Focusing on advertising in media throughout my career has allowed me to work with many brands in both B2C and B2B sectors and understand similarities and differences between them.
TV advertising is considered a mass media channel that brands can use to reach out to a wide range of people. I think, in the digital paid media world, our dominant media channels i.e. paid search and paid social, are also considered mass media channels with a key difference being that their audience targeting allows for a more precise outreach compared to TV advertising.
Given the role of paid media in this context, if you have a service or product that is tailored to the specific needs of consumers, using paid search and paid social plays significantly in your favour helping to generate results from your advertising. This is perhaps less the case when it comes to B2B sector, where their target group is smaller and is restricted to the business environment.
Brands that operate in both B2C and B2B sectors usually invest in paid media to support both parts of their business. However, given the nature of B2B, paid media channels are not the sole method of generating sales for B2B. As a result, sometimes we’ve seen less investment in paid media for the B2B side compared to the B2C side.
There is a lesson here for those brands that only operate in B2B – that digital paid media advertising is still a valuable way to connect to their prospects and to protect their market share or even to create a market share. B2B brands need to ensure that the goals and expectations set for the paid channels are clear to the business and that they have also reflected on the way their online shop/website is designed, which is where the paid media traffic is sent to.
In this way we, paid media marketers, can measure the impact of advertising through analytics tracking on the website. It also helps the prospects to have a clear understanding of what is being offered by your brand as they read through your website’s content and, more importantly, what they are required to do on your website to inquire about your service and product. This is where we capture them as new leads.