B2B advertising has become increasingly complex. Buying cycles are long, requiring multiple touchpoints with key stakeholders, while the number of channels continues to increase. Additionally, prospects often feel overwhelmed by content, making it difficult for your brand to stand out.
The right B2B marketing agency can help companies cut through the noise while elevating their presence with their core audiences. Continue reading to learn more about how to find the right partner for your brand.
Key Takeaways
- The Right Partner Can Improve Campaign Outcomes. Partnering with the right B2B partner will improve campaign performance, including time to launch and lead quality, while driving cost efficiencies.
- Industry Knowledge + Channel Expertise are Vital. The right agency needs a wide range of channel expertise, so they can select the right places to drive impact. They should be able to layer this expertise with audience insights and psychology to create a plan that achieves your business goals. Additionally, B2B industries can differ in terms of regulations, channels, and needs. Your B2B partner should have the experience necessary to make the right media planning decisions.
- B2B Agencies Must be Able to Measure Results: Measurement gets increasingly complex, especially as the number of channels increases. Your partner will need to be able to measure outcomes and tell a cohesive story across data points.
Benefits of Partnering with a B2B Advertising Agency
There are many advantages to partnering with a B2B advertising agency. Check out the reasons below:
1. Improve Campaign Outcomes
Marketing agencies offer specialized expertise, advanced tools, and analytics capabilities to help you meet business objectives. In fact, most companies note that their outsourcing partners usually or always meet their stated goals. B2B advertising agencies can help improve the overarching marketing strategy, branding, and quality of leads, while optimizing campaigns based on performance data.
2. Expand Team Capabilities
Instead of managing and hiring for specialized roles, your company benefits from having access to multidisciplinary experts.
Engagements can also flex as your needs evolve, such as incorporating branding or go-to-market plans. In fact, 22% of those surveyed noted that outsourcing was more cost-effective than hiring a full team to execute the same projects.
3. Save Time + Execute Campaigns More Quickly
Outsourcing B2B marketing reduces the time needed for campaign execution. 22% of those surveyed are outsourcing their B2B advertising to combat limited internal resources or timing constraints, while 18% are using outsourcing to execute their strategies more quickly.
4. Benefit from Better Media Rates + Increased Platform Resources
Marketing agencies are negotiating media on behalf of a wide range of companies. This collective buying power and publisher relationships often allow them to unlock better rates, saving money on advertising costs.
Additionally, the right agencies will often have contacts at LinkedIn and Google, who share new campaign formats before they are available, allowing for better planning and new innovative campaigns.
Vital Capabilities for B2B Advertising Agencies
When choosing a marketing partner, it’s important to consider their capabilities and what services they offer. Below are essential components of any advertising agency.
Media Planning + Wide Channel Expertise
The right agency will be able to plan a holistic B2B media plan, including channel considerations, tailored to your individual needs. They will have a wide range of expertise, ensuring they choose the best B2B marketing channels, whether that be OOH, paid search, LinkedIn, email, display or media buys with key associations and publications. Campaigns should combine business goals, messaging strategy, product launches, and audience psychology to drive measurable outcomes.
Creative Services + Branding
Creative and brand strategy are core elements of building B2B brand awareness. Agencies will have the in-house capabilities to make recommendations on creative and the ability to launch new branding initiatives based on key insights related to your audience.
Account-Based Marketing
Sales and marketing notoriously face misalignment, particularly in terms of lead generation and what’s most valuable in terms of strategy. Account-based marketing can help companies better align these teams.
While often conflated, lead generation and ABM are not the same strategy. Account-based marketing can include lead generation components, but focuses on the accounts more holistically. Sales and marketing can work together to determine the highest priority accounts to close deals. The right B2B agency will be able to incorporate these kinds of campaigns into its overarching strategy, while being able to measure impact.
Content Marketing
Content marketing accounts for 30% of the marketing budget for organizations surveyed. However, this bucket often incorporates several items, including creative, white papers, webinars, and SEO + GEO. The right agency will centralize these capabilities to support business goals as they evolve.
Additionally, digital environments are increasingly oversaturated with content. 55% of marketers noted it is difficult to encourage users to take a desired action, while 43% noted it is difficult to differentiate themselves. The right marketing agency will be able to recommend content — from topic development to creative execution — to address these challenges.
Finally, not only is it important for marketing agencies to understand what content to create, but also how to promote it. 36% of companies noted that most leads came from B2B content syndication or partner networks — the highest result for all channels from the survey. The right partner will be able to make recommendations on how to drive results through content – whether that be organically or via paid efforts.
