Display for B2B

Introduction

By Hanne Tuomisto-Inch, Online Communications Diretor, Banner and Amy Kean, Senior Marketing and PR Manager, IAB

Common misconceptions about the role of online display advertising within the B2B space are often:

• B2B advertising should be serious.

• It should be straight to the point.

• B2B advertising should be dry, follow a set formula, and god forbid it embraces the same level of creativity as consumer facing campaigns.

There is no research available to suggest that we stop becoming ‘textbook’ consumers as soon as we walk through our office doors. Whilst sometimes the subject matter may not be quite as inspiring and entertaining as, say, the latest Hollywood Blockbuster or a Renault Meganne, we should still aim to engage our audiences. If we want to drive sales, at the same time why not give them something nice to look at, too?

Back in 2006, the IAB conducted some research amongst key B2B decision makers with regard to their online marketing activity and exposure, and we found that 83% of respondents had taken action as a result of seeing an advert on a B2B website. Encouraging news, since that’s where our audiences are likely to be, and they’re ready and waiting for you to provide them with a reason to click.

Online display advertising comes in many forms. In fact, the first ever banner was for a B2B advertiser, AT&T back in 1994. Over the years our beloved banner, the skyscraper and MPU have gone from strength-to-strength, and are no longer confined to the realms of ‘click here’ and ‘purchase now!’ Of course aside from the more ‘traditional’ display formats, there are other tools available such as sponsorships, tenancies and video, which will be discussed later on.

In B2B, whilst driving sales, registrations or collecting data is extremely important, so too is driving brand affinity and getting people to like your product or service. Online display advertising and creativity can do this. Look at the ads for Barclays below, aimed at small businesses, produced by digital agency Dare. No doubt a serious subject matter and a campaign with real targets (the challenge for Barclays was to generate 1,154 new leads per week) but the execution could rival any B2C creative out there today.

Dare developed two unique creative executions: one used 3-D modelling to depict business ideas hatching out of eggs and another showed jump leads giving a
business a kick-start. Both emphasised the role of a Barclays Local Business Manager in providing expert advice and promoted the Barclays start-up guide.

The use of rich media to inject emotion into this predominantly rational marketplace paid huge dividends. After ten weeks, the campaign was already beating targets, with acquisitions 30% above target and cost per lead 46% under target.

But how do you implement such a campaign yourself?

Objectives and Strategies

There are four key elements that need to be considered in order to create success in your online display campaigns:

• Targeting

• Ad format

• Creative

• Placement

The strategy requires the creative, media and strategy teams to work in tandem, starting from a definition of your target audience, their media consumption habits (both on and offline) and insights into their interests, and what they respond to through the use of case studies or previous research conducted on the B2B audience. Visit www.iabuk.net/casestudies for more information.

The online budget allocation should be based on the level of internet usage vs. other media, campaign objectives, cost of media, competitive landscape and total budget available. Often the above equation means that the budget is heavily in favour of online due to high usage of internet when researching B2B purchases, resultsdriven objectives, relatively low cost of media and limited budgets.

The creative, ad format and targeting are all interlinked; the creative strategy needs to be in line with the most effective ad format for the campaign objective. For example, large ad units taking advantage of rich media such as video are best for brand building while more textbased, lower cost ad units work well for response-driven campaigns.

This needs to be taken into consideration in the creative concepting stage. The placement where the ad eventually appears, follows once the creative and media (targeting and ad format) strategies are in place.

Figure 1: Online display advertising strategy elements

Getting Started

The formats in display advertising can be roughly broken down to standard and rich media units. Standard, on the page online display units are as follows:

• 468x60 banner (now being phased out in favour of the larger leaderboard)

• 728x90 leaderboard

• 120x600 / 160x600 skyscraper

• 200x200 / 250x250 square

• 300x250 / 336x280 mpu or rectangle

• 180x150, 125x125 button

• Half page units are becoming more common as well (300x600)

The above standard units are generally created in Flash, with a gif /jpeg back-up, however they can be turned into rich media units by making them interactive. For example, any of the units can stream video, expand when moused over, or have interactive elements or forms that can be filled in the unit itself. In addition to making the
standard units rich, there are additional over the page rich media units as follows:

• Expandable ad units (all standard ad units can be made expandable)

• Overlay / floating units

As a general rule online display advertising is bought on a CPM (cost per thousand) basis, although some publishers, ad and affiliate networks will also work on a CPC (cost per click) or CPA (cost per acquisition) basis. In the B2B environment, the CPA deals are most commonly based on lead delivery not sales, due to the longer sales cycle.

