5 Ways Paid Media Can Deliver Powerful Experiences

5 Ways Paid Media Can Deliver Powerful Experiences

After the FIFA Women’s World Cup wrapped up, I started thinking: How effective would a team be if the players couldn’t use their dominant feet? If you’ve played soccer or watched your kid play, you probably know how difficult that would be.

Without learning how to use your non-dominant foot, you certainly would not be a world-class player on a world-class team.

Similarly, in the B2B world, marketers have dominant and non-dominant skillsets. On the one hand, we have many tools we are all familiar with, such as email, content marketing, and events. For some programs, you may be successful using only these dominant tools. But if you want to win—if you want to create truly epic experiences—you need to use every tool available.

Paid media is a shining example of a non-dominant skillset for most of us. Now, dominant tools–such as email, content, and events—require paid media components. Plus, ad platforms consistently change as consumers jump from social networks to the Web at any given time, so paid media requires we put extra attention on the skills needed to succeed.

So here are five tips for building up your non-dominant paid media skillset to increase customer engagement and program success.

1. Orchestrating Adtech To Complement Martech

Many marketers, especially those in the tech industry, tend to highlight the differences between B2B marketing technology and B2B advertising technology, or martech versus adtech. But if you look at it from the customer’s perspective, they’re really not that different.

Sarah Kennedy, VP of global marketing and digital experience at Adobe, said marketers should be asking how adtech and martech are delivering value to the customer. Martech and adtech are complementary tools that we can use to create powerful, end-to-end customer experiences, from awareness all the way to conversion.

2. Incorporating More Channels In Multichannel Campaigns

By definition, a campaign that incorporates two channels is technically a “multichannel campaign.” But of course, two channels are the bare minimum. A truly integrated campaign reaches prospects wherever they are with a consistent message across every touch point.

Now we know that B2B buyers aren’t only on email and your website via their desktops. They’re on their mobile devices, they engage with physical mail that’s sent to them, and, perhaps most importantly, they’re on hundreds and thousands of other Web pages every week, from scrolling LinkedIn to keeping up with industry blogs.

Paid media lets marketers engage across countless channels with far more frequency than they could otherwise. With hundreds of different paid media platforms available, each with different inventories, targeting capabilities, pricing structures, and more, paid media offers the variety that other channels cannot.

3. Targeting On The Open Web

The usual trade-off to better targeting and better personalization is smaller scale. Think about account-based marketing; most 1-to-1 or “1-to-few” ABM campaigns include tactics with limited reach—think: sharing personalized sales collateral, custom email, personalized Web content, nd direct mail offers. While effective, they aren’t the most scalable tactics.

On the other hand, most B2B marketers are only familiar with demographic or firmographic-based digital ad targeting. It’s super scalable but comes with way less precise targeting.

But with identity resolution technology, paid media offers the rare combination of people- and account-based targeting and scale across the open Web. Essentially, it allows marketers with a large enough dataset to target ads on social media or on the open Web the same way marketers target their email campaigns. If you have a list of email addresses, you can now reach them with digital ads across the open Web.

4. Personalizing Campaigns Based On Interchannel Activity

Multichannel campaigns, where you use the same coordinated message across multiple channels, is one thing, but the more advanced version is to use activity or behavior on one channel to trigger an action on another. It’s using integrated data to create a more personalized and more relevant experience in a privacy-conscious manner.

For example, in an email nurture campaign, you can create a trigger so that if prospects open email No. 1, they are automatically added to display campaign A (both having consistent messaging, of course). If they also open email No. 2, you can move them from display campaign A to display campaign B, further down the funnel. And finally, if they do not open any emails in the sequence, you can use that information to add them to a top-of-the-funnel general awareness display campaign.

Using paid media in tandem with other channels and using the responses to other channels to affect paid media enables marketers to personalize across every single channel.

5. Engaging Customers In A Privacy First Way

Finally, in the new world of GDPR, CAN-SPAM, CCPA, and more, it is absolutely critical that marketers use the customer data they gather in an ethical way. One best practice is to put a global data ethics program in place to ensure proper governance and ethical practices.

We want to engage our customers with powerful experiences, but we must also be mindful that lack of privacy or security could—in the words of Steve Lucas, SVP, business development, digital experience at Adobe—turn an epic experience into an epic failure.

Through identity resolution technology, marketers can engage consumers in a way that preserves their privacy preferences. With this process, platform identities of consumers are anonymized in a secure, safe haven environment and linked to a single anonymous identifier. Once anonymized, digital identities cannot be used to reidentify an individual in the offline world. This unified and privacy-first identifier enables marketers to plan, execute, and optimize omnichannel campaigns in a way that maintains trust with the consumer.

Best Feet Forward

Just like it requires practice for even world-class soccer players to fully develop their non-dominant feet, it also requires sufficient effort put into data collection and data integration to optimize buyer engagement with paid media. Without integrated data, your paid media activities will exist in a silo—so your left and right feet won’t work together, and you won’t reap the full benefits.

In the 2018 FIFA Men’s World Cup, 29% of goals were scored with players’ non-dominant feet. Are you limiting your impact by not taking full advantage of paid media? When it does go right, you can create powerful, world-class marketing campaigns.