When it comes to digital advertising, conversions are really what it’s all about. They’re so valuable, they can literally make or break a campaign, or even a business. The actions taken by potential customers when they interact with your ad—such as clicking on a text ad or viewing a video ad—can lead to additional actions that are important to your business, like filling out a form, calling you or even making a purchase.
Which Platform Should I Use?
Before we dive into best practices for increasing conversion rates, it’s worth understanding different advertising channels and how your goals, your audience, and your budget impact your options.
While a comprehensive review of ad channels is beyond the scope of this article, at the very least B2B businesses will want to advertise with Google Ads and the Google Display Network. This option provides the most bang for your buck as you get placements in all of Google’s owned and partner sites. You’ll also want to consider advertising on social media platforms—LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and others—especially the networks your audience frequents.
5 Best Practices to Increase Ad Campaign Conversions
- Be Specific About What Product or Service You’re Selling
It’s important to identify precisely the products or services you’re advertising. Let’s say you provide cloud database management services. While that might seem specific enough to a layperson, the use cases of these services are vastly different for customers in different vertical industries.
To use an oversimplified example, hospitals likely want to manage electronic patient records and appointment schedules. Restaurants, on the other hand, would want to track inventory and supplier contact details. If you create a general ad campaign for your main product, you won’t appeal very much to either group. For the hospitals, you might want to highlight the ease of organizing terabytes of information. For the restaurants, you could highlight the accessibility of your platform and services from any mobile device—therefore covering multiple branches.
It’s worth noting there’s nothing wrong with a generalized ad campaign, provided you understand it’s to generate brand awareness as opposed to converting customers. You might sell to a few outliers with a non-specific campaign, but don’t expect the numbers to be significant. To make a sale to convert, you have to spark interest in the specific group of people you’re selling to.
- Be Specific About Who You’re Selling To
Identifying your target audience will inform how you create your material. It will affect the language you use, the tone you adopt, the imagery you use, and ultimately the medium of delivery. When we talk about specifics, we’re talking about demographics, firmographics, technographics, and even characteristics.
For example, when selling to a younger audience, you’re likely to take a different approach than selling to an older crowd. A younger audience might prefer hip buzzwords, a more casual tone, bright and flashy imagery, all delivered in a snazzy infographic or even a video. An older crowd might prefer you put your benefits up front, adopt a more professional tone, have simpler imagery, all packaged in fully fleshed-out copy. The differentiation is key if you want your ad material to stand out to your intended audience.
The differentiation matters. Realistically, you might differentiate along blurred lines—for instance, talking to a sales director as opposed to the VP for a company—but there still are differences worth catering to. A sales director might need more product information so they can send your product or service up for approval while a VP might want to know more about the affordability of your product and any pricing options available. When you speak a person’s language with your advertising and marketing campaigns, they’re more likely to listen.
- Always A/B Test
One of the many advantages of digital advertising is your ability to test different ad configurations at the same time. A/B testing can be performed on everything from ad copy, imagery, and even the targeted audience. You can publish different versions of your ad to different slices of your total audience. You can gauge the results based on parameters you set—like site visits or conversions—and then send the better-performing ad to the rest of the leads in your database.
With A/B testing, you can maximize your ad spend on whichever version works best. You can test as many variations as you want along as many parameters as you deem valuable. The best part is you can analyze what made one version outperform another and re-apply the formula to other ads, then test again. This lets you fine-tune your messaging to be as near-perfect as possible.
- Develop a Landing Page
These days, on average, a person is exposed to roughly 6,000 to 10,000 ads per day across multiple media. The net result of this onslaught of advertising is we’ve conditioned ourselves to ignore everything that doesn’t immediately command our attention. That’s why it’s so important to ensure your ads are catchy, relevant, and interesting enough to pique the curiosity of your audience.
That’s all well and good, but how are you supposed to then detail the benefits they can enjoy? That’s where a landing page comes in. These are webpages associated but not accessible from your company website. Your potential customers can only get to them when they click your ad. The landing page is where you can go into more detail, adding more copy or even an infographic or video. At the end of this landing page, you should include a call-to-action (CTA). CTAs can be anything from a link to a phone number and can be used for everything from setting up an appointment with your sales teams, to registering for a webinar, or even to purchasing a product outright.
The advantage of a landing page is it takes the burden of providing that level of detail on the ad itself, while providing you with space to talk up your products and services. Ideally, your landing page will have a form to capture basic contact information of your potential buyers so you can continue to nurture them along their buyer journey. One of the best things about landing pages is that, just like with ads, you can A/B test them to find the variation that converts the most visitors.
- Offer Free Stuff—or a Great Deal
One the quickest ways to grab someone’s attention is by giving away free stuff. For B2C businesses, this often is some small item like a water bottle or other tchotchke given away with every purchase, or discounted “buy one, get one” deals. B2B businesses must be more creative. Common “freebies” and deals for B2B include free consultations that analyze pain points of a business, free trial periods of certain products and services, or limited-time discounts on long-term subscriptions or bulk purchases.
Which one you choose ultimately boils down to what you can offer and what you can afford to offer. Just know that you can benefit greatly from increased interest, an improved brand image, and broader appeal when you have some kind of offer. As for placement, you can tease an offer as part of your advertising and then expand on what exactly your potential customers can expect on the landing page.
Apply these five best practices to your next digital advertising campaign and you’ll see an increase in conversions in no time. Additionally, consider bolstering your ad campaigns with DemandScience’s PureABM service. We bring together outbound lead generation with high-volume, highly targeted advertising. This optimizes your ad spending by focusing on those more interested to purchase your products and services.
PureABM Helps You Target Your Ideal Audience
Allow us to strategically determine the best spaces to seed your advertising to ensure maximum buyer engagement. We do this by analyzing key datapoints about your target audience that include behavior across multiple platforms and channels. With PureABM, we make sure you target your ideal audience as well as look-alikes contacts to bolster your reach. Talk to us today about what you want to achieve. We can help you reach it.
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