B2B marketers have long had a love-hate relationship with digital advertising. Online ads obviously can be effective for growing brand awareness, driving qualified website traffic, and increasing sales.

Yet conventional advertising tactics often leave reputable B2B marketers filled with doubt. Professional services firms naturally want to address potential customers in as personalised manner as possible, and advertising sometimes feels that it can lack this nuance even if the advertising messages themselves are relevant.

Instead of broadcasting interruptive, repetitive advertising, what would happen if you designed an advertising strategy that enhanced your customer journey? Instead of being a potential nuisance, your ads could help to create a next-level customer experience for your audience.

You will get better results by targeting ads based on customer journey stage. Target customer-context driven ad campaigns using data about which prospects are using your site, viewing your content, reading your marketing emails and interacting with your social accounts. Your communications won’t just be about relevant content, they will deliver relevant content in the right customer context.

That is the premise behind journey-based advertising (JBA).

What Is Journey-based Advertising?

You can divide the B2B buyer’s journey into three phases prospects go through before they make a purchase. Each phase reflects the intent and actions of the buying team as they seek viable solutions and opportunities for their problem.

Awareness stage. Prospects realise they have a problem and seek to educate themselves about the situation to make informed decisions.
Consideration stage. The client develops broad categories of potential solutions and compares different products/services.
Decision stage. The buyer has settled on a solution, winnowed down prospective vendors, and is ready to make a purchase.

Keep in mind, B2B buyers seldom progress through the purchase journey in a tidy, linear fashion. They jump between research, stakeholder engagement, and evaluation (then go back to conduct even more research) before making any final decisions. Also, you are dealing with B2B buyers, plural. Not just one person, but an entire decision-making team representing different departments with specific needs.

With journey-based advertising, inbound methods and marketing automation align your advertising campaigns with touchpoints throughout the buyer’s journey. This is key for addressing the non-linear, collaborative nature of B2B decision-making. At each point in your campaign, you can meet the members of a buying team wherever they are in a loop.

Journey Based Advertising also shifts advertising from a transactional mindset to one focused on customer service. By understanding and responding to your customer journey, you create a more personalised experience. The aim is to make your advertising more intimate and encourage a two-way conversation with your customer.

The result is that rather than being distracting, your ads help viewers by delivering personalised messaging for their situation. By centring your ad campaigns on serving rather than exploiting your target audience, you improve conversion rates and lead quality.

How to Build a Journey-based Advertising Strategy?

A journey-based advertising approach adds business value by:

Making advertising more relevant and helping increase ad recall.
Accelerating the pipeline not only through lead generation but also by using ads for nurturing leads.
Allowing B2B brands to have a competitive edge by standing out amid content overload.

This all sounds good in theory. But how do you go about building a journey-based advertising strategy out in the wild?

Map Your Ads to Your Buyer’s Journey

In JBA strategy, you base the structure of your ad account on the different phases of your buyer’s journey. When building campaigns, you map ad formats, bids, keywords, etc., to how much a lead knows about their problem, solutions, and your brand. It is critical to match your advertising to search intent to deliver the right content at the right time.

In the awareness stage, your viewers are looking for content to help them frame their problems. You need to position yourself as a trusted authority in the space. Your ad copy should show you understand, and can help solve, the buyer’s pain points.

Instead of promoting a specific product or service, offer free resources like blogs, live streams, and podcasts that outline their issues. Target PPC ads on informational keywords to appear high in the rankings on search engines. Use formats like discover ads, display advertising, videos, and boosted posts on social media platforms.

Advertising for the consideration stage is all about commercial investigation. The viewer now understands their problem and is evaluating potential solutions. Their focus is on comparing your products and services to other providers. Your job is to explain why you are their best choice.

Here you target keywords with commercial intent and use advanced targeting methods to deliver hyper-relevant, high-value content. Ads should encourage direct interaction with your brand. Use content marketing to drive lead generation by sending viewers to landing pages for white papers, case studies and demos.

The consideration phase is when search ads and sponsored content will play a larger role. Retargeting campaigns will also help you put content in front of interested buyers who saw you during the Awareness stage.

To connect with decision-phase buyers, target transactional keywords with high buyer intent. Your goal is to prompt the user into action (before they get distracted by another research loop). Now is the time to sweeten the deal. Target ads with offers and promotions, or that invite prospects to book a consultation or demo.

Ad formats for this stage include call ads, non-skippable video ads, prominent display ads, and retargeting. By now, you should have cultivated enough goodwill to reach out to prospects. Make an ask using email or direct messaging, like LinkedIn Message ads.

