5 steps to sharpen your media planning for B2B Lead Generation

At B2Bento we generally don’t talk much about paid media. It may well be the time for us to pay more attention to it now. Paid digital advertisements are now cheaper, better and way more effective than they have ever been. They have better analytics and targeting mechanisms making it essential for us B2B marketers to look at our digital media planning from a different perspective.

Leveraging the targeting mechanisms we can be more effective in reaching our consumers and generating more digital leads and conversions. To help you formulate your digital media strategy we’ve come up with some key points for you to keep in mind before you dive in to improve your lead generation effectiveness.

1. Select media channels by focusing on Persona, not your gut feel.

We often fall into the trap of thinking that our consumers are exactly like us. We feel that they browse and surf the websites we do and more often than not will end up selecting media channels on that basis.

We should be looking at our target personas and conducting focus groups or surveys to identify where our consumers actually spend all their time and take more informed decisions.

2. Focus on value to your prospect

The basic premise for all lead generation activities through paid digital media is to entice your target persona to click on the advertisement link. This leads them to your landing page where you offer them an item of value in exchange for them parting with either their personal or business information.

The item can be in the form of an incentive, lucky draw or as most often seen in B2B – a piece of content. The content typically can be an ROI calculator, a whitepaper or infographic. The main focus is that the content needs to be useful to your consumer. This is definitely not the time to offer up a sales pitch or brochure with your latest product/service offerings.

3. Establish KPI and set up analytics

It is essential to clearly identify your goals, establish KPI and set-up analytics before you embark on your digital campaign. When setting your goals be sure to think about your primary, secondary and tertiary objectives. For example is lead quality the only goal or does quantity also matter?

Another area to put some thought into is the attribution models you plan to use. Target prospects may arrive at your site from multiple different sources and even a single prospect may reach your site through different channels at different times. This gives rise to the first-click attribution, last-click attribution, or weighted average debate. There is no one size fits all in this and it varies depending on your industry, what you are trying to sell, and your prospect. It will probably take a few tries and some tweaking before you find the model that works best for your projects.

4. Map the performance end to end

Mapping the performance of your digital campaign from end-to-end is crucial to getting a complete picture of how your campaign has done. You need to judge media performance, traffic generated, number of conversions and subscriptions from a particular source, and lead quality. End-to-end mapping is not technically difficult but the timeline of an average B2B lead-to-sale conversion is long. The top of funnel conversion and point the actual sale goes through is typically several months apart.

Assessing the media source from the perspective of lead quality is not easy and definitely one approach which will need the campaign to run its course to be accurate. Starting the process now means you can see the result in your normal sales cycle. Another way to assess the lead quality is to match the conversions you are getting against your expectation of type of organization or persona you identified as the ones you want in your lead funnel.

To re-iterate the basic assessment of performance should be the traffic the media source is sending. The secondary consideration should be the number of conversions you are generating. The last consideration would be the lead quality at point of sale or matched against your target persona.

5. Optimise and align

The most important aspect of any media strategy needs to be its agility. It is not possible to have a long-term media plan in terms of which generic media sources to use. There are multiple options including but not limited to Google Display Network, Yahoo and other specific publishers. Your media plan needs to be tailored to your industry and geographical location as the efficacy of different media sources varies greatly across these platforms. An example of this would be LinkedIn direct ads. They work great in places like Australia and India but have a poor performance in Singapore.

You need to constantly monitor the analytics and keeping your KPIs in mind optimize and re-align your media sources accordingly. Each media has a particular behavioral model which will affect you different based on your industry, country and even region.

Read more: Lead generation and lead nurturing campaign services provided by GetIT Comms