing who will see your ad does not determine how they will receive your message.

Context can also determine if your ad is seen at all. Neuroscience shows that the brain is amazing at filtering out non-relevant information.

Say, for example, you’re reading a blog about marketing automation and someone is running a display ad about lawnmowers. It is likely, you won’t even register its existence. The ad is not relevant to your needs at that moment, so your brain filters it out.

However, just as failing to account for context can trip you up, by paying attention, you can use it to your advantage.

First is making sure to aim your advertising in the right direction. Consider the characteristics that make up your audience. This might include factors such as their interests, political views, preferred social media platforms, ideologies, etc. Also, pay attention to generational differences (which can make or break your ad copy).

Next, think about where your ads will run. Don’t misuse programmatic buying to blindly purchase inventory across the open web—that is a sure path to awkward or irrelevant ad placement at best, damaging placement at worst. Instead, be strategic when purchasing inventory to ensure your ads are showing in places that fit with your brand image.

Also, keep in mind that different platforms have different audiences on them. Trying to use the same content and presentation across all of your platforms might not yield the best results.

Another important factor to consider is timing. By this, we don’t just mean the time of day, but what is happening in the broader world and the lives of your audience. Running a super happy, upbeat ad campaign during a crisis could appear heartless or tasteless. On the flip side, it might provide some much-needed levity that your audience will appreciate. The point is that you need to be aware of current events and how they can influence the reception of your ads.

Content

Advertising doesn’t operate in a void. It needs to be considered as part of your overall marketing strategy. As such, you need to think about how your ad creative blends with the rest of your content to create a seamless experience. You need a content infrastructure of landing pages, email workflows, downloadables, etc., that support your ad campaigns and help potential customers along the buyer’s journey.

You should also consider how you can use online advertising platforms to bolster your content marketing efforts. This is called content advertising, where you create content specifically to promote through paid distribution channels. For example, an ad that targets a key segment of leads of social media, offering a white paper that focuses specifically on a common problem they face (and that you can solve!).

A major advantage of this approach is that it doesn’t rely on search engine results pages or social media discoverability. Just use whichever channel best fits your audience and your marketing objectives. Content advertising also enables you to focus on specific industry topics that may be too niche to succeed organically—which can be an issue in B2B content marketing.

Technically content advertising is a form of outbound marketing. However, when executed well, it is virtually indistinguishable from inbound content marketing from the viewer’s perspective. If someone is considering downloading your white paper, they won’t care if they found it via organic search or an ad. It is the quality of the content that matters to them, not how they found it.

This touches on another issue, namely the need to make digital ad content more conversational.

In the name of efficiency, marketers keep using rudimentary, static ad formats because they’re easy to automate and work ‘well enough’. However, such ads merely broadcast a message without an opportunity for any real conversation.

This is a problem, as conversations are how we, as humans, engage with each other. A good conversation provides value, is interactive, and is respectful of the participants’ time and attention. They introduce new ideas, help us form opinions, and inspire action—exactly what advertisers are trying to achieve.

The advertising industry is increasingly realising the importance of conversation and is developing new ways to use ads as a communication tool. For instance, interactive display ads and landing pages that use automation, machine learning and natural language processing technology to create a seamless customer experience. Users can type or voice a question or request and the system responds via personalised images, text, cards, buttons, and videos.

This type of conversational advertising allows users to self-select how to engage and makes outbound marketing an engaging, highly relevant, and non-disruptive experience.

Measurement

Bear in mind, when direct sales are not the main objective of your ad campaign, you might not reap the benefits immediately. Similar to content marketing, it can take some time for the fruit of your labour to become evident.

Unfortunately, this can make it difficult to report on the success of a campaign when talking to the C-Suite. This is why it is important to understand the objective your advertising is aiming for, and how it fits with your other marketing strategies.

You will find that different objectives have different dimensions of success. By understanding these differences, you can track the correct metrics—sales conversions, views, impressions, click through rate—to uncover the true ROI of your ad campaigns.

We hope this article was helpful and would love to talk more with you about your specific advertising needs. From Google Ads to Instagram to Amazon, our expert marketing consultants know all the top ways to advertise for B2B. Reach out today and learn how we can help you create highly effective campaigns for search, remarketing, display, and social advertising.