Generating Cost-Effective Leads from Targeted B2B Display Advertising

One of the critical challenges for any B2B company is how to drive more qualified traffic to their website. Every growth or demand marketer would want to see more of the buyers they want to engage, from their target accounts, visiting their website every day. After marketing emails, outbound programmatic advertising is the second-lowest-cost channel to reach and engage your target buyers. That said, one of the key reasons many companies hesitate to invest in paid advertising programs is the low number of lead conversions that they can attribute to their paid media budget and spend directly. 

LinkedIn Ads Are Expensive

Many companies spend a significant portion of their paid media budget on LinkedIn. However, LinkedIn paid media costs 4X to 5X more than other paid media options available today! As we talk to B2B marketers, they often report the cost per lead on LinkedIn from $300 to $450. At these per-lead costs, it becomes quite difficult to justify return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) from paid media programs.

Running Programmatic Advertising Programs -  Navigating Key Challenges

As a quick refresher, let’s look at the typical challenges that a B2B growth or media team must overcome as they look to optimize their paid media budgets.

Inadequate Account and Buyer Targeting: Substantial media budgets, at a time with every dollar needs to be well-directed, are often wasted on accounts that have no near term intent to purchase. Worse still, valuable advertising is directed towards inappropriate individuals, outside of the Company’s target personas, within specific accounts.

Lack of Programmatic Control: An inability to exert fine-grained control over programmatic ad campaigns when running campaigns through most of today’s ABM advertising platforms leads to excess spend on an already engaged account. Marketers also face less effective spend due to limitations on user-level controls on campaign execution timing, geo-location, publisher websites, channels (desktop vs mobile) and ad formats (allowing them to easily double down on high-performing ad sizes).

Need for Account-based audiences not limited by third-party cookie restrictions: Many ad networks and exchanges today offer much more inventory for ad serving for first-party audiences that are owned directly by the advertiser. Third party-audiences that are cookies re-sold by media publishers to intermediary data aggregators are now increasingly being turned off or limited in their reach into prospects by the major display advertising networks. 

The Biggest Hurdle - Limited Landing Page Form Conversions on Company Websites

Prospects today are even less likely than ever before, to fill out a landing page form, on an advertiser’s website. As a result, form page conversions have continued to drop to anywhere from 0.5% to 2% of all the click-through traffic from paid media and advertising programs. No wonder, if this is the only actionable data available for SDRs/BDRs, display programs will feel like a super expensive channel for generating leads.

Introducing Kwanzoo Buyer Resolution Technology - Boost Leads from Display by 10X or More

Kwanzoo’s new Buyer Resolution technology enables advertisers to convert 20% to 30% of incoming prospects who click through display campaigns to get converted on the advertiser’s websites to Leads with full personally identifiable (PII) information on the prospects that is available to the SDR/BDR team for follow-up. Advertisers will now see their “Cost Per Lead” metrics drop dramatically, to where B2B leads from programmatic display campaigns are now 20% to 40% of the current “Cost Per Lead” metrics of $300 to $450 for LinkedIn ad campaigns.

Kwanzoo First-party Audiences for Ad Targeting

Programmatic ads served through the Kwanzoo B2B Pipeline Growth platform further benefit from Kwanzoo’s first-party target audiences, which are made available to our advertiser clients. All that an advertiser has to do is define their audience segment in terms of specifications of the types of accounts they want to pursue (account’s revenue range (s), industries) and the key buyer personas (department, seniority, job functions or titles) at those accounts. The platform (delivered as a managed service through our Customer Success team) then generates the first-party audience routed to a media buying platform (DSP) to target the buyers and serve out the ads. 

Modeling Return-on-Ad-Spend (ROAS) from Display Campaigns

When modeling return on ad spend, we recommend starting with a goal of a defined set of target accounts and buyer personas. Then see what sort of addressable or reachable audience (in terms of first party cookies) is available for ad targeting. We then follow certain best practices on the maximum number of ads to be served to any specific cookie over a 90-day period. The effective click-through-rate (CTR) plays a key role and correlates well to the number of on-target buyers that click-through or view-through display ads from this advertiser to visit and browse content on the website.

Our Excel-based Media Budget and ROI Modeler: Media Budget and ROI Modeler then goes on and shows you a straightforward way to estimate the number of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), Sales Accepted Leads (SALs), Pipeline and Revenue Generated, as well as effective ROAS from a set media budget, or media budget finalized for reaching a set number of target accounts and buyer personas.   

Net-net, as you will find in the modeler, for some very reasonable assumptions on display ad CTRs of 0.06% to 0.09%, a properly executed display campaign should generate Leads directly off the website at a “Cost Per Lead” of $83 - $125 (which is substantially lower than LinkedIn cost-per-lead metrics of $300 - $450).

The Return-on-Ad-Spend for a B2B company offering products and solutions at an ACV of $50,000 is anywhere from 9X to 12X for quarterly media budgets of $27,000 or more. 

In the coming weeks, we will delve deeper into Kwanzoo’s display advertising insights and impact dashboards. They are designed to make ongoing operational decisions around active display advertising campaigns quick to execute, while providing critical insights on the effectiveness of the campaigns to all key staff across the campaigns, ABM, growth, media operations, and revenue operations teams.

Have questions on Kwanzoo’s display advertising solutions? Please drop us a note and we’d be glad to get on a call to talk further!