Let’s not forget that our business audiences are still people that appreciate good advertising, who want to be entertained and feel proud of the purchases they make. As such it is important to strive for quality – in terms of the idea at least, if not the actual creative – of B2C campaigns. In terms of your creative strategy, think about the message and how it can best be communicated to your target audience, and meeting your campaign objectives. Grab your audience’s attention, tap into their interests, and even tell a story, like the rich media campaign for Canon, below, created by digital agency GT.

It is also essential to decide upfront, exactly how you want to measure your campaign, what’s important to you and what response you want from your potential business customers, as this should also dictate the creative and production process.

There are numerous banks of exceptional online creativity available, to both provide inspiration and also insights into how your competitors may be using the medium. Try Creative Showcase, or Rich Media Roadshow to begin with. Other great industry tools are All Our Best Work, Creative Zone at Eyeblaster, Tangozebra and DoubleClick Gallery. Enjoy!

Delivery - Targeting, placement & ad serving

Online targeting and placement strategies are based on the target audience definition, their interests and behaviours. The targeting options offered by publishers for display advertising are as follows:

• Contextual

• Behavioural

• Demographic

• Geographic (IP/Location)

• Frequency capping

The most common targeting strategies are contextual and behavioural. Contextual online display inventory has become scarcer and its cost has increased, leading to behavioural options becoming more attractive. Behaviourally targeted inventory uses the ad networks such as Revenue Science or Tacoda to display ads to audiences that are heavy and/or recent viewers of relevant content, for example, people that have read technology content more than four times over the last 2 weeks. The use of demographic targeting is available on sites that require registration, and geographic targeting is usually important to exclude. For example for UK advertisers it is important to IP target to UK audiences only as English language websites often attract a significant proportion of their visitors from abroad. Frequency capping is a targeting technology that allows you to limit the maximum number of times a person is able to see your ad. For branding campaigns, a higher frequency of 6-8 is beneficial for better brand impact and brand recall, while response-driven campaigns may want to limit the frequency to 1-2 per user.

The online advertising placement decides which types of sites should be included in the campaign and where on the site and page the ad should be positioned. The homepage used to be a popular placement in the past, however nowadays users often go directly to the content / section they want to read via search engines, thus bypassing the homepage. The positioning on the page is important as well. In general, above the fold placements are preferred as users don’t have to scroll down to see your ad, therefore you won’t be wasting money on people that won’t even see it. However, navigational browsing means that the cheaper, bottom of the page placements might sometimes work better for response campaigns as once the person has read the article, they are more likely to respond to advertising than at the top of the page.

Ad serving is the means of delivering your ads to the desired target audience. Ads are served on sites based on the targeting chosen (site, section, ad unit, behavioural, demographic, IP and frequency). Ad serving enables you to track the number of times the ads have been seen and the relevant responses. Third party rich media ad servers also enable tracking of interaction rates on video / expandable / interactive units. Agencies will serve ads through third parties for all of their campaigns as a rule in order to have an independent bird’s eye view. This will allow them to report and optimise on the campaign for their clients. Ad servers also enable tracking on the landing page on a post click and post impression basis, thus enabling conversion and ROI tracking.

Measurements and Tracking

It is important to set the key performance indicators by which the campaign success will be measured. Campaign objectives determine the KPIs, and can be divided into branding and response metrics.

Response

• Response rate / Click-through-rate (CTR%): the campaign response rate can be measured using the click rate as a gauge and benchmarked by ad unit, industry and country according to the market averages from Doubleclick.

• Conversion rate (from click to conversion): conversion rate is often a more relevant metric as it relates to the campaign’s goal, whether it be a registration for an event, competition or whitepaper. Marketingsherpa is a good source to benchmark your campaign’s conversion rates to industry averages.

• Cost-effectiveness (CPC and CPA/CPL): you should set a target CPC or CPA/CPL based on business realities before campaign start. For demand generation campaigns, the maximum CPCs or CPAs that you should pay need to be calculated utilising your ROI targets, cost of goods sold, expected conversion rates and deal values.

Branding

• Lifts in brand awareness metrics: can be measured using the overall brand tracking studies, however in order to measure the impact of any specific campaign it is better to utilise research studies by companies like Dynamic Logic and Media Metrix. They allow advertisers to measure each media’s impact on campaign metrics, while benchmarking the results against the market average.

• Brand engagement: can be measured by tracking interaction rates, video play durations and number of visits to the landing page on a post click and post impression basis. Doubleclick and the 3rd party Rich Media servers such as Eyeblaster and Pointroll have benchmarks by ad unit, country and industry for the rich media interaction and response rates.

• Buzz measurement: Online reputation monitoring services such as Nielsen Buzzmetrics (and many complimentary ones on the internet) allow you to track the mentions of your brand in the blogosphere. You can chart the increase and direction (positive/negative) that your campaign has had on the blog opinion and level of discussion throughout the campaign.

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