Responding to customer behaviour

The key to creating journey-based advertising is to understand the different types of behaviour you will see in customers at different stages.

In general, if a customer has only visited a few pages of your website, they are probably at the awareness stage. If they have started to read your more in-depth content on your site or download more detailed white papers, they are probably entering the consideration stage. If they’re accessing ‘how-to’ content or contacting you, they’re moving into a decision stage.

For more specific types of content, if a prospect is interacting with social media posts that are about a particular aspect of your offer, or if they’re reading pages on your site that go into more detail about this part of your proposition, it would make sense to stay top of mind by serving ads that relate directly to what they’re interested in.

Fundamental to this approach is the use of remarketing audiences. Advertising platforms like Google and LinkedIn allow you to create target audiences of prospects based on their behaviour on your site. You can create audiences of people who have visited particular pages or who have competed forms on your site. That way you can target adverts that match what you know about their interests based on their behaviour.

1827 Marketing provides its clients with SharpSpring for marketing automation. This platform goes further because it incorporates an advertising platform that allows you to serve ads to the lists of prospects that you use in other campaigns. With SharpSpring you can create lists of prospects that might have been sent or acted upon a marketing email. Or they might have interacted with your social accounts or with a specific post. Or they might have visited key pages. Or they might have seen pdfs or videos that SharpSpring is able to track. With this approach, you can bolster email marketing with advertising to create greater awareness and recall. You can serve ads to people who have read pdf reports or user guides.

Set Up Ad Sequences

Another important element for effective journey-based advertising is the use of ad sequences. It is an ability offered by major ad platforms (e.g. Google Ads, YouTube, Facebook, etc.), where you can use dynamic retargeting lists to move customers through a series of ads.

Think about how you interact with prospects in the real world.

When you first meet someone, you introduce yourself and offer your company's elevator pitch. The next time you meet, you don’t repeat the same introduction and pitch word-for-word.

The person is already familiar with you and with what you do. If anything, repetition suggests that you have forgotten who they are. Instead, you build on the relationship and continue the conversation.

Suppose you don’t see the person again for several months. It might be necessary to prompt their memory with a brief reintroduction, but then you move on from there. Each time you encounter someone, you present new information to help build the relationship.

Ad sequences help you create this type of dynamic interaction with your online advertising. On YouTube, for example, an ad sequence can tell a story in a flexible order that makes sense to the user. This ability is useful for matching up your ads with the looping nature of the B2B buying process. Instead of showing a viewer the same ad, you can create a narrative that helps them along their purchase journey.

Choose the Right Automation Platform

You can also build sequence your ads with the creative use of marketing automation tools.

Automation systems can add and remove leads from campaigns depending on their interactions with your previous ads (and wider marketing). Did someone visit a specific landing page and download an asset? The platform can serve them the next ad in the sequence to encourage them to go deeper into the service offering. Or send an automated email message that invites them to take up a free consultation/demo, etc.

There are several functionalities you should look for in a quality marketing automation software. For example, automatic tagging and lead scoring and workflow triggers/filters for different marketing tasks. You also want the ability to create lookalike audiences based on your highest-value clients. And to retarget existing customers who are in the cycle for a new product in your suite.

Integrate Your Data

Building an effective JBA strategy requires integrating your advertising and marketing, sales pipeline, and customer relationship management software.

Using data from across multiple channels enables creative experience. Your potential customers are busy people in an age of information overwhelm. Experience helps you to stand out and achieve higher conversion rates.

Being aware of gaps in your data (such as non-integrated sources) can help you find untapped potential. By developing an omnichannel approach, you can provide the smooth customer-focused digital experiences that modern B2B buyers demand.

The Bottom Line

Conventional PPC advertising often comes across as unhelpful, if not outright spammy. We get so caught up in the mechanics that we forget we are trying to communicate with actual human beings. The result is spending our ad budget on campaigns that only generate modest returns.

So, how do you create an advertising campaign that will intrigue viewers and drive engagement with your business? Journey-based advertising may be the solution.

JBA strategy applies inbound marketing ideas and automation to advertising. Using the buyer’s journey to inform your campaign structure, content, and ad formats helps you better connect with buyers. When you match your ads to touchpoints along your customer journey, they appear when viewers are most receptive to your message. You give customers more reasons to engage and stay loyal by creating personalised, valuable experiences.

1827 Marketing is here to serve the B2B digital marketing needs of large and small businesses alike. Reach out today to learn how we can help design and automate a memorable, omnichannel customer experience.

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