Industry Expertise
Industry expertise influences messaging, channel strategy and campaign optimizations. It’s important to select a B2B partner who has proven experience in your industry. Below are some examples:
- B2B Healthcare: B2B healthcare paid keywords often have overlap between patients and physicians. If the goal is to only target physicians, the search results for these keywords will need to be carefully analyzed to prevent less relevant traffic.
- Tech & Cybersecurity: For tech and cybersecurity lead generation campaigns, buying groups are extremely large – up to 28 people. Research has also shown that the buying process goes more smoothly when everyone is familiar with a brand. As a result, marketers will need to ensure that they are reaching several members of the buying committee to produce results.
- Financial Services: Financial services digital marketing has several challenges, including regulations and long sales cycles. Trust remains a central pillar when building these campaigns, as credibility is an important component in this space.
However, ABM should also be a priority for financial services companies, particularly as it relates to customer retention. Research shows 36% of financial services companies were able to improve this rate when including these strategies in their marketing plan.
Full Funnel Capabilities
Lead volume is an insufficient success metric, especially when it is not tied to business outcomes. Instead, marketing partners must take a full-funnel approach in their campaigns, considering top of funnel, middle of funnel, and bottom of funnel activations.
Measurement
Measuring campaign success can be complicated. Channels such as print, OOH, digital, and LinkedIn offer different metrics, making it difficult to weave a consistent narrative to leadership. Other considerations for measurement, such as lead quality or target account list penetration, can be manual and seemingly impossible to measure.
Marketing agencies will have data experts on staff to make reporting more insightful. Reports should include opportunities for optimizations, which is valuable to internal marketing teams. The right agency will also be able to set consistent KPIs and tie performance metrics to revenue.
Integrated Experience
You should be able to scale your marketing programs with your B2B advertising agency, while still getting an integrated experience. Integrated marketing agencies eliminate silos while improving overarching campaign performance.
Examples of Successful B2B Advertising Campaigns
commercetools Breaks from B2B Tradition with Bold Campaign
commercetools was looking for a campaign to improve B2B brand awareness, while positioning themselves as a disruptor in the commerce solution industry. They partnered with Walker Sands to deliver bold creative paired with a robust media plan. The key insight was that most commerce tools did not give customers the capabilities they needed, limiting revenue generation.
Walker Sands cast Will Arnett to play a legacy commerce solution, personifying the lack of agility offered by these legacy brands. The campaign was then deployed across video, event branding and OOH.
The campaign was widely successful, achieving the following metrics over three months:
- 16.9 million views
- 54% video completion rate on YouTube
- 98% positive sentiment around the campaign
- +308% brand conversations on LinkedIn, X
- Three feature placements in the first day, including Adweek and The Drum, and a mention in AdAge the following week.
Promevo Generates New Business Through Paid Media + PR
Promevo, a Google Premier Partner specializing in comprehensive Google Workspace (GWS) solutions, partnered with Walker Sands to achieve their aggressive business goals. In a crowded marketplace, Promevo was looking to differentiate itself while also showcasing its abilities to be a holistic IT partner.
The initial program focused on key channels such as Google Search, Google Display and LinkedIn to reach SMBs in places they trust and are searching for information. Phase 2 included PR, using thought leadership to differentiate itself from competitors.
The campaign was able to achieve the following results:
- 100+ qualified leads
- $320,000+ pipeline generated
- 254% return on ad spend
- 22 PR placements
Final Thoughts
Successful B2B marketing campaigns don’t happen by accident. They are driven by successful, creative, data-driven media plans and measurement. The right B2B partner will be able to execute campaigns based on your goals to drive tangible business results.
Ready to talk outcomes? Contact us today.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why Should You Choose a B2B Agency?
B2B agency partners can help you expand the capabilities of your own team at a more competitive rate. Additionally, they offer multidisciplinary expertise that improves campaign outcomes.
How Do B2B and B2C Advertising Differ?
B2B advertising campaigns often have longer sales cycles and larger buying groups than B2C advertising. Channels for B2B and B2C do overlap, but B2B has a greater focus on LinkedIn, industry publications and associations than B2C.
What’s the Difference Between a B2B Advertising Agency and Digital Marketing Agency?
While both B2B advertising and digital marketing agencies will offer digital capabilities, B2B advertising companies will expand those offerings to include channels such as print, direct mail and DOOH.
