Until now, B2B marketers have been surprisingly unimaginative when it comes to online advertising. Despite the fact that as much as 93 per cent of the B2B community actively uses the Internet for business purposes on a daily basis, only 39 per cent of B2B companies claim to take advantage of online display advertising to target their customers and only 29 per cent have experimented with online classified ads. This contrasts with 84 per cent that actively use email for marketing to other companies.
These are the findings of the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), which notes that in the B2C market online advertising is now worth more than £768 million and is bigger than radio in terms of ad spend and market share (IAB/PwC online adspend study 2005). Clearly, the B2B community has some catching up to do.
“Online advertising is not being harnessed as it could be in the B2B sector,” says Val-Pierre Genton, chairman of the B2B Council at the IAB. “We need more thought leadership on the practice so that marketers can see more clearly what the options are and how best to exploit them.”
Such help is likely to be much appreciated, given B2B Magazine’s own ‘Insight’ report, which found that 76 per cent of B2B marketers were planning to increase their online ad spending in 2007.
Differentiating between online advertising and other forms of online marketing will be a good starting point since many B2B marketers have traditionally focused on email and search marketing over online advertising in its many forms. This is a shame, given that advertising is generally considered to be less of a nuisance than marketing by email, more flexible and creative than search marketing and powerful for brand building and reinforcement, as well as lead generation.
Brand impact
Contrary to popular belief, there is a lot more to online advertising than pop-ups that can be deselected by the viewer. As in the magazine world, there are banners, column ads (‘skyscrapers’), plus all sorts of creative interpretations such as sponsorship and ‘editorial’ add-ons (white papers, glossaries, case studies, by-lined opinion articles and so on). Just as in other media, successful advertising on the Internet is all about going where the audience is and thinking outside of the box.
“From a brand awareness perspective, large ad units on key sites aimed at the target audience work best,” claims Hanne Tuomisto-Inch, online communications director at marketing agency Banner. The largest IAB standard ad units are MPUs (336×280) and half-page units (300×600). “Various studies validate what common sense already tells you – that the larger the ad unit, the bigger the impact on brand metrics.”
Unsurprisingly, context also has a major influence. “The brand impact of online ads is higher if you are reaching the person in the right context (for example, a relevant section), although behaviourally targeted, out-of-context advertising is impactful as well, as your ad will stand out better from the crowd,” says Tuomisto-Inch.
The next decision is where to be seen. “Advertising space is generally available across a variety of online properties owned by publishers,” notes Adrian Moss, founder and CEO of online marketing group, DGM.
He lists the following popular vehicles for online advertising:
- High-traffic portals such as MSN and Yahoo
- Vertical-sector sites or vertical channels within portals such as Yahoo Finance and Guardian Unlimited
- Premium websites – content-specific with a defined audience base such as Businessesforsale.com
Online trade publications are a popular forum too, allowing businesses to position their messages alongside credible editorial and educational content to which executives might allocate a decent chunk of time – book-marking or even printing the content to read at leisure or keep on file.
Yet as with any form of marketing and advertising activity, online advertising demands an extremely well thought-out strategy. As well as the need to integrate online activities with other complementary elements of the marketing mix (for example email, search engine marketing, magazine ads and any radio, TV, poster, directory or direct mail campaign) online campaigns must be planned and managed to ensure that budget is maximised and positive results secured.
The good news is that online advertising is highly measurable – much more so than other forms of advertising – and it offers businesses more flexibility both in the number of options available to them as well as the speed with which they can chop and change sites and mount new advertising content.
Advertising formats
There are three main routes to consider for an advertiser launching an online advertising campaign according to DGM: direct engagement with media owners, via a traditional media agency and via an intermediary ad network provider.
Picking the best platforms for the advertising message will be down to the relevance to the target audience, level of user traffic, advertising format options and price.
Olaf Genrich, head of marketing at InteractiveMedia, notes that current demand is developing from standard advertising formats to individual and integrated formats, advertorials and special ads embedded in content. “We are also seeing a shift from banner, button and pop-up ads to super banner, rectangles, layer and video ads,” he says, pointing companies to the EIAA European Ads Formats report at www.eiaa.net.
The beauty of the Internet compared with static, paper-based advertising is its support for interactive content, including audio, video and animation, or links to up-to-the-minute information and news. “Ideally the ad unit would not only contain a video, but also further information that could be accessed via different tabs,” says Tuomisto-Inch, pointing to a current corporate campaign Banner is running for Novell in the UK, Canada and Australia, which has a user-initiated (mouse-over) video and further information that people can download such as white papers.
“In these types of units, you can measure more than just the normal click metrics, such as brand interaction time and brand interaction rate,” she explains. “The ‘Discover innovation’ campaign, targeted at senior IT decision-makers, had interaction rates of just under 16 per cent against an industry average (according to Pointroll) of less than three per cent and an interaction time of 21 seconds (against an average of just 3.7 seconds).”
Measurability is one of the Internet’s biggest strengths and an entire sub-industry has been dedicated to monitoring user traffic and activity, providing advertisers with plenty of feedback so they can modify and continue to justify their online advertising spend.
Knowing that ‘educational’ content keeps readers looking for longer confirms what marketing communications experts have long known – that providing more than a sales message – i.e. something of immediate perceived value for the reader – is a great way to reinforce a brand message, through positive associations and an extra injection of credibility.
“Working alongside media companies that have active online property is an excellent way to create contextual context positioning, pushing through thought leadership and content towards an engaged audience,” notes Genton.
“As well as any banner advertising, companies bring in a PR element, using a webcast or downloadable white paper to inform the target audience on a subject, which launches from within an authoritative article on a related subject. This acts almost as subliminal advertising, building trust in the brand.”
Fresh creative
RSS (real simple syndication) can help with all of this too, making it easy for businesses to update and refresh their messages across multiple locations quickly and automatically by linking all of their advertising sites back to a single, central content source. (RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts.)
“Online property is running out of banner space, forcing prices up,” Genton notes. “This is driving site owners to think of new and creative ways of forming a canvas for advertisers. Offering RSS windows for pushing white papers, webcasts, press releases, by-lined opinion articles, brochures and anything else that could be published online is something that’s likely to grow in the future.”
Smaller companies with more modest advertising budgets will want to do their homework before making any outlay. Advertising rates online have soared as the metrics for measuring success rates have become more powerful and sophisticated and as online real estate has become highly sought-after. Genton recalls a client paying £20,000 for two months advertising exposure on a site while sponsorship of webcasts can go for £10,000 or even £50,000.
This is because of the dominance of the Internet as a business resource and because of the sheer measurability of the medium, Genton explains. “Not only do you get feedback on how many visitors you’ve had, but how long they’ve looked at your content and where they came from. With a sponsorship package, for example, you’d get all this plus viewer contact information. This makes the marketing director look good.”
“It is important to keep testing new opportunities all the time, such as RSS and blog advertising,” concurs Tuomisto-Inch. “Even though their reach and inventory might not be that high yet, they can be a good opportunity to reach the audience in an uncluttered environment where the response rates are often higher.”
